I liked going to the arcade on holidays, seeing how things were different. You could treat the arcade in a collect-them-all kind of way. You could see who was there during the Super Bowl. During a citywide motorcycle rally. During lunch hour. After church. While an enormous convention of Realtors was in town. On Christmas Day. It was always different.
The Marine was into chests, and when we met he insisted I take my shirt off, which I had never done out there. He wanted us to press our chests together, which we did. The letters “USMC” were tattooed on both his arms. He was the first person I ever kissed at the arcade, and it happened on the first night I met him. I never would have thought I would kiss out there, but he asked if I wanted to, and I found that I did. It was the kind of kissing that was so engrossing I couldn’t think about anything else, and even the self-critic in my head was silenced. I felt lucky that we established those things in our first meeting, the kissing and the pressing our bare chests together because then we got do them every time we saw each other. We never wasted time not doing those things.
We always came when we were together, which was another thing I had never done at the arcade before meeting the Marine. Usually, I’d just watch and play and then go home and jerk off remembering it all. But with him I always let it go further. I could feel him getting close, and I’d let myself get close, and he’d let go, and we would lean forward with our pants around our ankles so we could hit the floor or the little garbage can, splattering anything other than our trousers and underwear. In the dark, you could hear the sound of your wad hitting the trashcan liner or see the glittering light reflected off the tiny fresh puddles on the floor. Coming with someone at the theater was a compliment. It meant you weren’t going to go on cruising around for someone else to play with.
Once, I told him I thought we should get together someplace else, and he gave me an email address and said to write him. I could tell it wasn’t his real email address. It was the address he used for fooling around with guys. Everyone had one of those. At least one. His was somethingsomethingMarine@hotmail.com.
The subject line of the email I sent read, “Dispatches from the Booths.” I kept it short and light, but the Marine didn’t reply.
After that, I didn’t see him at the arcade for a while, though I always looked for him. Then one day weeks later he was leaving just as I was arriving. He saw me, but he didn’t put his car back into park and go inside with me. He reversed out of the spot and drove away. Right after him, banging through the door, came a short, dark haired guy who could have been my stand-in on a movie set.
I did see him in the booths one last time after that. I told him I had tried to email him and he confirmed that I had his correct email address. “Maybe it went to your spam folder,” I said. We had a nice time together, and I sent another email afterwards. He didn’t reply, and I never saw him out there again. I liked to imagine that he had post-traumatic stress disorder or that he was recovering from a love affair with a fellow Marine who died in combat. I liked to imagine he had managed to live for thirty years without ever learning how to check his spam filter. I liked to imagine that I’d bump into him again at some point, but I never did.
19
HERE WAS SOMETHING THAT COULD HAPPEN: YOU HOOKED up with someone and had an unexpectedly incredible experience, the kind during which you both ran out of tokens and started feeding dollar bills into the machine just to be together a little longer, the kind that could only be credited to pheromones or some unknowable chemical magic. When it was over you exchanged names — real or fake, didn’t matter — and you even touched one another on the stomach or over the bulge in their underwear as you both got dressed again. You fantasized about it later and imagined running into him, how both of you would smile and shake your heads like, “Here comes trouble!”
And then you did see him again finally, and he smiled and nodded, and walked past you or into a booth with someone else. It was worse when there was no one around and you could see he was just waiting for someone, anyone else, to show up. And there you had shown up, and he kept waiting, watching to see who was coming in each time the door opened. You walked by him again to try and jog his memory, but he just gave a short, dismissive nod, a combination of recognition and rejection.
20
IT WAS THE COP’S FAULT THAT I DISCOVERED THE ARCADE at all. I never would have heard of the place if I hadn’t been reading the Missed Connections section of Craigslist, which I checked compulsively in hopes that he would post something there for me. The ads called to mind a movie I’d seen on television dozens of times in my youth, the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, in which Madonna, a fashion-forward rock hussy/petty criminal, communicates with her one true love via coded personal ads in a tabloid newspaper. It was easy to see how Rosanna Arquette became fixated on their ads, following their story, and eventually becoming entangled in it herself.
I loved reading the ads. The people posting in Missed Connections were my people, their ads filled with stories like my own, sometimes with so much at stake and sometimes as trivial as could be imagined. They were always trying to reconnect with the people with whom they’d had these passing encounters or arrangements that had failed for any number of reasons. They’d go home and fantasize about them. They’d have sex with their wives or girlfriends or boyfriends, and their erections would be a tribute to those strangers who in fleeting episodes in odd locales stirred something in them. Occasionally, you’d see pleas to reunite with former long-term lovers. I scanned the ads so often that I came to recognize repeated postings from the same desperate people, who, one assumed, would never find satisfaction there.
Most Missed Connections ads had titles like “Laundromat Parking Lot, May 18th” or “Silver Daddy at the XXX theater” or “Bathhouse Jock with Steelers Tattoo.”
After rehashing their encounters in gooey prose, their authors would say things like, “Tell me what I was wearing so I know it’s you.” Or “Where did you pinch me before we parted ways?”
Most Missed Connections ended with one of a few heartbreaking codas in acknowledgment of the astronomically bad odds of reconnecting:
“I know this is a long shot.”
“You’ll probably never see this.”
“If you happen somehow to read this, please get in touch.”
Such is a seldom-considered risk of casual encounters. You can end up having the best sex of your life with someone you’ll never see again. You think you couldn’t have feelings about someone you blew at a rest stop, who jerked you off and kissed you in an airport bathroom, or who hugged you from behind and reached into your pants in a dark booth at the arcade. But then you do, and those experiences rise to the surface again and again, as fantasies and memories and standards that your loved ones will never meet.
I picture a lie detector with its spindly metal arms marking straight lines on an endless scroll, registering encounters with gentlemen and sleazebags, guys in sports coats or swimsuits or wind-breakers. I picture the metal arms shuddering here and there with the passing men, then bursting to life, drawing lines so abrupt and jagged they cannot be reconciled with what came before. That’s what it was like with the cop.
I met him on a website for connecting straight men and women looking for casual sex. I had initiated a membership there because I was looking for male/female couples that might agree to sleep with me. Threeways seemed like a reasonable middle ground in which I could demonstrate my heterosexuality while being in very close proximity to other naked, engorged men.