Some men implemented velvet rope tactics, keeping their red lights lit and then standing in the doorway, beckoning chosen guys in the form of hissed whispers, or rejecting undesirables in the same way as they headed down that part of the corridor. Those gatekeepers always struck me as the most jaded and depressing of the arcade dwellers. I never connected with any of them, even when I was invited. It just seemed discourteous not to let people come in and be rejected or embraced in whatever meager privacy could be mustered.
The old pros were my least favorite of the arcade’s characters. There were always one or two of them around. I was in the minor leagues compared to the real regulars. One middle-aged man who drove a sporty silver Mercedes was guaranteed to be there during daylight hours. He dressed like a regular professional — always in slacks and a button-down shirt with stays in the collars and slick leather shoes — but I can’t imagine how he could’ve held down a job with his rigorous dick sucking schedule.
I’d hear him in the booths sucking guys off, at which he must have been incredibly skilled, because their reactions were frequently atypically vocal. You’d think he’d be in heaven, but he seemed so bored with it all. He’d come out of the booth and go back to scouting the hallway for fresh guys as soon as he was finished. He’d buy a soda from the machine and drink it while he walked around, washing the last guy out of his mouth with a Big Red.
My whole life I aspired to be a “regular” someplace. The limitations of the town where I was raised had, years earlier, introduced me to the sense that the world was nothing but an oversized play whose actors were all known to me. It was more than a mere TV fantasy having a waitress who knew your order the moment you sat down, or having a gas station attendant who put your brand of cigarettes on the countertop when he saw your car pull into the lot. I didn’t know until I left how I’d miss being a member of that play’s cast, and how often I’d try to duplicate the feeling at some neighborhood restaurant or bar in whatever city I had adopted.
For a time, I enjoyed the thought of becoming a regular at the arcade. Then I saw what the real regulars were like, how they were hunters with darting eyes, alert to every move. I saw how practiced they were, and how pleasureless their interactions.
28
MOST TIMES WHEN I WENT OUT THERE NOTHING HAPPENED. I spent three dollars on tokens, one dollar tipping the clerk, then roamed around looking for a good time that never materialized, and eventually left. But the possibility was there. It was a better bet than a lotto ticket. Even if I only watched the rituals and saw the ongoing narrative of the place unfolding, that itself was a happening. I never felt ripped off.
You discovered something about yourself out there. A new branch of your personality emerged, the way it does when you take a new job or meet your boyfriend’s parents or go to French class. You’re a different person when you hang out with your redneck cousins who you only see once a year at Thanksgiving. When I went to the arcade this untapped part of myself — a little knot of roots — came to life, and a personality grew around it that never would have existed if I hadn’t gone there.
You didn’t have to go to prison or volunteer in Mogadishu. You didn’t have to join the Navy to have a different part of yourself come to life. You could do something small on the outskirts of town that no one knew about but you.
29
I FELL INTO A BRIEF PHASE OF AGGRESSIVELY POSITIVE thinking after watching a badly produced pseudo-documentary about the law of attraction. Regardless of the idea’s inherent implausibility, I found myself desperately invested in the new age fantasy that I could reach the life I most desired through a more affirmative version of the anxious forecasting that already occupied most of my time. Unable to control the cop through any other means, I undertook the acquisition of my ideal life with him by projecting it into the future as if its eventuality were a guarantee.
When asked by the few friends whose calls I still sporadically answered, I told them that the cop and I would get back together soon and that everything was going perfectly between us.
“Oh!” came the surprised replies. “So he ended things with the kid?”
“Well, they still live together,” I said. “But it’s winding down.”
“Wow, that’s great. You must be so relieved. So, this is really happening. You two are really going to give it a shot?”
“It’s sure looking that way,” I said through a tense smile. “I can’t really get into the details at the moment though.” As if it were a contract, the particulars of which hadn’t quite been hammered out yet.
The system was designed to punish negative thinking of any kind. “Energy flows where attention goes,” the motto went. So whenever I caught myself returning to dark thoughts, I instantly became despondent and upset, reprimanding myself for destroying my future with the cop before schizophrenically snapping back to a collection of cheery visions for as long as I could. Then reality began seeping in again and the process repeated.
I managed to keep it up for a week or so, during which time their emails revealed no sign of a weakened relationship between the cop and the kid, no matter how hard I searched.
When I finally abandoned positive thinking I had to explain to anyone I’d spoken to that, in fact, nothing had changed and I hadn’t spoken to the cop in weeks. None of them had bought it anyway, least of all Malcolm, who had been the unfortunate witness to most of my phony levity and optimism and the subsequent crashes.
“Maybe you could just try focusing on learning the lessons of this experience so this sort of thing doesn’t keep happening to you.”
“Like what lessons, for instance?”
“You know, all the obvious stuff. Like being more open and honest about who you are. Being the kind of person that someone else would want as a partner. Not hurting yourself by looking at things that make you feel bad, like his email.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, quickly cataloging a few lessons I might learn and how the acquisition of such lessons might lead to a happier future with the cop. Maybe people who believed the universe to be random and unjust simply failed to grasp its basis in lesson-learning reciprocity.
“So you think if I learn all the right lessons, the cop might come back to me?”
“No, that’s not what I was saying at all.”
“But it definitely could happen,” I said.
“I don’t think there’s a magical component to this at all,” Malcolm said. “I don’t think the universe cares or is tracking you karmically or anything like that. I just think trying to grow and learn these lessons would be better for you in the long run. That’s all I’m saying.”
“But what good is that?” I cried. “I have to live today, not in some distant time. What good is learning lessons that may or may not help in some uncertain future?”
There was a silence on the line, and Malcolm, who had told me at the start of our conversation that he had had a long day at work, sighed into the receiver.
“Tell me this,” I said. “Do you even believe that things would work out between me and the cop if I got a second chance?”
“How could I possibly know that, Sam?”
“Well, what do you think just based on your gut?”
“If you want to know the truth, I honestly doubt that it could ever work out between the two of you.”
Before I realized what I had done, I hung up the phone.
All night, I lay in bed thinking about what he had said and trying not to. Wondering if Malcolm was furious or just tired of me. Wondering the same thing about the cop.