Reading about the XXX place in the Missed Connections ads had evoked visions like those I’d once had of weekend nights at the town square. I pictured men leaning against their cars, smoking, fixing their hair in rear-view mirrors, checking one another out, talking casually as if nothing might happen or everything might happen.
I imagined something secret, but also right out in the open for people who took the time to look into it or join, like Freemasonry or the Elks. When I discovered the arcade, it was sort of like that after all. I couldn’t believe it.
5
SOON AFTER THAT INITIAL VISIT, I LEARNED THAT THE residents of the surrounding neighborhoods had protested the adult video store when it was first built, and apparently still bore a grudge against the place. I guessed I could understand why. They had gone to the trouble of moving outside of town thinking, naturally, that such a distance would be sufficient to insulate themselves from the city’s corrupt influences, and then the corrupt influences came to them. What made it worse was that they were already very near the town dump with all its associated smells and rumbling trucks and groundwater problems and whatever other tradeoffs living close to an enormous landfill must entail.
I didn’t know about the protests until I spoke to a man I’d met online. He was in his late forties and had emailed me a photograph of himself taken from inside the cab of his pickup, smiling with Oakley sunglasses pushed up on his head. He was the embodiment of my ideal. Divorced for years, he claimed that he still dated women but said the failed marriage had soured him against them. He certainly didn’t date men, though he had fooled around with them off and on his whole life. What he really wanted was a buddy, a friend with whom he could hang out and go golfing and camping and fishing and to sporting events, and of course with whom he could privately have sex because, as all of them will tell you, they prefer women, but there’s just something about playing with another guy. Not better, just different. You know how women are. You know how they complicate everything.
I’d learned over time to insist on chatting by phone before hooking up. It was prudent, I thought, to see if the guy sounded like the type who might ejaculate and then murder me in the throes of shame, or lock me in his basement for the remainder of my life, or hold me down and rape me. Or drill holes in my head and inject boiling water and hydrochloric acid into my brain, the way Jeffrey Dahmer did with his hookups to try and turn them into sex zombies.
The guy with the Oakley sunglasses was a rare find. Many of the guys I’d met online wouldn’t talk on the phone. Those guys didn’t want a buddy. They wanted men they’d never met before to come over and fuck or get fucked, then immediately tuck their dripping dicks inside their trousers and leave without requesting so much as a towel. Certainly without so much as the suggestion of intimacy. I once had a guy shout at me for patting his ass as I pulled up my pants to leave. It had been intended as a gesture of butch camaraderie, but he snapped that I shouldn’t get any ideas. He wasn’t a fag and I sure as fuck wasn’t his boyfriend — in case a moments-earlier instance of sodomy had been mistaken for something more substantive.
The man with the Oakley sunglasses was the classic good ol’ boy — his slow Texan drawl perfect and utterly unaffected. He wanted me to come over but worried what his neighbors would think. I’d heard that a lot and had the same fear about inviting men to my own place. Guys in our position had the idea that our neighbors — even the ones we’d never met — were tracking our every movement. The guy said he lived in a conservative neighborhood and asked what kind of car I drove. A pickup, I told him, which I knew was the right answer. He said he was going to run some errands, but that I should come by later that evening. We could turn on the football game, drink a beer or two, and see how we got along.
He told me he lived just outside of town. As he described how I would get to his neighborhood I drew the connection.
“You live close to the triple-X place.”
A long pause on the line. “You don’t go there, do you?” he said. The sudden tone of suspicion suggested I had lost ground with him merely by knowing of its existence.
“I went out there once. I checked it out for the first time a couple of weeks ago.” It was true. I had only just discovered the place. “You’ve never been?”
“Hell, you couldn’t pay me to step foot in a place like that. That’s the kind of place you get AIDS in. I heard they got a retard there who all he does is scrub cum with a mop all day.”
“Aw hell, it’s not as bad as all that,” I said, more careful than ever to slow and deepen my voice. Though whatever hick burg the guy with the Oakley sunglasses had come from was probably no smaller than my own hometown, the accent — natural on the tongues of everyone else in my family — had never quite stuck in my throat. But I could fake it well enough.
“I never touched anyone out there or anything,” I said, knowing that opting for the double negative would have been better, but unable to bring myself to do it. “It’s cleaner than you’d guess once you walk inside. But I know what you mean. It’s definitely a funny kinda place. I just went on a lark. I thought it was a regular old porn shop, place to get DVDs and all. You should go see for yourself sometime. It’s nothing much to be afraid of.”
“Shit, I ain’t afraid of it. I just know too many people ‘round here to have my truck seen in the parking lot of a place like that, even if I did want to go, which I don’t.”
“Surely people don’t pay that much attention to whose cars are in the parking lot,” I said, not bothering to detail for him the building’s clever arrangement, how it hid cars parked there from visibility by drivers-by.
“I guess you never heard about the protests when it first opened up. It was in the papers. Course that’s been a few years back now. Maybe you missed it.”
“What kind of protests? People with signs?”
“Yeah, they were out front. Women mostly, holding signs and all that. My neighbor took off work to go out there with her daughter.”
“Like a little girl?”
“Yeah, a kid. Or she was then. Might be she’s a teenager now.”
“There were kids at the protests?”
“I guess so. At least one.”
“What kind of signs did they have?”
“Just paper signs on poster board, stapled to stakes like you see on TV.”
“What did they say?”
“Hell if I know. I tried to ignore all that.”
“Surely you can remember one or two of them.”
“Hell, I don’t know. Let me think. One of them I think said something about ‘Real men don’t need porn.’ Then another one said something about ‘Shame on you, something something, devil something.’ I can’t remember. What are you so interested for anyway?”
“I’m not interested,” I said. “Except, I guess, just because it seems funny protesting a place like that. Of all the things in the world to protest about, I mean.”
“Well, maybe you’d feel different if it was in your own neighborhood.”
“You do have a point there, sir,” I said. “You certainly do have a point.”
I wanted to ask a hundred more questions. I’d never have thought of the residents of those neighborhoods as community activists, though it did make sense that, if they were going to protest anything, it would be the possibility of gay sex in their immediate vicinity.