“Did you go to the protests too?” I said, allowing myself this one final question on the subject.
“Nah, I signed the petition like everyone else around here — the folks from the subdivisions, and those of us who still have some acreage in the area. ‘Course, even though we all signed it and someone took it to a city council meeting, it didn’t come to nothing. They steamrolled everything through and opened it up anyhow. Truth is, I’m surprised nobody ever chucked a grenade at the place yet.”
6
LATER THAT NIGHT, THE GUY WITH THE OAKLEY SUNGLASSES gave an excuse about why he couldn’t invite me over. Maybe because of my questions about the arcade, or maybe he had just jerked off and changed his mind. It didn’t matter. It was better that way, in fact. Since our conversation, I had felt magnetized to the arcade. I couldn’t imagine how I’d let a whole two weeks pass since my first visit.
I had thought about it over that time, of course, but it didn’t really occur to me to go back. I had already achieved my aim. I’d taken those scattered Missed Connections dispatches and tracked down the source. I had been someplace none of my friends or family would ever go, smelled the smells and seen the sights.
The image of a grenade being thrown at the arcade was lodged in my mind. When the guy with the Oakley sunglasses said it, I pictured some outraged shit kicker driving by in his pickup, chucking a bomb from his window. Or his fat, country wife tossing it, hanging out the passenger side, their daughter in the backseat cheering the great pig on, a crumpled protest sign at her feet, reading “Shame on you, something something, devil something.”
The idea that people like that wanted to blow it up increased the appeal of the arcade enormously. And the more I thought of it, the more I realized how little I’d seen on my one trip out, how I’d left too soon after my arrival on that first visit and with too many tokens still in my pocket. I had them in a zip lock bag hidden in my underwear drawer. After talking to the guy in the Oakley sunglasses I realized that, though I had been there, I’d barely experienced the place at all.
I took a shower and changed into a clean pair of jeans and a striped polo shirt that I didn’t like particularly, but had twice been complimented on. It was the perennial scene: Junior Prepares for His Big Date, with all the usual beats, except for the slapped-on aftershave.
Entering the arcade, I nodded to the clerk. It was a different fellow than the one I’d seen on my first visit. This guy looked decidedly more normal and non-porny than the other one. He looked almost like one of my college roommates — shaggy hair, a worn and faded polo shirt, ratty jeans, his haphazard appearance a perfect opposite to the studied attempt at goth coolness I’d recognized in the other clerk.
As the rumpled clerk counted out stacks of tokens, the goth clerk, wearing his trademark fedora, emerged from a backroom door behind the counter. I overheard them as I made my way to a rack of DVDs.
“Anything else I need to know?” the rumpled clerk said.
“That’s it, I think,” the goth clerk said. “Oh, except there’s a thing on the desk about another guy they banned yesterday. He can’t come on the premises at all anymore. If you see him, call Ronnie.”
The rumpled clerk picked up a piece of paper, which I could tell from the reverse side was a printed photograph surrounded by text, like a notice someone would hang on a telephone pole about his lost dog.
“I know this guy,” the rumpled clerk said. “He drives a blue Honda.”
“Yeah, that’s what Rick said too. I’ve never seen him. He must only do nights.”
The goth clerk shouldered a black bag and made his way out from behind the counter and through the exit door.
I stood pretending to peruse their selection of overpriced DVDs while keeping my eye on the counter and the front door. The pocketful of tokens recalled days of my youth when, left by my shopping parents to roam the mall alone, I cashed in a five- or ten-dollar bill for that clanking jackpot rush from a video game arcade’s coin changing machine. Before the quarters started to dwindle, the options seemed limitless.
After several minutes passed with no one coming or going, and a few glances from the rumpled clerk, I goaded myself to the mouth of one of the hallways, where I lingered briefly before forcing myself inside. My shoulders relaxed when I found the corridor empty, save for one or two red lights illuminated above the doors. I chose an empty booth, locked the door behind myself, and popped a few tokens into the glowing slot.
As shrieking porn began to play, I used the light from my phone’s screen to scan the benches for anything I wouldn’t want to sit on and discovered a gift from heaven: a forgotten pack of Camels with a book of matches in its cellophane. I had been in the process of quitting for a couple of weeks by then, and had been unsuccessful, despite the fact that I had completely stopped keeping cigarettes on me. One problem was that I didn’t actually want to quit at all. I loved smoking. It was the cop I was in love with who didn’t like it. I was giving it up for him.
I took a cigarette from the half-empty pack and lit one. I didn’t change the movie on the screen. I just sat staring up at it, filling the booth with smoke and idly rubbing my dick through my jeans.
Before I’d smoked even half the cigarette, I was startled by the sound of someone trying to enter the booth. I was perfectly silent, though of course he knew someone was inside, not simply because of the light above the door, but also due to the loud squeals of a woman in a nurse’s uniform being screwed onscreen by a man in green scrubs and a surgeon’s mask.
After pushing against the door several times, the person on the other side actually started knocking on it in a quiet and creepily persistent manner that filled me with panic. My eyes shot around the booth like someone in a horror movie seeking out a weapon in their limited environment. The lit cigarette was the only thing I felt I could use if it came down to defending myself. Maybe I could blind him if he somehow broke through the door.
I knew if I didn’t respond, he would be forced to move on eventually, but he was still there, quietly pressing and knocking on the door when the tokens ran out and the movie ended. Suddenly the room was quiet and I heard a whispering voice that I hadn’t been able to distinguish from the din moments earlier. Without rising from my bench, I leaned in the direction of the door to hear it.
“Hey,” it was saying. “Hey, let me in.”
“Go away,” I whispered. Then I rose and quickly put three tokens in the slot. In an instant, the screen came back to life with another scene from the video, which now showed a woman having her temperature taken rectally by a physician while she performed oral sex on an orderly. I rapidly tapped the Vol+ button until the deafening moans of the medical assistant drowned out all other sounds.
Every muscle in my body was tense as I cranked myself around to see the shadows of the would-be intruder’s feet beneath the door. A minute later, after they withdrew, I calmed down. But after a short time they returned. He pressed on the door, and the voice hissed something inaudible, the shadow lingering for a moment before the shoes retreated again for the last time.
I sat in the booth and smoked three more cigarettes one after another, dropping tokens in the slot each time the movie ended. Then I rose, noiselessly slid the bolt free from the lock, and peered through the open door. The hallway was empty.
I rushed towards the brightness of the store as if making my way to a protected shelter. But the eeriness of the dark hallway had carried over into the shopping space, which was still vacant and utterly silent. Now even the counter was unmanned, the clerk gone.