When I found myself alone in terrible and shameful situations, my first assumption was always that the end of the world was upon us, and I had been caught with my pants down. Had the nuclear apocalypse been announced, and here I was about to die alone, blasted apart along with one of the biggest collections of sex toys and videos in Central Texas? Had the man at my door, his voice raspy with radiation illness, been trying to warn me?
I noticed some movement at the front of the store. Just outside the exit, I could see something. It was the rumpled clerk pacing and having a cigarette in the one place where he could smoke while watching both the parking lot and the front desk.
The tokens still filled my pocket like a bag of marbles, but I was afraid to go to the other hallway and run into whoever had been at my door. I took a cigarette from the pack of Camels, and went to where the rumpled clerk was smoking.
“‘Scuse me, bro,” I said, a portrait of heterosexuality. “Mind if I bum a light?”
The clerk narrowed his eyes at me, but reached into his pocket and handed me his lighter. “Here you go.”
I lit my smoke and gave it back to him. “Thanks. How’s it going tonight? You just starting your shift?”
“That’s right,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Only seven hours and forty-three minutes to go.”
“But who’s counting, right? Anyway, I bet the time passes quick. It must be an interesting place to work.”
“Can be,” he said.
“You worked here long?”
By my posture, movement, and eyes, I did everything in my power, short of hocking a loogie, to indicate that these questions were merely friendly conversation and in no way a come-on. I could tell the guy was cautious and even a little annoyed, but he was too polite to tell me to fuck off.
“I’ve been here about six months.”
“Cool. You like it?”
“It’s okay.”
“Seems pretty dead tonight. Does it ever get really busy around here?”
“Yeah, it gets busy,” he said.
“So when does it pick up?”
“Different times. Like around nine o’clock people tend to show up. After the bars close at two. Lunch hours are busy, and I’ve heard that Sunday after church a lot of guys pop in.”
“After church?”
“Yeah, supposedly. I’ve never seen that myself. I work nights.”
“I heard your coworker say something about someone getting banned. I was just wondering, I mean, how…”
“Phone’s ringing man,” the rumpled clerk said, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray he’d used to prop open the door. “Gotta go.”
He scooted the can out of the way, and the door slammed closed with him on the other side. I took two more drags from my cigarette, then left what remained of the pack in the ashtray and headed to my pickup with the tokens still in my pocket, more to add to my collection. Mine was the only vehicle left in the parking lot, aside from a beat up Toyota that matched the rumpled clerk perfectly.
7
ALL OF MY PROBLEMS BEGAN IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL WHEN my best friend stole a porn magazine. We had a terrific indoor newsstand in our small town, owned and operated by the same family who delivered everyone’s newspapers.
At the front of the shop against a blacked-out window stood the shelves of porn, a section demarcated by two magazine racks facing one another. If you were looking at the magazines nearby, you could see — and, in fact, reach — the contents of the little smut alley without actually entering it. At twelve years of age, I created a diversion, giving my friend the opportunity to lean in and snatch a magazine. I carried some smoke bombs to the clerk, then swept them off the counter so that the he had to stoop to pick them up. After I paid, my friend and I ran away, him with the magazine tucked under his shirt.
We made straight for our fort in the reedy bank of a drainage ditch near his house. It was a tremendous thrill, even if I do recall registering a little disappointment when I finally saw what he had nabbed — a small digest-style black-and-white rag printed on cheap newsprint. Sex stories filled most of its pages, and the few small photos it did contain were blurry and hard to see, printed in grainy grayscale. My friend and I took turns taking the magazine home, reading it over and over again until we had all but memorized it, in the process learning with awestruck disbelief about such things as golden showers and fisting. I was never without men’s magazines after that.
A friend’s older brother returned from the Navy bearing gifts. I had written to him several times, and to show his appreciation he gave me some German pornography from his travels. My favorite was a naturist magazine printed on thick card stock with full-bleed images that seemed already to be decades old. Its incomprehensible text was in German, but I could see that the magazine was arranged like a tour of a nudist colony, starting at the entrance gate. There were people hanging out at picnic tables naked and playing volleyball naked and just walking around or sitting in a circle talking, always naked. There were pictures of kids too, just standing around like everyone else. That worried me a little, although nothing about the magazine seemed particularly pornographic, even the final page, which was a photograph of a naked man lying on top of a naked woman. No genitals were visible in that picture, not so much as a breast. Hers were pressed against the man’s chest. The two of them were looking into one another’s eyes and smiling.
Around the same time, I paid the older brother of a classmate to take all that was left of my birthday money and purchase as many porn magazines as the cash would buy. I rode with him to the newsstand, and stayed ducked down in his car while he went inside. I was amazed at his apparent ease with the errand. He emerged with a black plastic bag and gave it to me in exchange for the twenty dollars we had agreed upon.
No one was home when he dropped me off at my house. I spilled the contents of the bag onto the floor of my room. Of the titles, I had only ever heard of Penthouse. The others—Club, Oui, and Cherry—were new to me. Years passed before I came to understand that Oui was the French word for “yes.” I pronounced it “oh-you-eye,” the same way I pronounced US magazine—“you-ess.”
I had seen porn magazines before — the naturist magazine from Germany and Playboy-style centerfolds — but nothing that qualified as hardcore. I had also never seen an erect penis other than my own. One of my school friends had told me it was illegal to show them in print. So maybe it was the shock of seeing one for the first time that made me ejaculate, or maybe it was that I had wanted to see one for so long. The glistening example on the page I flipped to was enormous and pointed at a woman, inches from her belly. I remember shaking all over and coming in my pants, then immediately putting the magazines back in the black plastic bag.
I kept shaking after that, searching my room for a hiding spot where no one would look. I searched everywhere, trying not to think about what had happened. That was the moment when I knew I was in real trouble, that I might really be the kind of person you weren’t supposed to be.
8
THE ARCADE HAD A MUSKY, SWEATY AROMA, WITH HEAVY overtones of the scent I’ve seen described as “mushroomy” and “earthy,” though really it’s the smell of the male crotch and nothing else. It’s the stink that rises from your pants as you take a leak in the middle of the summer after walking around the city all day. It’s a pleasant smell, always different but the same on every man you meet.