Even after I hung up, the kid stayed there at the table, pretending to examine a bus schedule and a flyer for a company offering double decker bus tours.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” I said.
He turned around and looked at me. I thought he was about to say something, but he just kept staring. The seconds ticked past, and I could feel my face turn red and my throat close up.
His face was red too. It was the first time I was able to get a good impression of him. I could almost see what the cop would want with him. Maybe there was something handsome in him. Beneath the baby fat, I thought I could see something dignified. A jawline. Broad shoulders.
The map in the kid’s hands shook. It seemed likely that he would remove a gun or a knife from his pants and that would be the end of me. But after staring at one another for several seconds, he nodded. Then, with trembling hands, he folded the bus map, put it back on the table and left.
81
FANTASIZING WAYS TO ESCAPE THE LOBBY, I IMAGINED THE possibility of a career at the arcade. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw that I didn’t really want to work out there so much as I wanted to have an arcade of my own.
I thought about getting into the industry, the newsletters I never would have known existed, the catalogs and invitations to sleazy conventions where I’d meet guys who’d seen it all. Maybe one would make a project of me, teaching me the business the way Burgess Meredith taught Sylvester Stallone how to box in Rocky. Maybe I’d speak at his funeral and inherit his chain of arcades and car washes, the son he’d never had.
I’d be like Bruce Mailman, the owner of the New St. Marks Baths in New York. Like the St. Mark’s, we’d never close. I read that, though the building had been open and operating as a bathhouse for more than seventy years, the city had been forced to buy a lock when they shut it down in 1985 because no one who worked there — not even the owners — had a key to the place. They’d never closed up before, not even for holidays.
My employees and I would all have horror stories about cleaning up booths and the bathroom. We’d have favorite regulars and guys we wanted to sleep with, and guys we absolutely loathed, and guys we banned. We’d have an endless supply of anecdotes for one another about the things we had seen and the conversations we’d had, and no one would understand except for those of us who worked there.
Maybe manning the counter, I’d meet fascinating and fun people, and maybe when I did, I could join them in a booth, leaving the front desk unattended like a sidewalk newsstand from the 1950s, with a stack of tokens and a note reading “Honor System.”
82
I EMAILED MALCOLM TO TELL HIM ABOUT THE VISIT FROM the kid. I couldn’t talk about it out loud yet.
His reply arrived just a few minutes later.
“Sounds to me like that’s finished. And like maybe it’s time for you to move on. Since it seems like you’re never going to ask, you know I could get you a job, right? A pretty good one. All you have to do is say the word. Of course, you’d have to tell me your real name.”
83
IT WAS A QUIET NIGHT. I WAS DOING MY USUAL ROUNDS, walking from here to there, looking at DVD covers, waiting for something to happen. I wasn’t interested in anyone out there, and no one was interested in me.
I went to the hallway and entered an empty booth. The second I dropped a token in the slot, I recognized a powerful stench. I searched around for its source and spotted on the floor a pile of human excrement. I jumped back, I was so startled. I didn’t think for a second before pushing out of the booth. I felt so revolted, I wanted to leave the arcade right away, but I was afraid that if I did the staff might see me entering the booth and then leaving abruptly on the security footage, and assume I was the culprit. Maybe they’d freeze frame a picture of me and hang a wanted poster on the premises. Maybe they’d wait until the next time I came in to confront me. Surely they’d see what a short time I’d spent in there. But, then, maybe if you really had to go, you could be in and out in no time at all.
I walked around for a few minutes trying to behave normally but not feeling normal. I no longer felt like finding someone to connect with. I thought the arcade must be falling apart and becoming the kind of weird and disgusting underbelly that anyone might imagine when thinking of a place like that.
I left after I felt enough time had passed to clear me as someone who had shat and run. Walking past the clerk on my way out, I debated telling him what I’d seen, but I feared it would make me look like someone trying to avoid suspicion.
Driving home, I didn’t know what to think about the place. I wasn’t sure why I had been going or where it was all leading. I wondered about my best-case scenario at the arcade, and if there had ever been one at all. I wondered what, if anything, would finally make me stop going there. Maybe it would take a big scare or a real crisis. I imagined that the whole place was in decline. I thought about the broken windows theory, and wondered if I had seen the first broken window, or maybe just a broken window. Maybe it wasn’t the first shit on the floor. Maybe it was just the first one I had encountered.
I remembered Holden Caulfield at the end of The Catcher in Rye, when he discovers the words “fuck you” written on the wall at his younger sister Phoebe’s school, how he imagines the way it threatens to destroy the innocence of the children there. “I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it,” he says.
84
I WENT OUT TO THE ARCADE ONE NIGHT A FEW WEEKS LATER, and found it closed. The building was dark. There was another man out there. We circled the place in our cars. I got out and tried the door. The guy parked next to my car, and I went to his window after I found the door locked. He was a good-looking, middle-aged Latino.
“It’s locked,” I said.
“That’s strange,” he said. “Was there a note on the door?”
“I didn’t see one.”
I walked back to the door to see if I had missed a note, or if one had fallen on the ground.
“No note,” I said.
I went back to his window, and we appraised one another for a second.
“All the lights are off,” I said. “Maybe they’re closed for a staff meeting or something.”
“Huh,” the guy said. “Well, you wanna sit in my car with me for a minute?”
“Thanks, but I think I’m going to head out. Playing in public makes me nervous. Besides you could be an axe murderer.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you too.”
“Maybe I’ll see you next time.”
“Okay, man.”
Another car was pulling in as I was leaving. We drove past one another very slowly, but I wasn’t able to get a look at the driver.
The day I found the arcade I knew that it couldn’t last forever. It seemed too old fashioned to survive, the buttons on the wall, the porn on disks instead of online. The lit-up coin slots. It was like discovering a pinball arcade.
The next time I went, a week later, the place had been completely emptied out. No note.
However much the arcade seemed like an artifact from some lost era, I had never imagined it would close that way — with no warning, no clearance sale, no heads-up from the clerks, no sign on the front door made in Microsoft Word.
I experienced the same reaction as when the cop ended things with me. Not the hysterical sadness, but the incredulity at not having a vote about something that pertained to me so directly. Like a kid told by his parents that the family is moving across the country, I couldn’t believe other people were permitted to make these decisions about my life unilaterally.