In a forum online I saw a thread about favorite smells. There was the usual stuff about fresh cut grass, babies, and whatever, but slowly a controversial contingent arose which named the smell of their own balls as their favorite aroma. At first, it wasn’t taken seriously. It seemed like the usual internet trolls saying the least constructive, most absurd thing imaginable. But as the day progressed that answer received more and more votes and notes of agreement. A conversation arose. The internet is a miracle at times like that, not just in the way it brings likeminded people together, but in the way it suggests that we are all of the same mind after all, connected by invisible trails like neural paths.
In the arcade, the smell was everywhere, mixed with a certain bleachiness. Just vaguely. Diluted. Enough to know the place was being kept up. It was a nice smell, actually, the way it hit you in the cool air the second you opened the door.
I once worked with a guy whose girlfriend’s company produced scents for retail stores and restaurants. The smell of cinnamon rolls in shopping malls was the company’s landmark achievement. They could duplicate the smell of anything, improve upon it chemically, and then, through patented machinery, send out their proprietary scents in invisible puffs, all but forcing people to consume impossibly high-calorie desserts as they shopped.
Smells, he told me, could make people do all sorts of things.
9
ONE OF THE GREAT MYSTERIES OF THE ARCADE WAS THAT, despite the smell of bleach, I never once saw anyone cleaning it. It was impossible to avoid imagining the chore after seeing so much genetic material splattered around, particularly after hearing the rumor from the man with the Oakley sunglasses about an intellectually disabled cumscrubber on staff. But I never saw so much as a bottle of cleaning solution or a mop propped against a wall. Maybe they tidied in the mornings, but I usually went at night, and most of the booths were still pretty clean by that time, which would seem unlikely considering what the rumpled clerk told me about there being a lunch hour crowd.
Of course, sometimes the booths were just destroyed. Though I tried to be mindful about choosing carefully, there often wasn’t enough light to see what was going on inside until I started a video. Only when the screen was lit could I see the mess on the vinyl benches and on the floor. Once in a while I found myself actually slipping in cum, skidding around the tiny space praying to find traction before I landed in a puddle of some stranger’s gooey discharge. Some booths had cigarette butts ground into the linoleum floor, along with wads of used tissues and paper towels from the bathroom, the smell of ass and cum as thick as if someone had been burning some vile scented candle. I hated finding myself in booths like that. After starting a movie I felt obligated to wait for the time to elapse before leaving, as if it were somehow rude to leave a light lit outside an empty booth. I practically cowered against the door counting the seconds until the minute passed. Some compartments were so horrible I wasn’t able to wait it out.
I tried to pay special attention to the floors in avoidance of the shimmering puddles that made my sneakers stick to the ground for hours, that peeling-off-the-floor sound an unwelcome reminder of what I was doing with my spare time. Over the course of several visits to the arcade, I learned that there were other reasons to worry that the floors weren’t sufficiently sanitized.
One session after another I went out and paid my tokens to sit alone in a booth with my door locked. After I got into the flow of the place and figured out when other men were actually there, I started overhearing every variety of interaction. I discovered that with my dick in my hand and my ear pressed against the surface of the thin laminate wall separating me from those actually involved in the sorts of activities for which the place existed, I could have something like an encounter out there — a vicarious experience completely free of any fears of infection or the face-to-face intimacy I didn’t know how to process.
The sounds I heard made me feel as auditorially attuned as I’d always heard the blind were, my ears twitching at the barely detectible slip of a button through a buttonhole, every stretch of elastic, as anxious hands reached into unfamiliar underwear. No matter what I heard or for how long, I always hungered for more, staying later than I had intended in hopes of listening in on another encounter.
It wasn’t easy making out the details of my neighbors’ interactions. I was stuck guessing at what was happening over the racket of full-volume porn on all sides — the aural equivalent to my childhood attempts at discerning bits of pornography from scrambled channels my parents didn’t pay for.
As I innocently strategized ways to overhear more of my neighbors’ encounters, I realized that most of the sounds I received came not through the wall but via a small gap of about three inches at the bottom of every partition. From there, it didn’t take long to realize that if I got on my hands and knees, I might be able to actually see into the neighboring compartment. I don’t know why the walls didn’t extend all the way to the floor. Knowing that place, it might have been to accommodate precisely that pervert’s view.
The first time I worked up the nerve to try it, I heard my target making his way down the hallway, testing every door as he did. He pushed on one door and found it locked, then pushed on another and found it unlocked but empty. He pushed on another and opened the door to find someone inside with whom he didn’t wish to connect. I heard a brief exchange of murmurs before he exited and moved along down the hallway, running his hand against the flat plane of doors like a kid running a stick along a picket fence. He tried my door as he passed, found it locked, of course, and then moved along to the neighboring booth, which for some reason he decided to enter and occupy for a while.
Without locking his door, the man dropped a couple of tokens in the slot. In my booth, I did the same with my volume turned all the way down and my ears pricked. Twice over the next few minutes a visitor entered my neighbor’s compartment. I heard the door creak open, and could only imagine what was happening as the two of them sized each other up in the darkness before determining they were not a match. When the third man came along, there was a long pause. The two of them exchanged words in bass whispers I couldn’t make out. Then the man who had just entered turned and locked the door.
Doing my best to conceal the sound of my breath, I squinted at the floor searching for anything that might give me AIDS if it got in my eye or into a tiny cut of which I was unaware. I knelt, then put my hands to the ground and lowered my face until I could make out two pairs of feet, one standing near the screen wearing a pair of black dress shoes with the dark cuffs of his slacks resting on their laces, the other wearing a pair of jeans and work boots covered in dry mud.
First they were on opposite sides of the booth. Then the guy in the dress shoes dropped a few tokens in the slot. One of them whispered something. Only the words “suck” and “you” were audible to me. I heard the clanking of belt buckles as they came undone, then the feet moved closer. There were more whispers before the man in slacks got onto his knees without, I noted, nearly so thorough a check of the floor as I had executed. The man in the work boots sighed, and I heard his belt clanking rhythmically. At last he separated from the suit long enough to pull his jeans down until they rested on top of his boots. The suit half stood to pull down his own pants, then got back into position and continued sucking. I could hear the sounds of his mouth against the other guy’s dick. They both groaned quietly. I could see the silhouette of the suit’s fist wrapped around his own member, his bare knees on the floor. When the movie stopped, the man in work boots reached down to search the pockets of his crumpled pants until he found a handful of tokens to cram in the slot.