I tried phoning him, even though the email was from hours earlier, but got no answer. I left a long, hyperactive message on his voicemail, trying to summarize the events of the past several weeks so speedily that I probably sounded more like a meth addict than the victim of a broken heart.
I sat down and elaborated in a pages-long email about the cop, the kid, and my heartbreak, crying as I typed and then signing off, “I’m literally crying as I type this. Sam.”
THE FIRST TIME I ACTUALLY ENTERED A BOOTH WITH someone else, it was a couple. They gave me a look in the main room, the fluorescent tube lights glowing down on us from the high ceiling. They must have given one another a look too, to agree upon me, and then they gave me the look together. They seemed sexually serious in a way that I wasn’t, as if they belonged to that class of people who devote part of each paycheck to the pursuit of sex, who devote rooms of their house to it, who join clubs and groups devoted to their favorite type of sex, who get tattoos pertaining to their sexual penchants and partialities, who have a special wardrobe that enables them to live more fully in the world of their fantasies. One of the men was wearing leather pants and a dog collar. The other looked muscular in denim and a work shirt. He had severe and asymmetric facial features. I pictured him as the oddball on some construction crew about town, while the other probably spent most of his day in a large dog kennel. Still, they were sexy in their way.
A friend once told me that when faced with a situation in which violence or sex might occur one should always try not to smile. A guy comes up to you on the street and starts asking you strange questions. You feel like he’s sizing you up. Maybe he’s going to mug you or hurt you or just fuck with you. It’s the instinct of most people to give the guy a smile, or to let out a short laugh and say, “What is this, buddy?” My friend says that’s the worst thing you can do. He says you should do just the opposite. He says to treat it like what you think it might be from the beginning. Somebody fucking with you on the street is no reason to smile.
The same rule applies to sex. My friend says you should behave the same way you would if you were being confronted by a predator. Narrow your eyes, tilt your head in an expression of humorless miscomprehension. You talkin’ to me?
That’s the look the members of the sexually serious pair gave me. This was before I’d learned the lesson of not smiling, so I replied to their look with a Who me? double take just shy of looking behind myself to see who else they might be checking out.
I followed the men into the dark hallway and then into a booth, all of it arranged by nothing more than a couple of exchanged glances. I felt as if I was being let in on a secret. So this was how men connected. I had no idea.
“What do you like?” the construction worker asked me, as his boyfriend dropped a couple of tokens into the slot.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not much. I guess I’d like to watch you two do something.”
I hadn’t known that watching was what I wanted to do until I heard the words myself.
The couple accepted my request as readily as a jukebox. The man in the leather pants peeled them down until they were stretched tightly across his ankles. His boyfriend did the same with his jeans. I saw both of their dicks. They were wearing cock rings. The leather guy wore a leather one. The denim guy had a steel ring. I took myself out too. I didn’t have a cock ring, but I didn’t need one. The man in leather pants dropped to his knees and started sucking the man in blue jeans. I stood next to the man in jeans. With my pants down, pulling at myself, it was almost as if I was the one getting the blowjob.
I touched the man in denim. He let me reach up his shirt to feel his chest. He made to touch me too, but I brushed him away, shaking my head. The kneeling man tried next, reaching for me and pulling away from his boyfriend in a way that suggested he intended to begin doing for me what he had been doing for him. I shook my head, but he persisted in reaching for me as if I were merely being coy.
I did my best to appear somewhat relaxed as I essentially bolted from the booth in a state of what would once have been called “homosexual panic.” I put myself into my pants as quickly as I could and took off, unlocking the door and leaving it bouncing against its frame.
By chance, I ran into them the very next time I went to the arcade. They gave me the look again, and I followed them into exactly the same booth as before. We started a video and wordlessly got half undressed as though it were a familiar routine. Since our first meeting, I frequently recalled the precise details of what had gone on between the two of them in front of me. I felt brazen and alert to an extreme and almost frightening degree, my eyes like vacuums, drawing it all in. This time, grasping more fully the dominate/subordinate dynamic between them, I said to the construction worker, “Can I watch you fuck him?”
He looked at his partner, then reached into his pocket and removed a condom. As he donned the rubber, the sub took off his shoes, shimmied out of his leather pants, and tossed them in a wad in the corner. He got on his hands and knees on one of the benches. The construction worker spat into his hand and rubbed it into the crack of his partner’s ass. Then he slowly slid himself in. I watched their faces. It was instantly one of my favorite things, one of the favorite things I’d ever seen in person.
I stood beside the man in denim. It was the same as last time, except better. I stood watching like that for a while. The man in denim reached over and touched me, and I let him. It felt very good very quickly. I pulled away and sat down on one of the benches near his partner’s head.
The man on all fours looked at me. He still looked serious. They both looked serious. It didn’t seem as if they were engaged in a fun romp. I looked at both of them, and I felt serious too. I didn’t know where it was going. I thought maybe we could all climax together, but only after a very long time of doing what we were doing. I wanted the experience to last. Every time the video ended, I stood to drop a fresh token or two into the slot, then sat back down.
As I took my seat for the last time, the man on all fours leaned his head directly over my groin and let loose a long dribble of saliva expertly aimed at my penis. It was a direct hit, and before I could react he began rubbing me using the spit as lubricant. I jumped into the air. This time I didn’t even attempt an air of coolness. I raced from the booth, down the hallway, and out the door. I sped to my house and tore off my clothes. I got into the shower and scrubbed until the hot water ran out, swearing to God and to myself that I would never again return to the arcade.
For weeks after, I obsessed over what I had undoubtedly caught from the man in leather. I thought back on the event searching my memory for clues. In retrospect, I found it damning that his boyfriend had used a condom. I figured he only did that because his partner had something he didn’t want to catch. Or maybe it was the dom guy who was infected, the one who had been touching me so much. But that didn’t make as much sense. He was obviously a top, and tops were rarely the ones who got infected, I’d heard. It was usually the bottoms—or the “receptive partners” as the literature would have it. So it was the leather sub spitter who was infected. I knew it. Shit.
I Googled it for hours. I didn’t think I’d catch HIV from the guy, but I thought I’d probably get whatever else he had. A friend who volunteered at an AIDS hospice said that AIDS and herpes went together. He told me that almost everyone who had AIDS had herpes too. That worried me.
Someone on the notoriously unreliable Yahoo! Answers—then Ask Yahoo!—had written a panicked plea for information after