The guy with the Oakley sunglasses was a rare find. Many of the guys I’d met online wouldn’t talk on the phone. Those guys didn’t want a buddy. They wanted men they’d never met before to come over and fuck or get fucked, then immediately tuck their dripping dicks inside their trousers and leave without requesting so much as a towel. Certainly without so much as the suggestion of intimacy. I once had a guy shout at me for patting his ass as I pulled up my pants to leave. It had been intended as a gesture of butch camaraderie, but he snapped that I shouldn’t get any ideas. He wasn’t a fag and I sure as fuck wasn’t his boyfriend—in case a moments-earlier instance of sodomy had been mistaken for something more substantive.
The man with the Oakley sunglasses was the classic good ol’ boy—his slow Texan drawl perfect and utterly unaffected. He wanted me to come over but worried what his neighbors would think. I’d heard that a lot and had the same fear about inviting men to my own place. Guys in our position had the idea that our neighbors—even the ones we’d never met—were tracking our every movement. The guy said he lived in a conservative neighborhood and asked what kind of car I drove. A pickup, I told him, which I knew was the right answer. He said he was going to run some errands, but that I should come by later that evening. We could turn on the football game, drink a beer or two, and see how we got along.
He told me he lived just outside of town. As he described how I would get to his neighborhood I drew the connection.
“You live close to the triple-X place.”
A long pause on the line. “You don’t go there, do you?” he said. The sudden tone of suspicion suggested I had lost ground with him merely by knowing of its existence.
“I went out there once. I checked it out for the first time a couple of weeks ago.” It was true. I had only just discovered the place. “You’ve never been?”
“Hell, you couldn’t pay me to step foot in a place like that. That’s the kind of place you get AIDS in. I heard they got a retard there who all he does is scrub cum with a mop all day.”
“Aw hell, it’s not as bad as all that,” I said, more careful than ever to slow and deepen my voice. Though whatever hick burg the guy with the Oakley sunglasses had come from was probably no smaller than my own hometown, the accent—natural on the tongues of everyone else in my family—had never quite stuck in my throat. But I could fake it well enough.
“I never touched anyone out there or anything,” I said, knowing that opting for the double negative would have been better, but unable to bring myself to do it. “It’s cleaner than you’d guess once you walk inside. But I know what you mean. It’s definitely a funny kinda place. I just went on a lark. I thought it was a regular old porn shop, place to get DVDs and all. You should go see for yourself sometime. It’s nothing much to be afraid of.”
“Shit, I ain’t afraid of it. I just know too many people ‘round here to have my truck seen in the parking lot of a place like that, even if I did want to go, which I don’t.”
“Surely people don’t pay that much attention to whose cars are in the parking lot,” I said, not bothering to detail for him the building’s clever arrangement, how it hid cars parked there from visibility by drivers-by.
“I guess you never heard about the protests when it first opened up. It was in the papers. Course that’s been a few years back now. Maybe you missed it.”
“What kind of protests? People with signs?”
“Yeah, they were out front. Women mostly, holding signs and all that. My neighbor took off work to go out there with her daughter.”
“Like a little girl?”
“Yeah, a kid. Or she was then. Might be she’s a teenager now.”
“There were kids at the protests?”
“I guess so. At least one.”
“What kind of signs did they have?”
“Just paper signs on poster board, stapled to stakes like you see on TV.”
“What did they say?”
“Hell if I know. I tried to ignore all that.”
“Surely you can remember one or two of them.”
“Hell, I don’t know. Let me think. One of them I think said something about ‘Real men don’t need porn.’ Then another one said something about ‘Shame on you, something something, devil something.’ I can’t remember. What are you so interested for anyway?”
“I’m not interested,” I said. “Except, I guess, just because it seems funny protesting a place like that. Of all the things in the world to protest about, I mean.”
“Well, maybe you’d feel different if it was in your own neighborhood.”
“You do have a point there, sir,” I said. “You certainly do have a point.”
I wanted to ask a hundred more questions. I’d never have thought of the residents of those neighborhoods as community activists, though it did make sense that, if they were going to protest anything, it would be the possibility of gay sex in their immediate vicinity.
“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.”
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