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.
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.
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.
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