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.
I couldn’t see the suit’s mouth on the worker’s dick, but I could see his hand working at himself, and I took out my own dick so I could time my rhythm with his. I could hear the worker getting closer and closer as the sound of the slurping grew louder and more intense. At last, the worker sighed heavily and let go, forgetting himself entirely and letting loose a series of loud exhalations as the suit kept at him until he was really and truly empty.
Then I saw them straighten up. The guy on his knees stood. “Thanks, man,” one of them whispered. Then the other said, “Hey, thank you.” They got themselves in order, pulled their pants up and tucked in their shirts. The guy with the work boots said, “Here, man, take these,” and I heard the sound of him removing his remaining tokens from his pocket and spilling them into the suit’s hand.
I eventually learned that by inserting my tokens at the same time as my neighbors, I could time my exit from a compartment to coincide with theirs. It completed the scene to see the faces when I could. Often they were guys I’d already passed in my rounds. It was interesting seeing who ended up with who.
Sometimes I felt jealous watching the men make their way out of the booths, down the hallway, and out into the world. Particularly if I found one or both of the men attractive, or if one or both had spurned me before connecting with each other. I couldn’t help wondering what it was that made me not good enough. It was a familiar feeling. I’d had it off and on my entire life.
When I was eight or nine, I watched the Olympics with my parents. The gymnasts were competing, and some of them appeared to be almost the same age as me. I was more interested in their performances than I was in the other contests since I was in a gymnastics class and was among the best in my age group. My parents, in a presumably innocent attempt to engage me, persisted in asking my opinions of the athletes onscreen.
Didn’t she do a great job?
Did you see that flip?
What kind of score do you think he’ll get?
I could feel my face reddening.
“I could do that if I wanted to,” I said, the volume and pitch of my voice rising. “If I practiced harder, I could do that too.”
But I had already heard the commentators going on about how many years the athletes had worked to perfect their skills. I had heard about how they were selected in earliest youth and recognized to have abilities possessed by a minuscule fraction of humankind. After a few minutes more, I went to my room and bawled thinking about all the things from which I was already excluded.
Back then, I still clung to the fantasy that I might be a prodigy. It wasn’t immediately clear what my special ability might be, but I knew I must have one. I had the idea that everyone might be a prodigy at something. It was just a matter of finding out what it was you were so unexpectedly good at. I sat at a piano for the first time believing it as likely as not that I would be able to play perfectly without a single lesson. Same for guitar, trumpet, drums, harmonica, tennis, golf, baseball, karate, and tae kwon do. It seemed to me that the next thing I tried, whatever it was, would surely lead to the discovery of an unaccountable superpower-like skill. I was in my middle twenties before, defeated, I finally gave up the idea.
ONE DAY I DROPPED A TOKEN IN THE SLOT AND SETTLED ON a movie and an appropriate volume, then got down to peek into the neighboring booth. There, I discovered a dark figure on his hands and knees peering back at me. Startled, I stood up, feeling like a monkey who had discovered a mirror in his cage. I almost bolted, but something stopped me, and, heart pounding, I lowered my pants and knelt down where he could see me. He watched for a long while before he slowly slid his fingers beneath the wall.
“Come here,” he whispered through the opening. “Come here.”
I felt possessed edging forward along the floor until his spidery fingers finally grasped me. He touched me with tremendous care, stroking me slowly and hyper-deliberately, as if measuring my dick or performing some kind of examination of my erection. My head swam as his hand traveled its length over and over again.
For a moment, it was as if a black cloth had been dropped