“I don’t fucking masturbate!” Barney said, looking at me angrily, walking toward me rapidly. He approached the counter, half his right arm still in his pocket, still shaking it, and said, “It fucking ITCHES, Taco. It itches real bad!” then stormed out the door.
“I don’t masturbate,” they say. “I haven’t masturbated since 9/11,” they all say around here. I hate people who lie and I also hate tattle-tails. Soon after Barney left, some young kid wearing a knit cap, about 19 years old, came up to the counter from the video arcade with this astonished look on his face. “Hey, there’s a couple guys in one of the booths back there buttfucking,” he said.
“Oh really?” I said, not really giving a shit. Technically, it’s against the rules, of course, for guys to engage in sexual activities—including masturbation, even—in the back, but we know it happens all the time and generally let it slide because it’s good for business. “How do you know?” I said to the kid. “Were you watching them?”
“No, dude, I ain’t no fucking queer. They had the door open, man—go back there and look!”
“Alright, I’ll check it out here in a few. What booth are they in?”
He tells me the booth number and I’m in no hurry to check it out. For one, I hate fucking tattle-tails, especially this young twerp who is so lifeless as to actually hang out in the back of a dirty movie arcade all day, having nothing better to do than rat guys out for buttfucking. Another is that I’ve seen guys having sex a million times and get tired of it. I have to go back there and clean once a day, sometimes for hours scrubbing and mopping; I change the movies, make sure the coin slots are working. None of us really care about what goes on in the back. For business, it’s best to let them do about anything they want as long as no one gets hurt. But since the kid told me about it and it’s technically against the rules I have to feign interest and look into it. I wait a bit, let the front of the store clear out from customers then walk back there to see what’s happening, hoping by now they are finished buttfucking and I don’t have to see it because I’m not in the mood.
I get back there and there are about 3 or 4 guys huddled around booth #3. It’s the preview booth/multi channel booth which is handicap-accessible so it’s three times as big as any other booth—and a favorite booth for buttfucking. One of the guys watching is Melvin, this black gay dude from the Virgin Islands here in town to study law. He is here constantly and I have no idea when he ever studies for his classes, he is so obsessed with sucking cock. He’s a younger, good-looking guy and has the back of his jeans pulled down so half his bare ass is showing; it’s a common habit of his to strut around the arcade like that to lure people in, or simply to turn guys on. I like Melvin and most of the time I think it’s funny but not now. “Melvin, pull your pants up, dude,” I say, “I’m sick of looking at your ass every time I come back here.”
“Ooooh . . . .sorry, baby,” Melvin says. “What’cha doin back here, anyway?”
“Some guys are buttfucking and I’m here to stop it,” I say, nudging through the observers, two old perverted men with their dicks out, stroking it. “Put your dicks in your fucking pants,” I say. Then I look in the booth and there is this fucking KID, the same mother fucking tattle-tail, in the booth. He’d tricked me! He had some old man bent over the plastic white lawn chair we keep in there. I’m getting a clear side view of the kid, butt-naked except for the knit cap on his head, driving his dick into this old man’s messy ass. “How much is this young cock worth to you, old man?” the cocky kid says, swatting the guy’s old, wrinkled ass, driving his thick dick into that tight old faggot butt.
“Ooooh . . “ the old man moans.
“This stroke’ll cost you a fucking dollar,” the kid says, jamming his dick in with a thrust so vicious only the truly young could pull it off. He pulls it out, puts it back in as I just stand there a second, fuming that this kid had tricked me into having to watch him fuck this old man for money. “Dollar every time my cock goes in this dirty butt, old man. That’s what I’m askin today because I’m needin a new Ipod and that’s what I’m gonna fucking GET,” jams his dick in again mercilessly, nearly knocking the old man off the chair.
Suddenly the kid looks at me and smiles arrogantly. Then he starts laughing, sticks his dick in the old man’s ass one more time, turns around and shoots a big white load of cum in my direction, nearly hitting the toe of my boot. He’s giggling and groaning, cumming as his knees wobble. The old man can hardly move. He slides from the chair, his knees hitting the dirty, red brick tile floor. “How you like that, porno dude?” the kid says. “I told you there was a couple guys back here buttfuckin! Can’t have any of that back here now, can we? Even though you fuckers charge us $3 in tokens to even come back here and each token only lasts a goddam minute.” He’s saying this with his hard, young pink dick erect and facing me; he’s grunting and drawing the last of the cum from his throbbing, purple tip as I look at the drops of spooge on the floor that I’ll have to mop up.
“Get the fuck out and don’t come back,” I say. The kid says something about my having fun cleaning up the mess as he takes money from the old man’s hand, laughs and walks out. I’d been TrIcKeD By A TaTTle TaIL and even though I banned him from the store it’ll only be on my shift and for just a few months. I’ll never be able to get my boss to ban him completely. A kid buys $3 in tokens a day, every day times 365 days a year; multiplied by kids similar to him in the company’s 43 stores all over the Midwest, and it stands to reason why my boss isn’t keen on banning people from the store no matter what they do, as long as they’re not violent. The kid is a prostitute which is against the law, of course, but I pride myself in the fact that I’ve never called the cops on anyone in my life. As soon as I have to call them for something it’ll be a lot harder for me to hate them.
It was the morning after the tattle-tail tricked me and I was back in the arcade again, broom in hand, sweeping out the booths. I was thinking of how in the hell I would ever get out of here; how I would ever pay my $50,000 Taco Heaven debt by mopping up the cum of masturbators, cocksuckers and buttfuckers. Dollar signs, naked bodies and the titties and hairy tacos of countless werewomen were all swirling and dancing in my mind as I swept up the biological fluids of faggots and losers, their used condoms—swept the jizz-stained tissues of masturbators into my dust pan, hating myself; hating masturbators and homos for what they were doing to me, for all the pubic hairs they were possessing me with; I had eaten too many of those Taco Cow tacos I’d gotten and felt the fur balls in the pit of my stomach, exacerbating my lyncanthropia. There was a hollowed-out cucumber in booth #3. In booth #6 there was a pair of dirty men’s underwear and in booth #7 there was this pile of about five or six tacos from Taco Cow— I saw them splattered on the dirty floor; soggy, wet corn shell bits mixed with blobs of hot sauce-stained hair covered in sour cream spoonfuls that someone had cummed upon, maybe the same guy who was writing those straight guys’ phone numbers. The same guy leaves these hairy tacos there for me every Tuesday morning and he sticks a dollar bill as a joke—or some sort of tip—stuck to the wall with his own dried up cum and sour cream. Depressed as hell, I put the dollar in my flannel shirt pocket and continued sweeping, thinking of dead, naked hairy women and wishing I could home to jerk off, howl at the moon and cry.
Before heading into the arcade that morning I’d seen something that had upset me greatly. I walked into the employee restroom after brewing some coffee. I didn’t think anyone was in there and I accidentally walked in on Grant-- the third shift clerk who is gay—taking a shit. Grant is a twink, about 19, with the slender fine features of an elf-- curly, well-styled, moussed hair, dyed bright blonde and he had large, blue eyes. I saw his “poop face” to my horror, and what was disturbing is that, in the midst of the poop face he gave me a kid smile and look of embarrassment. I saw the side of his ass, and it was a slender, smooth one. Grant always bragged about how much of a pussy he was, and he wasn’t a whole lot like the ballsy tattle-tail who had tricked me. But the side of his ass made me think of that kid from yesterday and I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of that cocky kid buttfucking that old man, then taunting me about it.
I continued to sweep, walked past the emergency fire exit and noticed it was open. It’s supposed to set off a buzzer we can hear up front when someone opens it—no one’s allowed to use it—but the buzzer’s been broken for some time and it looked like someone had recently snuck either in or out of the arcade. I’m guessing “in” because Grant- after the awkward moment of my watching him shit—told me there was no one in the arcade he had sold tokens to. I approached booth #6 and noticed the door was shut and locked but the “in use” light which goes on whenever tokens are dropped in the slot wasn’t lit. “Hey,” I said, knocking on the door, “drop tokens in the slot or exit the booth. The store has a no loitering policy.”
“I ain’t got no more tokens,” the voice said from behind the door. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it.
“Then you’re gonna have to buy more up front or leave,” I said, not feeling like messing with this shit already today.
“I said I ain’t got no more tokens,” the voice said, and I snapped. I dropped my broom, pounded on the door and screamed, “GET OUT OF THE GODDAM BOOTH THEN!!” The third time I pounded on the door I nearly fell forward because the guy in there opened it suddenly and there he was. There was Barney sitting there on the floor, huddled in a corner. “Barney?” I said, shocked to see my friend back here in the arcade. He’d always been a real “he-man non-masturbator,” and of course, he hated “fags”. But here he was, huddled in the corner of the booth underneath the television screen. He had his desert khakis pulled down to his ankles; had a desert combat field hat cap on. To my horror and disgust I didn’t see a penis between his legs; all I saw was a thick patch of blonde pubic hairs that was gnarly and unkempt. The arcade was a bit chilly so early in the morning and maybe his dick had shrunken into a nub with the cold but I saw no evidence of a cock whatsoever and it worried me. I didn’t know what to say, felt embarrassed for him as I noticed the rotten smell of his semen in the air. I felt Barney’s pungent body heat and moisture all around me, the smell of a masturbator’s desperate sweat nearly gagged me as, to my unbelief, shock and sadness Barney showed me his right arm, the one I thought he was frigging himself with in the store front the other day.
