Arcade

Following a breakup, a curious young man begins frequenting the peepshow stalls of a sex shop where men meet for anonymous trysts. Situated on the outskirts of a small Texas town, the Arcade is both sleazy and sterile, utterly terrifying and yet totally safe. It is a good fit for our guileless hero, who - as demonstrated by his unrequited love of a closeted cop and fussy sexual habits - is a fundamentally contradictory character himself.

For our nameless narrator the arcade becomes a crash course in anonymous sexual etiquette. Buying tokens, lurking in the stalls, recognizing the approaches and petitions of potential hook-ups, he dabbles cautiously.

While the cop starts a new life with a teenage boyfriend known only as the Kid, our hero's dead-end job as a motel desk clerk leaves him with little else to do but think about sex, have sex, or watch others have sex - his only real friend being Malcolm, a man he’s never met in person but who talks to him on the phone (first for phone sex; and then for friendship and phone sex).

As his adventures within the arcade leak into craigslist and road side hookups, our increasingly debauched hero must eventually confront whether his time at the arcade is just the passing phase that his family insists it is, or perhaps, the gateway to a new way of life.

Drew Nellins Smith's writing has appeared in Bookslut, The Believer,Tin House, The Rumpus, The Daily Beast, The Millions, and elsewhere.Arcade is his first novel. He lives in Austin, TX.