He mulled over Hawley’s news as he rode. He was privately a little relieved; he’d felt certain more than once that his parents were ready to call him into the living room one evening and tell him they knew everything—about the store, the hours after school, the money under the table. We’re disappointed you’d try to keep secrets from us, they would say—that would be Dad’s word, delivered slowly and with resonance handed down over generations: disappointed. His mother would be angry, but anger was different. Anger passes. Disappointment vibrates.
The bell dinged when he opened the door; Derrick noticed that Hawley looked oddly chipper for a weekday afternoon inside a dark bookstore where people came to do things in secret. “Hey, now,” he said.
“Hey, now, yourself,” said Hawley. He smiled broadly; he was never unfriendly in his aspect, but this felt like an unusual look.
“Everything all right?” Derrick asked. He was already headed for the supply closet, but Hawley stopped him: physically stopped him, gently but firmly putting his hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t want you cleaning up back there anymore,” he said.
“Come on,” said Derrick. “Nothing I haven’t done before.”
“No,” said Hawley, “it’s not like that. It’s just—I want to be out of here by the end of the month. I don’t trust them to prorate me if I’m still here even a minute into October. And I’m not taking anything with me. So it doesn’t matter if we take care of this place now, and there’s no need for you to give everything the Cadillac treatment like you do.”
Derrick raised his eyebrows more pointedly than he generally allowed himself to when adults were present. “It will get nasty back there,” he said.
“I’ll mop the halls. That’s it. They raised the rent on me four times in the short time I’ve been here. Four times, you know?”
Either Hawley had been carefully masking real anger over the whole affair, or it had taken a little while to surface. But Derrick could see it now: resentment. Spite. Maybe he’d spent a few days thinking about it.
“So they can just clean that shit up themselves,” Hawley concluded, looking back down at the counter the way he’d often done to indicate that a subject was now closed.
Derrick sat down on one of the two barstools behind the counter, the one he considered his: it had a maroon seat cover made out of leatherette, attached to the cushion by hexagonal gold-colored metal studs so old they boasted a kind of grimy patina. To Derrick, this chair had always looked like a prop from a scene in a low-budget movie: a crew of medieval nobodies at the tavern, sitting around drinking before the guy who’s come to wreck the village shows up.
“Landlord’s gonna be mad,” Derrick remarked, getting out a sketchbook.
“Then she can be mad,” Hawley said, his tone mild but conclusive. The landlord’s pleasure was no longer his concern.
The bell sounded again as a pair of customers came inside: college students, from the look of them, a man and a woman, both visibly trying as hard as they could to not look nervous.
SOLO I
In its brief operating days, the Monster Adult X arcade boasted seven booths in total: six for single occupants and one couples booth. You had to select one specific movie to watch if you wanted the couples booth, and you paid eight dollars to watch it in the comfort of a booth with a long bench seat down the back and a small love seat to the side of the screen. The other booths, minus their screens, might as easily have been confessionals: dark, austere, private. All were lockable from the inside by a sliding bolt latch; these locks may or may not have been legal. Had the store lasted longer, somebody from the city might have taken an interest in the question.
But nobody did; Monster Adult X barely pinged anybody’s radar. Its flickering existence had been a brief detour on Anthony Hawley’s travels through entrepreneurship. Beyond the business license, the only outward sign of the life inside had been an advertisement in the Yellow Pages, under “BOOKS—NEW AND SPECIALTY”： set off by a bold black border, and featuring a small clip-art portrait of a clean-cut man with a very firm jaw, it stood out from the more demure ads with which it shared space on the page. PRIVATE BOOTHS, the text read in part. When I talked to him, Hawley seemed amused by my interest in the details.
“I know it was seven booths because of the whole thing with Derrick’s friends later,” he said. “I remember that. And I remember the couples booth because the couples cleaned up after themselves, unlike the guys in the solo booths, who…”