Devil House(42)
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…”
He pursed his lips. “You wouldn’t believe what some of these guys get up to in there. It would make you sick. And they write on the walls, or carve designs in there. Who does that? Gets out their pocketknife while they’re watching the porno movie and just carves something in the wall.”
But these carvings, occasionally, either by virtue of their sheer crudeness or because of some detail that grabbed the imagination and wouldn’t let go, made cleanup—the worst part of the job, and also its most recurring, reliable function— a little less degrading, and a little more interesting. Derrick judged them like entries in a competition. The first solo booth, just to the right of the arcade entrance, had had two carvings, both predating Devil House; neither would have made his honorable mentions list. One looked like an eyeball but was probably supposed to be a breast. The other was unmistakably a penis drawn by a person whose feeling for the organ was one part wonder to two parts revulsion; none of the later work done to improve it could wholly mask the veins that had once popped out from under its skin, or the sinewy detail of the frenulum.
Still, one evidentiary photograph shows how a later-arriving artist had tried to improve upon it, doing his level best to transform the glans into the head of a sea serpent that looked like one of the Godzilla knockoffs who used to show up on late-night TV. The batwing-like ears jutting out from it are stark, and striking; the urethral meatus is now only one pupil among three gazing out from carefully rounded, menacing eyes.
No one familiar with Derrick’s hand—his gently wavering lines, the slumping biomorphic shapes—could mistake this work for his. Derrick’s work awaited the onlooker’s attention; it repaid the eye wise enough to dwell on it with detail and nuance. Even his most garish pieces had a softness, and doted on line and curve that seemed to soften their content. The penis-monster in Solo Booth I is also quite detailed—its scales are meticulous, the claws at the ends of its bulbous feet are of uniform length. But the hand that drew it feels driven: the point of the piece seems not decorative but communicative.
It has to be Seth. Seth wanted to say something to the outside world when he drew, even if the chances anyone would see it, or care when they did, were infinitesimally small.
FOR MATTHEW PARIS
Often, if you have an exact enough description of the primary source you’re looking for, you can follow its movements—you can find out when it changed hands, and for how much, and how heated or tepid the bidding was during the auction. Once in a while, when buyers or sellers get sloppy, you can even find out their names and cull their contact information. All it takes is someone whose hurry was too great to check the “keep this information private” box on a single click-through screen, and many auctions end in a short flurry of click-throughs: people get impatient. Archaeologists have determined that the earliest written records in existence were sales records; if you can get your hands on a bill of sale, or, even better, a ledger, the data you harvest tell a vivid story provided you know how to connect the dots.