Glory Chasing
by Adam Swanson
Jen Fuller, F(LIGHT), Hawthorne Bridge – Portland Winter Light Festival, fused glass, steel, video projection, and sound, dimensions variable, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Glory Chasing
ADAM SWANSON / OCT 2021 / ISSUE 10
Inside an adult sex shop, far from the street entrance, a curtain made by strings of tiny metal beads separates the plastic-wrapped silicone and DVDs from a dark hallway lined with five booths on either side. In the back of the store, the booths are numbered, and each of the small square rooms has a hole cut into the center of the adjoining wall, creating an opening between the booths large enough for an exchange.
One afternoon, from the opposite end of the dark hallway, I loitered in the shadowed light and watched as the beads found the contours of a man’s body and the wedges of his wheelchair. His electric chair cruised into the hall of booths. A small pride flag stood erected from the back of his chair, and for some reason, he had a name tag hanging from his neck, carried by a rainbow-patterned lanyard. His colorful gay pride socks were pulled halfway up his narrow shins and his knees turned toward one another as if they were held in a permanent state of “hello there!”
Sometimes I wonder if people know where some men get off. There are the places more commonly thought of, perhaps, like bathhouses or public parks or circuit parties, places you might hear referenced in a movie. But there are darker places, too, more common and with less light, more discreet, where shadow and shame can be more present, places tucked away yet alive with anonymous bodies.
Visiting video booths in a sex shop can feel seedy, an equivalent to reinviting learned shame into your body. At least for me. But this man’s jawline tamped it, my shame. His sharp features held his smile well. The curve of his upper lip and the shape of his teeth made him look beautiful, almost happy. His face seemed genuine, perhaps, and maybe as desperate as my own, seeking with lines of longing as deep as mine. Maybe that’s why I smiled back at him, this time, for this man. Maybe I was trying to maintain grace in the face of my reflection carried by another.
Sitting across the hall from me, his eyes explored the shape of me. He had no reservations. He looked on without subtlety or shame. Me? I look away. I avoid the eyes. I prefer to avoid the human connection. Get in, get out, and get on or something like that—that’s what I tell myself.
He smiled as he spoke. “I need the big room,” he said, nodding his head toward booth number one, the corner room, which was occupied as indicated by the red light above the door that turns from green to red once someone feeds the booth’s video player a buck. “It’s the only room that can fit my chair,” he added.
“Oh,” I said, not meaning it to sound like pity. I’ve seen pity, it’s a violent, ugly look. I didn’t go there to be charmed. He tried to get closer to me as he spoke, but a steel building column in the center of the hallway blocked him from getting any further. His chair made jerky movements as he continued to try out bits of conversation. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t find a way to fit his chair past either side of the rod. Somewhere I felt ashamed to be openly wanted, and mad too, since a part of me felt pulled to wait with him for the bigger room, to give him something simply because he made it clear he wanted it. I kept myself there, sequestered by immovable steel instead of allowing myself to move any closer.
With little else to say, we stared at one another from opposite ends of the hall until someone else made their way through the metal beads. The new man was tall. His face was slightly obscured by a worn baseball cap; married to a woman, if I had to guess, his eyes safely tucked under the brim of a hat.
After lingering for a moment between us all, the tall man made his way inside booth seven, glancing at me as he closed the door. The door latched, the lock clicked, and I listened to the machine take in a dollar, granting him his video tokens as the small light above room seven turned to red.
Following the expected rhythm, I walked into the booth next to him, number six, locked the door and put a dollar into the video player. I unbuttoned my pants near the hole in the wall as I scrolled through the channels. I chose a video that filled the old television screen with pulsing limbs and flashes of ball sacks moving at a tempo. I always choose something gay to try to compete against the inevitable echoes of women screaming somewhere; the digital moans of women often come from other booths in places like this, full of men. There was a paycheck, for her, I imagine, and maybe some kind of visibility. But I like to make these men hear men’s whiny sighs, too.
I watched his fingers wrap around the edges of the glory hole, asking without words. He grabbed my cock and pulled me through to his side of the wall. He exhaled lightly over my skin. He felt warm like the feeling of a summer breeze. He had a soft tongue and pink lips like a well of wet silk. He went slow. I rested my forehead on the wall. With my skull supported and neck relaxed, I grabbed the two metal bars mounted above my head and leaned slightly into my shoulder blades so that I could watch his mouth. He slurped and used his hands, full with spit.
As my nerves began to ebb, a firm knocking started at my door. Then it stopped and started again—a total breach of the unwritten protocols of this place; as long as you pay for the video feed, the room is yours—no questions asked. No interruptions. And no one knocks.
I let out a dismissive, performative grunt in response that I hoped communicated a sort of masculine ambivalence, at best, and annoyance, at worst. I wanted my grunt to say, I’m gettin’ my dick sucked, man!
It didn’t work. The door throbbed while the man with the hat continued on the other side of the wall, unfazed.
I made myself finish and watched the man’s tongue lick its lips as I wiped myself with a paper towel and buttoned up. With a shifted mind, I wanted to be away from the rooms of sleaze, anonymous contact, and moaning women. I unlocked the door and made my way through the curtain, but before I made it outside among the traffic and revving city, or even into the storefront full of fluorescent light, the man in the wheelchair, still waiting for his larger room, yelled in my direction. “Are you leaving?” he asked, turning his chair as I passed by.
“Yes,” I said with my back to him, pushing past the beaded curtain.
“Where are you going?” he asked over the sounds of rustling metal.
Soon he was outside too, and following me. I looked over my shoulder, casually, as if I wasn’t panicked. I walked more briskly, turning corners to try to make myself unseen. He tailed me for several blocks and finally caught me at a bus stop.
“Where are you going?” he asked as he approached. “I wanted to suck you off!” he shouted, his mouth held open like he’d released a question that needed a response. “I wanted to feel your cum in my throat.”
At a bus stop on a busy street in the middle of downtown, with no regard for discretion, he told me I hurt his feelings. I’d made him feel rejected. My throat clenched as his lonesome blue-grey eyes pierced me. I wanted to explain, or find words built from some kind of care, about why I was not his for the taking even though we came across one another at a sex shop where I freely gave myself to a hole in a wall. Denying his frantic beauty made me feel like an asshole, so instead of explaining or looking for words, I apologized.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I told him he didn’t need to go to places like that—or, that I didn’t need to go to places like that. I said no, I wouldn't go back to the video store with him when he’d asked. Looking for a way to de-escalate the tension and cast away any onlookers’ eyes, I offered to walk him to a nearby gay bar. He agreed.
Traffic swam past us. The sun forced sweat from the space just above my brow. Between crosswalk light signals and canopies of city trees, he told me how he longed for a boyfriend. Longed for connection. Skin, and touch. He asked me if I had a partner. He asked how often I went to the video store. I lied.
I still see him around; I’ve spotted his flag from a bus window a few times. He’ll be at a corner or making his way on an avenue somewhere as a breeze directs the little cloth rainbow waving from the back of his chair.
He didn’t follow me again after I said goodbye, after I turned away and left him outside a queer dive. Before I left him, I moved closer and reached out to touch his face. My hands cupped the stubble of his cheeks. I said nothing. I just looked into his pale purple eyes as my fingers felt at the edges of his oily, living skin. And together, we kept looking.
Adam Swanson’s writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Washington Post, Lambda Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Writing by Writers, Lambda Literary, and the Creative Writing Program at Emerson College. Adam is the Senior Prevention Specialist at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center.
Portland-based installation artist Jen Fuller has been constructing ephemeral glass, steel, and light experiences around the United States for over 10 years. As a self-taught artist, Fuller found her passion rooted in the traditional techniques of kiln-formed glass, industrial welding, and digital lighting. Her art reflects the delicate vulnerability and intrinsic interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Fuller’s work has been commissioned by Metro Regional Government, Ovation TV, Lan Su Chinese Garden, OMSI, Olbrich Botanical Garden and private collectors around the world.