It’s an empty middle-of-the-week hump night, Wednesday, two-thirty a.m. The moon is full; the uncommonly illuminated sky is azure and clear, bright as it most often is a half-hour before sunup. University Avenue looks broader at night, quiet and wide-open and still. Any sound is amplified ten-fold — each car that passes cannot disguise quivers from loose bolts, shudders from worn belts, gasps from wounded mufflers or radiators.

A few blocks east of College, next to the Salvation Army rotunda, squats the Jolar Adult Theater, promising XXX Video and Parking in Rear. A red neon sign blazing in the front window proclaims, always, Live Girls.

Within a cheerless glass display case just inside the open front door, an array of pseudo-studio-quality photographs advertises the dancers. The pictures are unframed, bowed, affixed with crude hand-written labels: Monet, Sicily, Jezebel, Angel. A wistful androgyne: Sebastian. A portly matron in blue Sears chiffon: Helene. Their smiles are artless, unpracticed, out of focus.

A brightly lit showroom lies behind the photos. Staring out across his counter, the bored night clerk observes a clean, well-dressed young man browsing timidly through shelves of videotapes; piles of sealed magazines; racks of sleazy tabloid newspapers; stacks of creams, ointments, salves, and gels; and row upon row of pre-packaged rubber genitalia.

The clerk dispenses arcade tokens in exchange for cash, punching out a golden handful from a device that resembles a clunky biology-class microscope. He pours the alloy tokens into the patron’s waiting hand, taking care not to touch skin. In this manner, the transaction is somehow incomplete. His shame mirrors that of the customer. His silence bespeaks an attitude: “Don’t look me in the eye and ask me why I’m working here,” an attitude reflected by the customer’s imploded guilt: “And don’t ask me why I have nowhere else to go in the hollow of the night.”

A hand-lettered card rests at the base of the token dispenser: “The girls will return at 10 a.m.” Inked-in filigrees curling around the card obscure some of the text, testifying to hours of jailhouse-style monotony.

Behind the clerk’s head hang security television screens that reveal shifting black-and-white views of arcade booths inside the theater. Drab and mute, these scenes change and repeat, capturing an occasional patron emerging from one booth before disappearing into another. At this late hour, there is no music, no soundtrack. The dancers have gone home. The live-action booths in the back are closed.

The Jolar video booths are fashioned from slick red Formica stuff and mock-wood paneling. Stainless steel tissue dispensers are mounted on the walls near the change machines. The room, a brightly lit maze, conceals dozens of barely private video nooks. Amid the fragmentary and isolated groans of anguished movie-people, the biting odor of ammonia and fresh ejaculate stabs at the nose and eyes. Within each nook is provided a trash basket, a chair, and a television screen protected by a thick sheet of acrylic. After tokens are inserted, a button is pressed to change channels. Each press creates a shrill beep. The intermingling of these high-pitched tones from all around the arcade results in pitiful minimalist music — unseen customers search for the most pleasing scene, announcing their pursuit through a series of irritating electronic yips. In counterpoint, add the periodic rush of tokens tumbling into metal collection tins, along with the occasional swish of a sopping mop — not to mention endless video streams of garish color, hopeless dialogue, repulsive gymnastics, counterfeit enthusiasm, unfortunate commands.

Sloppy floundering; a mixed couple, white and black, cavorts with chocolate syrup. The bed sags. Their bodies fuse into a puffy morass of carnal yin and yang. Beep. Confused choreography; some painfully exhausted group-gropers change positions without changing expressions. Beep. Vaguely handsome couples fornicate with the lackadaisical spirit of a plumber puttering for overtime. The shadows of cameramen sweep across their backs. Beep. More Hershey’s. Beep. A sultry blonde in black leather drips phony candle wax onto a nearby abdomen. Beep. Beep. Different faces, all etched with the same unmistakable desperation. The stuff of fantasy leached through a scramble of flesh, strained through numbing repetitive anatomical close-ups of hair and heap and crevice. Blemishes on haunches. Quivering cellulite. The screen, a fiendish carnival mirror, reflects each and every furtive soul hidden away in Jolar nooks. Groaning, whelping, crying, twitching. Collisions of flesh punctuated by tokens dropping and spilling. In and out. The dancers don’t dance till 10 a.m.

Out front, a pickup truck has been backed up tight against the entrance; the bed is loaded with bottles of bleach, cleaning fluids, disinfectant. Three-thirty a.m. Everything is closed and dark except the Jolar. The moon is now obscured by haze. Unseen birds begin to chatter. Stinkbugs skitter toward the gutter, their shiny black rear-ends aimed skyward, vanishing into a weather-beaten disposable diaper. The silver carcass of a crushed snake lies meatless and dry on the sidewalk. In the adjacent shopping center, a fat man in shorts forces bag-loads of aluminum cans into a recycling machine. The crush and slam of metal on metal ricochets off the homes across the avenue. Echoes repeat echoes. Figures slither through the shadows alongside the theater, aiming for the door.