The Buddy Booth
My heart raced as I made my way into the seedy shop. The fluorescent lighting was glaring, giving a stark contrast to the darkness outside. Right in the middle of 8th avenue, sandwiched between a restaurant and a garment shop was a store whose windows were plastered with images of scantily clad women, bleached and faded from years in the sun. They served at one time as advertisements, but now mostly to shield the customers on the inside from pedestrians on the street. I had passed by this place a hundred times on the way to work and eventually got it in my head that I needed to check it out. I’d been in porn shops before on a lark, but this time I wasn’t there to purchase smut. Almost unnoticeable among the faded advertisements …