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THE LOOP
THE VIDEO CABINS are on the right just after you go through the turnstile, beyond the racks of video cassettes and DVDs, and before you get to the first cinema. I never go into the cinemas now, I just come for the loops. The cabins are boxes about six feet high, made of metal and painted red. They're a bit like the cars on a fairground ride, except that you can't see out. Each one has a sign on the door saying that you get five minutes for five francs, and you can get a monthly season ticket though I don't think anyone does. Most people don't come here often enough, and anyway the boss doesn't change the loops weekly like it says on the signs outside. He just lets each one run until it's worn out because he saves money that way. He hasn't gone over to DVDs yet either, he still uses cassettes on a bank of old VCRs in the office that are wired up to the cabins. They run all day, noon to midnight. They're pretty clapped out.
You get into the cabin and sit on the plastic seat. Then you slide the door shut. There's a latch to keep it closed and so people know the cabin is occupied. There are four small screens in front of you so you can see what's on all the loops at once. They're labelled A, B, C and D and there are buttons you can press once you've put your money in, so the video you choose shows up on the big screen above them. If you get bored with that one, you press a different letter and you get a different picture and so on. There are also buttons for fast forward, rewind, freeze frame and advance, so you can find your favourite bit and keep it on the screen, but they don't work well and if you freeze the picture it goes jagged so I don't do that, although sometimes I wish I could. The films are called loops because they run all the time as if they went round and round, but they don't: they're just short videotapes and when one gets to the end, after ten or fifteen minutes, it has to rewind. Quite often one of the small screens is black while the tape rewinds. It takes a while because of the worn-out VCRs, so if you specially want to see that one you waste your money waiting. You can feed the slots as much as you like to buy more time.
I found this loop by accident. The first time I came in it was because I was feeling depressed again and I was hoping for something to take my mind off it. I think a lot of people come here because they feel like that. I put in my five franc piece and took a look at the small screens. There was a man having sex with two women on one channel, two lesbians on another, something I've forgotten on the third and on the fourth there she was, this girl on a sofa wearing nothing but a pair of thigh-high black PVC boots, playing with herself, sucking her fingers and stroking herself and wriggling about. I clicked on D to bring her up on the main screen and watched, hardly believing it. I drank in every detail with my heart pounding: the little pout of the lips she kept giving, the way she wriggled her bottom to get more comfortable on the leather sofa, the way she would lick her lips and stare out of the picture, narrowing her eyes so as to look wicked and sexy. She was so beautiful.
[A young man's apparent addiction to pornography hides a tragic secret. To read the rest of this story, order The London Magazine, February/March 2005 from www.londonmagazine.ukf.net/links.htm]
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