In An Adult Arcade: `It Makes You Look At People Differently'

"25 CENTS multi-channel, adult action, video arcade - private."

The black letters are painted on a dingy pink building in SeaTac. An occasional car pulls over. Men get out and walk, heads down, through a makeshift parking lot of crumbling blacktop. There is no sidewalk; cars whiz past a few feet away.

Inside, yellowed magazines and old videos line shelves and sex paraphernalia fills glass cases. The air feels soiled.

Joseph takes a drag on a cigarette. He has pale skin and thin black hair that comes to a sharp V above his forehead. He has seven piercings, three in each ear and one in his right nostril.

"I see a side of people that most people never see."

Joseph, 22, has worked here full time the past 18 months. He talks in quiet tones as rock music blares from a portable stereo. "The Revelation," a book of horror, lies next to him, unopened.

"It can get to you, seeing all the depravity. The lust in their eyes - animalistic. It's something you don't see on the streets."

A sharply dressed man, 50ish, quietly exits. A young man, several days worth of beard on his face, hands over a $5 bill and gets back $3 in tokens, $2 in cash.

"We have a lot of regulars. They come in here about the same time for the same thing every day. It's like they're getting a fix."

Most head straight through the plastic curtains that lead to the back room, the arcade.

"They can't help themselves . . . I feel sorry for them;

they're taking their lives into their own hands."

In the arcade, four men do a silent shuffle, glancing up at each other and down at the booths, which are in two small rows and have doors that end knee-level. The clink of metal coins and muffled moans of shabby porn are the only sounds.

"It's like cruising in a small area."

Sex in the booths is illegal. Joseph says he doesn't have much time to monitor the area, though, and even if he did, he probably wouldn't often.

"It's kind of creepy . . . I have to clean up back there . . . I don't think many use condoms . . . I'd say it's a dangerous place, probably a breeding ground for HIV."

A police officer stops by and says a man tried to abduct a 4-year-old child up the road about 45 minutes earlier. He gives Joseph a description and asks him to call if he sees anything.

Joseph nods. His job pays minimum wage with 8 percent commission on product sales, which have been slow lately. A tip from his mother led to his hiring, and "laziness" and a "poor job market" keep him there.

"I don't like it. But it doesn't matter whether I work here or someone else works here."

Police have been cracking down lately. The "glory holes" in between booths will be patched and the arcade area will be made more open.

Joseph says he'll get a new job soon.

"It makes you look at people differently. It makes you have a bad outlook on life. "

Wayne Wurzer, Times South bureau

Southscape, a periodic feature in the South edition of The Times, is intended to give you some glimpses of life in South King County - probably the kinds of things that don't normally make the news pages.