Videogames run through my life like the music I've listened to. They provide marking points for memories, pleasant and otherwise. Videogames aren't anything other than what they are. They just are.  

Super Mario Bros.

Her name is Kelly* and she likes to drink vodka all day every day like a Belle and Sebastian song. Before she crawled her intelligent (bona fide genius), slim ass into the bottle (or wineskin) I was making her my world, watching her master level after level of Mario Brothers’ in her mother’s nicotine stained townhouse. When she was done she’d smoke a cigarette and fuck with my face, pulling it in different directions like I was Jim Carrey talking ‘bout how malleable it was. I don’t miss those days. It was grade 10 and I  was trying to be a roughneck like the NWA and assorted hardcore shit I was listening to, but I was soft like the Depeche Mode torchlight songs of angst I despised. 

I never got the timing down with Mario Brothers, and never got the timing down to enjoy a normal, calm relationship. The Drama quotient was high, and I always left her place feeling like a neutered jack-ass with my heart racing like the stupid soundtrack to that stupid game, a feeling numbed only by chain-smoking, hash and the huffing of hair mousse.  

I, of course, never had my own Nintendo system, so I was destined to always get schooled when I tried to hang with the people who spent their waking moments tearing up level after level with lil’ Mario and Luigi. I grabbed wallspace on the grimy carpet, hid behind a wall of smoke compliments of my Dunhills and talked smack to the rest of the family, of course never mentioning that Mario and Luigi were negative and damaging depictions of Italians as short, fat labourers – or skilled craftsmen if you’d like to put a positive spin on things - no, I was above such obvious insecurity inspired remarks. 

Winners Don’t Use Drugs

That used to be an advertisement from the U.S. government on the beginning of arcade games, something my boys and I found laughable as we clocked high-scores and honeys. I’m a winner, no? I see these sober kids struggling in Super Sprint and my stoned ass is playing for keeps? Do that math on that, Pointdexter. Keep it clean like Young M.C., bust a corny move and I’ll win every time. Too bad the same rules of conduct didn't apply to life: Get stoned and win! Winners get zooted! Perhaps if Nancy Reagan was honest she'd have endorsed an ad to the effect that Winners Use Prescription Drugs. 

Too many stupid little bad things happened at these convenience stores, from continuous minor theft competitions, to showdowns with the cops - being accused of being gang members (cops in the suburbs have to amuse themselves I suppose), having my brand new Ricky Barnes skateboard stolen and being too fried to mention it to the cops who rolled by, back then the only things that had any real value were quarters and foil-wrapped dimes of herb.  

 

NHLPA

Somewhere along the line my drug use caught up to me and kicked my ass into a serious depression. I couldn’t stop drinking and getting fucked up yet felt no relief from loneliness in my constant inebriation: That game just stopped working. No amount of dimes or quarters or distractions worked. 

And I ended up in rehab in the wonderful city of Minneapolis. Happy to be smoking American cigarettes, I decided to give sobriety a kick. And it started to work. I, however, still had my own ideas about what living clean was about, so when my roommate at a halfway house snuck in at three in the morning with a drunken buzz and stolen goods, I didn’t say boo. 

The halfway house bought me some time away from the temptations of home. It was peopled with addicts like myself, most with far more impressive stories of self-destruction than I. Situated in a former hotel beside a highway, it was full of smoke, coffee, and people struggling to go against their self-destructive nature. From track-suited Tony the former mob-affiliated bookie, who managed to find time to smoke 3 packs of Marlboro reds a day who became my defender due to my wise-ass big mouth, to the recovering coke-freak musician Angela who’d made it onto COPS and regaled me with stories of anal sex and enemas, there were some characters there. 

It was 3 months of growth and limbo. I spent my days chain-smoking and blowing O's at the ceiling wondering what I was doing in Minneapolis. And just trying to stop wondering, period. 

Now, the way this halfway house worked was, you follow the rules, or you’re out. The rules were simple: get a job, follow curfew, attend meetings, don’t sleep with anyone and don’t drink or do drugs or you’re out. Oh, and report anyone who breaks any of the above rules. It sounded corny, trite and juvenile, but it made sense, after all, quitting a lifestyle meant quitting a lifestyle and replacing it with something perhaps a little less destructive. 

My second roommate Steve* had different plans. His were: Don’t do crystal meth, but drink and smoke herb and break into shit. 

When he stumbled in one night with his boy Rico at 3 in the morning, my conscience was kicking. So I went back to sleep. Waking up, I was mad nervous. Do I rat or say nothing and risk getting kicked out? I wasn't looking to get kicked for anything other than fucking up and breaking to the calls of the dealers on Minneapolis's main strip. I might have been lazy and surly, but I certainly wasn't no rat. He slumbered with the scent of booze in the air, a previously empty corner of the room filled with the spoils of the big heist: a big airbrush machine, a small TV and, God Bless him, a Super Nintendo System.  

Playing NHLPA all day made my decision simple: He’d fuck up and get his own ass kicked out, and I could enjoy videogames galore until that day.

 

Pac Man/PlayStation 2

The first time I saw NHLPA on a borrowed PlayStation 2 I nearly lost my shit. I immediately knew that my time was no longer my own. I knew my time belonged to the PS2, until someone came and got it. 

Funny, cause the first time I saw Therese, a well-bootied honey, my heart skipped crazily. I just looked at her, the way she moved and it was just like dying. She was mad sexy in her slightly elevated boots, tight jeans accentuating her bubble butt, tight-yellow T-shirt and cornrows. The way she walked right past me like I wasn’t even there, like I was a wall or some shit, it killed me. I knew right at that moment that I had to have it (the booty, that is). 

Around that time I’d found myself single. My long-term girlfriend had dropped me after returning from a work term in Ecuador, trading up for some Ecuadorian cat (the kind she swore she despised, which had always made me nervous).  

After that relationship, I learned something. Like a wisened Sade, I had a bulletproof soul. More to the point, I felt like Pac-Man. I’d eaten a power pellet and felt indestructible. I could run through any scenario with a honey and come out unaffected. Which was all a nice way of avoiding some unpleasant feelings. 

Which brings me back to the booty blessed honey, she of the cornrows. I ran smooth game on her while on break at a mall where I was working for a couple weeks. She worked at the flower shop where I coincidentally bought my grandmother some “Get Well Soon” flowers. Mad bonus points for that. With my super Pac Man force I ran game on her with the quickness with her co-worker to bare witness to my diabolical quick wit. I was slick, things just clicked. Discussing my Grandmother's recovering health (it helps
to play honestly), I segued smoothly to a request for her digits. Her eyes narrowed, suspecting something was afoot. She parried with 'And when will you call me?'. Cool player that I was, knowing that I was most certainly in it to hit it, I deftly responded 'Sometime. Whenever.' This did not meet with her approval. I slithered off, checking her fine-features and offhandedly remarked 'Aight. I'mma have to go back to the lab and see what I can concoct. I'll check you Monday then.'

Five minutes later, back at work, her co-worker dropped me a card with a playfully threatening note. And her digits. 

Needless to say, I got mine, had some good times and learned this simple truth: If it’s booty you want, booty you’ll get. Any man can score some ass. I, however, was too wrapped up in my Pac Man metaphor. Replaying my suave responses to her not so subtle overtures of love, I marveled at my own cold-heartedness. She’d run at me like one of those ghosts saying "You’re so sexy, you’re so kind, you smell so dope, I really like you" and I’d counter with "You’re mad cool and got a fine ass". Period.  

Just like Pac Man though, my cold heart ran out, and her passive-aggressive comments and need for love or affection or something other than smart-assed lust caught up with me. Like Pac Man my invincibility ran out, the ghosts caught me when I got greedy and I got caught like a limp dick. See, like Common's dis track aimed at Ice Cube (The Bitch in Yoo), I found the bitch in me. The fearful, self-degrading, finger pointing bitch in me that didn't want to get hurt. 

*Names have been changed to protect those who ain’t innocent.

copyright Jeremy Relph

 

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