#12

But last week I felt fine. More than fine. Actually, last week was pretty much the best week I’ve had since I got back to the States.

SUNDAY: Phone call from prospective employers asking if I was available to interview on Wednesday. (Yes! Of course!) Also: the Super Bowl.

MONDAY: Dinner party with old friends. There was lots of fancy red wine. Also manicotti. Also there was a trampoline! I jumped up and down on the trampoline. I didn’t fall off!

TUESDAY: I moved most of my stuff over to my new apartment. (I have a new apartment! In San Francisco!) My friend helped me. When we finished I took her out to lunch in Alameda. I had the tuna melt. It was terrific.

WEDNESDAY: The job interview. It went fabulously. (Or did it? Am I delusional? I think I’m really charming.) That evening I went to a bar with a few friends. It was deserted except for a single big fat guy, who bought us all drinks. We played pool and, as if by magic, I was incredibly good at it. I sank seven balls in a row. I was as mystified as everyone else. This must be how Clark Kent felt, I thought, the first time he had sex.

THURSDAY: I took the train all the way to the end of the line, Fremont, and my friend picked me up and we drove to San Jose, to a parking lot, and we smoked weed from a tiny glass pipe, there in his car. Then we got out of the car and walked inconspicuously across the parking lot to the nickel arcade, Nickel City, paid our two dollars’ admission and bought a sack of nickels each, and then pushed through the turnstile and went inside.
A video arcade at two p.m. on a Thursday is generally a deserted place, and this is a wonderful thing. I can’t stand being surrounded by children at a video arcade. I feel watched. I worry that I look like a pedophile, or like one of those friendless retarded persons who appears every afternoon in certain establishments in his hometown, friendly but incoherent, sporting a three-day beard but mentally ten years old. It’s horrifying to imagine being confused with such a person. But this afternoon it didn’t matter. The arcade was completely empty. I dragged my friend to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles console on the ‘free play’ wall and we started in.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Copyright 1989 Konami. I hadn’t thought about this game in years. In another time my brother and I had spent countless hours (and tokens) trying to beat it, but we’d never even come close. Probably our motor skills were insufficiently developed.
Where had this occurred? I couldn’t place the memory. Some other arcade, obviously, but which one? And how long ago? It didn’t matter. As I stood there playing the game, my memories of this other arcade and my actual surroundings, this physical space I actually existed in, conflated and then became one. And the noises of the arcade–the blips and the chirps, the confusion of a dozen different MIDI theme songs playing on top of each other–joined with the remembered noises of all the arcades of my past, and the two became indistinguishable, and I experienced a sensation of lightness. I felt as if I were growing, expanding to fill the entire space of the arcade–or perhaps the space was shrinking to fit me, growing smaller and smaller until I and it were inextricable, one and the same. I felt I was integrally and completely a part of this space. I was no longer an individual, but a component of the arcade. I could not be said to be playing the game any more than the game could be said to be playing me. I was part of the machine.
Is this what Billy Mitchell felt like as he pursued his perfect game of Pac-Man? It was an attractive thought. But my friend and I didn’t come close to beating the Ninja Turtles game. I don’t think either of us really wanted to. We lacked the fortitude. Besides, the high had turned on us. Already we were drifting towards another console. . .

FRIDAY: Who cares?

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