Last December (4 page)

That night, I ate dinner with Ma, and all she talked about was how sore her stupid back was from being pregnant, and I was bored and sort of wound up like I needed to get out of my body. So I went to my room instead and I couldn’t stop pacing around even though I was kind of tired from hockey, and then I just knew I had to get out of the apartment, so I went to the kitchen and told Ma I was going on a walk, and I basically never went out after dark since we’ve been in our new apartment, because I didn’t really have any after-school friends at St. Clair, and maybe that’s why Ma turned around with her hands still in the sink and just stared at me for a while without saying anything. Then she finally said, “Okay, Steven,” like she was agreeing to send me to fight the Russians in World War III. Anyways, I shrugged and said, “See ya later,” grabbed my coat, and left the apartment.

When I got outside, it was cold. I forgot my gloves and hat again, and the ground was crunchy under my feet. In the places where the salt had eaten through, there were broken-off pieces, which looked like the shapes of little countries with all these bullet holes through them. I kicked one of the countries and it slid off the sidewalk and crashed into a whole bunch of pieces onto a sewer grate, and then I stepped off the sidewalk and crunched all
the little pieces so they went
bloop-bloop-bloop
in the sewer, and I remember wondering why the water wasn’t frozen in the sewer (I still don’t know, Sam). And then when I got to St. Clair, a serious wind hit my face, and my cheeks went numb right away, and my nose started to run, and my jeans went all hard and cold against my legs, and a half-empty streetcar squealed by, like it was complaining about the cold, and I thought of turning back, but I really really didn’t want to go back home.

So I kept on walking and I remembered that there was a doughnut shop called the Donut Hole, right beside the shoe-repair shop Ma goes to, a couple of blocks away, so I put my chin into my coat and walked toward it, and when I finally got to the Donut Hole I went inside, but I realized by the way the girl behind the counter looked at me that she was expecting me to buy something. She was pretty cute, too, but way older than me, like nineteen or twenty-four or something. She had blond hair and she was wearing these big hoop earrings and pink lipstick on her big puffy lips and lots of mascara on her eyelashes, and I got nervous and started searching my pockets for money even though I knew I didn’t have any, but the funny thing is I did. I had two dimes and a penny in my front right pocket.

And I was doing all this pathetic fidgeting right in front of the counter girl, and she had her arms crossed, watching me, and she finally said, “Don’t have enough, do you?” I shrugged and went red, and then she stepped along the counter and made her two long, nail-polished fingers like chopsticks from House of Chan (where Ma took me for my twelfth birthday) and dipped them into the matches box and grabbed four pennies, one at a time, and
then she said, “I’ve got a deal for you. If you give me what you’ve got there, then I’ll give you a quarter back … and then you’ll have enough to play,” and I said, sort of embarrassed, “Play what?” and she smirked and said, “You can’t fool a fooler,” and then she looked down at the end of the doughnut shop at this tabletop video machine and she said, “I know a video game addict when I see one,” and I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t a video game addict, because she was being so nice and she was really sexy and it was so cold outside and I didn’t want to see or think about Ma or home or pregnancy for a while, so I just gave her the coins and took the quarter and went down to the tabletop.

I sat down and looked at the screen. I don’t know if you are going to know what Ms. Pac-Man is, Sam, so I’ll explain a little. So you are this yellow guy, who is actually pretty much a female, and she looks kind of like a pizza with no topping but with a little bow (for hair she doesn’t actually have) and one slice cut out of her, and that slice is like a mouth, and the whole idea is for you to move Ms. Pac-Man through a maze while eating all these yellow dots, which are called pellets. If you eat all the pellets, you go to the next screen, which is harder, and the point of the whole thing is to see how many screens and points you can get to.

The only problem is there are these four ghosts that follow you around, and if they catch you, there’s this sad, dying sound (
warung, warung, warung
) and then you lose a life. If you lose three lives, the game is over. The best part of the game is that there are about six bigger pellets and, when you eat them, you can chase the ghosts and eat
them
for points, and then they start flashing, which is a warning that they are going to turn back to
normal. But the dead ghosts don’t go away for good. When they are eaten, all you can see are their eyes floating back to this sort of prison in the middle of the maze, and then when a certain amount of time is up, they become regular ghosts again, leave the prison, and come after you.

So I slid the coin into the machine and pressed Start, and this funny intro thing with music came on and then the game began. It took me a bit to figure out what the hell I was doing, because I’ve only played Ms. Pac-Man a couple of times. The red ghost was the fastest and he immediately got on my tail, and I tried to get away from him, but he kept on following me around the maze. Finally, I’d had enough of being chased, so I swallowed one of the big pellets in the corner and the ghosts all turned blue and I ate the one that used to be red and I whispered, “Take that,” and then his eyes floated back to the prison and I started chasing the other ones.

And I was just about to eat one of the other blue ghosts when someone said, “Hey. It’s Mr. Tough Guy,” which scared the crap out of me.

I grabbed my heart and looked up and around, and this big guy was standing over me, and I didn’t even get to focus on his face when he said, “Watch out, kid!” because the time had run out on the big pellet and the ghosts had turned back to their original colors, and when I tried to make the Ms. Pac-Man guy escape, I ran right into the orange one.

“Damn,” I whispered, and the guy laughed and said, “That sucks, man. Beaten by Sue,” and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I didn’t want to even acknowledge his existence, because he got me killed and it pissed me off. So I kept on
playing, because the game doesn’t just wait for you to start, like it does in pinball. So the guy sat down across from me, and this made me nervous, and as I was playing, I realized that I could sort of see his reflection on the tabletop, and so even though I knew I should keep my eyes on the game and not get killed, I couldn’t help focusing on his reflection and that’s when I realized that he was the guy who poked his finger on the skinhead’s forehead!

And then I heard the sad, dying music again because—guess what—I died, and I swore again, but I wasn’t really mad. I was actually kind of freaked out that this seriously tough guy was going to beat my head in. So for my last Ms. Pac-Man man, I just made myself die right away, and then I pretended like I was really pissed, hitting my hand on the glass, and then I quickly got up to make my getaway.

“Hey,” he said. “Where’re you going, kid?” and I kept on walking and said, “I gotta go,” and he said, “No you don’t. Get back here. I owe you a game,” and over my shoulder, I said, “Naw. It’s okay,” and then he kind of shouted, “Hey. Stop right there,” pointing at me like he did at the skinhead’s forehead. “You owe me. I saved your effin’ butt the other day. So get back here,” and then he laughed and said, “Tough guy. Yeah, you just come over here and we’ll play a game, and you can learn a little from the master,” and he did some kung fu chops in the air like he was Bruce Lee, and I kind of wanted to argue, but it was true, I did kind of owe him, and anyways, he was sort of funny and way way bigger than me.

“Okay,” I said, “but I’m pretty crappy,” and he said, “Nah, you just don’t know how to play yet. Like I said, I’m the master. Here,” he said, getting up and switching seats, “I’ll go first.”

So I sat in the seat across from him and he put a stack of quarters on the table. He must have been rich, I thought, even though he didn’t really dress like it. He wore a puffy blue winter jacket, which he took off, and jeans and a T-shirt that had a kid with greasy hair and “U2—War” on it, and the guy had greasy brown hair, too, but way longer, and really white teeth that looked like they were kind of too big for his mouth, and I thought he must be a senior or something.

“So you’ll notice my name there in the high-score list,” he said, and I looked down and all the top-ten scores were called bm best, and I couldn’t help myself. I said, “How do I know that’s you?” and his eyes flickered and he said, “So … you think you’re a
real
tough guy now?” and I shrugged and looked down and said, “No,” and he leaned forward a bit, and said, “You
know
it’s me because my name is
B
for
Byron
,
M
for
McCarthy
, and I’m the effin’ BEST. I
never
surrender,” and then he said, “Now quit being a dork, and listen up to your first lesson,” and he pointed down at the screen, where I could see the ghosts kind of floating there, waiting for us to play. “THEY are the enemy, and you have to know your enemy, right?” he said, smiling, and I nodded and he said, “Therefore,” and stuck out three fingers in a triangle so that the tips kind of looked like the mathematical
therefore
sign,  , which I just learned in math. So I laughed.

And he really smiled at me this time, because I think he liked me laughing at him and he liked that I knew the mathematical
therefore
sign, so he said it again and stuck out his fingers. “Therefore … I’ll fill you in … So Blinky is the red one, and he is enemy number one. He can smell you from miles away, and
he’s not happy until your three lives are done. Pinky is Pink, right? No guff. And he’s like a deputy guy—not quite as smart and fast, but he’s still going to take you down if you give him a chance,” and his eyes were alive and kind of crazy-looking, and he sort of garbled his words because they wouldn’t come out fast enough. “And Inky is the green guy and he’s tricky. He’s following you one second and then all of a sudden he’s off doing something else like he’s got other business to attend to. And last but not least is Sue the Stoner,” he said, grinning.

“Stoner?” I asked, and he said, “Yeah, like too much doobage,” and he put his thumb and middle finger to his mouth like he was smoking a marijuana joint, and I said, “Oh,” and he said, “Yeah,” his eyes half-closed like he was totally out of it. “She’s like, ‘Whoa, maaaan. Look at this cool maze. Yeahhh, I wonder what I’m doing in here, look at the red walls, and whoa, there’s another ghost just like me, and hey, there’s this yellow chick with a bow in her hair, better stay away from her,’” and I looked at him like he was an alien, and then he started laughing, and he finally said, “Yeah, well, anyway, you don’t have to worry about Sue. The only way she’s going to kill you is if
you
run into her, so don’t do it again.”

Zero

And then Byron grabbed two coins and slipped them into the machine. “And that’s all you need to know about your enemy, kid, except you always have to be prepared for the Chaos Factor,” and then he just froze, looking at me with wild eyes, and I nodded
like I knew what he was talking about, but then suddenly he leaned right across the tabletop and said really really seriously, “So what is the Chaos Factor, then, kid?” and I shrugged, but it was like he didn’t see me do it, because he was in another world, and then he leaned back in his chair and looked just above my head, and then all of a sudden, his eyes were back on me like glue and his mouth was having trouble getting the words out again.

“The Chaos Factor is this theory about how we think we know how things are going to go in the world, but we really don’t, because there’s no plan, man, it’s chaos, right? But we have these scientific theories to answer life’s troubling problems, but they don’t explain everything, because sometimes things just happen that we can’t explain. Yeah, I mean, God isn’t the God you think he is, man. No effin’ way! He’s god with a small
g
and he just started this stupid universe with a bang, just like the Russians and the Americans are going to end it with a bang, and I have this friend at the U.S. embassy, so I have inside information about this, and anyway god with a small
g
has no idea how it’s going to turn out, man. You gotta know that, kid. You’ve
got
to. He’s just the first mover, the first cause, or whatever. No one effin’ knows what’s going to happen, kid. You know that, don’t you?” and he just stared at me, so I said, “Um … yeah,” like an idiot, and then he said, “Yeah is right, and it’s the same with Ms. Pac-Man and Sue the Stoner. You think you know what she’s going to do and then all of a sudden, she starts going right after you. Here, I’ll show you.”

And then he must have pressed the start button for two players because the music started and he was playing and it was
like his eyes were eating up the dots, and he ate up a ton of them until he got close to Sue the Stoner, who wouldn’t chase him no matter what he did, even though he was sort of teasing her to, but he couldn’t do this for long because Blinky, the red ghost, enemy number one, was on him. “Sue didn’t chase me today, but one day she will, when I least expect it, even though I sort of have a kind of psychic connection to the game. …”

And then he went quiet, because he was really concentrating, and his tongue went out to the side whenever he was in a jam and his eyes were still flickering, and it took three screens or around ten minutes for him to finally die, and for it to be my turn.

When I finally started playing, Byron said, “Nice eyebrow, kid. So what are you doing picking fights with skinheads?” I shrugged because not only did I not have an answer, I also was concentrating on not getting eaten by the ghosts. “You took a good shot,” he said. “That Bobby McIntyre is a nitwit, man, and …” and then I don’t know what he said because I was concentrating too hard on the game.

After a bit, Byron finally stopped talking, so I said, “Um … you know Bobby McIntyre?” and he replied, “Yeah, I used to be a rocker, so we used to cross paths at Eglinton Station and at the park. But now I’m just a peaceful psycho dude with long hair … the whole thing is just so stupid,” and I was being chased by Inky, the green ghost, and then all of a sudden, Inky went off my tail, and Byron said, “Told you he’s unpredictable. I know this game inside out,” and then I asked, “What whole thing is stupid?” And he said, “The skins and the mods fighting the rockers and stuff,” and I said, “Oh,” and he said, “You don’t know what the eff I’m
talking about, do you?” And I didn’t say anything because I was now being chased by red Blinky, and then green Inky came from the other side and I was trapped.