It’s only natural, when you enjoy something beside someone you always get that impulse to look over and say something to them. They bonded over games mostly, spent hours upon hours playing the console port of Street Fighter II on their Super Nintendo in their room from sun up to sun down with nothing but the television’s tube lighting the small room and twilight in the window. They played until their corneas felt like hot coals on their brain.
Daniel could never beat his older brother Louis at any fighting game, but that’s usually how it was for younger siblings. Their bond was strong, though. There was a fondness between the two boys, Danny being two years younger than Louie was probably what made the two get along more as friends than siblings. They rarely if ever squabbled over small things like possessions and whatnot, but then again maybe it was their upbringing in a strict Chinese-American household.
Louis was the black sheep of their family of five, of the three children he didn’t focus on his studies or getting good marks in school, he didn’t have any real aspirations to become anyone of any real standings like a doctor or a lawyer or a politician so his parents often berated him because of such. The thing about stereotypes is that there’s always some truth in them, Danny would often tell people. His parents were first generation Taiwanese immigrants who were looking to carve a better life for their family, two things they didn’t tolerate were slackers and poor grades.
They still cried at his funeral despite how many times they called him a dishonorable louch who brought shame on their family.
1996 by sylvester joseph
UNDER NEON
There are two reasons why Daniel’s fresh wound of losing his older brother was reopened; the first was that he was the same age Louie was when he died and the second was that he got a job at the AMC theater in Beltway Plaza. Now you’re probably wondering what does the latter have to do with anything? Well, in ‘96, just in front of the AMC theater was probably the busiest arcade in the entire state. People came from all around to crowd in front of the arcade cabinets and fight one another in the plethora of fighting games while the racing games went unmanned.
In those days, Beltway Plaza was so alive with neon signs and clamor of voices and laughter. If you were to go there today it would be almost unrecognizable, the arcade is gone and the movie theater--which was almost always packed on the weekends seems to barely be doing business now. The neon lights have dimmed down to the point where even if you had never been in that mall before you knew that it was a shadow of its former self.
After work Danny would throw on his brother’s old green bomber jacket and make his way down the corridor and past the arcade which had bright lights and the delightful cacophony of Ryu screaming Hadouken on at least three different cabinets. Smelling of popcorn and a heart filled with frustration toward his job and life, he often paused and watched grown men mashing the slick and smooth plastic buttons while holding the joysticks in death grips as they maneuvered their avatars on the screen trying to beat one another.
Someone else would come up and call next by placing a token on the cabinet’s screen, either on the left or the right, usually on the side that they thought would lose. Today, Danny noticed, that there were five coins lined up on the left side of the screen while there were none on the right. Maybe it was because the right side of the cabinet was the one that was up against the wall, but Danny was sure that he’d seen people place tokens on that side before because the cabinet was slanted and left enough space for at least one or two people to stand on that side without bothering the person playing on the player 2 stick.
He would usually just watch for a round or two and then go and catch the C2 home, but today he found himself watching a couple of matches and understood why there were no coins on the right side of the screen. The girl who was playing on the player 2 side was cleaning house, sending aforementioned grown men back to the token machine while fishing more money out of their pockets. She had on a baseball cap and an oversized denim jacket so Danny couldn’t tell that she was definitely a she until he drew closer and saw her painted nails and slicked down baby hairs in the light of Super Street Fighter II.
“Get outta the way, bonehead.” A tall, slender man said as he made his way to the front, shoulder checking Danny as he did so. He fished the token he’d placed on the screen, dropped it in the player 1 slot and smacked the start button with gusto. She chewed on her gum not bothering to look her opponent over, she blew a bubble and when it popped Danny caught the scent of Dubble Bubble. Sweet, sugary, it smelled of childhood that was quickly swept underneath the smell of sausages and hot dogs from the nearby eatery roasting in small rotations.
He watched her closely as she demolished him with the best Cammy he’d ever seen. He promptly found myself trying to turn a crumpled dollar that sat in the pit of his pocket into four tokens without questioning it. After placing one of the tokens on the window of the console before he knew it he was up next to try and slay this girl who was dominating her competition.
It was important to be mindful that our boy Danny hasn’t played Street Fighter in over a year, it was just too hard to try and get back into it without his brother beside him. It was also important to be mindful that our boy never laid hands on an actual arcade version of the game, he’d only played the Super Nintendo port which, while widely celebrated and greatly received, was hardly the arcade port. It was like playing high school level football and thinking you can compete on a professional level, sure, you know your fundamentals and you know how to move but it’s a different game.
He selected Ryu, which was his go-to in every version of the game and lost very convincingly. It was almost embarrassing how badly she’d whooped him and without a word she blew a bubble and glanced up at Danny, puzzled as to why he wouldn’t get out of the way and let the next rube get his ass whooped.
VAGABONDAGE
The bus ride home was long, not because it was a distance to travel but because he was busy trying to think up of ways to win in the game and why it was so much more different than the one he played at home. Sitting in the back of the bus with his feet up on the adjacent seat he pondered the move speed and the tactics, the hit boxes, the pokes and whiffs, he analyzed it and thought as hard on Street Fighter as he did his homework--and seeing as how Danny was top of his class that was saying a lot.
The next time he came to work he peered in the vacant arcade on his way in and eyeballed it on his way to the bus. He stopped and played a couple of rounds, proving to himself that he wasn’t as shitty as he thought. Maybe, since he was in summer break, he would spend his time during the weekdays when he had to work in the arcade getting better. Street Fighter had become fun for the first time since Louis died and he didn’t completely understand why.
Maybe I want to beat that girl, he thought.
“Hey.” A voice called from over his shoulder, prompting him to spin around in the middle of a fight. Standing behind him in the same oversized denim jacket was that girl with her french braids and slicked down baby hairs.
“H-hey.” Danny managed to stammer out.
“You work at the theater, right?” She asked, Danny wasn’t sure what to say so he just shrugged his shoulders. “You’re the guy who rips the tickets and stuff, right?”
“Yeah. You’re the girl who beats up guys in Street Fighter, right?”
“As if.” She scoffed. “I just play a little bit. I’m not good, everyone else is just bad.”
“Is that so?” Danny asked, turning back around to try and salvage his tokens from being eaten the machine by fighting for the rest of his life bar.
“You talk like an English teacher.”
“You mean I speak properly?”
“You always talk like that or…?”
“Why do you want to know?” Danny asked, the clicking and tacking of the buttons underneath his fingers dressed their conversation like christmas lights on a tree. She leaned against the cabinet and her large, almond shaped eyes stared into his. At this point Danny was beginning to wonder if she even remembered beating him the other night after he got off work.
“I was just wondering.” She scrunched up her face and rolled her eyes in an animated matter. “You want me to say sorry for taxing that ass the other night or are you still salty?” He took his eyes from the screen to look to her, and she raised her eyebrows as if to illustrate that yes, she did remember very well how she demolished him and made him look like complete shit in front of a crowd of people.
“Are you wacked? I just worked a six hour shift, that was all.” Danny responded.
“I’d prove you wrong but I’m broke today so I guess we’ll never know.”
“I guess.”
They remained quiet as Danny struggled with the computer’s Balrog. She made small noises as if to adorn every little mistake he was making and it was beginning to annoy him. “What? What do you want?”
“I’m glad you ask, man.” She shifted her position and slapped Danny’s arm which prompted the young man to eyeball her with his bothered expression. “I was wondering if you could get me into a movie or something.”
“Which one?” Danny asked much to her surprise. The truth is that Danny took to her immediately, ever since he smelled the popped bubble on the air and watched how well she played Street Fighter. It was effortless the way she smacked the buttons, he was drawn to her on a level he couldn’t comprehend.
“Flipper.” She said.
“No.”
“Why not?” She asked.
“I hold the right to withhold the ability to sneak you into a movie.”
“But why would you exercise said right?”
“Flipper is a shit movie about a dolphin. If I sneak you into a movie it has to be at least three weeks old and it can’t be shitty.” Danny stated rather clearly with a smirk, while she hated the idea she took him up on his offer. Every weekend he worked he’d let her in and then they’d hang out after he got off. Her name was Tamia and much like Danny she was a loner, not out of choice but because of some cosmic force that caused people to be repelled by them. It wasn’t that they were social outcasts, per se. It was a complete freak accident that they seemed to have a lot of people just hanging around outside their orbit but no one they could truly call friends. Thinking about it always reminded Danny of a conversation he had with Louis before he died about Ryu from Street Fighter and whether he was lonely or not.
“He travels the world by himself with no shoes on in a karate gi trying to fight people to get stronger and shit.” Louis said one day while slumped on his bed with his head propped up against the wall watching the ending play out where Ryu is walking into the sunset looking for his next challenge with the SNES controller resting on his abdomen. “Maybe he does it looking to have some sort of connection with someone. Sounds mental, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Danny said, sitting on the floor at Louis’ feet watching the ending with gusto.
FAIRY-TYPE
Tamia and Danny were almost inseparable the summer of 96, though. They were attached at the hip whether it was going to see whatever flick was making waves that month or sitting in the arcade underneath lights that made their skin neon green and electric purple. Maybe they liked one another Danny thought in retrospect, but it was an innocent flirtation that had no expectations. People often misunderstood what innocence meant, they mistook it for childish or adolescent. As if they hadn’t talked about art and film and cultural shit. How many hours did they dedicate sitting on benches and bumming around the mall, just two figures eating churros and chatting about ideas that were bigger than anything they’d been taught in school.
It wasn’t that Danny never thought about asking Tamia on a formal date or kissing her or holding her hand or laying next to her naked--it’s just that when he did think about things like that with Tamia they seemed like the wrong thing to do. It wasn’t that Tamia wasn’t attractive, either. She looked like a really young Salma Hayek with none of the breasts. She was almost a washboard up top and constantly complained about hoping that one day she’d wake up with gigantic tits.
“I don’t think that’s how that works,” Danny chuckled one time while they were standing outside the theater eating ice cream.
“My cousin got hers the morning after her quince. One day she had no sort of tits then bam! Fun bags.” She carefully licked around her cone.
“What the hell do you want big tits for, anyway?”
“Are you kidding me? I can’t fill out a fucking shirt and I have no cleavage to speak of.” Tamia looked down at her chest and wished that some of the melting chocolate swirl would drip onto the fat breasts she didn’t have. The thought of how hard it would be to get ice cream on her breasts made her sad, so much so that she sighed and bumped shoulders with Danny.
“Yet, boys like you fine.” Danny said. One of their first conversations happened to be about how she was so good at Street Fighter, to which she replied that one of her exes always played and since she was always around him she gradually picked it up. She was only seventeen, older than Danny by a whole nine months and had ten times the boyfriends than he had girlfriends (1x10=10). How could one girl have had so many boyfriends, Danny asked her when she told him to which she answered that she didn’t know. One relationship ended and she started dating someone new, mostly for the attention and to have someone to hang with, but that started getting old with expectations and resentment and just downright boredom cutting in.
“It’s not about boys liking me.” She huffed. And it was true, it wasn’t. It was more about her liking her. It had nothing to do with boys. She didn’t want to say as much because while they’d gravitated toward each other like two kindred spirits she still felt like she couldn’t say shit like that to Danny. So instead of finding a way to say it in another fashion she just went on to talk about something else. That’s the type of person Tamia was.
THE GHOST OF SUPERMAN PAST
The summer was winding down, it was spectacular but he would eventually quit his job and return to school and his studies. Street Fighter and hanging out at the mall would take a back seat. No one understood that his time with Tamia and his carefree behavior was coming to an end. Everything had an expiration date, even friendships and especially people.
It came sudden, though. So sudden that it reminded him of Louis. One day Tamia stopped hanging out, she fell off the grid almost completely. Whenever he got off work he’d check for her in the arcade then he’d walk to the bus stop and go home where he’d hurry to the phone mounted on the kitchen wall and dial her at home. The first couple of times a man who Danny assumed was Tamia’s dad just said she wasn’t home and hung up, but he gradually got more aggressive and annoyed.
Had she not wanted to talk to him?
That’s the only thing that he could begin to guess.
It worked out for the best, that’s what he told himself.
The night he decided that it was for the best he was visited by a spectre, one that was without a doubt holy in nature. It appeared at the foot of his bed, he couldn’t tell if it was glowing or if it was the glow of the television flickering behind it but it appeared to be illuminated with a light of otherworldly nature. That wasn’t the most peculiar part, this ghost dressed and looked exactly like Superman, his cape billowing as he floated high above Danny’s bed, his hand extended upward in a gesture of benediction with his two forefingers and thumb slightly extended from his fist.
Maybe it had nothing to do with a conversation he had with his brother, but they had an argument one time--one of the very few that they had. Batman or Superman. It was a lopsided argument because the general public thought Batman was cooler not only because he was edgy and dark but because he had no powers. On top of that he had a successful cartoon series and three movies in recent history where Superman was still reeling from Superman IV which was made damn near a decade ago at this point. Danny hadn’t understood why Louis enjoyed Superman, none of it made sense, even looking at Superman today at this point in time there wasn’t anything good going on in the comic books.
“The last thing he did of any importance in the comics was die.” Danny said, and it was one of the last things they spoke about while watching the Batman cartoon one saturday morning with cold bowls of cereal in their grips. “He’s a boy scout and not interesting and he was better off dead.”
“He represents something.”
“Outdated American ideals?”
“Can you please talk like a fifteen year old for once in your life?”
“Honestly, what the heck do you think he represents?”
“Think about it, kiddo.” Louis said while leaning back in his bunk. “Batman? Fights crime because his parents died. He fights crime out of fear that what happened to him will happen to someone else--and we all know it does every single night he’s patrolling Gotham and shit--”
A bellow came from the next room over in Cantonese demanding that Louis stop cursing in the white man’s tongue. Louis rolled his eyes before continuing what he was saying.
“Spider-Man? Fights crime out of guilt because he could have stopped his uncle Ben from being shot by some dickhole.” He said, this triggered the old man in the other room to audibly stand up from his chair. There was a stomping that was coming toward their room, one that grew louder and louder as it drew closer. Danny was deathly afraid, the sound of the stomping matched the sound of his heart drumming as their father drew near. If he weren’t looking directly at Louis when he finished he probably wouldn’t have heard what he said next; “Some people save people just because it’s the right thing to do.”
Their dad who wasn’t particularly big or threatening when he was behind the counter of the small convenience store they owned was always super threatening to Danny during these days. When he burst in the room Danny jumped and milk rolled from the lip of his bowl along with a couple of pieces of Cap’n Crunch. It was a programmed fear that was supposed to emulate respect, Danny realized. They failed to program Louis.
Submitted June 16, 2019 at 07:55PM by illituracy http://bit.ly/2Fdaqb4
No comments:
Post a Comment