By Bowling Pin
He loves animals. He has a pet lizard and a year old husky with gorgeous white and light brown fur. Besides asking about games, sometimes he asks if I’ve found garden snakes so he could add another to the collection. I think the games and pets fill a void – he’s estranged from his father, and his stepfather passed away last year. I don’t think they had a happy relationship either. Between that and hitting the street looking for work, I think he’s just trying to pass the time. As far as I know he has no idea what he wants to do after high school, but no one really does. Once he met my brother’s ex-girlfriend, who was an honest-to-god sweetheart. I mentioned that they broke up to the kid, and he said, “oh…I liked her. She was nice to me. People usually aren’t.”
She was a nice girl! My brother just sucks.
He’s usually very humble. The first time I met him, I was talking to his mom about something, and he tried asking her a question. His mom snapped at him and told him to never interrupt a conversation between grown-ups. I was taken aback, pleaded that I was okay with him, but he looked me square in the eyes and said “I’m sor-sor-sorry for interrupting si-si-sir…” So I decided I’d let him talk to me whenever he wanted. But last summer a friend of his came down here to visit, a kid a couple years younger than him. The younger boy emboldened him. The neighbor and the young friend came over once while another friend of mine, Angello, was hanging out.
“Hey. Do you play Call of Duty?” asked the neighbor.
“Not really. I stopped playing the series since the third one,” Angello replied.
“Oh. … Is it because you suck?” I wasn’t used to the neighbor having balls. Angello wasn’t pleased having this strange kid talking shit to him, so they got on the only multiplayer FPS I had installed at the time: Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. They couldn’t actually compete against each other, so they just compared kill-to-die ratios. The unfamiliarity of the keyboard and mouse rendered the kid a sitting target half the time, while Angello dominated at a game he hadn’t really played before. The younger friend just sat there with a toothy grin.
“This is crap. PC is crap. I’m only getting beat because these losers do nothing with their lives besides play this game.” It was clear to me that if you were worse at a game than the neighbor, it was because you suck. If you were better than him, it was because you were a troglodyte living without meaning. Also, I don’t believe there are actually people dedicated to HL2DM.
“Why is PC crap?” I asked. “I mostly play on PC. It’s cheaper than going to Gamestop at least. I think I only paid five bucks for this game…”
“Five bucks?” he goes. “That’s because this game is only WORTH five bucks.”
That son of a bitch. So I held back my rage and had him play DooM. Best decision I ever made. He and his young friend took turns exploring Episode 1. The primordial game.