💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ezines › textfiles › ezines › Y0LK › y0lk-113… captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19.
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--(y0lk)---------------------------------------------------------------------
y0lk #113: "i'm a tough guy with a hard lust for nintendo" by kreid
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uh, i'm not going to introduce this one. it's a pretty crappy story
about THE REAL WORLD. i wrote all this stuff this summer with nowhere to
publish them, so i have quite an abundance of fiction stuff to release. can
you even stand the pleasure?
--(<squealing noises>)-------------------------------------------------------
fuck fuck fucky fuck fuck, said i, nothing on the television. never
anything on six channels of t.v. at 4:00 in the morning. so i sat there and
flipped through the six channels, watching scraps of television, until 4:02.
fuck. i said it out loud even though nobody else ever came into my room. i
figured i might as well speak once in a while or else the room would never
hear a word, me being alone the way i was. is it cruel to raise a baby
without teaching it language? i didn't know. so i spoke to the room.
fuck you, empty room with one mattress and hardwood floor and
expensive 21 inch television set. i remembered cable. i remembered having
cable less than one week ago, and i knew, i might never have cable again.
almost eighteen years of my life lived with cable and nintendo, and now, no
cable. only nintendo with six games and two broken control pads. fucky fuck
fuck.
with cable, there was always something on at 4:00 in the morning.
something stupid enough to hold just enough of my attention to lull me to
sleep. and if not, i could flip through the sixty channels a few times and
soon enough, it would be 4:30, and there would be a whole new batch of
diversions, a fingertip's press away. now there were six channels. two,
four, five, seven, eleven, thirteen. and at 4:00, the city slept, and so
did the television. i turned it off. what could possibly lull me to sleep
now?
i had six dollars in my pocket, and a big stupid black car parked
outside the motel i happened to be staying at. i was in jersey city, i
think. just a few minutes away from the big ugly city. there had to be a
nintendo controller somewhere in the city, i thought. something to divert
me for under six dollars. something to spend just enough energy to push me
to a point where i could sleep. i ate too much that day, that was the
problem. i had put too much energy into me and now i couldn't get to sleep.
fuck, fuck food. fuck me. tomorrow i would get a job and be making my own
money and i would come back to my motel barely awake enough to prepare the
food i would need to live. today i stole a kitchenful of my parents' food
and ate to make my stupid self fat and too damned energetic. fuck me.
nintendo seemed to be the only answer. a key to keep my youth and
sanity and sleep all together in this motel room. i would need to go out and
get a controller in the big rotten city, i knew it. otherwise i was never
going to sleep, and i would have to rest another day before getting a job.
another day would leave me with five dollars. or no dollars, if the motel
owner found out that i had broken into this room. the future was bright and
intimidating. i needed nintendo. i needed to be five years old again,
wearing shorts and smiling and staring at a television which i was amazed to
be able to control. so i put on the only pair of pants i had. thick, black
jeans. tough pants for a tough guy.
it then occured to me that it would be very difficult to find an open
store in new york city which sold nintendo control pads at past 4:00 in the
morning. i looked for a clock to check the time again, but there was no clock
except the one on the television. fuck. okay. i walked out the door anyway
but i decided against going to the big city in search of nintendo control
pads. i decided to sit in my car instead. since i was only going out to the
parking lot, i decided not to put on my boots. i was barefoot and barechested
and barefaced heading out the door and down the stairs and into the motel
parking lot. i remembered to stick one of my boots in the door so it wouldn't
close and i wouldn't have to pick the lock again.
on the way to my car, barefoot, i noticed everything in jersey city
(or wherever i was) seemed to be made of cement, and, although it hadn't
rained in a few days, everything seemed to be slightly wet. i assumed the
wetness came from the urine of one thousand bums who were once like me but
ran out of luck and lost the will to break into motels. it was dirty and
used; it felt like living in this motel was like fucking a sixty-year-old
whore. i knew this feeling even though i had never had the privilege of
fucking any whores, or even any girls over twenty. but i was a jersey city
fuck-up now, so anything could happen. i had a few more hours ahead of me
before dawn. i was pretty sure at that point that i would not be sleeping
on that night. i opened the car door which i had intentionally forgotten to
lock, and then i hopped in and shut it. i locked it from the inside.
my big stupid black car was actually a lot more comfortable than the
motel room, but there was nowhere to plug in my cheap nintendo or the
expensive t.v. i had stolen from my parents before i left. i looked around
the car and found only a bunch of my cd's and a sleeping bag and a pack
of camel filter cigarettes. i did not smoke. the cigarettes belonged to a
friend which i might never see again, so i decided to take up smoking in his
honor. i should get in the habit of doing these things now that i was a
jersey city fuck-up. tomorrow was my eighteenth birthday, and i would be
able to buy more cigarettes, legally, with my remaining six dollars. being
eighteen tomorrow also meant if the cops found me that they would probably not
be able to return me to my parents. hooray for me. hooray, even for the
cops. well, no, i take that back. fuck the cops. and fuck me, too.
i would probably never graduate high school, and i would not fall into
the fortune that my parents would have died with. oh, well! i would not have
minded completing high school and becoming wealthy, but i was eighteen and i
knew what was best for me. i had to live a life. otherwise, money would not
be worth anything to me. and as an artist, i would be pretty damned
worthless. artists had to be poor, they needed to live within an arm's reach
of death. somewhere between death and utter failure. hemingway was rich, i
think. i never read hemingway. i don't think i would have liked him anyway.
fuck hemingway. i smoked a cigarette and then i threw it on the wet
piss-soaked parking lot, all in one split second. boom. past 4:00 a.m. the
sky got a strange purple color and you could break all the laws of time and
nature. even nature couldn't keep awake. all the clocks were asleep, gravity
was drifting off. and me, i couldn't sleep because i didn't have
cable.
the night was long. very long. i did a lot of thinking, but didn't
come to any revelations. or if i did, i don't remember them. i don't know;
i was tired and i couldn't sleep. i smoked the whole pack of cigarettes,
each one hovering in the air, falling to earth with incredible slowness. the
sky was getting pink and gravity was dozing.
i checked the gas gauge. there was none. i knew there was none,
that's why i stopped at that particular motel. the needle had been down at
"E" for an hour before i got there. i would be surprised if i could make it
to the nearest gas station, which i glanced over at. gulf, 92 cents a gallon.
92 + 9/10ths of a cent per gallon. cheap gas in jersey city. i could maybe
even drive the city tomorrow. no. fuck it, i thought, the car was not part
of my future. stupid black car. i unlocked the doors and decided to leave
the keys in the ignition tomorrow morning while i looked for a job or a
nintendo control pad.
finally, like magic, i looked up and i saw the sun was beginning to
rise. the clocks woke up, gravity laughed in my face. nature didn't get much
sleep, and i thought, neither would i, a jersey city fuck-up. i looked out
and stared right out at that sunrise over the industrial skyline. it was
amazing, magical. i refused to take my eyes off it. i was mesmerized. it
was one hundred times more interesting than anything cable t.v. could have
offered at whatever hour it was now. and i watched it, attentively. a
pivotal moment of my coming adult life. but within a few minutes of the
spectacle, i was asleep. i got a taste of it, maybe, but i missed out. maybe
the sun always rose like that over jersey city. i hoped so.
when i woke up, i found my boot had left the door where i left it to
keep from shutting. i picked the lock that night again (i wonder why the
locks are so easy in a town like this?) but the room was empty. no boots, no
t.v., no nintendo. it was official. i was a man now. a pair of pants and
six dollars worth of a man.