It was the spring of 2003 and I was hiding in the cool metal enclosure of my neighbourhood slide. The mouth of the slide served as a sort of ear, I could hear the echoes of laughter, of dogs, of roller-skates from the outside world, but I didn’t care about any of that. Hiding in that rusty piece of playground equipment with dried tears on my cheeks I only cared about one thing: My Gameboy.
The world of ten-year-old boys is a cruel one. I started off grade three already at a disadvantage, I was a scrawny and had trouble grasping ahold of conversations, but within one day I had managed to go from a somewhat disliked kid to a complete social pariah. Crying in class will do that to a person. Earlier that week the class had watched a documentary film on the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis. Most of the kids in the room ignored the video; they were too busy throwing things at each other, engaging in discussions about who’s parents would win in a fist-fight and other fun back-of-the-room activities yet the documentary had my full attention. Watching those faceless soldiers goose-step through our streets, seeing the national buildings that my grandfather so proudly talked about covered in swastikas, seeing the suffering that the Third Reich brought to Czechoslovakia; the history hit me like a brick. I tried to keep my weeping as private as possible, but as soon as Jonatan Sousedík noticed me crying the attention of the entire class was focused on my tender emotional moment. I had hoped that the episode would be quickly forgotten, but as the week went on it became clear that I would be dubbed The Crybaby for the rest of my days on earth. Jonatan was the most efficient bully in the entire district; most of the kids who caught his attention would only escape by switching classes or by moving out of the neighborhood. I had a different plan. I had my GameBoy.
We all played the same thing in different variations: MonsterFighter, a game in which you would collect monsters in the wild and then battle them against an increasingly difficult series of gym leaders. The videogame came in different variations MonsterFighter Bronze*,* MonsterFighter Gold*,* MonsterFighter Platinum, all essentially the same product with slight cosmetic variations. All games ended with the ultimate battle against The Elite Five, a series of gym leaders that had the strongest monsters. All versions of MonsterFighter would be beat by someone in the class within a week or two, all except one: MonsterFighter Silver.
The MonsterFighter Silver was a mystery to the class. Whilst the other versions of the game could be beaten with enough willpower and tactics MonsterFighter Silver was impossibly difficult. The game was far too punishing, the gym leaders were far too strong; no one had even gotten to the battle with The Elite Five. Jonatan claimed he had an uncle who helped design the game. After two weeks of everyone in the class attempting to beat MonsterFighter Silver Jonatan announced that his uncle had specifically designed the game to be unbeatable. I knew that if I could defeat The Elite Five and prove Jonatan wrong I could reclaim my rightful spot on the fringes of the third grade social order. All I needed to do was focus on the game. The inside of the slide provided a perfect escape from my mother’s nagging and my stepfather’s booming voice. Sitting on the edge of the slide, hidden by its metal covering I could focus.
I was tapping away at my GameBoy, preparing my monsters for the fight of their life, when I noticed I wasn’t alone. Behind me, hanging on to the ladder to the slide, was a boy of no older than six. He stared at me out of the darkness with big blue eyes.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied, turning my attention back to the GameBoy. The kid gave off an uneasy vibe. A tan button-up shirt with suspenders, a news cap over his blonde locks; he looked like something straight out of Oliver Twist.
“Do you want to play with me?” He asked, holding up a football made of stitched leather. “I have a ball!” he added once he noticed most of my attention was on my screen.
“No,” I replied, not looking up from my GameBoy. I was already an outcast, being seen playing with a baby would further worsen my standing within the social life of the third grade. From the corner of my eye I could see the kid’s face drop. I hoped that he would leave, but he persisted.
“What are you doing?” He asked, trying to get a peek over my shoulder.
“Playing MonsterFighter,” I replied, shifting away from him so that he couldn’t see my screen. He wasn’t getting the hint; the kid hung on to the ladder and kept on watching me. “Hey, kid, shouldn’t you be going back to your parents? You’re a baby,” I finally said, in my best impression of Jonatan’s tone.
“My parents died in the war,” the kid said without much emotion in his voice. I looked away from my screen and into those blue eyes; they seemed to be welling up with tears. I had heard on the news that the Americans had invaded some Arab country in order to take away their nuclear weapons; I imagined a young blue-eyed couple wearing turbans running away with hands full of plutonium getting gunned down by Uncle Sam. I took pity on the kid.
“Want to watch me play MonsterFighter?” I sighed.
The kid’s eyes lit up. “What is MonsterFighter?” he asked, crawling closer to me. There was a twinge to his accent, he was obviously foreign, everyone knew what MonsterFighter was around these parts. I explained the game in broad strokes and let him sit down next to me. He tucked his leather ball into the corner of the metal enclosure and watched me play with utter fascination. “The future is beautiful,” he whispered as he took in the digital monsters on the screen.
It was as if the kid had never seen a videogame. Every time something on the screen moved he let out a little gasps of fascination. He kept on asking questions; every aspect of the game was coated with bewildering mystery for him. Regardless of his strange distractions, however, I managed to play well. By the time my mother called me home for supper I had managed to get past The Cave of Challenges, the same cave that Jonatan claimed his uncle designed to be unbeatable. I was going to prove him wrong. I could taste my newfound status as the guy that could beat the unbeatable.
“Who were you talking to?” the kid asked as I put my cellphone in the pocket of my shorts.
“My mom, I have to go to dinner now,” I replied.
The kid took a while to process this idea. He seemed perplexed by my cellphone. “Can I borrow your game? I promise I will return it,” he finally said with hope in his eyes.
I laughed. My GameBoy was my most prized possession. There was no way that I was going to let some strange Industrial-Era-London kid borrow it. I slid out and left the kid alone in the metal enclosure with his leather ball.
I went to school the next day proud of my MonsterFighter achievements. I left with my cheeks covered with a new trail of tears. Jonatan did not take kindly to my victory in the Cave of Challenges; as soon as he got word that I was showing off my progress he snatched away my GameBoy. Between every class I would weep and beg for him to give me back what was rightfully mine but Jonatan refused. It wasn’t until the end of the day, when other members of the class started to suggest that maybe Jonatan was keeping the game away from me because he was scared of my skills that he relented. When all my classmates were starting to head back home Jonatan came to me, delivered a powerful slap to my face and then gave me back my GameBoy. I thought that maybe the physical punishment was the only thing that he would dole out but Jonatan kept his most cruel abuse secret.
I crawled into my metal hiding space above the slide when I noticed it. Jonatan had renamed both my avatar in the game and all of the monsters I had caught and trained to a single name: PENIS. The digital humiliation stung worse than the slap, yet after a couple of minutes of crying I gathered my strength and persevered. There was a way out of this torture, even if it meant that I would have to battle The Elite Five with a team of monsters named after genitals.
I tried to focus on the game, there were still plenty of challenges left for me and my monsters, yet there was something that kept on distracting me. It wasn’t the sounds outside world; those echoes of joy and playfulness that came in through the mouth of the slide I was used to. It was something else. It was a smell. A smell of old, rotting leather, the same type of smell that ebbed from my grandfathers couch. In the same corner where the strange child had placed his football was now a deflated mess of stringy hide. I shifted away from the rancid object and continued playing my GameBoy, but the smell lingered in the air.
Multiple groups of children came and went from the playground, I could hear them laughing and playing outside, but it wasn’t until much later that someone came and visited the slide. I didn’t hear him come up; I was far too occupied by my GameBoy. I smelled him before I saw him. The scent of old leather was replaced with the stench of phosphorus.
I nearly burst into tears out of shock. Behind me, smelling like a war-zone, was a kid my age with his face covered in soot. Big blue eyes stared at me from the darkness. “Hello! My name is Rudolph! Can I watch you play?”
Rudolph looked oddly familiar to the child I had met the previous day, but he was considerably older. At first I was scared of the strange character sneaking up on me in the dark, but beneath all the dirt Rudolph looked friendly. I saw my chance to make a friend, an ally who would help me in my struggle against Jonatan. I let him take a seat next to me. He stared at the game with stifled fascination, he would cheer on whenever my monsters would prove victorious but whenever he grew too excited he would reel himself back.
“Who made this game?” He finally asked.
“The Japanese, I think?”
Rudolph’s brow furrowed, “The Japanese have a strong military, my father used to say that as long as they remain in the war the suffering will never end,” a trickle of blood ran from beneath his muddy blonde locks.
“You’re bleeding,” I said, feeling queasy at the sight of scarlet, “What happen?”
Rudolph lifted his hair and revealed a nasty looking gnash. “Shrapnel,” he said as he ran his filthy fingers over the wound, “Just a bit of a cut.”
I didn’t know what shrapnel was, so I just laughed. He laughed as well. I felt like I had a friend. “Why is the word penis written all over the screen?” he asked after our moment passed.
At first I was reluctant to tell him the truth, but I knew that if I were to gain more allies in my fight against Jonatan I would have to be honest. I told Rudolph about my struggles.
“He’s a fascist,” Rudolph said after I finished off my story. His voice was cold and filled with anger. “I hate fascists.”
“Me too,” I said, not knowing what a fascist was. I was just happy that someone else disliked Jonatan.
“Fascism is a suicide cult, they will fight and oppress and kill the other until there is no other. Once the other is destroyed, the fascists will fight among themselves,” Rudolph recited the words as if they were not his own. All his cheeriness was gone. I felt like I was sitting in the dark with someone who had struggled against these fascists his entire life. “The only way a fascist can be destroyed is by his own kind. If you make Jonatan seem weaker than his friends, less than his friends, they will eat him alive.”
“How do I do that?” I asked, my chest filling with hope.
“Tell him that he is the weakest of his group, only slightly stronger than you, only a couple steps away from your own frailty,” a fire danced in those blue eyes. It lit a torch in my soul. A plan started to formulate in my mind. Rudolph had given me the keys to redemption.
I saved the game. If he was to make any mistakes I did not want them to set back my progress towards fighting The Elite Five, but I also wanted to thank Rudolph. I had seen the way that he looked at the GameBoy. “Do you want to try the game?” I asked, knowing the answer.
Rudolph’s brow shot up in surprise, sending another trickle of blood down to his eyes, “Really?”
“Yeah, we’re friends. Friends share things,” I said, pretending I knew what it was like to have a friend.
Rudolph held the GameBoy in his dirty hands as if it was a newborn. He tenderly pressed on the buttons to move the characters around. With each press he would pause, take in what had happened on the screen and shake his head. “The future is beautiful,” he whispered as he got into the game.
We sat in the metal prison of the slide for over an hour in near silence. The only thing you could hear was the choked midi-music of the GameBoy and Rudolph’s occasional gasps of excitement whenever a monster fight went well. His first couple of battles went rather poorly, but as soon as Rudolph grasped the mechanics of MonsterFighter he played with the tactics of a military strategist. Side-by-side we managed to defeat three gym leaders, proving victorious in our fight against The Elite Five seemed to only be a question of time but then the GameBoy screen went dark. The batteries had run out.
It was way past my curfew, my mother and step-dad wouldn’t necessarily be worried about me but they would definitely be angry that I had disobeyed them. I made plans to meet with Rudolph on the playground the next day. We could stay out longer then, my step-dad was always more relaxed with the curfew on Fridays because that’s when he would drink. Rudolph was sad to see me go and that made me the happiest boy in the world. I had finally made a friend.
School next day was a game changer. Jonatan had started his usual routine of berating me in front of his friends, but this time, instead of ignoring him or arguing back (both of which were liable to get me hit) I simply agreed with all of his assessments. Yes, I was a weak crybaby. Yes, I was the wimpiest kid in class. Yes, I was the only kid that Jonatan could pick on because of his own scrawny frame. The last truth puzzled Jonatan and caught the attention of his goons. Jonatan raised his hand to hit me but I simply reminded him that hitting me would underscore his status as the second weakest kid. He didn’t hit me. In fact, Jonatan left me alone for the rest of the day. His friends left me alone as well; they were too busy sizing Jonatan up.
After school I sprinted to the playground, excited to share news of my victory with Rudolph but he was nowhere to be found. I sat outside of the slide, seeing two full games of basketball play out on the nearby court before I crawled into my metal safe-space.
The inside of the slide never felt emptier. The leather smell was gone, only a smudge of gross remained where the ball used to lay, the play and laughter of the outside world echoed through the walls like a poor facsimile of joy. I kept on telling myself that maybe Rudolph had simply forgotten about me, or that something had gotten in his way, but deep inside I knew that he abandoned me. I turned up the muffled midi-music on the GameBoy and tried focusing on my MonsterFighter game. I was close to beating it; all that was left was the battle against The Elite Five.
Yet the battle proved to be impossible. I tried over and over again to match the strength of even the first of The Elite Five gym leaders but my monsters simply weren’t good enough. I simply wasn’t good enough. I started to think that maybe Jonatan was right; maybe MonsterFighter Silver was never meant to be beaten. That’s when I smelt him.
It was a dirty smell, a combination of sweat and puss; it came so quickly I couldn’t help but to spin around in search of its source. Hanging on the ladder to the slide was a vagrant, his clothes were ripped and his face was caked in dirt. One big blue eye stared at me. The other side of his face was covered in stained bandages.
“Do you need help defeating The Elite Five?” asked the strange man.
I instinctively pulled back to the edge of the slide. The man moved up the ladder to be closer to me. “Don’t be scared,” he said, “It’s me, your friend Rudolph.”
But it wasn’t Rudolph. It clearly wasn’t Rudolph. This stranger must have been at least twenty, but the state of his bandages made him look ancient. I moved closer to the slide, hoping to make my escape, but the man grabbed me by the arm. His hands were covered in cuts.
“I am your friend, please, let me play,” he said, moving inside of the metal enclosure. Suddenly the space felt a lot less empty. Suddenly my metal safe-space became terrifying.
I tried to break free of his grasp but his grip was strong. I waved my little fists around but they were no match for his adult body. He kept on pleading with me to let him play, he kept on saying we could defeat The Elite Five together but his words were washed out by my panic. I flailed around as he tried to pull me from the slide. I broke the fighting code of the playground; I scratched at his face.
The bandages came off swiftly, covering my fingers with a thick layer of pus. The stench of rot grew as it was given more room to breathe. Beneath that filthy cloth was a heinous, yellowing scar that led all the way down to a bloody eye-socket. The man screamed in agony as he grabbed his bleeding face. I slid down the slide and ran for my life.
It wasn’t until I was at my front door that I realized that I had left behind my book bag inside of the slide. It wasn’t until I was at my front door that I realized that I had also left behind my GameBoy. I ran back at the same speed that I left. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the strange man, but I knew that there was no way in hell that I would let someone take my most prized possession. I wasn’t going to let this fascist boss me around.
Aside from the lingering smell of rot there was no trace of the man inside the slide. My book bag was thrown to the side, just like I had left it, but my GameBoy was nowhere to be found. I spent the whole weekend in tears.
I didn’t tell my mother or step-dad about what happened. The last thing that I wanted was for my step-dad to yell at me for getting robbed. My mother would have a few choice words for me as well. GameBoys were not cheap.
I got most of my crying done on Saturday. I wept for my lost GameBoy, for my lost friendship, for my lost battle against The Elite Five. By Sunday morning my eyes didn’t have any new tears to shed. I sat around feeling empty.
The neighborhood was covered in a thick layer of fog, the sun was blotted out by clouds; the weather was tailor made for an indoor Sunday. Yet in the late afternoon my mother came in and yelled at me for sitting at home all weekend. I tried to argue with her but with every word that came out of my mouth I could feel myself inching towards tears. I left the comfort of my room and ventured into the frigid world outside.
The playground was completely empty. By the time I got inside of my second home it started to rain. The soft pitter-patter of the raindrops reminded my body I wasn’t completely spent. I started crying again. The thought of going to school on Monday, of staying in school for the next nine years, agitated my tears even further. I started to imagine Jonatan going to the same university as me, getting a job in the same office, being dropped off at the same nursing home. I wept, imagining an eternity of Jonatan. That’s when I heard it.
It was a faint echo, a gentle tune that I barely heard over my sobs, yet as soon as it grazed my attention it was unmistakable. Somewhere on the playground the midi-music theme of MonsterFighter was playing. I inched my way down the slide to find the source of the music.
An old man sat on the bench near the slide. His beard was long and unkempt, his clothes looked like they went through a war-zone, wisps of stringy white hair barely covered a poorly healed scar over his right eye. He was holding my GameBoy.
The man looked feeble, getting the GameBoy, even for someone as meek as I was would not be a problem. I was about to shout something at him, but before I had a chance to open my mouth he looked at me with his single blue eye. With some effort the old man got off the bench and walked towards me. He held out my GameBoy, his hands shivered beneath its weight. I took it.
“The future is beautiful,” he said managing a weak smile. He reached out his bony hand and frizzled my hair and then walked off into the fog. He disappeared as if he never existed.
I was beyond bewildered, but as soon as my eyes drifted down to the GameBoy all of my confusion was replaced with unadulterated joy. The future was indeed beautiful. Jonatan would eat his words. On the screen, black on white, there were eight simple words that would allow me to prove Jonatan wrong once and for all:
“Congratulations PENIS, You have beaten The Elite Five”
For the first time in my life I was excited to go to school.