Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  Except the kid had turned his attention back to the fence and apparently decided to ignore me. OK, I was thinking, I did my best. Most of my friends were already kicking the soccer ball around and recess was short, so I was pretty much done with the fat kid.

  I was about to walk away when he said, “Sega sucks.”

  “Does not,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t the best gaming system out. Truth was, all I ever dreamed about at that time was getting a PlayStation, which was like three hundred dollars, and my father said no way, not until I learned to listen better. As it was, he threatened to take my Sega away at least once a week, whenever he thought I wasn’t trying hard enough or whenever my sister Lindsey complained to him about something I did. I already knew that my father held out little hope that the medicine was going to cure me. As far as he was concerned, I was as stupid as the fat kid was saying I was.

  “Besides, I’m getting a PlayStation,” I told him, even though this wasn’t true. Still, I had a feeling . . .

  “PlayStation sucks too.”

  “Does not.”

  “Does so. Compared to Nintendo 64, it does.”

  Nintendo 64 had been out for, like, maybe two months and was really hard to get. I played it in some stores and kids were just starting to bring it home. It kicked ass. And was maybe the best system ever, with Donkey Kong and Mario and everything, and I would have begged for it.

  Except for one thing.

  The one thing was: PlayStation had a new game that was, in fact, the best game ever, a game that I would become closely identified with.

  The game in question had come out a few months before and was about a red-and-brown, two-legged dog-thing that kept running and running and running and running, jumping over ditches, spinning around turtles, popping on them, sending them hurling into space, and then running while being chased by humongous boulders and having to jump over pits, while spinning through crates and breaking things, never stopping, except to get an oingaboinga and otherwise stop and you’re dead.

  Everything in the game mirrored exactly how I felt every single day of my life, while teachers and others tried so hard to sit me down and keep me still, even though I was spinning; while they were giving me my ADD medicine to try and stop my constant need to move, and to stop me from trying to break free from my chair and the room and the school. Letters on the chalkboard, words in a book, and all I could think of, all I could keep feeling, was get out.

  Get outside.

  When is school over?

  When oh when is recess?

  When oh when oh when do I get to go to Pete’s house and play the game again?

  It got so bad for me that I sometimes skipped baseball in order to get to Pete’s, because he was the only one who had the game. And no one played the game like me.

  Because I was him and he was me.

  I was Crash Bandicoot. And I hated Doctor Neo Cortex even more than I hated sitting in the chair in school every day, waiting and waiting, practically sweating, while Mrs. Henderson talked on and on and on and on about science and history and math and language and writing and English.

  People reminded me often enough that my nickname was Crash even before the game came out.

  Whatever.

  What I remember is, from the time I first played it, the name “Crash” took on a new significance for me. Because I could sit absolutely still for hours and hours with a controller in my hands and Crash on the screen; because I could solve every puzzle that frazzled Crash and the rest of my friends; because I could collect every life and find every secret and never have to stop or worry about feeling like I missed something important.

  And being that my name, Steven Crashinsky, had “Crash” in it, I pretty much believed that the universe had created the game just for me; that somewhere out there, they knew, they totally knew. Given my name and my constant craving for movement, how could it have been otherwise? It was secret proof to me, a cosmic validation that I was capable of anything if I was able to concentrate, no matter what my father or my sister or anyone else said about me, including the fat kid clawing at the fence. I was a genius in my own way. It didn’t matter whether anyone ever noticed.

  “Whatever” is what I said to the fat kid, ready to move on. The soccer ball called.

  “So you acknowledge, then, that Nintendo is a superior system?” asked the fat kid in a voice to match his odd use of words.

  Being a secret genius in my own way, I recognized that, for some odd reason, it seemed superimportant to this kid to be smarter than me. I almost always know whether a kid is truly smarter than me. So I knew right away, the fat kid was definitely smarter than me.

  But I also knew that he would never hit a three-point shot, or kick a game-winning goal, or catch a football crossing over into the end zone, no matter how old he got. So I pretty much summed him up as a smart loser kid. Besides, I sensed that, even though he was smarter than me, there was something off about him. Really off.

  “Maybe,” I answered about the Nintendo/PlayStation issue. “Except . . . except Nintendo doesn’t have Crash Bandicoot” is what I told him in my moment of triumph.

  “Shit,” said the fat kid. “I will acknowledge that Crash is an awesome game . . . ,” he added, his voice drifting off as he said it. And I knew that I had defeated my enemy, conquered the big boss of level seven, and was ready for the next round. Except I also knew that this kid was not the kind of kid who was destined to be my friend. So we were done.

  And just in time, Pete passed the soccer ball to me, actually probably at the fat kid, but I intercepted and then cut left and cut right around everyone else on the field, and all alone, I angled toward the goal and kicked a perfect center goal kick, right past Evan, who was diving for the ball. He never had a chance.

  It would be a long time before I won another argument with David Burnett.

  Anyways, a few months later, it was Christmas.

  For the Crashinskys, as in Jamie, Lindsey, my mom and dad, and me, Christmas also meant Hanukkah, given that my father is a nonpracticing Jew and my mom is a superstitious Catholic. Anyways, under the Christmas tree/Hanukkah bush, there was a present from my father’s sister, Aunt Randi, which was twice as big as any size box that she had ever given me before. And I knew, I totally knew even before she handed the present to me with a wet-cheek kiss: PlayStation.

  You would think I’d be happy. But instead, I was totally panicked. Because my father had still not let up on the “No new toys until you do better in school” rule, which he was adamant about, because even with my new medication, I was, according to him, still not “applying myself” in school and still being lazy and distracted. I already knew that my mom wasn’t going to stand up to him, as she had secretly given me the new Sonic game a few days earlier. Sonic, of course, was, in my mind, the single greatest video-game hero ever, until Crash, and the reason I was able to survive in school until PlayStation.

  So I was physically rattled as I tore open the menorah-patterned wrapping paper to get to my aunt’s present.

  The system.

  And out spilled the game. My very own Crash Bandicoot, no more begging Pete to get to his basement. There it was.

  And there he was, my father, standing over me, shaking his head in a way that clearly said “no.”

  He waited until the system was completely unwrapped, then grabbed it from my hands and handed it back to his sister.

  “I thought we talked about this,” he said, practically barking at her.

  “It’s Hanukkah,” she yelled back at him, grabbing it and trying to hand it back to me again. “Give the kid a break.”

  Now they were both holding my PlayStation, just above my head, with me under it, cross-legged, afraid that if I moved even the slightest bit, the game would be gone forever.

  One quick yank and he was in sole possession.

  Now he focused his attention on me. “Do you really think that you’ve earned this?” he said with a sneer.

  I dared not
answer.

  “He doesn’t have to earn everything,” his sister told him. “That’s what the holidays are all about, Mr. Scrooge.”

  “Stay out of this, Randi,” he commanded. “The child has to learn.”

  I could feel the game slipping away with every word from him. Because I had five, maybe six seconds left before I totally lost it on him, as I usually did. And I could feel it coming on, taking control of me.

  “Steven,” said Aunt Randi, “will you try harder?”

  “Yes” was all I could manage.

  “There,” she said.

  Maybe my level of control swayed him, since it was so unusual, or maybe it was the Christmas/Hanukkah spirit or something, because my father, for no reason at all, dropped the PlayStation into my lap.

  “It’s either this one or the other,” he said. And at first, I had not a clue what he meant, except that he wanted me to choose and it seemed like he was testing me again, like he was always testing me in some way, and if I got this wrong, I would lose everything. So my mind raced. If “this” is PlayStation, “the other” must be Sega. That had to be what he meant.

  “This” was all I said.

  I was up most of the time between Christmas and New Year’s, beating level after level. I was magic. I was fast. Faster than anything I was capable of before, body tilting to keep up with the controller, to keep up with the levels. Standing, twisting, ducking down, all with my fingers constantly moving, even faster than I moved on the soccer field. No shit. I actually became, with no part of me not believing this, Crash Bandicoot.

  “Heard you got PlayStation,” David Burnett said to me the first morning back at school after winter break.

  He was in Mrs. Bender’s class, in the room next to me, so the only time I ran into him was either lunch or recess. By then, he and I had a weird kind of relationship. For one, our mothers met each other at some parent-teacher conference and seemed to strike up a friendship of some sort. His mom was a superstitious Jew, his father a nonpracticing Catholic, so we had, in a way, the religious/nonreligious thing in common. And apparently our fathers were in the same kind of business and occasionally took the train into Manhattan together. Plus, we both had sisters who were two years older than us, as in me with Lindsey and him with Roxanne, although they apparently did not like each other very much.

  Point is, by then, I didn’t think that he was all that bizarre, except rumor had it that he was a supergenius, always showing off his superknowledge, like, every day in class and challenging Mrs. Bender all the time. Even finding mistakes in the tests she gave and correcting her.

  Plus he was always coming up with strange ideas.

  Once on the playground, I was wearing gloves, and he asked if I knew where mittens came from, and then he told me “mats” and laughed like it was funny and told me he was writing a book.

  Another time, he asked about Christina Haines, who was this kiss-ass who always had her hand up in class, for, like, practically every question, and he told me that he heard that she liked me and that he thought that she had a very nice voice, of all things.

  Another time, during lunch, he told me that he was building a rocket that would go backward in time for a science project.

  He seemed to be making a few friends, but for some reason would never participate in after-school activities or even take the bus with the rest of us, and always waited for his mom to pick him up after school. Also, apparently his parents were pressuring mine for a family get-together or a group trip on a random Sunday. My mother seemed interested, but my father, typically, was preoccupied with work or something.

  Then, one morning right before the break, his sister literally rammed into me on the bus line, even though I had never actually talked to her before.

  “Crash Ban-di-cute, Crash Ban-di-cute” is what she chanted as she purposely bumped me, almost knocking me over. She had these pigtail braids and reminded me of Wednesday from The Addams Family movie. And she kept staring at me like she was trying to verify something that her brother told her. “Are you really Crash Bandicute? Or do they just call you that because your real last name is so horrible?”

  It never occurred to me before how horrible-sounding my last name was. Not until I heard her pronounce it superslowly, like she was talking to a handicapped person or a foreigner.

  “KRAH . . . SHIN . . . SKEEEEEEEE?” Contorting her face as she overpronounced the syllables.

  Then I thought about what David had told me about her when we first met, about how she made fun of their cousin all the time and he never knew. Was she doing that to me?

  “When are you going to come over to our house to play with David? Puleeze come over to our house to play with David,” she repeated, but then sped off in the direction of a honking Audi. And there was David in the backseat, looking suitably miserable.

  Now, seeing him after the break, he didn’t look miserable at all. He was all loud and everything, yelling at kids in the hall and laughing for, like, no reason. The first thing I thought of was that I was probably going to have to go to the Burnetts’ house for some kind of playdate. My mom had mentioned it a few times in passing, like it was no big deal. But I was not prepared to do that, as he just didn’t seem like any fun, not the kind of fun that I was used to. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether his sister would be there and whether she would try to knock me down again or find other ways to torment me.

  “Heard you had to give up Sega,” he announced loudly, more to other kids in the hall than to me.

  “I could get it back,” I announced with equal loudness but no conviction whatsoever.

  “Heard your dad said that you can’t play the game on school days.”

  Yeah, all I had to do was do better in school. And “apply myself,” whatever that meant. This was the way my father interpreted my promise to Aunt Randi, when he informed me the night before the break ended that there would be no PlayStation on weekdays. “Until further notice,” whatever that meant. I did not take the news well. I had been on my best behavior, at least I thought I was, and no way should I have been punished for no reason whatsoever. But, whatever. How did David Burnett know all of this, anyways?

  “You can play at my house, if you want,” he informed me, his way of telling me that he got PlayStation too. “How far did you get?”

  “The High Road,” I told him, referencing my last save point, which I calculated to be like 75 percent done. “No cheats.” He had to be impressed.

  “Well, I already beat it, so you can start anywhere, if you want,” he said in triumph.

  “You beat it?” No one I knew had actually beat the entire game at that point. I was going to be the first, assuming that I could get my game back at some point.

  “In a few days. Of course, in fairness to you, I don’t actually sleep, so my days are longer than yours.”

  A week later, my mom told me that she heard that David was being disruptive in class and that Mrs. Burnett had to go down to the school and meet with Principal Seidman.

  When I saw David the next day, he bumped me, just like his sister, and said, “School sucks.”

  I pretty much repeated his words. “Yeah, school sucks.”

  I had lost my right to play the game that past weekend because I didn’t do well on my vocab test. So yeah, school sucked. Home sucked too.

  “If I could make it better, so you wouldn’t have to go back, would you want to help?”

  “Yeah, OK.” Which is what I usually say when I don’t understand the question, or if I’m not sure whether there was even a question at all.

  “No, I mean it, Crash. No more school. Forever.” He looked deadly serious when he said this.

  “Sounds pretty good to me” was all I could think of, which it did, not that it was a real possibility or anything. At least not in my mind.

  One morning, a week after that, as me and Evan and Pete were heading into McAllister, I heard his voice from behind me, and turned and saw him and Roxanne getting out of their Audi. He wa
s racing toward me. She was holding her books, just staring in my direction with that same look she gave me the day she rammed into me. My friends abandoned me, seeing as Burnett was coming. Both were in Mrs. Bender’s class with him, and both had told me that he was totally out of control.

  “Crash, I got it to work,” he said. “Just like we planned. Remember, you promised to help. You can’t back out now. Just think of it, no more school.”

  Which is how I ended up in the janitor’s office that afternoon.

  Actually, you might need a few more details. It was lunch period. I was eating at my table, and David came over again and whispered to me that I absolutely had to follow him since I promised to help, that he had built the most amazing thing, and no, of course I couldn’t invite anyone else, it was a secret that he would only share with me. I was the only one he could trust; I was the only one who hated school the way he hated school. I was the only one who understood.

  So like the idiot that I could sometimes be, I snuck out of the lunchroom with him and headed down the corridor, heart pounding, hoping that the ghost of General William McAllister had not followed us to intercept us and take us to the poltergeist dimension.

  We reached the basement stairs, and he motioned for me to go down. At first I said no way, but he was convincing. No, more than convincing, he was determined and bubbling over with energy. And I was overwhelmed with curiosity. And he just kept talking, sounding increasingly persuasive with every step down the stairs.

  Then down into the dark, humid basement and down the hall, with the air heavy with the scent of mildew and dirt, a smell that absolutely lingers in my nostrils even as I write this.

  The McAllister smell.

  Then he motioned to a door that read JANITOR’S OFFICE.

  “Dave, I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

  And as soon as I stepped into the room and saw the mountain of newspaper and torn-up schoolbooks in the middle of the floor, I finally figured out that something was catastrophically wrong.