I felt like I was getting skinned alive through sheer boredom because the hours would just not go away. The shift stretched on and on and the cigarette breaks I took didn’t do a damn thing to kill the time. It seemed like by the time I had the Marlboro lit I was back inside on my feet slamming out drinks. I was short-pouring people left and right and pimping out some stale Budweiser, but everyone was content and relaxed because the humid weather outside was making them a little bit sleepy.
Finally at around ten the crowd thinned out a little and we hadn’t gotten the wave of sailors who usually came to our little place as the last stop on a brutal pub crawl that started at Sloppy Joe’s. I took a break again, but this time curiosity got the best of me and I went over to the Polybius. I could do this because the Old Man and Monika had left, leaving me in charge of the place. As long as the money flowed in and I didn’t skim too much, I could run the place. Camille didn’t say shit. She had a kid that was two years old; she didn’t want to rock the boat.
Anyway, I reached into my pocket, took a stolen-from-the-register coin, and plopped it into the machine.
The funny thing was, the title screen didn’t do the game justice. It really had some cool visuals. You were in this sort of space fighter, and you flew around and shot your lasers out at these hammer-and-sickle-shaped fighter planes. At first the game was easy, as every game is, but then it started to get faster and faster and the graphics got more and more realistic—to the point you could see the little men in the opposing space fighters hold up their hands and look like they were shrieking when they exploded.
Five minutes went by as I played and I didn’t even notice it. The Navy sailors started to cruise in while I was barely paying attention, and a few got curious at the game I was playing as they could hear the sort of orchestral music and the screams from the people I was flying around and blowing up. The game was getting really intense fast, and I felt my heart pumping away and my hands sweat. I got to about the third level with 88,888 points when I got blown up.
I stepped away and noticed that an hour had passed. Camille was swamped. I ignored the sailors clapping me on the back and the excited talk about never seeing a game like that before. The first sailor, some black kid, jumped on the thing as soon as I left.
Camille wasn’t so much pissed off as she was surprised at the game. “Never seen anything like that before. Looks like you were playing the Star Wars movie.”
I was sweating and poured myself a beer. “I know, right?”
Some sailor was trying to get my attention. “Yo, can I get a Budweiser now? You done yapping?”
I shrugged. “No.” I poured another beer in a schooner glass for myself. He looked even more annoyed.
I wanted to play the game again. I had to fight the urge. My eyes kept flicking toward the thing. The sailor who replaced me got replaced by another. Everyone started to watch the next guy play, what with all the commotion and the horseshit from the sailors acting up and some even pushing each other to get in line. It was like a movie; I’ve never seen people crowd a machine like that. Even the regular pool players, my friends the Felix brothers, interrupted their game to watch the machine go off. They scratched their stubble-covered chins and asked me what was going on.
“Popular arcade game. Don’t know.”
“Ever heard of it before?” Bobby Felix asked.
I couldn’t say I had. And usually I’d seen a million ads for arcade machines come through the bar supply magazine we got every month. All the games were in there: Tempest, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, something else I think called Galaga… but never that game.
* * *
It was only about a little after one o’clock. My legs ached a bit, but I didn’t feel that tired as everyone was playing the game. Camille was laughing.
“Never seen anything like that,” she said. “I guess I gotta try next—”
There was some commotion with the mini-crowd over by the machine. That black sailor I saw before was trying to go for another turn when I saw this country-looking big Okie take out a pocketknife.
I thought at first he was gonna threaten him, but he did two things next. First he stabbed the kid. Right in the throat. Blood gushed as he hit the kid in the throat again and again. The kid just dropped to the floor, bleeding out.
No one stopped or restrained him. They just sort of stood back, like they were in a daze or shock. But these were Navy sailors; these were the kind of guys who were good about reacting to situations and sobering up and doing something when shit like that went down.
But they just sort of parted the waves and let the killer pop a quarter into the machine and start playing. He was playing there still when the P.D. tackled him. Skinner Sam the bouncer was nowhere to be seen. I was on the phone with the operator when I saw the asshole’s face after they tackled him. His eyes were wide and unfocused; he looked like a dead fish that had floated up to the surface. Someone kept asking, “Why’d you do it, man? Why’d you do it?“
I put the phone down. Camille was sobbing and I put an arm around her.
The machine departs
The kid, that sailor, had died on the floor. I’d never seen anything like that before. Camille was crying. I called the Old Man and Monika, and they came down as the cops set up this whole half-assed crime scene with yellow police tape. Jimmy, the on-duty sergeant, stood around with his big belly sticking out, chewing gum.
“Fucked up, huh? Over a what—an arcade machine?” Sergeant Jimmy said, snapping his gum.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess one cut or was hogging the machine and shit. I don’t know.”
“Can I get a gin and tonic?” Sergeant Jimmy said. I made it up and served it to him. He sipped it, and some of that clear liquid ran down his double chin. The good ol’ boy belched a second after, then adjusted his gut over his belt. The pig never paid.
“Crazy. Crazy, crazy. Get the poor darkie stabbed over what, you know? Crazy. Maybe it was a, a—a homo-cide. You get it? Homo-cide? Homo?”
I laughed obnoxiously. “Uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh.”
Sergeant Jimmy pounded the drink and set it back on the wooden counter. There was no one around, as the place had cleared out after the stabbing. For the moment. We’d had stabbings before—just not fatal ones. For example, we’d had that girl from Diff’rent Strokes stab her agent here last summer. They covered it up though in the news. But I saw it. Some people said it wasn’t her but I knew.
* * *
The Old Man spoke up as he stood next to me. “Any way I can charge the Navy for cleaning up the bloodstain? That’s the third one in six months now. And this guy is the first one to die.”
Sergeant Jimmy shrugged. “Shit in one hand, you know, wish and pray. You know what I mean.”
I took a deep breath. “Can I take a step out? Are we done?”
Sergeant Jimmy shrugged. “I think so. I mean, it’s shut and open. You know. Guy gets stabbed. This isn’t Sherlock Holmes mysteries, here.”
I stepped out to where Monika was having a smoke. There was a sudden downpour from a cloudburst, and Monika handed me a cigarette without saying anything.
“Fuckin’ nuts,” I said.
“It is strange, yes.”
We stood there uncomfortably for a few moments.
“Are you gonna…” I said. “I was already feeling sort of under the weather, and, you know, this whole thing has busted me up and…”
I coughed into my hand.
“I’m not closing. You have to make up for the day before yesterday when you did not close.”
She puffed on her cigarette. Her smoke blew into my face.
“Please?”
“No. Your father and I are at the strip club for the city attorney’s birthday for the rest of the night.”
“You’ve got the prettiest blue eyes, you know that?” I said.
“You do your job.”
An old Chevy drove up, and Monika ran across the street to talk quickly to the hot driver.
“Frog wh
ore,” I said under my breath. My old man was near me when I said it, and we just exchanged a look with each other.
“Well, she’s my whore,” he whispered.
“We gonna close now?” I asked.
He shook his head. “What’s the use? Don’t know what the point would be. The investigation’s over. Does that sound sort of, you know, callous? But what do we do? Have a night of mourning? Something? I don’t know. Sailors get the first drink free if they come back in. We need a better bouncer, that’s for sure.”
I took a puff and listened to the rain coming down. We stayed open the rest of the night, and we ripped down the crime scene police tape after the local cops said we didn’t need it. The kid’s blood stained the wooden floor, but it wasn’t wet or sticky or anything. The bar resumed business as usual, though at least ten times I had to point out where the kid got stabbed when a random person asked. Polybius was on, and a crowd had formed again.
“Good enough game if people are stabbing each other over it,” I said.
I thought it was weird, and so did Camille, who could barely talk. We sort of motioned to each other as we watched more and more of the bar surround the machine. The music and the blasting noises and the screams were loud enough to drown out Led Zeppelin.
I myself really wanted to go another round on it. It was like a sort of internal itch, like a mental horniness to go after the machine again. It beat the hell out of the Tempest machine over at Captain Tony’s. And I had the high score in that.
I thought about the game as I listened to this young guy, this writer with long hair, Harley Mark, ramble on after getting his fifth Manhattan of the day. I was busy staring at a black-haired woman with blue eyes. And she was busy watching everything with a sort of weird, wide-eyed look. Drugs, probably. I could see she was focusing on the crowd near the game the entire time.
I was gonna make my way over toward her but Harley Mark’s wisdom kept pouring into my ears.
“Man, you guys wanna know something? I got into so much trouble back in grade school a couple of times, for the lamest stuff. I wrote this story where Batman wore a dress and drank toilet water, another about eating bug sandwiches on Gilligan’s Island; I thought they were hilarious, and I still do. Why? Because it’s silly, silly. I knew, while I couldn’t express it back then, that through writing I could take characters I enjoyed and put them in any situation of my whim, and I could mash them together. I can’t remember why I had Batman in a dress or why he drank out of the toilet, but I remember getting berated. In high school I wrote a story parodying Romeo and Juliet, but Romeo was a drunk who couldn’t remember which girl he was after and the setting was at a dive bar. I almost got suspended for this stuff; each time I went to the principal. Well, ‘I am champagne and they are shit.’ All forgiven of course, but damn to this day I still haven’t forgotten. I am the one still laughing. Guide imagination, don’t stifle it. Schools do that now. Fucking Reagan.”
“Miss, you want something to drink?”
The black-haired woman turned to me, staring and not blinking.
“Oh, yes. What is the popular drink?”
“Beer, I guess. We make our own, actually…”
“I will have this beer.”
Harley and I looked at each other, and he just continued to ramble away.
“Here’s a mini-story. Batman sat in his easy chair one fine Sunday morning. It was a fine Sunday morning, as this particular morning was a Sunday morning in late spring, and it happened to be his day off from a very successful week in fighting crime. A fresh cup of coffee was next to his chair, and the sun warmed his face while slippers warmed his feet. With a ‘bing’ from the kitchen, he lay down the Sunday comics and rose with a smile to have his breakfast of smashed cockroach oatmeal…”
I finished pouring the drink for the woman and gave it to her.
“Yes, thanks to you,” she said. She took a long sip of the beer, downing half of it.
“Okay, that’s sort of…”
I didn’t finish my sentence.
“Looks like King Crimson here just got the high score!” someone shouted. It wasn’t one of the sailors, it was one of the young locals like me that had nowhere to go and enough of an allowance or minimum wage to spend on beer and shots.
I almost forgot who King Crimson was. I saw him near the machine with his long white-people dreads and his ripped black T-shirt with the In the Court of the Crimson King album art on it. He was a guy everyone sort of liked/disliked—a ginger with a long beard who was always making up bullshit.
But I didn’t like that guy at all. He tipped like shit and smelled like shit and looked like shit and I think he was only five years older than me but he looked fifteen years older.
“No one can beat it! No one can beat it! This is my life! This is my life!”
I was already over my free limit of two drinks and I told Camille, “Goddamn rock hobo’s gonna get it.”
The black-haired woman turned to me. “You should go and beat the high score.”
She stared into my eyes for a moment, and I winked back at her.
Harley Mark sipped his Manhattan.
“You should beat the high score and make something grand happen,” she said. “Get the high score.”
I went over to the machine.
“I can beat this,” I said out loud.
King Crimson pointed to the machine. “You can beat this, really? You think you can?”
“Please. It’s a new machine. I mean, what are you bragging about? Seriously? This whole thing is—this isn’t a victory, it’s a game. And I’m gonna beat you at it.”
King Crimson pulled some of his long white-man dreads over his shoulder. “Go ahead, girl. Come on now.”
I blew out a Bronx cheer.
Then I put in a quarter. “Suck it long and suck it hard, King Crimson.”
The game started up, and soon I felt better and better, forgetting I was standing on the dried bloodstain from that poor sailor. The game just sort of picked me up and took me into this other place. I got past level after level, destroying these space fighters and watching the little men scream as the lasers from my own space fighter blew them apart. You could hear engines roaring, you could see flames bursting out as the space fighters exploded. I mean, this game was something else. Like playing a movie all right. And the flashing lights and the noises when I got to a new level were pure pleasure.
I didn’t know that King Crimson had already taken off when I got to the final screen. It was different from the rest of the fly-around-and-shoot-down-your-enemies thing. This final part had just these four floating heads with chalk white faces that shot out these green lightning bolts, and you had to sort of shoot your lasers from your space fighters into their eyes. And I did—and it was crazy fucking weird because once when one of those heads finally died from lasers being fired into it, it screamed my name.
“Did you hear that?” I said, turning around. But the crowd wasn’t even watching me anymore. They were watching King Crimson instead. He was shaking terribly and moaning while holding his head.
“What the fuck?” I said.
King Crimson then started throwing up blood all over the back wall and over the mural we had of the sea and my family’s fishing boat, Medium Talent. Skinner Sam, who usually slept in the back corner, finally woke up (he’d shown up again sometime after the stabbing) and stood on his tree trunk legs, but he really couldn’t do anything except watch that homeless King Crimson puke all over the beautiful mural on the back wall and then fall down and start banging his head against the cold floor.
“Holy fuck,” I said. “What was he doing? Did anyone see?”
The yuppie tourist people sitting at the bar, the locals, the couple of sailors too drunk or ignorant or indifferent to care about the stabbing earlier, no one knew. And King Crimson kept banging his head against the floor. Blood started pouring out.
“Don’t these sort of people have medication, for Christ’s sake?” Skinner said.
> “Somebody got that epileptic stuff?” I yelled out.
Then King Crimson stood up, thrashed his arms around, and started going after all the glasses in the bar, screaming about the high score and yelling and yodeling all at the same time. Skinner grabbed him from behind and put him in a sleeper hold to take him down, but Crimson just flipped him over his shoulder like a bag of laundry and slammed poor Skinner into the bar.
I could see for a moment Harley Mark and the black-haired woman watching. Neither had any sort of reaction to the violence in the room. It was so strange.
Four guys started to wrestle King Crimson back and down to the ground, but Crimson fought like a tiger in a cage, swinging his arms around, slapping and biting and spitting on everyone. One guy he bit hard on the neck, taking out a chunk. I reached behind the bar’s counter and grabbed the tire iron we kept back there and whapped him in the head three times, his head giving a little after that last hit.
Then I took the bloody tire iron and placed it back behind the bar counter and looked over to the black-haired woman and whispered to her, “I have the high score, now and always.”
Harley Mark clapped. “You’re in the driver’s seat.”
* * *
King Crimson died on the floor of the bar and this time we did close the place early. Two deaths in one day was bad. Camille lost her shit and couldn’t stop crying and she went home by cab when she usually walked home. The Old Man drank more than he usually drank. Monika smoked more than she usually smoked, and she muttered that she was calling the place we had gotten Polybius from and replacing it with a Ms. Pac-Man like we wanted, since Polybius was making more people play instead of drink. She was trying to focus on something other than the violence.
“But it’s a great game,” I protested.
“Great game does not make us money. People lining up there all the time means less time for the drink.”
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy Page 9