Bash Bash Revolution

by Douglas Lain

  “Sir?”

  “It’s okay,” Dad said. “Here’s the receipt.” Then he reached out for the girl, reached past her. He’d seen a bag of organic peanut butter cups and decided he wanted them. “I’ll make it even next time I come in.” He opened the bag of candy and ate one of the cups right in front of the shopgirl. “Delicious.”

  The shopgirl nodded after us as Dad dragged me to the security gate and then through the sliding doors.

  “Our AI is really good,” he reminded me once we were out on the street. Then he handed his earbuds over to me and waited for the modem sound to do its trick again. “You’re really drunk, aren’t you?” he asked.

  Dad said that as good as Bucky was, and even if he had passed the Turing test and a dozen others, he wasn’t sure if Bucky was really intelligent. “There may not be enough of a there, there,” he said.

  The problem was that Bucky could help the user do things. Bucky could even diagnose or evaluate empirical data and make accurate predictions about what was going to happen next, but Bucky couldn’t make decisions or decide what was important and what was not. Put another way, the trouble with Bucky was that he could answer questions but couldn’t ask any.

  “We want it to solve problems for itself, to figure out what to do and not just how to do it,” Dad said. “We want it to think.”

  “But, that’s always been the goal? Right? So what’s the emergency?”

  Dad shrugged. “Did I say there was an emergency?”

  We reached the parking lot, and Dad poured out more wine. He filled two dixie cups with his cheap Merlot. And, despite everything, handed one over to me.

  “The emergency is just that he can’t be creative,” Dad said.

  “He?”

  “We think of it as a he. His name is Bucky, actually. We call him Bucky.”

  “Why is the fact that Bucky can’t think an emergency?”

  Dad didn’t answer but just poured himself more wine.

  Dad’s Money Match

  MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/19/17

  3:02 PM

  For Dad’s first money match, we agreed to meet a guy named Evan who had been bragging on reddit and who I’d been planning on taking money from anyhow. Evan lives in Oregon City, or he did back then anyhow, and he wanted to meet up at the Delta Kream Drive-In.

  The Delta Kream is about a block from the Oregon City public library, and Evan showed up with the complete first season of Johnny Test under his arm. He found our table under the awning, under the C in Coca-Cola, set his stack of DVDs on the edge of the metal outdoor table, and then accidentally tipped them over. Before he even said hello Evan was scrambling after plastic cases and rolling discs. It turned out that Dad’s first match would be against a spaz in an orange kitten T-shirt who couldn’t even sit down without causing a scene.

  “Do you think I scratched them?” Evan asked.

  “You’re Evan, right?” I said. “I’m Matthew, and this is my Dad.”

  “Jeffrey,” Dad said. He offered his hand but Evan didn’t seem to notice. He left Dad hanging as he continued to examine his DVDs.

  “Look at that. Is that a scratch? Do you have a microfiber cloth on you?” he asked. He spit a wad of what was probably gum onto the asphalt, stared at me like he wanted to fight or something, and then brushed his long, greasy blonde hair out of his face and looked at my dad. “Your dad? What the fuck?”

  “I’m Jeffrey,” Dad said again. He offered Evan his hand to shake for a second time and it looked like Evan was going to leave him hanging again, but then Evan lost his nerve and acted civil. He shook my dad’s hand limply, then wiped away imagined germs on his jeans. “Are we going to get fries? Did you guys buy fries?”

  A guy who won’t buy his own fries is wrong for a money match. If Evan couldn’t afford fries, how was he going to pay if he lost? More than that, if he couldn’t afford fries then how good could he be at Bash? If you’re good enough to play for money then you should always have at least a little cash, maybe not a lot, but some.

  “I’m just kidding, dude. I’m going to get a shake. Chocolate. You want a shake?”

  “Coffee,” Dad said.

  When the food came Evan struggled to slurp his thick chocolate shake through the straw, Dad blew on his overly hot coffee, and I just watched them. I felt a little nauseous. I didn’t want anything.

  We didn’t have much protection from the wind there in the middle of the parking lot, and there weren’t a lot of other people around. It was just us, a garbage can, the owner/manager behind the counter window, and a couple of thick-necked suburban dads wearing yellow and green sweatshirts. Two out-of-shape guys silently eating hamburgers, plowing through their meal like they were in a contest.

  “I know them,” Dad said. He put down his coffee and stood up from the table, knocking his knee against the edge hard enough to cause a vibration, and causing his coffee to slosh over the side of his paper cup.

  “Shit!” Dad said. “Be right back.”

  While Dad talked to the men in primary colors, Evan stared at me. The situation was really bugging him. He let out a long breath, a kind of asthmatic sigh, and adjusted his orange kitten shirt by pulling the cotton fabric away from his chest and letting go with a snap. “You ever had a girlfriend even?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Bringing your dad?” He enjoyed being incredulous. “I mean, I’ve had a girlfriend. I’ve had a bunch of girlfriends.”

  “I bet.”

  He insisted that it was true. He started to list them all for me, but only came up with two names before there was a long pause and he started over, taking a new tact.

  “I’ve had a blowjob before. Yep.” he said. “You probably wouldn’t even guess how many either.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to guess,” I agreed.

  “Because you brought your Dad to a money match. I mean, is that cool? Really?” Evan was delighted.

  I wasn’t concerned about any of this stuff from Evan. A sort of arrested adolescence came with the territory. If you’re a guy who likes to fight using a Marshmallow or a Princess Teacup then you probably haven’t found your way to the other side of puberty, even if you do have hair under in your armpits and all of that. I mean, I’m not excluding myself here, but if you’re big into gaming then you’re just not a mature person. And for Bash fanatics this rule counts double.

  Evan wasn’t that interesting, ultimately.

  “I didn’t bring my Dad to a money match,” I told him. “He brought me.”

  Evan didn’t react. I mean, he gave me a big reaction by freezing in place. He held his straw like a pencil, getting ice cream on his fingers and letting chocolate drip onto the table.

  “My name is Matt, and that guy over there, my Dad, his name is Jeffrey.”

  Evan turned dramatically, not turning his head but turning his entire body, and looked at Dad again.

  The man in the green sweatshirt was shaking hands with Dad. The two sweatshirt guys were both looking at him with something like expectation, or maybe admiration? The three of them seemed to have reached an agreement of some kind, but then when Dad started to walk away from the table the man in the yellow sweatshirt, the slightly fatter one whose buzz cut hair had a touch of gray, stood up to stop him from leaving. The yellow sweatshirt guy reached out and touched Dad’s shoulder, and when Dad turned back around the man in yellow sweatshirt handed him a pen and napkin.

  Dad wrote something down for him.

  “They wanted your autograph?” I asked when Dad came back to the table.

  Dad took a sip of his coffee. “Perfect,” he said.

  “Still warm?” Evan asked. He was much more interested in Dad now.

  “Ice cold,” Dad said.

  9:45 AM

  Evan’s house reminded me of old futures; of science fiction movies from the 70s and 80s. It looked like it had been put together in pieces like a puzzle and, except for the garage, the walls were made of glass.

 
; He told us that it was a Rummer. “We’re selling because it’s worth a lot of money.”

  “Where are you going to live next?” I asked, but Evan wasn’t listening to me anymore. All of his attention was on Dad.

  “A lot,” Evan said as if answering a question that Dad hadn’t asked. “The house is worth a lot of money. It’s worth a lot of money because it has this philosophy and everything. The architect had this philosophy that a house should let the inside out and the outside in, which is why there is so much glass.”

  It was the wrong sort of house for Evan’s family. This philosophy of letting the world see in, the notion of removing the barrier between what’s private and public? It wasn’t a good fit with their lifestyle, because living in a literal glass house meant that any random passerby could tell that they were hoarders. Their living room was filled with newspapers, magazines, and broken toys, and all of it was in mounds pushing against the glass.

  Standing at their front door, a bright yellow wooden door on a house that was otherwise gray and glass, I looked in at a pile of old Star Wars figures that had turned white in the sun. There was a stack of magazines with an issue of Playboy on top, a pile of toy alarm clocks, plastic wind-up music boxes, parts from a Spirograph, and a Skedoodle. And the gaps in between the piles were filled in with wrappers, paper cups, and laundry. There were suitcases, cassette tapes, paperbacks without covers, and so on….

  Evan let us in, and it took a bit of time to navigate through the front, down a hallway filled with weeble wobbles, to Evan’s room.

  “Look,” Dad said. He picked out a copy of Newsweek and held it up so we could look at the cover. Gary Kasparov was sneering at the camera. The headline read “Man vs. Machine—The Brain’s Last Stand.”

  “What does your family do—” Dad started.

  “eBay,” Evan said. “That’s why. It’s because of eBay. We make good money too, but we’ll make more when we sell this house. It’s a Rummer.”

  Evan’s bedroom wasn’t exactly clean or orderly, but it was small and we could move about without having to watch our step if we didn’t mind walking on his dirty laundry, which we didn’t.

  He had wooden venetian blinds and a couple of blankets nailed up for privacy and so we sat in relative darkness, our eyes adjusting slowly to the dim light from a single working bulb in an antique fixture with vines etched in the glass and what looked like a coffee stain on the right side of the bulb cover.

  Evan’s CRT screen was huge. It was pressed up against a yellow wool blanket, which was probably a fire hazard. We sat down on the edge of his futon mattress and waited for to Evan connect his GameCube to the TV and start the first game. The menu screen fanfare blasted out at us.

  “Sorry,” Evan said. He handed my Dad what was clearly the shittier of the two controllers and started in with the rules.

  There were to be no items, they could pick any of the tournament-approved stages except for the North Pole and the Pirate Ship, and Evan got to pick the characters.

  “What?” I said.

  “I play Robotman and you play Marshmallow,” he said. “I mean, your dad plays Marshmallow.” Evan turned to Dad and nodded at him. “Okay?”

  Of course, that isn’t how it works, or I guess I should say how it worked. I should use the past tense.

  It was total bullshit to try to force a character on us. Nobody would ever put up with that, nobody who ever played competitively would have tried that. But because this was Dad’s first match he just shrugged. Dad didn’t have a favorite character. He wasn’t really trained on any of them.

  Dad put an earbud in his left ear, selected the boxing ring from the 1988 arcade game The Final Round, and proceeded to get smashed against the ropes, slapped this way and that, by Evan’s Robotman. Dad didn’t know how to shield, let alone shield grab. He tried Marshmallow’s special roasting move, missed, and ended up stuck to the canvas. He was unable to move out of the way as Evan backed up to deliver Robotman’s laser cannon blast.

  Dad lost the first three of his four lives one right after the other and Evan let out another of his asthmatic sighs.

  “Your dad sucks,” he said. “I’m kicking his ass. I am like totally going to kick his ass here.”

  And that’s when the game turned in Dad’s favor. Something clicked for him. Maybe Bucky’s instructions started making sense, or maybe Bucky intervened and boosted his reflexes, but what had been a fumbling and poorly timed attempt at the roast move the first few times was now deadly accurate. Dad buried Robotman in melted marshmallow again and again. He delivered a hundred soft body blows, absorbing every counterattack and smothering the robot’s circuits in goo.

  Rather than four-stocking Dad, Evan struggled to stay out of Dad’s way. Unable to counterattack when Dad threw a special, Evan played defensively. He spent his three remaining lives on the run, hopping up to the platform of spotlights above the ring, trying to hit Dad with sniper shots using his bionic eye, but his distance game was shit and Dad always managed to get in close.

  In no time at all, Dad had won the first game.

  It wasn’t exactly fair to Evan. Dad was basically cheating, but I didn’t really know that at the time, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have felt bad for Evan, because he was a cheater too. Dad four-stocked him in the second game, this time on a 4bit rainbow stage borrowed from the 1976 video game Breakout, and Evan just sort of flipped out.

  “No, no, no! C’mon, bitch!” Evan threw down his controller and turned to look at me, like his loss had something to do with me. “What the fuck, dude! What the fuck is wrong with your Dad?”

  Dad was sitting motionless, his legs crossed, holding the controller with both hands, mindlessly thumbing the C-Stick back and forth. He was perfectly calm.

  “There’s one more game,” I said. “Three of five.”

  “It sorta seems like your Dad is playing me,” Evan said. “Are you playing me?”

  Dad looked a little confused. “Yes? I am playing you? That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

  Evan started to explain how he didn’t spend all his time on this stupid video game. He hadn’t dedicated his life to it or anything. Also, Evan explained, he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before and he had a sore stomach. Dad nodded.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “Should we finish anyway?”

  Evan said that he didn’t think Dad should play Marshmallow anymore. And he said he wanted to switch remotes. Dad didn’t mind this either, told him he’d play whatever character Evan preferred. Princess Teacup, Robin Hood, Eagle Person—it didn’t matter to Dad.

  This just made Evan angrier. More hysterical. Evan did not want to lose, could not stand to lose. Not to somebody’s middle-aged Dad.

  “Items, bitch!” he said.

  And this is when I objected. That was too much.

  You never play with items. Since 2006 or something, that had been the rule. Nobody plays competitive Bash with items turned on, but Evan insisted and Dad didn’t care.

  “It’s a shit game this way,” I said. “It makes a game of skill into a game of chance.”

  But Dad didn’t mind. He just put his earbuds back in, twisted them all the way in to block out all external sound, and pressed B.

  Evan decided that Dad should continue on as Marshmallow after all, and when the first round started Evan found a cheese grater and just wiped Dad out with it. Just a couple of hits with a cheese grater transforms Marshmallow into a pile of miniatures. Then Dad lost his second life when Robotman found a saw blade and used it to cut Dad’s soft and sweet character in half, but, predictably, the game turned when Dad found an umbrella and a pair of bunny ears. The bunny ears sped Dad up. The open umbrella was the perfect tool to push Robotman off of the platform on the left side of the screen.

  Evan used everything he could against Dad’s Marshmallow, all of it to no avail.

  “What’s the word for this?” Evan asked. “There is a word for this, for what your Dad is.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking
about. “What my Dad is? My Dad is owed $50.”

  “No, I mean. He shows up in his REI pullover, he’s maybe fifty years old—”

  “Forty-five,” Dad said.

  “He’s this total Normie. He probably doesn’t even know the name of the original Marshmallow game—”

  “Marshmallow 2000,” Dad said.

  “And then he beats me with an umbrella? Who uses an umbrella against a robot? Who knows how to do that? That’s not normal,” Evan said.

  But we’d played by his rules. We’d agreed to the money up front, and no matter how many Johns he tried on us, there was no way out of it.

  “Ringer,” Dad said.

  “What?” Evan asked.

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘ringer.’”

  “Pay up,” I said.

  Evan opened his mouth to make another excuse, some other reason why it just wasn’t fair that he’d been beaten at his favorite video game by somebody’s dad, but he didn’t get any of it out before we were interrupted. Right as he opened his mouth to speak a chime sounded, something like the sound of an old computer starting up.

  Dad looked around. For the first time, he looked startled.

  “It’s the door,” Evan said. “Somebody is at the door.”

  11:02 AM

  The sweatshirt guys from Delta Kream were the ones making the Macintosh Plus sound at the door. Evan’s mom, who turned out to have been home all along, escorted them past the piles of newspaper and broken handheld games to Evan’s bedroom door.

  They wanted to talk to my Dad, of course. They wanted to show him something.

  I found out later that the sweatshirts were NSA agents but, at the time, they just introduced themselves as Bill and Ted. Maybe that was their idea of a joke? Anyhow, the three of them—Bill, Ted, and my Dad—sat on Evan’s unmade futon bed. Since the CRT screen was useless for regular television, they watched a Facebook livestream on Dad’s Galaxy S7 Android.