by Joel Golby
So for the last time ever and in honor of the new life barreling towards us (him), Jay and I decided to go to a day rave, which is a rave, but it is during the day.
Raves have never been my thing because even at my deepest drunk or highest high I have still been lucid enough to recognize when (and be deeply annoyed by) people who are talking absolute shit to me, which people on ecstasy at raves very much like to do, to me, also while listening to dance music, which is the worst type of music there is. This rave was no different: “Are you all right, mate?” people asked. “Are you having a good night?” This is pointless conversation, doubly so when I’m at a urinal pissing. A girl in a glitter top noticed that I was “very tall.” Truly, I don’t ever want to be so high that I can unlock the simple part of the brain that allows me to think this is significant or useful conversation, but I can’t, even when chemically baffled, and that makes talking to people who can very difficult to me. In the toilets, a man in a Hawaiian shirt—unbuttoned, so you could see his entire waxed chest—noticed that I, too, was holding my hands under the hand dryer for an unnecessarily long period of time, and nodded, “Nice, isn’t it?” before his sunglasses fell back onto his face and he turned to leave. “Good to you, mate,” he said, extending a warm hand, and he genuinely meant it.
I mean yes, I should probably mention I was flying on ecstasy at this point. I’d only ever done half a pill before, years earlier, and it made me derangedly horny—it flipped me from a meek man who has never approached a woman in a bar ever in his life into some sort of frothing-mouthed Tom-Jones-spliced-with-another-somehow-hornier-version-of-Tom-Jones fuck-a-geddon, where I went around to every woman in the bar in turn and chatted her up, striking out methodically with each of them, and after I woke up harrowingly alone at 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon I vowed never to take that one again—but Jay had somehow palmed two pills from some dealer in the crowd of the main room, and despite my horniness reservations, hey, it was the Final Sesh, so yes, I banged one and washed it down with cider.
The hand dryer incident was the first I’d noticed any great side effect. Ecstasy seems to go one of two ways—horny (derangedly so) or a kind of simple childlike wonder with the world around you—but so far I was feeling neither. Coming up had just made me overwhelmingly anxious—in my head I was quite scared I’d altered my brain chemistry permanently, forever, and was making small vows to myself that if I was still feeling this way in half an hour, I would simply leave; still feeling like this the next day, I figured I’d quit my job and tell them I could never again come back to work; if I still felt like this a week later, then I’d simply have to kill myself—but after a half tin of cider and a couple of visits to the urinal, I started to feel the requisite warm and glowy. Then I went and sat down and—Oh my god, guys. Oh. Oh my god.
I feel like I invented sitting down that day. Listen: I know a lot of people have sat before. There were people sitting down before me and there will be people sitting after me. The first Neanderthal man probably sat on something. Animals can sit down. You are probably sitting down right now, a skill you almost certainly learned as a child. But listen to me: I invented sitting down. Until I took slightly too much ecstasy at a day rave as a thirty-year-old trying desperately to relate one final time to an old friend, we were just sitting on things.
Jay was not so into this as I was. He kept saying things like: “Please, I want to dance.” He found a flyer with the DJ set times and explained that his favorite DJ in the world was playing at 10:30 p.m. “We’ll go there,” he explained, in the soft tones he had now accepted he had to talk to me in, the Sitting-Down Boy, to get me to do anything. “We’ll go there, and have a little dance.” And I would say to him: “But after that, we can sit down?” And he would say: yes. And I would say: “Is it all right if I just sit down for, like, forty-five more minutes first?” And he would look at his watch and sigh: yes. And then I would sit there, sitting down, and explain to him very quickly how astounding sitting down feels. Direct transcript, J. R. Golby, February 10, 2018, 8 p.m., Extremely High, re: sitting down: “Why don’t we do this all the time?”
I suppose it was a fitting end to the Final Sesh, really: that, after years of partying together, through university and first jobs and moves to big cities and birthdays and just-because-we-feel-like-its, that time I had to go to a house and pick his shoes up because he had bafflingly left them there, that time we ended up in Soho in the deep dark pink hours of it, the time we ended up folded into the crowd of soccer supporters flooding into town from a packed Wembley, all those pints and all those shots, all those pisses against chain-link fences near tube stations, all those arguments with taxi drivers, the Final Sesh would be me, desperately sitting down and unmoving, rigidly refusing to go and dance to a DJ we’d paid upwards of £30 to see. In a way, as the last dry skin of youth shed off our friendship and we became, snakelike, incrementally more adult together, something important happened: we came to know each other, not as kids anymore, but as men. Seated men.
I Have the Monopoly
None of us trust each other alone with the board. That is how this has happened. I will describe the scene: I am holding on to Sam’s leg. Sam was my friend before this started, but he isn’t now. He has lost both of his Adilette slides in the tussle. We are both lying on the floor in a position which, if it wasn’t for the aggressive energy in the hallway, could have been described as “pre-erotic.” We are twisted together so I am both on top of and below him. Sam is holding on to his upright girlfriend’s leg. Also going on: the plastic beaker I went to the kitchen for has bounced all the way down the stairs, and also Sam is biting me. Everyone is yelling. We have been playing for an hour now, barely out of diapers in the overall life of the game, but already we have all gone, collectively, insane. Kimeya needed to take her laundry out of the machine in the kitchen and didn’t trust us alone with the board in the lounge, so we both had to go with her. She and Sam both needed the bathroom, too, so we all had to go in shuttle runs, each watching over the door of the other while they pissed silently behind it, a complex and passive-aggressive urine-soaked retelling of the old fox-chicken-grain brainteaser. Sam, while pissing: “Joel, are you still there?” Kimeya, while pissing: “If you guys touch that board, SO HELP ME GOD.” To reiterate: Sam is biting me. His teeth are in my shoulder. I have him in a headlock while he slowly goes pink. Look at the clock. Look at us all, here on the gray-yellow carpet of their share flat in Clapton. Fifty minutes ago we started playing Monopoly. And look at us now, here. All our dignity gone and the only thing remaining is our hunger for the win.
* * *
—
Monopoly is the best game because the Actual Devil lives inside it, and you don’t get that with other board games or games in general. I mean yes: there has been a certain renaissance in recent years for board games, particularly adult ones—the best of them is Settlers of Catan, which is very good, and where you and four others tessellate an island together out of board pieces, then compete to roll dice and collect resources, building up roads and townships and most crucially an army, until whoever hits the ten-point limit wins, and in mimicry of Monopoly, the best game, it is also played in stages (the early game is all about collecting wood and stone, wildly; the second is about etching out a plot of land for yourself, a feeling of control, the hope that, after you die, and the wind and rain comes, this island will know your legacy; the endgame is realizing you have no chance to win unless you dick over your opponents and really squeeze them whenever they come to you for wood, which they are also trying to do whenever you come to them for stone; there is no way to escape this island without calling at least someone you are close to a “dickhead” or a “fuckhead” or a “fuckhead dickhead”) (the major mechanic in many of these games is not just crushing but humiliating your opponent, your opponent who in real life is your close family or your very best friend); another game I like, Resistance, takes the Monopoly mechanic of yelling furiously
at the people you love but projects it onto a game of subterfuge, where you take it in turns to, as per the draw of random cards, play as a spy amongst golden adventurers. But many of these games lack a certain, final, over-the-top blooded edge to them, one that is stretched taut over every inch of Monopoly. A lot of these games are fun, is what I am saying, and are aimed at—how to say this? They are aimed at all of the people who have ever bought a full set of adult-edition Harry Potter books. They are aimed at hide-in-plain-sight nerds whose main idea of violence is having a favorite Game of Thrones gif. Monopoly, meanwhile, makes my blood come alive. It makes me want to tear off my clothes and kill. Monopoly makes me want to get my hands red in the middle of someone else. It makes me want to murder people, in a way that feels extremely cool and powerful.
Consider the history of Monopoly: Monopoly, the board game, is steeped in monopoly, the concept thereof. It was originally invented as The Landlord’s Game by Lizzie Magie—a feminist, short story writer, stenographer, comedian, stage actress, engineer, and later game inventor, and most importantly a proponent of Georgism, a single-tax economic philosophy—who around the turn of the century invented The Landlord’s Game as a way of championing the idea that land, rather than property, should be taxed by the state (some Georgism thing, man). The original game had two sets of rules: the “Prosperity” rules, under which everyone benefited from a central pot of money every time someone on the board acquired property—the aim of the game was that everyone won (everyone! won!) when the player who started with the lowest amount of money had doubled their cash. And then you had the “Monopolist” rules, which were meant to be a stinging criticism of capitalism and instead proved to be really, really fun, and those are the ones that more closely resemble Monopoly as we know it today: buy low, rent high, crush your opponents into dust, and the richest man standing wins it all. The game was a sort of pass-around hit among left-wing intellectuals (especially popular at Wharton, Harvard, and Columbia) and among the Quaker community, who redrew the board with street names and destinations from Atlantic City. One person who played the game was Charles Darrow, unemployed at the time, who took the concept of The Landlord’s Game, drew it up as Monopoly, and then eventually licensed it to Parker Brothers for a hefty fee. So see: Monopoly, the game, existed because it was monopolized, an idea stolen wholesale and repainted a more palatable color and sold at a profit to the masses. Nobody knew Monopoly was a sheer rip-off until a court case in the ’70s, when economics professor Ralph Anspach—who was being sued by Parker Brothers at the time after marketing the Anti-Monopoly game, because Monopoly cannot help but attract trouble—dug up Magie’s old patents. Monopoly was the result of selling someone else’s idea for violent profit, and the truth about that only emerged when Monopoly tried to hammer down someone else’s idea years later. Capitalism pulses so naturally through the blood of this game that it can’t help but come out on the game board.
I have figured what it is that makes Monopoly like a sort of crackpipe of board-based emotional violence, and that is this: Monopoly is like six or seven different games at once, games stacked on top of games, a primary game that morphs into something More. The Monopoly you know is Stage 1: you race around the board eating up all the property you can get your sticky little hands on until it is all bought up, and this can go on for anything from four to eight trips past Go (everyone is refusing to land on Tennessee Avenue, always Tennessee Avenue, so that’s where the holdup is). To some families, this is where Monopoly begins and ends—there’s five of you, someone’s kid brother keeps getting distracted, your mum gets up halfway through her turn to go and make a round of tea, there’s a film on in the background that everyone is half watching, it has somehow taken twenty-five minutes for everyone to do their first pass of the board, so an hour or so in you all decide to pack it in and just watch the film instead, to the protestations of your dad, who is convinced that, because he is $500 up, he is winning. No. He is not winning. You all have failed on the first circle of Monopoly.
The next stage of the game is the foreplay-like preamble before Stage 3, where it really gets good: at this point in the game, there is a lap or two of the board where everyone is low on funds, and they are touchy and tentative, they think about but do not ultimately buy Atlantic Avenue when they land on it, they are property-rich and cash-poor, and they go around picking up little fines and getting hit with small, petty rents, and fine, fine. Your family might ditch out at this stage, too, convinced the game is a scam, that it is boring and dull: that you just go around, grinding, losing money on property and slowly being overwhelmed by the cost of life, a sad analogy for existence. Again, and without meaning disrespect: you’ve fucked it.
Because if you ditch out before Stage 3 of the game, then you have approached greatness but melted your own wings before you have truly had a chance to touch it, because Stage 3 of Monopoly is negotiation, and that is where it transcends the board game and becomes something More. Stage 2 is necessary scene setting for this section of the game, because most importantly it frays your nerves and your temper—imperceptibly, maybe, maybe you didn’t notice yourself losing your humanity, atom by atom, to a green-and-red board game, but you did—the half second of calm before the explosion. Monopoly is a game designed to drive you mad, and Stage 2 is important because in those tedious loops around the board something alchemic happens: you start to believe the false money stacked in front of you is, if not real, then halfway towards real; the Monopoly currency starts to take on a weight and importance it didn’t have before; you start casting your eyes round to see who has the colored cards that will help you complete a monopoly, escalating you up the path to richness. Ask yourself the question: Who do you have to crush to make a buck round here? And that is where Stage 2 grabs you and pulls you in: Stage 2 is important because it makes you a protocapitalist, despite your real-life politics, because it’s just a game, isn’t it? It’s just a game. It’s just a game that you really, really, really—all your blood wants to jump out of your body—really want to win.
Back at the board, we have made up our own rules. You do this, too. Every veteran Monopoly player has one or two firm rules that act like a hand brake to stop the entire game descending into a fistfight. Put your taxes underneath the Free Parking zone, for instance, is an unofficial rule. Three double-die rolls in a row puts you in prison. There are rules about the even distribution of houses on a monopoly. (Can you place four houses on one land plot and one on another? That is open to interpretation: you will be more amenable to this rule change if you, personally, own a good monopoly, like a green one.) The only three firm rules are: travel in a clockwise direction, pay what you owe, crush the competition. Everything else can be decided outside of the game. We have, predictably, gone mad with it: we now have to make a wiggly-fingers hand gesture whenever the Chance card is drawn and say the word “blop” when someone lands on Community Chest. After three turns of this, failing to make the hand gestures in a timely and enthusiastic manner results in a $50 fine (after eighty minutes of game time, our entire Monopoly is approaching a dictatorship). Or: you are not allowed to make problematic slurs over the course of midgame banter, which also results in a $50 fine. (Your narrator had to pay $50 for making an animal noise that was interpreted as being a swipe at the mentally ill, for instance; another player—not naming any names, but it was Sam—had to pay $50 for calling something “gay,” which was a real schoolyard throwback: Monopoly gets inside your brain and makes you forget how to be a person.) Very crucially, the final rule is this: No special sweeteners can be added in as part of negotiations. No auctioning up. Negotiations can only be between two people and must be entirely above board. And here I am suddenly hamstrung.
Because the real game of Monopoly happens in a magical, spectral space, just hovering in the air a few inches above the board—of Stage 3, of Negotiation, of squabbling back and forth over a property, of making an underhand deal. Nee-go-shee-ay-shun: so let’s for instance say you have Baltic A
venue and I have Vermont Avenue, or whatever their equivalents are on whatever branded board you have, but for simplicity’s sake let’s stick to American properties, and let’s say a swap of these properties would be mutually beneficial to us both: we entered this arena as friends, but now we are enemies united in a common goal, to crush. So I might offer you Vermont, yeah, in exchange for Baltic. But I also don’t want to be stung by rent every time I land on your monopoly. And so I will say, quietly under my breath, where nobody else can hear it, when everyone else is trying to remember whose dice throw it is: Well, maybe, you know, every time I land on Baltic, you can give me a pass. And maybe…maybe when you land, on Vermont. Maybe I can look the other way. Maybe…maybe we could grease each other’s wheels a bit here. Maybe we could play some real Monopoly.
Admission: I consider cheating a natural part of Monopoly, or at least a third- or fourth-tier subgame that sits invisible like a saddle over the top of the game proper. I am telling you right now that if you play Monopoly with me and trust me to be the banker, then you are a fool. I am saying that if you play Monopoly with me and I quote a rental price while holding the property card up to my face with a wry smile, then you should demand to see that card, because I am definitely massaging that figure and quoting a false one back to you on the basis that you—you with your blind, your innocent trust—will pay it regardless. Monopoly is an evil game and I am an evil player of it. I am rolling the dice quickly because you got distracted and didn’t notice me landing on your property. I am making up house rules about jail, about how you end up there and how long you must stay. I will win at Monopoly, because to win at Monopoly is to bend the very rules around you until you get what you want. I am going to crush you in a negotiation because that’s what Monopoly is. That’s the real quiz. Don’t you get it? Monopoly rubs away at the skin of you and reveals the steel-cold skeleton underneath. You cease to be a person when you play this game and become instead a monster. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? Give me Baltic. Give it to me. Give me Baltic and I promise not to crush you.