OUT OF LIVES

Last night, I mistook the flashing button of a printer in the guest bedroom for lightning. Later, I heard a noise—as if something, somewhere, had been knocked over—so I grabbed the Mag-Lite on my bedside table and ventured out of the bedroom; when I clicked the light off and on to check on what might be in the bathroom, the bright white of the toilet startled me. What might I have done had I found an intruder? Used the flashlight as a club to shatter the burglar’s skull? I don’t own a gun, except for a tiny pistol that fires blanks—the kind used for signaling the starts of races, and which my grandmother gave to me years ago, for a reason I can no longer remember—and it’s so old I’m afraid to pull the trigger, for fear—and I know this is stupid—that somehow it might explode in my hand. It’s true that sometimes I go on shooting sprees in Grand Theft Auto V—I just start shooting whoever’s around until the police arrive, and then I start shooting cops until I die—and that sometimes, in this game, I drive to the beach for the sole purpose of hunting people to run over, mowing down whole groups of beachgoers who’ve gathered around campfires, and that this—hearing them yell “oomph” and watching them flip into the air and over the car roof, in a slapsticky way—makes me laugh. Yes, these “people” bleed, but it’s not fair, really, to say that they “die,” not only because they were never alive to begin with, but also because after a minute or two their “bodies” disappear, and the only trace that they ever existed is a bloodstain and the money that popped out of their clothes when I hit them, and which glows a pulsing, radioactive green. I bought a headset so I could talk to other players when I play online, but now, every time I log on, it’s either a foul-mouthed nine-year-old boy whose mother I can hear screaming one-sided conversations in the background or drawling adult men who aren’t afraid to say the N-word or call each other “faggot.” My son tells me that Grand Theft Auto V is a bad game, and when I ask him what he means, he says, “It’s just bad!” The first time I remember being shamed for playing video games, I was riding down Main Street of my hometown in a truck with my father—past the A&P, past the drugstore, past the lunch counter where we’d order grilled cheese sandwiches with French fries and vanilla milkshakes—and out of nowhere, probably because I often felt a sense of camaraderie whenever I found myself riding alone with my father in his truck—I indulged an urge to confess a fantasy I’d just had—we’d passed an antique store and I had seen in its window shelves of glass vases and lamps—so I said, “Sometimes I think it would be fun to take an axe into a store where they sell a lot of glass stuff and chop it up.” My father did not laugh. He did not say, “Yeah, smashing and breaking stuff can be fun sometimes” or “I can see how imagining such a thing could feel very liberating, perhaps even cathartic” or even “Ha ha, yeah, sounds fun but don’t even think about it.” Instead, without missing a beat, he said, “You play too many video games,” a response that stunned me into silence, and which, upon reflection, I found disappointing, not only because it dismissed what I felt was a legitimately normal compulsion—who could in all honesty deny how much fun it would or could be to smash stuff, especially if said stuff happened to be highly shatterable—but also because it simply wasn’t true: I didn’t own an Atari or Intellivision console, didn’t know many kids who owned them—didn’t know many kids, period, because I lived in a small mountain town in the middle of nowhere and attended church school in a town twenty minutes away—and while it was true that I’d dropped a good number of quarters into the slots of the Kung-Fu Master and Spy Hunter cabinets at our local Video Den, it never took me long—fifteen minutes, tops—to burn through however much money I’d allotted for gameplay, mostly because my lack of experience resulted in what seemed to me to be ridiculously quick—and thus unfair—deaths. And yes, there was a mild amount of violence in these games: for instance, you had to time your punches and kicks just right in Kung-Fu Master or the goons would glom onto you and give you this weird group hug that would quickly diminish your health, and in Spy Hunter the whole point was to use the weaponry on G1655 Interceptor car (machine guns, smoke, oil slicks) to cause enemy cars to wreck and explode—but my all-time favorite game was Paperboy, the object of which, mundane as it might sound, was to deliver papers to subscribers without throwing them through windows, while avoiding obstacles like dogs, skateboarders, sidewalk breakdancers, minitornadoes, kids playing with remote control cars, and the Grim Reaper; in that game, you didn’t even die when your turn was over—you were fired. I can’t remember the first actual video game I ever played, but I can still remember the first time that somebody—a kid named Stirling—described Pac-Man to me: he’d asked if I’d ever heard of the game and I’d said no and so he said, “It’s cool, you control a little guy who’s being chased by ghosts and then when he eats a power pellet he gets to chase the ghosts and eat them.” I found this description utterly confounding, in part because the phrase “little man who eats ghosts” made absolutely zero sense. And yet, the first time I played it—on a tabletop machine, in a Pizza Hut—it suddenly all came together. And the other day, when my son and I traveled to Roanoke, to visit a museum exhibit of upright arcade cabinet games, it was this same game I kept coming back to, the only one that made sense to play, in part because it allowed me to navigate a maze while being chased, and every time, to summon that old fear: a delightfully panicked state I inhabited whenever I was sure that something was gonna get me, but even if it did, I’d be okay—at least until I ran out of lives.