3
PWNAGE SUGGESTED they meet at a bar called Jezebels.
Samuel wrote:
That sounds like a strip club.
Ya it does lol
Is it?
No…but sort of
It was in another of Chicago’s suburbs, one that had ballooned in the mid-sixties in the first great migration out of the city. Now it was gently dying. All the people who had fled a generation before were moving back in, heading to the high-rises of Chicago’s newly gentrified downtown. White flight had given way to white infill, and now these first-generation suburbs—with their modest homes, their quaint malls—just seemed old. People were leaving, and as they left, home values declined, driving still more out in an unstoppable cascade. Schools closed. Shops were shuttered. Streetlights broken. Potholes left unfixed and widened. The giant shells of big-box retailers sat empty and anonymous but for old logos still legible in dirt outline.
Jezebels was situated in a strip mall between a liquor store and a place where you could rent to own tires. Its big front windows were covered with sheets of black plastic tinting that undulated where air bubbles were trapped and never smoothed out. Inside, the place had all the makings of a strip club: an elevated stage, a metal pole, purplish lights. But no strippers. The only thing to watch was the televisions, about two dozen of them arranged such that no matter where you sat, you always had an adequate sight line to at least four. The TVs were tuned to various niche cable channels specializing in sports or music videos or game shows or food. The largest television, which hovered above the stage and seemed to be bolted directly onto the stripper pole, was showing a nineties movie about strippers.
The place was mostly empty. A handful of guys sat at the bar looking at their phones. A larger party in the back, six people at a booth, currently quiet. Samuel didn’t see anyone matching Pwnage’s description (I’ll be the blond guy in a black shirt, is how he’d described himself), so he sat at a table and waited. A TV above the bar was tuned to a music channel where Molly Miller was being interviewed. Tonight was the premiere of her new video: “The song’s about, you know, being yourself?” said Molly. “It’s like what the song says. ‘You have got to represent.’ Just be true to who you are. Just, like, don’t change.”
“Yo Dodger!” said a man near the door. He was indeed wearing a black shirt, but his hair wasn’t so much blond as it was white with maybe a kind of jaundice-yellow discoloring at the tips. His face was pale and pocked and of an ambiguous age: He was either a fifty-year-old or a thirty-year-old who’d had a hard life. He wore jeans that were a few inches too short, a long-sleeve shirt that was maybe two sizes too tight. Clothes purchased for a younger and smaller self.
They shook hands. “Pwnage,” he said. “That’s my name.”
“I’m Samuel.”
“No you’re not,” he said. “You’re Dodger.” He slapped Samuel on the back. “I feel like I already know you, man. We’re war buddies.”
It looked like he carried a bowling ball under his shirt, just above his belt. A skinny guy with a big guy’s belly. His eyes were protuberant and red. His skin had the texture of cold wax.
A waitress came, and Pwnage asked for a beer and something called the “DoubleD Nachos, extra super loaded.”
“Interesting place,” Samuel said after the waitress had gone.
“It’s the only bar within walking distance of my house,” Pwnage said. “I like to walk. For the exercise. I’m starting a new diet soon. It’s called the Pleisto Diet. Heard of it?”
“Nope.”
“It’s the one where you eat like they did in the Pleistocene. Specifically, the Tarantian epoch, during the last ice age.”
“How do we know what they ate in the Pleistocene?”
“Because science. You eat like a caveman, minus the mastodons. Plus it’s gluten-free? The key is tricking your body into thinking you’ve gone back in time, before the invention of agriculture.”
“I don’t understand why you’d want to do that.”
“There’s a feeling that civilization was a mistake, is why. That we screwed up along the way, took a wrong turn. Now, because of it, we’re fat.”
His body had a noticeable tilt to one side, his right side. His mouse hand seemed dominant. His left arm seemed to lag a few moments behind the rest of him, like it was permanently asleep.
“I’m assuming nachos weren’t on the menu during the Pleistocene,” Samuel said.
“See, what’s important right now for me is to be frugal. I’m saving up. Do you know how expensive that organic health food stuff is? A sandwich is seventy-nine cents at the gas station but like ten bucks at the farmer’s market. Do you know how cheap, on a per-calorie basis, nachos are? Not to mention the Go-Go Taquitos or Pancake and Sausage To-Go Sticks or other foods that have no organic equivalent that I get for free at the 7-Eleven down the street.”
“How do you get them for free?”
“Well, if you know they can be cooked a maximum of twelve hours before they have to be thrown away for FDA-mandated public-health reasons, and if you arrive at the 7-Eleven a few minutes before the appointed food-rotation hour, then you can fill a plastic bag with not only a dozen or more taquitos and pancake sticks but also more conventional hot dogs, bratwurst, corn dogs, and bean burritos and such.”
“Wow. You have a whole system.”
“Of course, eating these food items is not what I might describe as pleasant, since they’re tough and scorched and moistureless from their all-day cooking on high-temperature rollers. Sometimes biting through a burrito’s thick tortilla casing can feel like chewing through your own toe calluses.”
“That’s an image that’s going to linger.”
“But it’s cheap, you know? And given my current level of income, which is, frankly, minimal since I lost my job, and also my unemployment checks are due to run out in like three months or so, right about the time I’ll be seeing real results, waistline-wise, of the new diet. And if I have to start eating bad cheap food then because the money is gone, well, it would be a momentum-stopping blow, I just know it. So I have to make the diet financially viable and sustainable long-term, which is why it’s important to not eat healthy right now in order to save up for the time I will be eating healthy. Get it?”
“I think so.”
“Every week I eat cheap shitty things, like nachos, is a week I can tick like seventy bucks to the other side of my mental ledger as cash ‘saved’ for my new life. This plan is going very well so far.”
There seemed to be a not-rightness about him, a sense of disorder and exotic illness. His features were off in a way Samuel could not immediately put his finger on, like he suffered from some long-eradicated disease—scurvy, maybe.
Their drinks came. “Cheers,” said Pwnage. “Welcome to Jezebels.”
“This place,” Samuel said. “Seems like there’s a story here.”
“Used to be it was a strip club,” Pwnage said. “Then the strippers stopped coming because the mayor banned alcohol at strip clubs, then banned lap dances at strip clubs, then banned strip clubs.”
“So now it’s more of a bar with a strip-club theme?”
“That’s right. He was a strict disciplinarian, the mayor. Elected in a last-ditch fit of anger when the city started going downhill.”
“You’ve been coming here a long time?”
“Not when it was a strip club,” Pwnage said, and he held up his hand to show Samuel his wedding ring. “She doesn’t really support strip clubs, my wife. Because of the patriarchy and stuff.”
“That’s sound.”
“How strip clubs are degrading to feminists and all that. Oh, hey, I love this song.”
He was talking about Molly Miller’s new single, the video to which had now begun on roughly one-third of the televisions in the bar: Molly singing in an abandoned drive-in movie theater where scores of good-looking young people had parked their cars, their late-sixties or early-seventies American muscle cars—Cameros, Mustangs, Challengers—in what was one example of the odd dislocation and ambiguity Samuel felt watching this video and processing its many props. The abandoned state of the drive-in spoke to a present-day setting, while the automobiles were forty years old and the mic Molly sang into was one of those chunky metal things that radio people used in the thirties. Meanwhile, her wardrobe appeared to be a hip, ironic nod to eighties fashion, most obviously in the form of large white plastic sunglasses and skinny jeans. It was a large ever-shifting referential stew of anachronistic symbols with no logical connection between them except their high cool quotient.
“So why did you want to meet?” Pwnage said, returning to his normal sitting position, his feet tucked beneath him.
“No reason,” Samuel said. “Just wanted to hang out.”
“We could have done that in Elfscape.”
“I suppose.”
“Actually, come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve hung out with someone not in Elfscape in a very long time.”
“Yeah,” Samuel said, and he considered this for a moment, and felt a little unsettled that this was also true for him. “Do you think it’s possible that we play Elfscape too much?”
“No. But yeah, maybe.”
“I mean, think about all the hours we spend on Elfscape, all the cumulative hours. And not only the hours spent playing but also the hours reading about playing and watching videos of other people playing and talking and strategizing and getting on discussion boards and such. It’s so much time. Without Elfscape we could all be, I don’t know, leading meaningful lives. Out in the real world.”
The nachos came in what looked like a lasagna pan. A corn-chip mound covered in ground beef and bacon and sausage and steak and onions and jalape?os and probably a couple of full pints of cheese, this bright orange cheese that looked thick and shiny and plastic.
Pwnage dove into the dish, then said, between bites, nacho shrapnel clinging to his lips, “I find Elfscape way more meaningful than the real world.”
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely. Because, listen, what I do in Elfscape matters. Like, the things I do affect the larger system. They change the world. You cannot say this about real life.”
“Sometimes you can.”
“Rarely. Most of the time you can’t. Most of the time there’s nothing you can do to affect the world. Like, okay, almost all my friends in Elfscape work retail in real life. They sell televisions or pants. They work in a mall. My last job was at a copy shop. Explain to me how that’s going to change the larger system.”
“I don’t think I can accept that a game is more meaningful than the real world.”
“When I lost my job, they told me it was because of the recession. They couldn’t afford so many employees. Even though that same year the CEO of the company got a salary that was literally eight hundred times bigger than mine. In the face of something like that, I’d say sinking into Elfscape is a pretty sane response. We’re fulfilling our basic human psychological need to feel meaningful and significant.”
The nachos were lifted to Pwnage’s mouth still tethered to the plate by strings of orange slime. He scooped up as much cheese and meat as each chip could maximally accommodate. He wouldn’t even finish chewing the last bite before taking the next one. It was like he had some kind of conveyor-belt system going on in there.
“If only the real world operated like Elfscape,” Pwnage said, chewing. “If only marriages worked that way. Like every time I did something right I earned man points until I was a grand-master level-hundred husband. Or when I was a jackass to Lisa I’d lose points and the closer I was to zero the closer I’d be to divorce. It would also be helpful if these events came with associated sound effects. Like that sound when Pac-Man shrivels up and dies. Or when you bid too high on The Price Is Right. That chorus of failure.”
“Lisa’s your wife?”
“Mm-hm,” Pwnage said. “We’re separated. But actually more accurately we’re divorced. For the time being.” He looked at his wedding ring, then up at the video, watching its swirl of disassociated images: Molly in a classroom; Molly cheering at a high-school football game; Molly at a bowling alley; Molly at a high-school dance; Molly in a grassy field having a picnic with a cute boy. The producers had obviously targeted the teen and tween demographic, and were blatantly rolling around in their idiom as dogs do on rotten food.
“When Lisa and I were married,” Pwnage said, “I thought everything was great. Then one day she said she was no longer satisfied with our relationship and boom, divorce papers. She just left one day, no warning.”
Pwnage scratched at a spot on his arm so heavily scratched-at that he’d left a threadbare spot on his shirtsleeve.
“That would never happen in a video game,” he said. “Being surprised like that. In a game, there’s immediate feedback. In a game, there would be a sound effect and a graphic of me losing man points whenever I did whatever I did to make her want to divorce me. Then I could have apologized right away and never done it again.”
Over his shoulder, Molly Miller sang to the dancing, cheering throngs. She was not supported onstage by a band or even a boom box and appeared to be singing a cappella. But her fans danced and jumped all out of proportion to someone singing a cappella, implying that actual music was coming from somewhere off camera in the non-diegetic fashion that has become de rigueur in pop music videos. Just go with it.
Pwnage said, “A game will always tell you how to win. Real life does not do this. I feel like I’ve lost at life and have no idea why.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, I screwed up with the only girl I’ve ever loved.”
“Me too,” Samuel said. “Her name was Bethany.”
“Yeah. And I don’t have any career to speak of.”
“Me too. I actually think there’s a student who wants to get me fired.”
“And I’m upside down on my mortgage.”
“Me too.”
“And I spend most of my time playing video games.”
“Me too.”
“Dude,” Pwnage said, looking at Samuel with bulbous, bloodshot eyes. “You and I? We’re, like, twins.”
They watched Molly Miller’s video in silence for a time, Pwnage eating, the both of them listening to the song, which was circling back to its chorus for like the fourth time now and so must have been approaching its end. Molly’s lyrics hinted at something barely out of reach, something just beyond comprehension, mostly because of her use of the pronoun “it” with shifting, ambiguous antecedents:
Don’t hurt it. You gotta serve it.
You gotta stuff it, kiss it.
I want to get it.
Push up on it. ’Cuz I’m gonna work it.
You got it? Think about it.