8 bit christmas, p.1
8-Bit Christmas, page 1
8 - B I T C H R I S T M A S
An ’80s Quest for NES
KEVIN JAKUBOWSKI
DB Press
Chicago Los Angeles
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
C H A P T E R O N E
C H A P T E R T W O
C H A P T E R T H R E E
C H A P T E R F O U R
C H A P T E R F I V E
C H A P T E R S I X
C H A P T E R S E V E N
C H A P T E R E I G H T
C H A P T E R N I N E
C H A P T E R T E N
C H A P T E R E L E V E N
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
C H A P T E R F I F T E E N
C H A P T E R S I X T E E N
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
C H A P T E R E I G H T E E N
C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F O U R
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F I V E
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S I X
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S E V E N
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Jakubowski
All rights reserved.
8-Bit Christmas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Jesús Prudencio, carsandfilms.com
Book design & e-formatting: editedbycaitlin.com
2013 DB PRESS FIRST E-BOOK EDITION
Also available in paperback (ISBN 978-0-578-13020-0)
kevin-jakubowski.com
To Mom, Dad and Leah
And to Meg, I love you more than Christmas
“For the spirit of Christmas fulfills the greatest hunger of mankind.”
—Loring A. Schuler
Editor, Ladies’ Home Journal
“I feel like eating after I win. Let’s go to lunch. Ha, ha, ha!”
—King Hippo
Boxer, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
C H A P T E R O N E
T immy Kleen was not a nice kid. Maybe he grew up to be a nice adult as he got older. Maybe he runs a soup kitchen in Harlem now. I kind of doubt it, though. If I had to guess, I’d say he probably graduated from Harvard, became an investment banker and single-handedly bankrupted half the country. Of course, I don’t know that for certain. It’s just fun to think about. Maybe he’s in jail now.
That would be sweet.
Growing up, Kleen’s dad was some kind of vice president for ComEd. He drove a Porsche. I asked my dad once why we didn’t have a Porsche and he told me, “Because we have you and your sister instead.” Interesting, I thought. Did that mean I was worth half a Porsche? Could we, say, sell my sister for a Suzuki? These were things to consider. Anyway, Mr. Kleen was loaded and he drove a Porsche. He parked it in the family’s three-car garage right below their pro-series adjustable basketball hoop, which was directly adjacent to their heated in-ground pool. No one in my town even had an above-ground pool, so being invited to Kleen’s was basically like a free trip to Disney World.
For starters, the Kleen house had its very own snack pantry. Not to be confused with their food pantry, the snack pantry’s sole purpose was to house and store snacks. I’d never heard of such a thing. Fruit Roll-Ups, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, Cool Ranch Doritos, Capri Suns and—fun size be damned—regular-size Snickers bars. They were all there for the taking. No restrictions, no locks, no health advisories or lectures on hungry Ethiopian children. Just open up the door, turn on the light and enjoy. It made the labors of trick-or-treating seem like some kind of sick joke. The pantry had a gum drawer, for crying out loud. A gum drawer! A drawer with nothing but gum in it! Are you kidding me? Such was the level of kid decadence available at the Kleen house.
The first time I went to Timmy’s was for his third grade birthday party. I didn’t want to go. My parents made me. Maybe they knew I’d be fed there and might catch a glimpse into the upper-class lifestyle and strive to one day live in a house with an intercom system. Or maybe they just wanted me out of the house for a few hours. Whatever the reason, I went. And after that birthday party my life was never quite the same.
If you grew up in the sixties, you probably remember where you were when you first saw the Beatles or where you were when the astronauts landed on the moon. Well, I grew up in the eighties. There wasn’t all that much to remember. The Challenger space shuttle disaster? I blocked that out years ago. The Berlin Wall? I’m pretty sure I was at a soccer practice making fart noises out of blades of grass when it went down. So really, my clearest, most vivid memory of the years 1982 to 1989 was watching Timmy Kleen unwrap the town’s first Nintendo Entertainment System.
It all started out innocently enough. Unwrapping presents. Timmy plowed through the crap we bought him. What do you get a kid whose parents make ten times more than yours? There were a few He-Man figures (he already had them), a couple of board games (how embarrassing), several Micro Machines. The Grusecki twins gave him a few packs of Donruss baseball cards, which I was pretty sure they’d opened and pilfered from first. Steve Zilinski gave Kleen a Marlboro duffle bag (clearly the spoils of his chain-smoking mother). I gave Kleen the children’s book The Whipping Boy . A Newberry Medal winner, it told the story of a young servant and a prince, and how the two came to have mutual respect for one another.
“What’s it about?” Mrs. Kleen asked.
“It’s about a boy who gets whipped,” I said, spraying out bits of Twinkie.
That was too violent for Timmy, she said, and threw the book away. Literally threw it away, like she was cleaning food scraps off the table. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but looking back, that’s messed up, right? If only she’d known the violence that was to come from the next gift, maybe she wouldn’t have been so hasty.
With the kid presents opened and discarded, Mr. Kleen plopped down a big one from him and the missus. One of the few universal truths growing up was that when it came to presents, bigger was unquestionably better. Our eyes widened at the possibilities. The box was huge. It was sturdy. Even Kleen didn’t seem to know what it was. Weeks of snooping around the attic and his parents’ bedroom had yielded no results.
The first rip to the wrapping paper served as a stunner, rendering Kleen unable to proceed in his normal fists-of-fury manner. Through the paper tear we could plainly see onto the box itself. It looked like some kind of space scene about to be uncovered, sort of like looking through the Millennium Falcon windshield right before the jump to hyperspace. What was it? Could this be a new Star Wars toy? Was that even possible? We’d been assured that the next movie wouldn’t be finished until the year 1997.
“What is it?” Zilinski quivered.
Kleen wasted no more time. His sickly arms tore in two directions at once, plowing apart the paper at the top of the box. We all leaned forward to have a look … And there she was, hovering in outer space, glistening in all her gray plastic glory. A maze of rubber wiring and electronic intelligence so advanced it was deemed not a video game but an 8-bit Entertainment System . Equipped with two control pads, a complimentary power gun and a front console home to the all-important on/off button and its savvy counterpart, restart. Within a week there wouldn’t be a pair of blistered kid thumbs in the room that didn’t feel an instinctive tingle when the word “Nintendo” was mentioned. Timmy Kleen had just hit the jackpot.
We sat there at first, numb with shock. Evan Olsen had already spilled Hi-C on his crotch and was now dripping ice cream down his leg. By the time I came to, I realized I was screaming at the top of my lungs. We all were. We may have been screaming for minutes and not even known it. Kleen tried to lift the box like some kind of title belt above his head and yelled:
“NINTENDO!”
Pandemonium hit the kitchen. Wrapping paper started flying, two kids jumped on the table, the Gruseckis tackled each other in ecstasy, Evan Olsen ran off to the bathroom to relieve himself, and I can never be sure, but I swear I heard Kleen’s three-year-old little cousin, Preston, say, “Holy shit” under his breath. This was big. And Batavia, Illinois, would never be the same.
Nintendo had come to town.
C H A P T E R T W O
B atavia, Illinois, is a small, some might say forgettable, suburb about an hour west of Chicago. Not too rich, not too poor. Its claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Ken Anderson, the losing quarterback of the 1980 Super Bowl. Ever heard of him? Didn’t think so. It’s also home to the world’s second largest atom smasher, Fermilab, which sits on a few thousand acres of prairie just outside of town. No one’s exactly sure what it does, but there it remains, billions of tax dollars at work, blasting unseen particles into smithereens in the name of science.
In 1958, an ice skating scene on Batavia’s Fox River graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post . It was one of the few covers of the magazine that was not painted by Norman Rockwell. Even as a kid I found that hilarious. It seemed the whole world knew that Batavia wasn’t quite good enough for someone as iconic as Rockwell. A guy named John Falter painted it. And that’s Batavia in a nutshell, really—the poor man’s Norman Rockwell.
Nonetheless, in the ’80s it was still a nice, quiet, middle-class town. This was before Pottery Barns and Menards Super Stores the size of baseball stadiums started popping up all over Randall Road. In the summer there were cornfields and fireflies, and in the winter, snowmen and central heating. It was a great place to grow up. You could throw rocks at the Fermilab buffalo, maybe even get free pop refills at the Burger King and then bounce around the Whopper Hopper until you puked. Good. Clean. Fun.
Our family lived on Watson Street in a two-story, two-colored, one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old house. We were told it was originally a farmhouse built around the time of the Civil War, but now it could most accurately be described as a construction site. This was thanks to my dad, John Doyle—the dyslexic Bob Vila. Somewhere around 1979 he decided to install a kitchen cabinet and had not stopped since. The place was in a perpetual state of remodeling. It was two colors only because my dad hadn’t finished putting up the new green siding on an otherwise blue-sided house. I would be in college before I could accurately say I lived in the green house on Watson Street.
On this particular morning, my dad was walking around our gutted living room in his favorite Saturday attire: bathrobe and tool belt. WGN sports talk radio was playing somewhere in the background.
“Bottom line, Ditka’s gotta stop wussy-footing around and THROW THE FOOTBALL.”
My dad took talk radio literally and considered himself an integral part of the broadcast. He yelled across the room.
“Oh, you can’t throw the ball without more pass protection, Pat!”
“McMahon doesn’t have enough time to throw,” the other on-air guy quipped. “He doesn’t have the pass protection!”
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You see?”
In the adjacent TV room, my mom and sister were doing aerobics to Jane Fonda’s Workout . The exercise tape would become a staple in the Doyle house, holding prime real estate in the VHS drawer next to Harry and the Hendersons and Crocodile Dundee —both recorded off TV during the magical two weeks in ’88 when we somehow managed to get Showtime.
Dressed from head to toe in leg warmers, my mom huffed and puffed to Fonda. Step for step right next to her was my little sister, Lizzy. She was five going on twenty-five, with a voice so gravely and a vocabulary so sophisticated, it would often stop strangers in the street.
“Work those glutes!” she rasped.
My father popped his head in, chewing on a drywall nail as he often did. He patted Lizzy’s Dutch Boy haircut, which held firmly in place.
“Morning, Lizzy.”
“Morning, Johnny.”
“Uh-huh. What did I say about calling me Dad?”
“Sorry, Daddy.”
“Where’s Jake at? I need his help.”
“He left about an hour ago on his bike,” said my mom between leg extensions.
“Where’d he go? Lizzy, where’s your brother?”
Not even in first grade yet, Lizzy had already mastered the art of getting me in trouble. Next to My Little Pony and spelling out m-o-n-o-n-u-c-l-e-o-s-i-s for a dollar, it might have been her favorite pastime.
“He’s at Timmy Kleen’s playing Nintendo. He didn’t pick up the dog poop in the backyard either.”
In the four months since Timmy Kleen had received his birthday Nintendo, a lot had changed. Jeff Hartwell, for instance, no longer delivered the Bonnie Buyer newspaper on Saturday mornings. Instead he dumped his papers in the Mueller Crest Woods so he could get to Kleen’s house in time for the nine o’clock Nintendo lineup. This was a system devised by Kleen that allowed a first-come, first-served entrance into his basement to play Nintendo. The line usually began forming sometime before dawn. Only ten lucky kids were let inside for the day, and today, even in the late-November cold, the yard was chock-full of Nintendo hopefuls, including my best friends:
EVAN OLSEN: nervous, allergic to bees, constant Kool-Aid moustache
MATT MAHONEY: tall, loud mouth, great at drawing army guys and lighting things on fire
STEVE ZILINSKI: popular, spike haircut, all-time quarterback, mom’s a psycho
RYAN GRUSECKI: chubby, runny nose, smart as a whip, great baseball card collection
TOMMY GRUSECKI: Ryan’s twin brother; see above
I was stuck somewhere around the eighth or ninth slot in line, between Mahoney and our sworn enemy, Josh Farmer. The two were already arguing.
“No cutss, no buttss!” lisped Farmer.
“Cool it,” said Mahoney.
“No, you cool it.”
“No, you cool it.”
“No, you cool it.”
“Idiot.”
“You’re a idiot.”
“No, you are.”
“No, you are. ”
And so on and so forth unto eternity.
Lining up this early made even the calmest of us a bit testy. We were also missing quality Saturday-morning cartoon hours. Farmer had started a rumor that Dr. Claw had actually been captured at the end of today’s Inspector Gadget episode. It had us all whipped up into a dither.
“Impossible,” I said.
“You’re full of it, Farmer.” Mahoney was pushing him now. “Dr. Claw always gets away.”
A pathological liar, Josh Farmer had once claimed to have seen and positively identified Randy “Macho Man” Savage in the Batavia Apartments, who had told him, among other things, that WWF wrestling was, in fact, real. The Dr. Claw fib was just one of a myriad of tall tales in his demented repertoire
“It totally happened, I saw it. Dr. Claw gets caught.”
“Bull crud.”
“Bull true.”
“Bull true like how your mom draws all the Garbage Pail Kids? Or how you saw Bigfoot jump off the Wilson school jungle gym?”
“Screw you guys. Dr. Claw totally—”
Farmer was cut short by the sound of high-pitched barking. The Kleens’ dog, Lacey Dog, a five-time contender for Most Annoying Dog of the Year, had just been let outside to do her business. This meant Timmy was about to open up shop.
We all turned to the door. Slowly it opened and Kleen stepped out onto the porch and into the light. Standing high above us in his robe and slippers, he calmly stirred a glass of chocolate milk, surveying the masses like some kind of amused Roman emperor. With a grand gesture, he checked his Swatch watch (both of them): It was nine o’clock. Eight hours of Nintendo to be had.
“Anyone for a little Nintendo?”
“RAAAAAAHHHH!”
The crowd went nuts. Clawing, biting, kicking, scratching, jostling for position. If you were driving by in a car, you’d think zombies were making their way down Cypress Avenue after us. What felt like a hundred and fifty kids for ten spots all swarmed toward the door.
Kleen tallied us up as we rushed through. “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten!”
For the third Saturday in a row I’d made the cut. I was inside, safe and sound. Kleen slammed the door behind him.
“That’s ten, that’s the cutoff.”
Packs of wailing kids banged on walls and windows outside. Ryan Grusecki’s little face pressed up against the glass, mouthing unheard pleas to his twin brother, Tommy.
“But my brother’s still out there!”
“You know the rules, Grusecki. You can always go back out and join him. It’s no skin off my nose.”
No skin off my nose? That’s seriously how Timmy Kleen talked. What kind of a nine-year-old kid talks like that? He barked out more orders as we filed down into the basement.
“Boots off, boots off, watch the carpet. That means you, Farmer.”
Lacey Dog yipped incessantly, clawing at our feet and nipping at our crotches. Mahoney casually kicked her in the face.
“Hey! Watch it,” Kleen snapped. “She’s a purebred Shih Tzu.”
“She’s a purebred psycho.”
“That’s it, end of the line!”
“No fair.”
“No fair, huh? You wanna be sittin’ home next Saturday, playing Sorry! with your sister? I don’t think so. End of the line.”
Giving the only Nintendo in town to a kid like Kleen had been a real lesson in God’s cruelty. I’d already prayed several times to be made part of his family.
