Everything Is Wrong with Me by Jason Mulgrew

Author:Jason Mulgrew [Mulgrew, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-11-19T23:00:00+00:00

As I mentioned, one of the main things we did at Uncle Petey’s house was play video games. We often escaped to Petey’s to get out of our houses, and since he didn’t work, he was home all the time just hanging out. Screech would bring us over and we’d spend hours in front of one of the two TVs in Petey’s living room, battling each other while Petey made calls, wrote down bets, or yelled at whatever player was fucking up his over/under bet by missing open layups.

This was the early ’90s, before the souped-up video games that are on the market now. These were the days when sixteen-bit graphics were groundbreaking, when Nintendo was just about to give way to Sega Genesis, and before John Madden had figured out how to make himself (even more of) a multimillionaire by lending his likeness and voice to a video game. We weren’t able to amuse ourselves with punching hookers in the latest Grand Theft Auto incarnation, so we had to stick to the basics. Mario was still King. And Luigi, well, he was always kind of off, right?

As a kid, I was a video game god. It may sound like I’m bragging here, but this is a statement of fact, pure and simple. You’re probably surprised at this revelation: an unathletic smart kid, good at video games. Shocking, I know. Though I couldn’t field a fly ball or make a layup, I could do some serious damage in RBI Baseball and I would take you to school in Double Dribble. Not only that, I could conquer the nonsports games as well. Give me a rainy Saturday morning and I would have Link and Princess Zelda kissing by dinnertime. While you might gape when after beating Metroid for the first time you learned that he was actually a she, this wouldn’t surprise me, since I beat the game before you (and once last week, too).

This continued into my preteen years, but by then I had dropped the other types of games and stuck only to the sports games, where I really made my mark. I imagined that I played these games with such fervor and would savor each victory so intensely precisely because I was—to put it mildly—the worst athlete in the history of the world. In the video game realm, I found my calling and my escape. What I could not achieve in reality, I could achieve in virtual reality. In Nintendo or Sega Genesis, I could hit eight three-pointers in a half or grab the winning touchdown and do it with grace and aplomb, visions of camera bulbs flashing in my head and snippets of my postgame interviews replaying on all the local newscasts. In this way I could prove to my friends that I was worthy of respect, an athlete in my own way and a force to be reckoned with. But like many superior athletes, my incredible prowess went straight to my head. It wasn’t long before

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