One Day by Gene Weingarten

Author:Gene Weingarten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

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BEFORE HE WAS FIVE, MICHAEL didn’t know he was different from anyone else, but as grade school approached, his father knew he had to prepare him. So it was then that Michael learned his history and that he had become someone whom ignorant people might fear and demonize. That came to pass, with even greater savagery than most in the family had imagined. It turned out that for little kids facing the anxiety of school, it was irresistible to have a peer whom they could feel better than. It turned into a conspiracy of scorn. Today, Michael describes it as a cauterizing experience—painful, but not without value.

“When you can control yourself when kids are calling you a freak or a monster,” he says, “you can control yourself anywhere at any time.”

Attitudinally, he improved. But not all barriers were about attitude. After high school, he could not get a job; it might have been more bearable had he been turned down explicitly on grounds that his appearance would disturb others. But he never was told that. What he was told, he believes, were well-intentioned lies that did not even leave him with the sullen satisfaction of nursing an obvious injustice.

At one point, as an adolescent, he had considered suicide. An ardent Christian, he figured he would do it in a passive way that would not consign him to hell: “I had heart problems, and I thought about just stopping taking my meds, and maybe God would not notice.” It helped when a pastor directed him to Proverbs 3:5–6, which he quotes now from memory: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” It took some pressure off.

There was another pressure release, a constant in his life, a force nearly as mighty as religion and almost as rewarding as soccer. Michael discovered that the configuration of instrumentation clusters on video game controller consoles allowed him to improvise effectively, using his wrists and thighs, which let him inhabit that world every bit as abled and competitive as anyone he was playing against. Plus, unlike most competitions, with video games you are not looking at your opponent—you’re both focused on a common screen. For Michael, the games were a great leveler.

Seeing this, his father—an old-fashioned, staunchly analogue man to whom physical affection does not come easily—learned to play, too. For hundreds of hours as Michael Jr. was growing up, father and son played side by side—first Sega Genesis, and later PlayStation, where they bonded over Tekken, a fighting game with a Gothic backstory that is not quite on point, but still oddly resonant: a scarred son’s revenge upon a father who had tried to hurl him off a cliff to his death when he was an infant.

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