In Real Life

by Lawrence Tabak

  Somehow I get through another week of school while all I can think about is the upcoming final rounds. The way I took out Stomp has my confidence level up a notch, but the waiting on Saturday is still excruciating. I’m getting a bunch of IMs from my online friends, wishing me luck. It’s a good thing I have a heavy-duty office chair, because I’m rocking it back and forth like I’m on horseback. Then the clock is ticking down to zero and from the first mouse click I just fall into this incredible groove. It’s hard to explain. I watched my brother hit seven three-pointers one night and I asked him how it felt and he just shrugged and said, “Sometimes you just know everything you throw up is going down the hole.”

  I’m in the same zone. Everything just flows. In the battles my mouse is clicking so fast that it’s almost a solid noise and I’m gliding over the map like a marble on glass. I dominate the semis and in the finals I don’t think I miss a single shot and squeak out a really close match against a well-known player, AceMaxer. Just like that, I’ve got a free seat at Nationals right after school gets out. The winner of the individual event at Nationals gets $30,000.

  All my online friends, like DTerra, they’re IMing me, screaming stuff like, “AWESOME DUDE!” and “NEXT STOP NATIONAL CHAMP!”

  When things settle down it’s just me and DTerra.

  DTerra: man id give anything to b there

  ActionSeth: so come

  DTerra: no way im going to qualify

  ActionSeth: come a day early and play the qualies and grind in

  DTerra: u think I got a chance

  ActionSeth: sure… u said your old man travels a lot

  ActionSeth: so get some frequent flier points…u can crash at my hotel, cheap trip

  DTerra: OK will work on it…gtg…cu

  I shut down the IM and sit there in a bit of a daze. Thinking about what I need to do to win that $30,000 and, of course, what I do with the money. First thing would be the ultimate gaming platform. I waste at least an hour a week browsing for a new rig I couldn’t possible afford. Until I win Nationals. That will leave about $27,000. Which I’ll need to cover my expenses while I train for the pro circuit. I can finish high school doing an online program, which costs a couple grand. I’ve checked it out completely and it’s totally legit. If you’re a famous teen actor or sports star, it’s pretty much automatic. If I’m going to be the first American to break into the pro game in a big way, it just makes sense that I’m going to have to train harder than any American ever has. Especially when you know how hard the Korean pros are working and how the best of them peak at age nineteen or twenty.

  Then I plan what I’m going to say when I’m interviewed for Computer Gaming World after I win Nationals. When they ask me what’s the most important source of my success. I picture myself standing on a stage holding an oversized check for $30,000. I have the answer all planned out: “My parents’ divorce.”

  That was back in ninth grade and, for one thing, they were spending so much time screaming at each other that it was getting really hard to concentrate on anything. Mom kept the house. Dad started renting a condo in this new development out on 124th street, just down the street from the high school.

  Back then Dad and me, we had pretty good times. We’d go to all of Garrett’s junior AAU games and sit in the stands eating popcorn and cheering. Back then I was still in pee-wee ball and he thought I’d be just like Garrett. Except that I was terrible at basketball. And soccer. And baseball. Still, Dad came to all my games and stood on the sidelines and yelled and afterwards we’d go get hamburgers and a milkshake. Tell me that I’d grow into it. To stick with it. Ever since I dropped out of sports he’s been on my case. Telling me that I’m wasting my life staring into a little glowing screen. It’s gotten even worse since Garrett left for college.

  That’s probably not all of it. I sort of pieced together that he got passed over for some sort of sales director job. When I think about it, he’s been pissed off about everything since then. But the good news for me is that he took a different position and he’s on the road half the time. And of course I’ve got a key to the condo. It’s almost like having my own place. Plus it’s only a five-minute walk from school, so when I ditch classes, I’m there in no time. Starfare paradise.

  I should have known it was too sweet a deal to last.

  3.

  I think it’s funny when my dad and I have a “serious” conversation in his “study.” First of all, he’s the only person in the world who would call it a study. Like he was a professor or something. True, there is a desk in the corner. Of course, there’s no chair, just a mini-refrigerator stocked with beer where your legs would go. And the big cabinet against the wall isn’t filled with technical manuals or legal books—it opens to a forty-two-inch flatscreen TV. The bookshelves are stuffed with Garrett’s trophies and autographed sports junk. He can spend almost the entire weekend in there, in this big brown recliner, watching football or basketball and drinking beer.

  Somehow I’ve got to break through the clutter and get him on board with Nationals. Problem is, even with free hotel and entry fee I still need an airplane ticket, and although I’ve got a couple hundred in a savings account at the bank, I can’t touch it without Dad’s permission. So I’ve got to hit him up for the money. I knock on the door. He insists that I knock before entering. God knows why.

  “Yes?”

  It’s amazing how much meaning my dad can pack into one word. When he says “yessss?” in that tone, he’s saying, “Now what? Can’t you see I’m busy (watching something incredibly boring and meaningless on TV, like a golf tournament without Tiger Woods)? I’d rather not deal with it at all, but if it’s absolutely necessary, then make it quick.”

  So I say through the door, “It will just take a sec.”

  Then he says OK and I open the door. I have to stand there, in the doorway, until some no-name golfer finishes hitting a putt from about twelve inches, possibly the most boring televised sporting activity in the world. He putts, the ball barely rotates, excruciatingly slow across the screen. The ball hovers on the edge and then, finally, drops in. Polite applause. My dad turns and says it again.

  “Yessss?”

  “I’ve got this great opportunity,” I begin, trying to set up the pitch. My dad once gave me this lecture about the secret of sales. He travels around the Midwest selling some obscure service to small companies that can’t afford the really good service that the big companies buy from his competitor.

  He arches his eyebrows, and I see I’ve actually, for a nanosecond, got his attention.

  “Yeah, I won this big online tournament and I qualified for the Nationals in San Diego. I’ll have to fly in on June twenty-sixth and fly back on the thirtieth. I won the entry fee and I get a free hotel room. That’s worth around $600, about half the cost of going.”

  Dad gets this puzzled look on his face and he runs his fingers through his hair. He’s pretty vain about his hair, which is still thick on top, a little gray above the ears. He keeps it fairly long and combed straight back, sometimes with this gel or grease.

  “You telling me they have Nationals for all the dweebs who play computer games? What kind of title is that? King of the nerds?”

  “OK,” I say, biting my tongue. “But seriously. It’s really hard to get the invite, and it’s a great opportunity. They’ve got $150,000 in prize money.”

  I let this sink in for a few seconds, while he continues to stare at the TV, as if he’s worried about missing some amazing chip shot or hole in one, which is nuts, because every time there’s a really great shot they replay it at least a dozen times.

  But he turns towards me and for at least a second I’ve got his attention. “Did you say 150 Gs?”

  I nod my head.

  “So how much you asking for?”

  “I can a get a flight for around $400 and then a little somethi
ng for food…”

  “Bottom line, please,” he says, like he’s some big-shot CEO.

  “I’ll need about $600, I figure.”

  Now I’ve really got his attention.

  “Six hundred. That’s a lot of money, Seth.”

  “I know.” Knowing it is, and it isn’t. He and a girlfriend once spent that much on bar bills at Vegas in a weekend. Then again, I have to work at a fast food joint every weekend for six months to save that much.

  “Six hundred bucks, huh.”

  “Six hundred bucks.” It’s possible to have an entire conversation with my dad where every other line is a repetition of the previous one.

  “OK. Let me get this straight. You need $600 to go play computer games with a bunch of geeks from across the country. You fly to San Diego, go sit down at a computer and pay to play for three straight days. What I want to know is, how is this different from what you do every day here, for free?”

  “Well, for one,” I reply. “No one is putting up $150k in prize money.”

  “And you’ve got a legitimate shot at this $150k?”

  “Well, not all of it. No one wins it all. It gets divvied up into different events. Different specialties, it’s hard to explain. But I feel like I’ve got a shot at a piece of it.”

  After the last online win, my rating jumped up twenty points, and that makes me fifth in the country.

  My dad screws up his face in this way he does when he really thinking. Like it takes an awful lot of effort.

  “OK,” he says. “I’ll make a deal with you.”

  “A deal?” So typical. My dad thinks he’s this great wheeler dealer sales expert.

  “I’m going to give you the money for this trip. Not lend it to you. Give it to you. On one condition.” He arches his eyebrows, waiting for me to ask him what the condition is.

  “What condition?”

  “You can go to California. Play with your nerd buddies into the wee hours. But when you come back empty-handed, that’s it. We forget this whole idea of playing the computer for money. In the meantime, you buckle down, get off that God-forsaken computer long enough to do your homework, stop skipping classes, get your GPA up, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be lucky enough to get into a fine university like your brother.”

  So then we shake on it, just like two businessmen. And I get back to my computer and start working on my moves, because I’m going to have to play flawless. Or, as Mrs. Lawson, my English teacher would insist, flawlessly.

  4.

  The rest of the semester I worry about screwing up and having Dad take back my ticket to San Diego. So I go to all my classes (mostly) and do my homework (as fast as possible, mostly in other classes) and concentrate on getting a seat in English and history behind Brit so I can stare at her the entire class without being too obvious. Even if it’s just the back of her soft, shiny hair, I watch the way the light plays off as if it were some hypnotic kaleidoscope. And for at least that moment, the Starfare game playing in the back of my mind goes on pause.

  A couple of weeks after Dad agreed to give me the cash I get an IM from my brother.

  3-PointShooter: Hey

  ActionSeth: Hey

  3-PointShooter: Good going

  ActionSeth: ?

  3-PointShooter: Heard u got the old man to cough up the dough to send u to some tourney

  ActionSeth: Yeah pretty amazing

  Garrett, he’s not into gaming like I am, but at least he understands. When I was about nine a friend of his lent us his Nintendo 64 and we started playing Mario Kart. At first Garrett, who was fourteen, killed me, but I spent every waking hour working on it and after a couple of weeks I started winning. It was the first time I had beaten him at anything and he just shook his head and laughed and claimed it was unfair, that I was practicing too much. I think it bothered him a bit until I showed him the times I was posting online—I was in the top hundred in the country on a couple of courses.

  We IM a little bit more about nothing much and then he wishes me luck at the tournament.

  I’m spending every extra hour I can online, trying to get it together for Nationals. It’s a Wednesday night and I’m at Mom’s. I’ve drawn a game against this kid from Korea. No one famous—they would never mess around playing against crap Americans, but he’s got a really high rating and I’m just barely hanging on. I’m not even sure why I’m struggling. I’ve won at least twenty games in a row and feeling like I’m on my way to a really good showing at Nationals. And then this. The action is incredibly fast and I’m pounding on the keyboard, wheeling the mouse and trying to keep track of three fronts at once.

  In an intense game like this, you’re in so deep the room around you just disappears. When you’re in the middle of a battle, and your fingers are flying across the keyboard, you’re not looking at the screen, you’re not playing at a game, you’re IN the game. Like those science fiction movies where someone gets sucked up in a wormhole or drops through a hole in time. It’s sort of like that. You get that same sense of being pulled into this other world. It’s not as though you believe your body has gone anywhere, but your mind, your consciousness is actually sucked through the screen. And you’re not alone.

  Not by a long shot. Sure it’s a world with all of these strange creatures and complicated rules, but it has dimensions and textures and players who become friends and geography you have to learn the way you know your neighborhood and the way to and from school. And if you’re good, like I am, then you move through this world with the kind of confidence that Kobe Bryant shows when he cuts to the basket, or when Payton Manning goes back to pass from his five-yard-line with ten seconds on the clock. That’s why it’s simply not acceptable for someone to start knocking on my bedroom door when I’m into a tough game, any more than you’d expect Kobe or Payton to stop, right at that critical moment, and chat up a couple of spectators. I know it might sound conceited, when I talk about these sports superstars, but that’s the way it is.

  So naturally Mom pounds on my door at the worst possible time.

  “Seth! Seth!”

  Out of the corner of my eye I see something unexpected on the northeast corner of the map. Crap, crap crap! Somehow he’s got three cruisers completely armed and moving in formation and that just seems impossible. I had a spybot up there just minutes ago. Unless he had them cloaked. But how?

  “Seth! Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”

  This comes at me like a voice shouted from a distant mountain across miles of canyons on a foggy morning.

  Then I see movement on the opposite corner and OMG it’s another three cruisers that come out of nowhere and I’m thinking, maybe this is one of the Korean pros slumming on an American server. Playing under a pseudonym just to yank someone’s chain. Like mine, because I’ve never, ever seen anyone develop that much firepower that quickly and I realize I am totally screwed.

  “Seth, it’s someone from your school.”

  Maybe I could distract him with a direct attack right at his home base, but that would be suicidal.

  “It’s a girl.”

  It’s like the screen blinks and when I look at it for a second it’s not a 3D world but just a flat screen with a dozen blinking blips. I suddenly hear the game’s sounds, which are usually lost in the background, like the computer’s fan. First the crunching sound when one of my land fighters gets crushed. Then the clattering of an army marching on pavement, sounding like hail on a roof.

  “What did you say?” I shout.

  “Seth, open the door. You know I hate talking through a closed door! It’s a girl from your school. Her name is Bret or Brit, I couldn’t really tell.”

  I was going to lose the game anyway.

  5.

  The only reason Mom isn’t freaking over a call from a girl is my older brother Garrett. I once did a count
of his Facebook friends: 298 girls and 87 boys. Garrett Gordon, high school jock exemplar. Minor: tennis doubles, third round state. Major: shooting guard, 19.6 point average. Hobby: going steady with beautiful girls.

  Garrett’s been hanging out with a series of girls since eighth grade. So many I gave up trying to keep them straight years ago and just call them all Kimberly. That makes me right about half the time. Kimberly is always pretty and perky and active in school—she’s got the lead in the school play, or is a varsity cheerleader, or has a room full of tennis trophies. And naturally, my brother is always there to give me advice about how to hook up with a Kimberly of my own. And to say I have no interest in the Kimberlys would be a lie. Kimberly looks amazing, I can vouch for this, even when she’s flat on her back on my dad’s sofa, with her hair and makeup mussed, popping up with a gasp when I burst through the door and turn on the light at 2 a.m. back from a night of gaming over at Eric’s.

  “Crap,” I said simultaneously with my brother, who was cursing me, and I’m fast enough on the light switch to be unsure if what I saw was a naked torso or a near-naked torso or a semi-naked torso. The image was stuck on my eyes like when you shoot a flash photo in a dark room, and I was happy to have it there, because I would want to examine it carefully, as soon as I got through the living room and into my bedroom.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, as I shuffled through the now darkened room, knowing the way by feel.

  “Jesus,” I heard Kimberly sigh. “Garrett, I really, really have to go. I had no idea it was this late and if I get caught sneaking in I’m going to be in so much trouble.”

  By then I was down the hallway to my bedroom door and I could hear my brother in the background as I locked it, making the kind of soothing sounds people make to calm a fidgeting horse. I just slipped out of my clothes and into bed and closed my eyes really tight, making that picture come back, the shock of blond hair flying into the air and Kimberly’s arms pushing Garrett away. She looked just awesome and I’d give just about anything to be Garrett for just that minute, or better yet, the minute before I burst in, as long as I didn’t have to stay Garrett forever. The last thing I want to be is Dad’s favorite sports star.