My Life's Addiction, Part 4: Brac

My parents reacted to my burgeoning interst in computer games - not just as a hobby, but as something I spent very significant time on - with some trepidation and reasonable concern. This is of course quite understandable, and to their credit, never once did their concerns become so overt as to result in conflict. They adjusted their thinking over time. That's something I've always respected them for.

Their primary concerns proved to be unfounded. They worried that it would affect my grades, but it didn't. They worried that it would overtake my interest in sports, but that turned out not to be the case. And they worried that so much time spent on games would hamper my ability to make friends, and on that count, the opposite actually turned out to be true, though it took them some time to see it.

The grades were easy. Elementary School, and Junior High alike, were like a movie in slow-motion. I could look up once every fifteen minutes and not miss a thing. I did most of my homework in class - 1st period math problems were almost always done by lunch, and I had long-since perfected the art of test-taking. I wasn't anal enough to be a straight-A student, but I was never so sloppy as to let more than a couple of my classes slip to B's. "It'll get harder", they warned me, but they were never right. "You might be smart enough to get away with this stuff here, but when you get to High School, it'll all be different." It wasn't. "You might be able to get away with this stuff here in High School," they said once I got to High School, "But College is a different beast." And it wasn't - not really, at least. Story of my life I guess. Of any smart student, I suppose.

Anyway, I digress. Sports and other activities had long been an intregal part of my life, from a very early age. By Junior High, I was playing hockey (as I had practically since infancy), trombone, track (mile and two-mile), piano, soccer, and baseball, though I only did Little League for a couple of years, and when I decided not to play that third year, my parents were relieved - little league parents were way too uptight to be allowed to live, and I think my parents were on the verge of becoming murderers. No one could make the claim that I wasn't involved in extracurriculars. And so my parents were denied that mode of argument.

But for the longest time, the assertion that it was affecting my friendships, and my potential for friendships, carried gravity. I wasn't making enough friends, to their eyes. Why wasn't I hanging out with the kids on my hockey team? (answer: they were more are less boorish jock-assholes; I played hockey for the sport, not the company). Why hadn't I taken more of an interest in girls? (answer: the interest was certainly there, but I was frightfully, almost dysfunctionally shy around them). Understand that these inquiries were never in the air directly. My parents were too subtle for that. But the directions of the dinnertime conversation made their feelings apparent. This was the one argument I couldn't counter with direct evidence. Was my interest in computer games replacing the natural desire for human contact? It certainly could have seemed that way.

I don't remember how it was that Brac and I met. We had been acquaintences for some time; we went to the same Elementary School, and lived in the same neighborhood. He was always around. I knew who he was, and had my first impressions, thought I knew the generalities as to what it was he was about. But we didn't really become friends until the Fifth Grade.

It was chess that brought us together. Simply enough, I saw him reading a chess book in class, and asked him about it over recess, in a lull, waiting to play tetherball. He took to talking about it right away. I was just learning the game, having been playing it with (and getting thwomped by) my brother. The next day, he brought in a magnetic travel set so we could play, again at recess. He destroyed me, but he was a willing teacher, and I was a willing student. Learning that we lived near to one another (his house was in fact on one of my paper routes, though his family didn't get the paper), so he invited me over to his places to play after school.

Chess started the friendship, but video games sustained it. He had a Nintendo, with an ecclectic collection of games that I took to immediately, and that served an immediate purpose: friendships need something to do, particularly friendships between young people, and that was that. We never seemed to get bored with them. They were with us for years to come.

It was evident from the start that Brac's home life was significantly different from my own. In my house, things were generally orderly - sometimes cluttered, but with a system, nice and clean. Dinner was on the table at a pre-ordained time, and if you had other plans, you were expected to make it known. Meals were home-made. We sat down at the dinner table, said, "please pass the salt", and we talked about our days. It wasn't military-discipline, as I realize now that I might be making it seem, and it wasn't quite the Cleavers, but it was nice, organized, pleasant.

Brac's situation was a world apart. His house, was drab, perpetually in need of a paint job, with cracked furniture, shitty silverware, raggedy carpet - hell, Brac still slept in a bunk bed. This led me at first to the conclusion that his family didn't have a lot of money, but that wasn't it. The house, despite its general crappiness, boasted a magnificent in-ground pool in the fenced-in back yard, the TV was of the sort you saw on display in the electronics store with a price tag in the thousands, the car his dad drove was a beat-up Mercedes. That actually said a lot about them. His father was a lawyer for Dow, and made deep six-figures. They were rich, but looking at their house, you would have never noticed it, unless you were looking quite closely.

The negligence which allowed for this state went beyond their home. I actually spent weeks hanging around with Brac after school before I ever saw either of his parents. His father was never around, perpetually away on some business trip or another, and his mom, though unemployed, seemed to spend most of her time in her room, lying in bed, eating ice cream, watching soap operas, and reading romance novels. She was morbidly obese, and lived a sedentary a life as I have ever encountered. Needless to say, this did not strike me as a particularly enviable existence.

Meals at Brac's household were by and large fend-for-yourself. The cabinets and fridge remained perpetually stocked with TV dinners, canned pasta, bread and sandwich materials, general easy-to-cook foodstuffs. The microwave saw a lot of use, and had probably seen better days. It amused Brac to no end that I would unfailingly call home to tell my parents that I wouldn't be home for dinner, whenever I was eating at his place. And my parents were more than a little surprised the first time Brac ate over at our place, and assured them that a call home wasn't necessary. A home-cooked meal was unheard of in his house. Prior to dinner with my family, Brac had never once eaten apple pie.

I picked up quickly and intuitively that the fact that Brac's father was never around was not necessarily a bad thing. It was a mixture of a few things, really, that turned me on to it: the tone of his voice when he announced that his dad would be home for a few days, his reluctance to hang out at his house when that was the case, even just the relative rarity with which he talked about him. For a time he tried to work it such that we didn't have to meet, but we had become close enough friends, and were in each others' proximity often enough, that that wasn't possible to sustain forever. And the very day we did meet, it became abundantly clear why Brac's attitude toward him had beeen, as I had put it, a little "off".

Brac's dad was a colossal, abusive prick.

Now, the word I have just used is not one that easily rolls off the keyboard and into the screen, nor is it a concept that I bandy about lightly. And yet when I am talking about abuse, in this specific case, I am not using it in the context in which it is more frequently used. To my knowledge, there was no physical or sexual abuse taking place in Brac's household, and I'd like to think that I'd have known about it if there were. And for years, I must admit, when I heard about the Triumvirate of categories of abuse (Physical, sexual, emotional), I had long considered Emotional Abuse to be somewhat of a bastard stepchild of the abuse family, one that barely even merited recognition in the same category. I don't feel that way any more.

I would certainly never want to make light of the perils of physical or sexual abuse, or to state that emotional abuse - "making someone feel bad" as someone might callously put it - is in the same category when it comes to severity. But it is certainly abuse. After meeting Brac's father, there was no doubt.

There is a difficulty inherent in the description of any form of emotional abuse, because its essential nature revolves not around specific, horrific behavior, but in the never-ending flood of criticism, yelling, screaming, and generally doing everything in one's power to convince someone that they are a piece of shit not worthy of the oxygen they are consuming. That was how Brac felt, day in and day out, when his father was around. Brac's father wasn't loud, as a general rule (although I witnessed a few screaming fits, they were rare), but he was just plain mean. Brac got good grades - as good as mine - but all his father ever talked about were the bad ones. He played in sports, and although he was big for a kid his age, Brac was in much better shape than his parents, but they consistently called him fat, a lard-ass, a piggy. His interest in computers and technology made him a geek, a loser, someone who would never get a girlfriend. In all the years I knew him, I never once heard his father give him a single word of praise.

This was a stark contrast to how his father dealt with Brac's older sister. Brac was actually the youngest of three siblings; the eldest, a daughter named Jo, was already out of college by the time that Brac and I started hanging out, but the few times I met her, she seemed pretty, nice, successful, and well-adjusted. The middle sister, Dori, was in High School, a year below my brother, and I knew her well. She was, in simple terms, a skank, a ho, and a slut These are three distinct, often overlapping, but not concentric, categories. She was a skank because she dressed in a trashy manner, pretty much all the time. She was a ho, as she calculated pretty much everything she did on the scale of what sexual effect it would have on the males around her. And she was a slut, because she had sex with a lot of boys. She was continuously doing drugs, disrespecting her family, and in general making a nuisance out of herself, and yet, never once did Brac's father speak ill of her. That was all reserved for the son, the disappointment that didn't allow for the father to cheer in the football stadium with bragging cries of "that's my boy!", the endless disappointment, the nerdy, bespectacled, shy, brilliant kid.

Ah yes. Brac was brilliant. I have met some smart people in my time, but venture a guess that Brac was probably the smartest. Things just came naturally to him. He got concepts. He was damn near a prodigal chess player, and despite all the games we played, I could never once even begin to touch him. He had a memory like nothing human. Concepts like calculus didn't even begin to challenge his intellect. By Senior Year, we had fallen out of friendship, and he wasn't exactly the most conscientious student, but still took Calculus with me, and aced it, effortlessly. All while his father did his utmost to convince him that he was a piece of shit.

Against this backdrop, video games were a welcome distraction, and the degree to which we were able to build our friendship around them opened my eyes to a quality of video games that I had never really appreciated: their theraputic power, their nerve-calming ability, their essence as the perfect time-waster in situations where the wasting of time is a necessity. It was the video games that kept him as level as he was for so long, and while his story isn't perfect, I am convinced that without the consistent distraction that the games provided us, they could have been much worse.

Brac got a 486 at some point in Junior High, and because of it, we played many a game over at his place, in his room. We played through Betrayal at Krondor, an excellent, under-appreciated RPG set in Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar fantasy universe, all the way to completion. It was through him that I discovered Civilization, a game we played for days on end. And then, of course, there was the Nintendo, and a new game rented pretty much every week, from the local corner store, who he swore (and in retrospect was probably correct) that was run by a gay guy that was dating the gay tenth grade English teacher.

Eventually, we fell out. He became depressed enough (through his father's influence, I'm convinced), to eventually try suicide, once, in earnest. He slit his wrist, and came within millimeters from the major artery. That was more than I knew how to deal with. It upset me, and caused tension between us, that was ultimately exacerbated when he discovered marijuana and became pretty much a full-fledged stoner. Even as a stoner, he did relatively well in school, but he was no fun to hang out with when he was high, which, in High School, was a lot. We stopped hanging out. We found other friends. And so it fizzled, as friendships and relationships so often do.

I look back on the years we spend as pretty much exclusive best friends with longing, with wonder at the intellect he portrayed, with respect for how he carried himself for years in a terrible situation, and with hope that he would right himself. Apparently he has. He has moved to Iowa, gotten married, had kids, and us a successful chiaropractor. We don't stay in touch. But occasionally I look up his company's web site. The picture brings up a lot of memories.

It was interesting, then, how much video games played a part in the maintenance of our friendship. Ultimately, I think it was somewhere during this time that I truly became a gamer, interested in the upcoming games, looking forward to my ability to sit down and play them. It was a suble transition, and slow, but it was through my friendship with Brac that it ultimately happened.