Syracuse 4
I loved video games. Loved them deeply, madly. I owned a Super Nintendo in the 90’s, my first real investment after graduating from college. I sold the SNES shortly after I gained admission to grad school.
This was an act that I would soon regret deeply.
I listed the SNES in the Chicago Reader in the classifieds section. I sold the SNES, in the box, along with twenty games (also in-box) for $300. I can no longer remember the face of the man who bought it from me. This moment was genuinely painful for me; so painful that it would not recede quietly into my history. Instead of receding, the SNES sale eventually evolved into a nagging, surrealist dream, one that reliably unfolded as such:
A man comes to the door of my Chicago apartment to collect an exotic parrot, a bird that happens to have purple feathers. I wait patiently at the top of the steps of the apartment. The purple parrot, which I would soon part with, is perched on my forearm. I listen to the sounds of the approaching footsteps, methodically climbing up through the building. The steps echo in the stairwell. When the phantom climber turns the corner, a face emerges from shadow, finally. The face looks familiar to me. I’ve seen the face someplace before… That’s when it hits me: The purple parrot purchaser looks exactly like me.
That’s when I wake up. In the dream/nightmare, I never complete the sale.
I sold the SNES because I thought it was time. Time to put aside juvenile pursuits, like this. Time for me to find pursuits other than attempting to defeat a pixelated, jackbooted sociopath named M. Bison (i.e., the final boss in Super Street Fighter II). It was time for me to stand up and become—or, at least, try to become—a somewhat more serious man than I was.
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I bought a fifth of bourbon. Sipped it on the sofa in the front room from a rocks glass, a single cube of ice skating around the bottom. I renewed my subscriptions to literary journals. Devoted myself to watching PBS. Went to poetry readings on Wednesday and Fridays. Got my ear pierced. Wore black turtlenecks.
Oh, I was a piece of work, all right.
Sten liked me more than I expected him to like me. He thought I had a refined, youthful point of view, one that the paper could benefit from. He gave me more work. Odd jobs, really. Places where I could fill in, develop a feel for the work. Then Sten began talking about bigger story ideas. He waxed poetic on possible feature stories for me. Stories that I wasn’t confident I could write. One afternoon up at the newspaper, Sten slapped his desk with an open hand. “Have I got something terrific for you!” Sten said.
Sten wanted me, his greenest writer in his stable of writers, to interview someone. “But I’ve never interviewed anyone in my life,” I told him.
He told me that it was easy. “Just ask the questions, take notes, then file the story,” he said.
Hollywood legend Gregory Peck was coming to Syracuse. Atticus Finch from To Kills a Mockingbird. Joe Bradley in Roman Holiday. And Sten wanted me to interview him? This man who had kissed Audrey Hepburn on the streets of Rome.
My stomach began to quake. I squirmed in my chair. “I can’t do it,” I told him.
Sten simply wouldn’t accept this. “You can, and you will,” Sten said.
