New Family

Videogames turned into an addiction, when life outside my games became unbearable. One morning, my dad just packed his shit, walked out the door and didn't come back. My brother and I had no idea what the hell was going on. And my mother had no idea how to deal with two kids. So we went straight back to being alone all day, while our mother was gone. She'd disappear all day, then come home with some random stranger, telling us he was an uncle we've never heard of. One of these uncles broke the bed. Another uncle invited us over to his place, popped a tape in the VCR and disappeared with my mother for the rest of the night. One day my mother came home so incredibly drunk, she forgot to cook dinner, shouted random nonsense and my brother spent the rest of the day hiding from her, because he was scared shitless.
So you can either sit and think about how your mother is losing your mind, why you have well over a dozen uncles you've never met before, and how you're alone and hungry all day and how everyone hates you in school. Or you can blow up one-eyed mammoths in Space Harrier. Be a hero, save the galaxy, do all sorts of cool shit when life is too soul-crushingly depressing for you to face it.

I saw my dad again after what may have been a year. Maybe it was just a few months. I don't know, I was six, I was trying my hardest to ignore life and the fucker just left me without saying a word. My brother and I went to his new place for a weekend. Or rather, his new family. He introduced us to his new girlfriend, who also had a daughter. She was just a little younger than my brother. They stuck all three of us in the bath tub together, because we were in Germany and this is how you introduce your kids to basic anatomy where I'm from.

I felt uneasy the entire time. We were at a stranger's house with this strange new family. But my dad would keep taking us over there for the weekends and eventually he started to prepare us for a court battle. You know, for custody. And if I say 'battle', I'm really not exaggerating. My dad and his new mistress would scare the crap out of us with insane bullshit. "You have to tell the judge that you want to live with us or you will never be allowed to see us again." Pretty sure that's not how custody works, but I didn't know that at the time. I didn't care much for my dad's new family, but I was terrified at the thought that I'd never see him again after he had just fucked off for a year.

On the plus side, it was now 1988 and my dad had just imported a Sega Mega Drive and a Nec PC-Engine from Japan. My brother and I played Golden Axe all day and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen! The characters were massive, there was no annoying sprite-flicker like on the Master System and holy shit was it brutal! By today's standards, the violence is cartoony at best, but I was seven years old and I could whack a guy over the head with a battle axe. Fuck everything else!

Divorce? Custody? Court? New family? Whatever man, Death Adder ain't gonna slay himself!

And don't get me started on the PC-Engine! You could connect five controllers to the damn thing! We didn't even have that many players in the house! My dad, my brother and I woul spend all day playing Tennis, Moto Roader, Dungeon Explorer, just crazy fun multiplayer shit. My dad sucked at spending time with us, he never showed that he actually gave a shit, so playing videogames with him was the best we got. So we fucking took it!

I escaped into videogames more and more while our parents were trying to manipulate us into saying whatever they needed us to say in court. They even sent a psychologist to our place, who watched and interviewed me for... look, I was seven, I had no idea what the fuck that was all about. And it didn't matter, because I had Phantasy Star. It's quite possibly the number one reason why you're reading this blog right now. It was my first ever RPG. The game was in English. I only understood German. In order to progress, to figure out what the hell was even going on, to do anything in this game, you had to understand the language. So I grabbed a dictionary.

While most other kids my age could barely read or write in their own language, I could already say things like 'Alys attacks Skeleton with Short Sword' and 'Odin uses Burger on Myau'. I could have moved to the UK right there and then! I was ready!
Of course I was helped by the fact that we had magazines full of walkthroughs and cheats for all our games. My dad also drew lots of maps for the dungeons, because automaps weren't a thing back then. So I didn't figure out the entire game on my own, but I got in touch with the English language through the power of videogames.

After a traumatizing court battle, my brother and I ended up with our dad and our new stepmother and stepsister. We didn't see or talk to our mother again until I was around ten or eleven. In the meanwhile, we moved in to a nice, big house and my stepmother quickly begun to realize that children are awesome for slave labour. I would polish my dad's shoes every other week or so. All 40 pairs of them, Italian, leather, super expensive shit. And boy would I get it if I used the wrong colour polish on any of them! Mistakes were common, because I dad to be quick. After all, I had to make time to do the dishes, help cook dinner, run to the supermarket (which was nearly 20 minutes away and she had a damn car!), secretly buy smokes and beer for my stepmother (she didn't want dad to know) and do just about every other damn chore she didn't want to do around the house. Don't get me wrong, I think it's perfectly cool for kids to help around the house. But she was constantly 'on strike' and let my brother and I do all the work.

Meanwhile, my stepsister didn't have to do anything. She simply refused to do her chores. Worst case scenario, she'd be grounded or she wouldn't be allowed to watch tv. But my parents would have to leave the house at some point, so she watched tv anyway. She'd annoy the shit out of them when she was grounded, so they'd let her out of the house, anyway. When I was a kid, I thought she was the meanest, most spoiled, most annoying brat on the planet. Looking back, I think she was just smarter than the rest of us and immediately figured out that our parents never had any real power over us. I looked her up on Facebook the other day and today she only has one arm and she has a daughter who looks exactly like she did when she was five.

I bet she's a writer for a soap opera now or something. I watched her play with her Barbie dolls once. One of them got hit the pink Barbie convertible and ended up in a coma. While she was in hospital, Ken would cheat on her with her sister. That shit was more exciting than anything I've seen on Coronation Street and my stepsister was only five years old when she came up with these things. That kid had seen some shit! Her mother came from an abusive relationship, more fighting, alcohol, the usual shit. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that asshole parents raise asshole children. We were all fucked up in more ways than I dare count.

My dad had to work hard to support his new family. He joined some big real estate company and won all sorts of awards, concert tickets, luxury cruises and shit, because he outperformed everyone else. He was a born salesman, a baby boomer, a self-made success story. And a manipulative con artist. He didn't just read the books on how to read a person's face and eyes, how to phrase questions to manipulate people into thinking it's their own decision to buy something they really don't need. He wrote books about it, too! 'The sale before the sale'. It was basically about how you have to become your client's friend. They have to like you, they have to want to like you, you gotta have things in common, relate to each other, make them crave to be friends with you. I think they're calling that the Columbo method now.

This also meant that we never saw him, because he was working all day and was too fucking tired to put up with us when he was at home. Or he'd go on these cool vacations he'd won with our stepmother and us kids stayed back at home with our uncle. Eventually, he didn't even play videogames with us anymore. If we wanted to get any time with our dad at all, we'd have to watch him play. He'd sit in the living room and play Phantasy Star 2 or Shining Force and if things weren't going well or we were too noisy, he'd send us to our rooms, so he could play in peace. Then came Ultima VII, so he hid in the basement all day and played on the computer instead.

The only thing I had in common with him apart from videogames was our massive fish tank. He'd take me to the pet shop, we'd buy a bunch of new fish, put them in the tank and watch them for hours. At some point he even bought me my own tiny fish tank, which was placed right next to his. My first own pets! The whole thing meant the world to me, because we were doing something together and he trusted me enough to let me take care of my own fish. This was big!

For my tenth birthday I asked for a day out with my dad. I didn't want any presents. All I asked was for my father to spend some time with me. I think we spent half a day or so walking around the park. They also had some fish there, lizards and other fun critters for people to look at. So that's what we did. Went to the park, looked at animals. Went home after a few hours when my dad got tired. That was my birthday gift.
I guess my dad just never knew how to show he cared. Or maybe he really didn't. My uncle always told me that our father loved us more than we'd ever know. That's another thing he repeated at the funeral. I asked my dad why he never gave a shit before I moved to the UK. And he basically just blamed his dad. He said he was raised by parents, who never cared about what the kids wanted, him and his siblings never had any say in anything. So that was simply normal to him. Great.