Suddenly Poverty

My stepmother hated videogames. She was convinced that, whenever my brother and I had a fight, it was because we spent too much time playing violent games. Looking back, I think she was just miserable and hated her life and she couldn't stand it when anyone near her was having fun. So she limited our daily videogame time to one lousy hour. You can beat Golden Axe in an hour if you're good. Try and finish more than two battles on Shining Force in an hour! Bitch.

Since I wasn't allowed to play games, I went and read about them. We had all the videogame magazines in the house. Power Play, the official Sega Magazine, I bought C64 magazines with my own allowance when I got my first computer for Christmas. I read this review of Shining Force by some mighty bearded dude named Michael Hengst. The guy was my hero. It was the coolest thing anyone had ever written. He joked about how you should stock on life-saving chips and coke before you even consider getting started with this game. As a kid I loved that line so much, I used it in one of my own reviews many years later.

A while back I actually found some gaming-related Facebook, where Michael Hengst himself was involved. I posted a comment and he liked it. This may not sound like a big deal to you, but he was a fucking rockstar to me when I was a kid. Kids my age grew up worshipping Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Michael Jackson or whatever. I wanted to be like those videogame critics, who get to play all the cool new shit, then write about how awesome it is. Back then, games journalism was a lot less serious, too! What I mean is, if I write a review today and use the word 'fart', there's a pretty high chance it'll get edited out. I'm not allowed to swear or be silly with my stuff. Granted, they're letting me get away with a lot more shit than other writers, because I've established a bit of a fan base, but it's insanely difficult in this day and age to write goofy articles.

Back when I was a kid, the reviewers would make funny faces and put them underneath the article, depending on how much they liked a game. They'd have a big idiot grin on their face if a game was really great. Underneath a really terrible game you'd see the writer screaming for help and there's be a facehugger making love to his oral cavity. Good times! If anyone had asked me what I wanted to be in life back then, I would have wanted to be a games journalist. Heck, when my daily hour of videogames was over, I'd just sit down and write my own reviews! I didn't show them to anyone, I didn't think they were all that great, but if I couldn't play or read about games, I'd write about them. Still better than having to deal with my frustrated stepmother.

It was around that time when my real mother got in touch with me again. She had remarried. Really cool guy, had long hair, an earring, a cool apartment in the city and he had Predator and Police Academy on tape. My dad didn't raise the bar very high, so my mother's new guy was my new personal hero. He'd take my mom, my brother and my lazy ass and go to the park. He was insane about table tennis for some reason, so that's what we played all day. Heck, the guy didn't even mind hopping on a bus with us to go places. I haven't seen my father step into a bus or a subway train in my entire life. If he couldn't drive there in his Range Rover or book a flight, it wasn't worth his time. If at all possible, he would have used the car to pick up the milk and the newspaper on our doorstep in the morning. So we never went anywhere, unless we could drive there.

Going places with my dad was never fun, because he was a snob. We went to McDonald's once and he ordered a Big Mac, some fries and a coke. The cashier was nice enough to rind him up a Big Mac meal to save him some money. My dad flipped and said he didn't want a meal. He wanted a Big Mac, some fries and a coke. Which is literally what a Big Mac Meal is, but there was a principle involved. He threw a massive fit, they had to get the manager and then rang him up his order, which was twice as expensive as the meal containing the exact same items. I'd rather not know what they did to his food after he put up a show like that.

He once bit a server's head off in Pizza Hut when we had to wait 40 minutes to get our food. We were all starving, but he decided he had waited too long and we were going home. The fucking pizza was right there! He may have won his imaginary argument, but sometimes dinner is more important than winning. But not to him.
Meanwhile, my mother's new guy made his own pizza. Back then I thought that's because he was awesome. Today I'm broke enought to understand the guy just couldn't afford ordering stuff. We lived in a palace, his apartment was tiny. He had a tiny, shitty tv, no games consoles apart from a classic Game Boy and he didn't even have a car. And the guy was fucking awesome, because he simply spent time with us, he listened, joked around and put up with our shit. He also hated our father with a passion and said he'd murder him if they ever met somewhere in the street. I was trying to picture whoose side I'd pick if that ever happened while I was around.

Back at home, my dad started developing some weird habits. He slept on the couch. The phone would ring in the morning to wake him up and he just ignored it. I don't even know if this service is still a thing nowadays, but back then you could just call a number and ask them to wake you up at a specific time. So he stayed on the sofa and slept. My stepmother asked me to buy more beer than ever. The guy at the gas station let me buy it even though I was only eleven years old, because he knew my stepmother. She also let me try my first bottle of beer. My parents were weird with this shit. They encouraged me to drink and smoke, figuring it would gross me out so much that I'd stay off the stuff by myself. And yeah, I hated beer and I refused to even touch a cigarette. Until this day I've never smoked anything. I'll admit you look fucking cool with a cigarette, but I never saw the appeal of actually inhaling something that smelled so nasty.

When the phone rang I had to answer it. I had to repeat the name of the caller. "Hello Mister Suchandsuch." Then my dad would signal to me whether he was in or not. He usually wasn't. Eventually, I had to answer the door in pretty much the same fashion. People would ask to see my dad, I'd tell them he's out. They'd say they can see the car in the garage and I'd panic and cry and tell them to just leave me alone, because I was a kid and I was scared and I was too stupid to say he was picked up or used a taxi or something. My dad and my stepmother were fighting all the time. Meanwhile, my real mother was making me paranoid, telling me I should call social services if my dad wouldn't allow me to see her. Why would she say that? Was something gonna happen? Where was this coming from? For fuck's sake, I finally got over the stupid court drama and the custody fight, where I had to tell people that my mother would leave us alone all day, come home drunk or bring home random strangers and now you're talking to me like that. Thanks, mom!

The people looking for my dad got more aggressive over time. One morning they walked around the house, banged on our windows and shouted his name. My siblings completely freaked out and started to cry. The guys outside seemed genuinely shocked. They didn't want to scare us, they apologized a million times, but damn! What had my father done to make them do this in the first place?
A few months later and random strangers would regularly come into our house and start looking at the place. My dad told me not to worry about it. What he didn't tell me was that we were gonna lose the house and those strangers were potential buyers! So I had some rich assholes and their stupid kids running around my room, trying to figure out where they'd place the bed. Wonderful.

When my dad broke the bad news to me and told me we had to move, he said he got ripped off by a business partner. My dad said he had paid for the house, but his partner had never put my dad's name on the property, so legally it was still his and he wanted my dad out. God knows what really happened, but if I had to guess, I'd say it had something to do with him not showing up for work anymore. Like, ever.
So we moved to a new town, into a new house. Without the fancy cars, without my stepmother and stepsister, in to a place, which was way above the paygrade of a guy who sleeps on the couch and doesn't have a job. I have no idea how he managed to rent that place. But my dad continued to sleep on the couch and my brother and I continued to play videogames. I thought life sucked with my stepmother around, but it got so much worse when she was gone.