Mike and I Playing Nintendo

We played a lot of video games, Mike and I;

late-80s, classic 8-bit Nintendo games:

Metroid, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Pro Wrestling, Ikari Warriors, Contra...

I was seven or eight, he a year or two younger

he and his mom lived above the bar where she worked until close

so we had a lot of time to play video games in the morning while she slept

unfortunately, when the game didn't go his way (which happened half the time)

he got mean

he'd almost always call my mother an El Cajon Blvd whore, say that I loved my sister's dirty panocha

that sort of thing

At first, I never gave it back

I couldn't

it didn't seem worth it for a video game

but it wore on me

wore on me bad

so eventually, I calculated an insult that would really hurt him

I turned it over and over in my mind

it was one of those perfect insults

expressly crafted to hurt a specific individual

the kind of exacting insult that can only come from someone close

someone who knows your fears and struggles

and can thus pinpoint precisely where your most sensitive nerve is

and punch a whole right through your heart

so the next time I was winning, and he started up on me

I said it:

“Yeah, well, we're richer than you.”

He didn't have a response; he was silent

but his mom did;

She usually slept on the couch in the living room with us,

but since she'd never reprimanded him for saying those fucked up things to me

I'd always assumed she slept through it and never heard a word

But when I told Mike that we were richer than him

all of his insults didn't matter

and it didn't matter that my family lived three blocks away from Mike and his mom,

that the only real socio-economic difference between our families

was that my parents hadn't divorced yet

His mom, said, “Well. that's because you have two parents who work.”

I felt horrible

worse than horrible

because I was wrong, you see

Mike had been right all along

I didn't realize until years later

that Mike's mom had certainly heard him hurting me

saying things about my mom and my sister

but she did nothing

so I thought I deserved it

that I was the one who had gone too far

the one good thing I took from the experience

was that I never honed my verbal ability to hurt that people I care about

no matter what they do or say to me,

and I never will

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