8 - B I T C H R I S T M A S
An 80s Quest for NES
KEVIN JAKUBOWSKI
DB Press
Chicago Los Angeles
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Copyright 2013 by Kevin Jakubowski
All rights reserved.
8-Bit Christmas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Jess Prudencio, carsandfilms.com
Book design & e-formatting: editedbycaitlin.com
2013 DB PRESS FIRST E-BOOK EDITION
Also available in paperback (ISBN 978-0-578-13020-0)
kevin-jakubowski.com
To Mom, Dad and Leah
And to Meg, I love you more than Christmas
For the spirit of Christmas fulfills the greatest hunger of mankind.
Loring A. Schuler
Editor, Ladies Home Journal
I feel like eating after I win. Lets go to lunch. Ha, ha, ha!
King Hippo
Boxer, Mike Tysons Punch-Out!!
C H A P T E R O N E
T immy Kleen was not a nice kid. Maybe he grew up to be a nice adult as he got older. Maybe he runs a soup kitchen in Harlem now. I kind of doubt it, though. If I had to guess, Id say he probably graduated from Harvard, became an investment banker and single-handedly bankrupted half the country. Of course, I dont know that for certain. Its just fun to think about. Maybe hes in jail now.
That would be sweet.
Growing up, Kleens dad was some kind of vice president for ComEd. He drove a Porsche. I asked my dad once why we didnt have a Porsche and he told me, Because we have you and your sister instead. Interesting, I thought. Did that mean I was worth half a Porsche? Could we, say, sell my sister for a Suzuki? These were things to consider. Anyway, Mr. Kleen was loaded and he drove a Porsche. He parked it in the familys three-car garage right below their pro-series adjustable basketball hoop, which was directly adjacent to their heated in-ground pool. No one in my town even had an above-ground pool, so being invited to Kleens was basically like a free trip to Disney World.
For starters, the Kleen house had its very own snack pantry. Not to be confused with their food pantry, the snack pantrys sole purpose was to house and store snacks. Id never heard of such a thing. Fruit Roll-Ups, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, Cool Ranch Doritos, Capri Suns andfun size be damned regular- size Snickers bars. They were all there for the taking. No restrictions, no locks, no health advisories or lectures on hungry Ethiopian children. Just open up the door, turn on the light and enjoy. It made the labors of trick-or-treating seem like some kind of sick joke. The pantry had a gum drawer, for crying out loud. A gum drawer! A drawer with nothing but gum in it! Are you kidding me? Such was the level of kid decadence available at the Kleen house.
The first time I went to Timmys was for his third grade birthday party. I didnt want to go. My parents made me. Maybe they knew Id be fed there and might catch a glimpse into the upper-class lifestyle and strive to one day live in a house with an intercom system. Or maybe they just wanted me out of the house for a few hours. Whatever the reason, I went. And after that birthday party my life was never quite the same.
If you grew up in the sixties, you probably remember where you were when you first saw the Beatles or where you were when the astronauts landed on the moon. Well, I grew up in the eighties. There wasnt all that much to remember. The Challenger space shuttle disaster? I blocked that out years ago. The Berlin Wall? Im pretty sure I was at a soccer practice making fart noises out of blades of grass when it went down. So really, my clearest, most vivid memory of the years 1982 to 1989 was watching Timmy Kleen unwrap the towns first Nintendo Entertainment System.
It all started out innocently enough. Unwrapping presents. Timmy plowed through the crap we bought him. What do you get a kid whose parents make ten times more than yours? There were a few He-Man figures (he already had them), a couple of board games (how embarrassing), several Micro Machines. The Grusecki twins gave him a few packs of Donruss baseball cards, which I was pretty sure theyd opened and pilfered from first. Steve Zilinski gave Kleen a Marlboro duffle bag (clearly the spoils of his chain-smoking mother). I gave Kleen the childrens book The Whipping Boy . A Newberry Medal winner, it told the story of a young servant and a prince, and how the two came to have mutual respect for one another.
Whats it about? Mrs. Kleen asked.
Its about a boy who gets whipped, I said, spraying out bits of Twinkie.
That was too violent for Timmy, she said, and threw the book away. Literally threw it away, like she was cleaning food scraps off the table. At the time I didnt think much of it, but looking back, thats messed up, right? If only shed known the violence that was to come from the next gift, maybe she wouldnt have been so hasty.
With the kid presents opened and discarded, Mr. Kleen plopped down a big one from him and the missus. One of the few universal truths growing up was that when it came to presents, bigger was unquestionably better. Our eyes widened at the possibilities. The box was huge. It was sturdy. Even Kleen didnt seem to know what it was. Weeks of snooping around the attic and his parents bedroom had yielded no results.
The first rip to the wrapping paper served as a stunner, rendering Kleen unable to proceed in his normal fists-of-fury manner. Through the paper tear we could plainly see onto the box itself. It looked like some kind of space scene about to be uncovered, sort of like looking through the Millennium Falcon windshield right before the jump to hyperspace. What was it? Could this be a new Star Wars toy? Was that even possible? Wed been assured that the next movie wouldnt be finished until the year 1997.
What is it? Zilinski quivered.
Kleen wasted no more time. His sickly arms tore in two directions at once, plowing apart the paper at the top of the box. We all leaned forward to have a look... And there she was, hovering in outer space, glistening in all her gray plastic glory. A maze of rubber wiring and electronic intelligence so advanced it was deemed not a video game but an 8-bit Entertainment System . Equipped with two control pads, a complimentary power gun and a front console home to the all-important on/off button and its savvy counterpart, restart. Within a week there wouldnt be a pair of blistered kid thumbs in the room that didnt feel an instinctive tingle when the word Nintendo was mentioned. Timmy Kleen had just hit the jackpot.
We sat there at first, numb with shock. Evan Olsen had already spilled Hi-C on his crotch and was now dripping ice cream down his leg. By the time I came to, I realized I was screaming at the top of my lungs. We all were. We may have been screaming for minutes and not even known it. Kleen tried to lift the box like some kind of title belt above his head and yelled:
NINTENDO!
Pandemonium hit the kitchen. Wrapping paper started flying, two kids jumped on the table, the Gruseckis tackled each other in ecstasy, Evan Olsen ran off to the bathroom to relieve himself, and I can never be sure, but I swear I heard Kleens three-year-old little cousin, Preston, say, Holy shit under his breath. This was big. And Batavia, Illinois, would never be the same.
Nintendo had come to town.
C H A P T E R T W O
