Yeah, I know it's not the same version as the one discussed in the article. I just like this image!
Most of the stories I have told you have made a certain amount of sense.
This one, however, is pure lunacy... and the only reason I didn't tell it sooner is because I honestly didn't know how to.
It all started the day I decided to go against any semblance of sense and judgement I had on me and rented Stephen King's "IT", thinking it would be a pretty fun, innocent weekend flick to watch, the kind that made all those lonely, pre-tween nights anchored between the last of school and the start of homework into something cozy and memorable. But, needless to say, it was a crass mistake.
"IT" had scared the absolute tar outta me, to the point where I was honestly afraid of being alone in the dark. The fact that the clerk at the video store even let me rent it after seeing just how young I was is a true testament to the IDGAF motto that's engraved in the forehead of all 9-5 workers across the world. I wanted something, I had the money for it and this was a free country... what else could they do? NOT rent the R-rated movie to the seven-year-old? Yeah, right.
Why would you let a child rent this?!?!
But watching that movie really was a mistake, and it wasn't helped by the fact that I had also picked up a copy of "TMNT: Out Of Their Shells Tour" in case the former film was "too much" for me... because the thing is that I couldn't even stomach that second offering. It was so bland in fact that I even failed to return it and the store just didn't even notice. They were probably glad of be rid of this thing because, looking at the little case (which I still own, because of course I do), I can see that it probably went through dozens of hands before landing on mine, so it was probably the centerpiece of a long list of complaints that the clerk and the video store people had to endure every time a child got pissed off by it and had to return it early. I like to think that, in a very weird way, it became sort of this universe's "One Ring" and that, by choosing to keep it, I did it them all a favor by carrying its curse with me.
But because I had watched both "IT" and whatever the hell that other movie was, I was literally shaken and quite jumpy, resulting on me refusing to go to my own, shared room and becoming the target of incredible amounts of teasing and mockery by my sister (who was just as scared, but was better at hiding it). Whatever the case, my mom had to do SOMETHING about me refusing to leave the safety of the kitchen (and getting in the way), so she offered me the ultimate treat: allowing me to watch cartoons on my parents' bedroom.
... Or this.
This wasn't just a comprise my mom was making, no, this was a BIG DEAL. Why? Because my parents' bedroom was not only equipped with a huge TV right by the foot of the bed (as opposed to the 14 inches one my sister and I shared, which was perched on top of a wardrobe and at an angle so bad that it made it impossible to see from certain points), but also had a solid cable connection right in there. No weak signal like ours, no, but a full thing with crisp, beautiful images and sounds coming out of it. We weren't allowed near that room for really good reasons, so getting to watch Johnny Bravo and the rest of my animated friends from that throne of gold was the best home remedy imaginable for my heavy case of the scares.
It could have been very beautiful... had it not been for the fact that my dad was my dad.
I will be forever amazed by the Montparnasse disaster of a train of thought he managed to set in motion here. It was almost an art form.
My dad knew I was scared.
He knew (from a telephone conversation with my mom) that I was nestling on their bedroom, the forbidden grounds we weren't supposed to see.
And he knew it was because the movie he had let me rent.
So, what did he do? He went out of his way to get a scary mask (complete with hair and everything!) on his way back home and entered the house wearing it, all whilst rushing to my location and making gargling, guttural, almost animalistic sounds.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. And I'd be extremely surprised if I didn't end up setting off car alarms for miles.
But that wasn't just it! He had obviously planned this after the phone conversation with my mom earlier that afternoon, so he actually had to drive to a Halloween store on his way back and buy the damn thing... whilst wearing his military uniform. Can you imagine how bizarre that must have been? The clerk was probably just sitting on his desk and lamenting how slow the business day had been when, all of the sudden, this towering, no-nonsense, UNIFORMED guy with a steely glance and clean cut entered into his store and asked to see a scary mask... on ADULT SIZE. My God, there was no pretending this was for his kids or anything. And he went with it like it was nothing. This sort of carefree, lovable recklessness would become my dad's trademark and the one thing I have for sure inherited from him.
It takes talent to make someone scared while Johnny Bravo is playing in the background...
The whole thing lasted maybe two minutes, but I was crying so hard that he had to spend triple that amount just getting me to calm down. It was a pretty ugly scene all-around (made worse because my mom was letting him have it about that), but something good came out of it: I got to spend some time with my dad (a rare commodity at that point in time).
My dad was stern and kind of harsh, but he wasn't unfair.
When I managed to break both the computer AND his weekend by introducing his military ID into the floppy drive like a damn lemming, he yelled at me until my ears got split and refused to let me have dessert for a week, but then explained why that had bothered him so much and then took me for ice cream to compensate. Likewise, when I aced my first test of the Second Grade, he immediately took me to a toy store and bought me the coolest-looking Power Ranger figure he could find. This time, however, he gave me something much more valuable as a way of saying sorry: his time.
As I explained on another article, the true tragedy of my childhood was that I barely ever saw my dad.
I certainly understand why that was now that I am adult (and responsible for my own children), but that stung very heavily when I was younger and couldn't understand why my dad was absent so much whilst all my friends could come home to both of their parents every single day. Turns out that mine worked on a job he hated just so we wouldn't be left wanting for anything, and that he made so little money working his bones into fine, suffering dust that he had to take as many extra shifts as possible in order to meet our basic needs, just so my mom could stay with us and help us get a better future. This exact conversation would actually turn out to be the last one we would have on this Earth, too, as he was still working when diagnosed with Cancer and told me that he regretted not following his dream after leaving a much lower-paying (but far more enjoyable) job in order to put food on the table for his growing family. He even told me that, if he somehow made it through, he would quit on the spot and focus on whatever made him happy... which I later found out it was being a traveling salesman for farm products on the paradise he had moved to after the divorce.
Gotta be honest: I never liked this one.
I still remember his firm (but not harsh) grip on my arms as he took my still-sobbing form and placed it in front of the newly-repaired (and ID-card-free) computer and took a seat right beside me, bringing up the DOS command line and navigating it with the kind of wizardry expected of a leader of his field. And much to my surprise, he didn't just pick a game for us to play, but actually asked me what I wanted to play myself (trust me, that never happened).
We only ever had three options: Sensible Soccer (which he loved and I hated), Secret Agent (which we both loved, but couldn't quite played by two people) and Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego? (a favorite for the three of us). I don't know what the mood was at the time, but I distinctly remember wanting to please him by suggesting Sensible Soccer, still bound to some sort of backwards loyalty to the man who thought it would be funny to cause me long-lasting trauma after learning that I was nearing a stress-induced heart attack. He dismissed me with a click of the tongue and brought up Carmen San Diego instead after noticing my sister lurking just out of sight from the computer room (which was actually just the dinning room). I remember the day being quite cold, and so two of us would sit in front of the computer whilst the third wheel to this demonic trike we were forming would be blasted by the lovely fireplace we had installed nearby (and yes, my dad thought it would be a good idea to have a computer sharing the same wall with a damn fireplace... the repair guy that came to take a look at it much later had to pick his jaw off the floor when he saw that one).
This one, however, was gold.
I loved Carmen San Diego because it wasn't quite as loud as other games we played, but it made us no less proud. We competed in it like we did on Super Mario Brothers, Battle City, Front Line and a myriad of other Famicom titles, but there simply wasn't any in-your-face gloating to be had whenever one of us messed up and the other person had to come to the rescue in order to get the case back on track. It was actually a pretty genius kind of edutainment because you really didn't want to look like the fool who couldn't get his bearings on the case, so you actually studied the answers in order to use them later on. It was an experience only comparable to the trivia game featured in Zeta Multimedia's "Historia del Mundo" (actually my first Windows 95 game), which was soulless but very interesting regardless.
We actually became quite a formidable team once we decided to work together, with my sister keeping an eye for clues that would help us draft the arrest warrant for the VILE scum that had gone around the globe stealing gigantic, significant junk from all the world's capitals (and I always sucked at that, so I was very glad to have her on board when it came to keeping track of those things) and me acing questions regarding flags, with dad chiming in and offering both solicited and unsolicited advise as the cases grew harder and harder to solve and dinner time approached, which signaled the end of the game night for us all. Mom could comprise on a lot of things, but she was definitely NOT going to delay dinner so we could stare at stereotypical, pixalated bad guys running away from the cartoony, sharp-edged version of the Keystone Cops.
We played so much Carmen San Diego that I actually ended up feeling smarter after sleep had caught up with us and my dad's pleas to my mom stopped working -- you could only use the "It's Saturday" card so much before it starts getting thrown back at your face. Regardless, that day marked the beginning of a tradition that would last two whole years in which my dad, my sister and I would take time each and every Saturday to try our best at catching the elusive title character, only really stopping when our forced machine upgrade meant that our new computer didn't have the appropriate floppy drive to let us keep playing our favorite games in the whole wide world. Oh, new games came to replace them... legendary juggernauts like Wolftenstein 3D and Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage soon filled the void, but this was also around the time our beloved Famicom suffered death-by-children and had to be replaced with a SEGA Genesis. Definitely an upgrade, but we lost so much more than the ability to play Super Mario Bros as a family once that was gone. Those Famicom and 386 classics were the only games my sister truly enjoyed playing, and because she was nearing her tween years by the time they were gone, she couldn't really be roped back into the "hot seat", not even when things like Spear Of Destiny (which was vastly inferior to Wolfenstein 3D, but one she liked better for some reason) or International Super Star Soccer Deluxe became available to us. She'd mostly hover around, looking pissy that it wasn't her turn to mash keyboards into fine dust, and occasionally (if begged hard enough) play a round or two, but she was living in another world now. As for my dad... well, he wouldn't be a feature in this household for long, either, getting on his way as soon as the ink on the divorce papers was finally signed with all the finality of war-ending treaty stained with the blood of innocence... mine, my sister's, even his.
Freeze! Stereotypical Scum!
When you are young the end of a chapter always feels more much impactful than it really is, mostly because the tools to deal with that sort of thing hadn't been yet forged in your mind. And so I'm thankful to say that I took much more issue with the removal of a favorite cartoon or the destruction of a precious toy than with the end of family life as I once knew it, all because the idea was so foreign to my still-developing mind as to not been able to properly process it until after the fact.
But it's actually quite funny, in a way... movies and TV shows had taught me that the year 2000 couldn't come fast enough, that I was gonna love it and be so blown away by it as to curse not being there yet. And while there definitely was some of that (can I really burn my own DVDs? This is CRAZY!), all it really meant was that I had unwittingly traded the rocky, unsteady and unpredictable nature of a peak for the bland calmness of a valley whose very outline was blurred and shrouded by the mist of a flavorless routine so deep as to result impenetrable.
A certain spark was gone and with it, the entire "engine" that powered our family dynamics went quiet.
I always found it funny how we have this much info on the world's most famous thief, yet she can poof the Statue Of Liberty like it was in her backyard XD
I didn't discover Carmen San Diego because of that night, nor did it start anything that wasn't already forming between my dad, my sister and I... but it was very memorable in a way, and I honestly credit it with cementing the game's name on my brain hard enough for me to remember it and find it again on an Abandonware site many years later, opening the door to sharing it with both of them again.
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