Here’s the first bit of a new little story I’m working on. Lots of fun. Takeoff on 80’s snobs v slobs comedies and latenight Cinemax stuff. Hope you like it!
This is a story about the time our sweet arcade almost got shut down by evil Japanese condo developers.
But in a way, it’s also a story about friendship, loss, love, betrayal, and the best friends I’ll ever have.
But in another, more accurate way, it’s about the time we used naked boobs to save our arcade from evil Japanese condo developers.
~
While you’re reading this story, you might notice that I don’t write that good. I’m not much of a writer. Or a reader. But I watched a lot of movies to figure out how to tell stories right. So if there’s stuff that’s kinda fucked-up in here, if it sounds real stupid, then don’t blame me. Blame the screenwriter of The Great Bikini Off-Road Adventure. Or maybe blame Shakespeare. That dude could’ve taught me how to write, but he was too boring for me to learn anything from him. Also, how did dudes in Shakespeare times maintain their mustaches so perfect? Maybe if they spent a little less time making mustaches, a little more time making their writing relatable, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I say blame Shakespeare for how shitty this book is.
~
Open on a street in a beach town. We see all kinds of different dudes walking around. We see like a punk dude with liberty spikes. We see some dudes breakdancing on a big piece of cardboard someone carried out to the sidewalk. We see the girl kind of dudes, in yellow swimsuits, and we mostly see their butts and how their long hair reaches down to the tops of their butts. We might think about if their hair ever gets in their butts, or if they’ve ever accidentally taken a dump on their own hair or dipped it in the toilet, but mostly we think about Damn, look at those butts in those yellow swimsuits!
Then we zoom in on one brick building. There’s a big sign above the front door, and it says Arkade.
You might think that it’s misspelled. Well, it is. The guy who owns it isn’t the most smartest. But he’s not the most dumbest. He figured out the name on the sign was wrong way after it was finished which was the dumb part, but then he just went with it and was like, “We’ll get two of every arcade game! Like that boat Jesus was on!”
He’s not the smartest guy at spelling or the Bible, but he’s pretty good at business, and he got two of a bunch of games. Centipede, Human Centipede Galaga, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Gender Ambiguous Pac-Person, and my favorite, Robotron 2084.
Robotron 2084 is the best because it’s the craziest game ever made. There isn’t even a button when you play. Just two joysticks. And those sticks put the “joy” back in “joysticks” because, holy shit, that game is the joytits.
Which brings us to the problem.
We were all hanging out, playing games.
I guess I should introduce who all the people are.
There’s me. I’m Pete. I’m playing Robotron 2084, and uh, I have black sneakers. I don’t know. It’s hard to describe people. But I’m like the awesome cool dude in the movie, for sure, and if it was a movie from a certain time, I’d probably have some fingerless leather gloves or something. And one of those leather jackets with the buckles and straps everywhere.
Okay, then there’s Jason. He’s probably playing Sinistar because he thinks Sinistar is totally hilarious when he talks. Jason’s the owner of the Arkade. I told you already he’s dumb. His shoes are also black. He’s not that smart, but he’s nice.
Then there’s Ben. Ben is probably playing Dig-Dug. Ben is the fat guy. Every group has a fat guy, unless it’s got two fat guys, and Ben is our fat guy. Black shoes also.
Then there’s Agnes. Agnes is our hot girl friend. Not girlfriend, but friend who’s a girl. Agnes doesn’t really date anyone right now. She dated this dude, Brad, during the school year, but it turned out that Brad was only dating her because he made a bet with his friends to see if he could make Agnes the prom queen. Then Agnes found out about it right before the prom, and she was really pissed, but Brad was like, “No, baby, that’s how it started, but now I’m really in love with you!” And Agnes was all, “Well…okay.” And then they went to the prom, and then Brad dumped her immediately after because it turned out it WAS a bet, and he didn’t fall in love with her, but she had to be crowned the prom queen for him to win the bet.
There’s always a bright side to things, and I guess the bright side is that Brad ended up making $13,000 dollars on the deal. He made a lot of bets with a lot of different people at the school, it turns out. And with people from just around town. Even Agnes’ parents bet against her, it turned out, and now Brad’s got all the money that was supposed to be for Agnes to get a car.
It’s kinda horrible, but we were all sort of impressed that Brad had that much initiative. Even Agnes one time admitted that it was pretty rad, from a pure business standpoint.
Anyway, Agnes is really good-looking and fun, but somehow none of us noticed this at the time. Her shoes are also black.
~
DIVERSITY BREAK
Oh yeah. Sometimes there’s criticism of a story or a movie or whatever because everyone is white and straight and whatever. Well, we’ve got our main characters, and let me tell you, they’re all kinds of diverse and they totally view gender as a spectrum of constructs. They don’t really talk about these topics regularly as they’ve elected to prioritize other stuff in their lives, and they’ve pretty much exhausted the discussion within their friend group and made peace with each other’s quirks in that realm. I’d stick something in here where Agnes mentions her heritage or Ben talks about how he’s experimented with a lot of different things and that genitals aren’t gender, but that didn’t happen during this story. We were pretty busy with other stuff, to be honest. And I don’t want to have a part that feels like it’s unrealistic and someone has to toss in their preferences on different stuff, so I’ll just break out entirely and do it here. So now you know, and now you don’t have to feel bad. This shit is totes culturally sensitive.
Feel free to photocopy this section, cut it out, and paste it in any other book you’d like.
~
THEN THE BAD SHIT HAPPENS
If this was a movie, what would happen now is the sky would turn totally dark, and the skateboard kids would hold out their hands and feel a raindrop and be all, “Oh, man.” And they’d stop skateboarding even though that girl from The Crow totally skates in the rain and she’s a girl and she’s like 12.
But it’s not a movie, so what really happened is that it rained, and the skateboard kids were all pissed off, not because they couldn’t skate, but because it’s hard to keep a blunt lit in the rain.
We were all in the Arkade, and right then lightning crashed, and the door opened.
Wait, that’s not right. I have notes here. They’re kinda hard to read. Hang on.
Okay, it was like this. What really happened was, lightning didn’t crash for real when the door opened. What happened was, “Lightning Crashes” by that band Live was playing overhead when the door opened. So not as cool as it would be if lightning was all POW when the door opened, but it was still pretty neat. That’s a neat song.
So Live was on, and the door opened and there was a bunch of guys in suits, and they all had briefcases, and they were all Japanese.
I didn’t know they were Japanese right then, but that didn’t really matter. It was way more weird to see someone inside the Arkade with a suit on than it was to see a group of Japanese men there. The Arkade had the kind of nachos where cheese comes from like a paint can. I don’t know how Japanese people feel about that cheese, in general, but I know how people in suits feel about that cheese. They think cheese comes in giant wheels always, in paint cans never.
We all turned to look at the men who stood in the doorway. They had just come out of the rain, but they were completely dry. It was like they moved between raindrops.
Haha, not really. They were just spooky is all. Spooky and wet.
There was one guy at the front who we’ll call Mustache because he had a mustache. He looked like he was in charge, and he turned his head to talk to one of the other men, but he kept his eyes on the Arkade. He held up his hand to block his mouth, and he whispered to the other man.
The man he whispered to, we’ll call him Craisin. Because I didn’t know it then, but that motherfucker was craze-o.
Craisin listened, and then he nodded, and he yelled into the Arkade.
“The honorable Mr. Yokoi would like to speak with the owner of this establishment.”
Jason stepped forward. He had cheese on his shirt. Paint can cheese. Not wheel cheese.
Jason raised his hand because I guess he never talked to people in suits, so when he did, he thought he had to raise his hand.
“Um, I own it,” he said.
Craisin and Mustache talked for a really long time. It kind of looked like Mustache didn’t believe Jason owned Arkade. Which is pretty understandable. Jason kind of didn’t believe he managed to own an arcade either. He had low self-esteem. It’s a big thing, and we don’t really bring it up unless we really have to. Let’s drop it for now.
Mustache talked some more, and Craisin said, “Mr. Yokoi would like to speak with you in your office.”
Jason said, “Of course!” Then he turned to me and he said, “Pete, will you get my office ready?”
I nodded and walked upstairs and had to decide what would be the most like the office, the bathroom or the closet where we kept the mop and stuff.
It took me a long time to decide, and I stalled by walking up the stairs and pretending I was out of breath after only a couple steps up. Then I’d do a couple more and get out of breath again, wait. You get the idea.
I heard Craisin and Mustache talking, probably about how I was out of shape and stuff. But really, I was forming a plan. Out of shape like a fat, wily fox!
~
All that deciding on the stairs paid off because I decided that the mop closet was better for an office than the bathroom because the bathroom had official toilets in it, which offices never have.
I say “Official Toilets” because the mop room definitely had an unofficial toilet in it, which was the drain in the middle of the floor. And I’m sure plenty of offices have unofficial toilets. A bottle in a desk drawer, a plant over in the corner. It wasn’t until I was like 17 that I found out people kept plants in their houses that they DIDN’T pee in. I just always assumed that was the whole point. Sometimes you have to pee, and sometimes it’s good to have a giant green flag waving you over to a convenient pee spot.
The mop closet had some boxes in it, and a mop. I moved the mop to the official toilet bathroom, then stacked the boxes to build sort of a desk for Jason, and then set two boxes for the Japanese guys to sit on.
The room looked really bare, so I took this big marker I had a drew a picture of a cat on the wall. He was hanging from a branch with his front paws, and then below it I wrote “Hang In There, Baby.”
Then I drew a rectangle around the picture so it looked like a poster, and I went back and added a bunch of exclamation points after “Baby” because I thought that made it look more like a poster for an office and like whoever made it was serious about hanging in there (baby).
I stood back and admired my work. Then I stood further back to where I was outside the mop closet, because I could only get so far back when I was in there, and the place still looked like shit.
I backed up even more until I hit the railing and almost fell over and onto the main floor, and even after I almost died, the job I did still looked horrible. I thought that if you almost died everything was supposed to taste sweeter and the light would be more beautiful and all that stuff, but the box furniture I made and the poster I drew on the wall still looked like shit.
I came down the stairs and Jason said, “Everything all ready?”
And I said, “No. I couldn’t quite get things squared away. Because you don’t have an office at all.”
Jason clapped his hands once out in front of him, and he said, “Splendid. Well, maybe we should just talk here.”
Craisin nodded, and he talked to Mustache. Then Craisin said, “We are buying this entire block to put up high-end condos. This building is the last one we have to buy, so we are here to make you an offer for this property.”
Jason said, “A money offer?”
And Craisin said, “Yes, a money offer.”
Jason rubbed his chin. I knew what he was thinking, probably. On the one hand, this place was his dream. On the other hand, he barely made any money. If he sold the place, he might not have to sleep in the mop closet. Which I hadn’t told him yet that I’d messed all up because I turned the boxes into a desk and chairs, and also while I did that I’d gotten worked up and peed in the unofficial toilet drain.
Jason said, “Okay. How much?”
Mustache nodded to another guy we’ll just call Cliff. Cliff had a big briefcase, and he opened it up, and inside there was a bunch of money.
Craisin said “One million dollars.”
Jason said, “Sounds great! I’ll take it!”
Craisin reached into the suitcase and took out big handfuls of bills. He took out a million, and there was still a lot left in there, which I guess means Jason should have held out for more. Or maybe that was money to buy another business or something.
Craisin said, “It was our pleasure. Please vacate the building by the end of the week.”
Jason was laughing and he’d already taken his shirt off and was rubbing bills all over his naked chest. “Uh-huh,” he said.