I’ve never been someone who goes to sleep early, and I only wake up early when I have to, but I had a 7:30am call the next day, and I was in a lot of scenes, so I’d closed my bedroom door and turned off the lights at the relatively early hour of 10pm. I sighed, reached up to the shelf above my bed, and pressed play on my CD player. I put my head on on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. I listened to the disc spin up, and then the mournful guitar that opens the second disc of The Wall began to play.
Hey you… out there in the cold getting lonely getting old can you feel me?
Hey you… Standing in the aisles with itchy feet and fading smiles can you feel me?
Hey you… Don’t help them to bury the light. Don’t give in without a fight.
Before I realized what was happening, tears began to run out of the corners of my eyes. I was so lonely, so sad, so frustrated and so unhappy. I imagined myself like Pink, in The Wall; an artist who felt trapped by success he wasn’t ready for, and the expectations of everyone around him to maintain and expand it.
It wasn’t nearly as bad as the complete breakdown Pink has, of course, but I was a hormonal teenager. I was a dramatic artiste, and until a few hours earlier I had been staying at a beach house with my best friend and his family, in a house full of the girls from his mom’s drill team, including the girl I liked. Oh, she didn’t like me back, and was was never going to like me back — she was cool and confident, and I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, I was a total weirdo even when I was trying hard not to be — but I could dream that someday I would graduate from Duckie to Blaine.
I laid there in my bed, listening to Pink Floyd, and I cried. I cried because I was lonely. I cried because I was frustrated. I cried because I was in almost everything on the call sheet for the next day, but I didn’t so much more than say “Aye, sir,” and that was all I’d been doing for what felt like a long time. I cried because, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, I felt like I was having my childhood taken away from me.
I let myself feel sad. I let myself miss my friends. I let myself wallow in the unrequited love that is so outsized when you’re a teenager. I stared at the ceiling until the CD was finished, and then I listened to it again, finally falling asleep during the second time through, sometime before Comfortably Numb.
So, obviously, I got better.
And I haven’t thought about that night, late in the summer of 1987, in over twenty-five years, but earlier this afternoon, it came back to me as clear and viscerally as if it had just happened. I’ve been playing classic NES games on my RetroPie, and 1987 was the summer that we were obsessed with The Legend of Zelda. We played a lot of Blades of Steel, Double Dribble, and Lifeforce, but we were obsessed with Zelda. In those days, we discovered secrets in the game by hearing them repeated from kids who knew a kid who knew a kid who went to camp with a kid. We pooled our money and bought big strategy guides that we couldn’t really afford, even though it felt like cheating, because that was the only way to get help when we were stuck. We made maps on graph paper, and kept notes about the different weapons, their damage against different enemies, and all the rumours we’d heard about secret levels and hidden dungeons. That was the summer we stayed up all night more than once, listening to Depeche Mode, Van Halen, New Order, and The Smiths while we ate enough junk food and drank enough Jolt cola to kill a muggle. That was the summer that I started to figure out who I was, and began figuring out who I wanted to be, and on this particular night that I’m remembering right now, I wanted to be with my friends.
Playing these old games has been like unwrapping memories, gifts I’d hidden for myself and forgotten about, and just accidentally knocked off a shelf. When I remembered how to beat King Hippo in Punch Out, though I hadn’t thought about that game in decades, and had completely forgotten that he ever existed, I felt like I’d punched a hole through time and watched myself, thirty years ago, doing it for the first time. The same thing happened when my hands took over and made me a spectator to a game of Super Mario Bros. that was played almost entirely by memory.
I have my system set up on the floor in my office right now, because I haven’t figured out where my RetroPie can live permanently, and my 44 year-old hips can’t handle sitting on the rug like their 14 year-old version could (though my 44 year-old self has a 100% better chance of actually kissing a girl before the end of the day than my 14 year-old self ever did) but I’ve spent hours there over the last few days, revisiting these games I loved when I was a kid, and letting the memories they reveal wash over me.
Building and updating and configuring and running this RetroPie (which is currently in a tiny, NES case that I made on my 3D printer) was a fun and rewarding experience, but the real joy that I get from Retrogaming isn’t from playing games from my youth, in some cases for the very first time. The real joy — in fact, the real magic — is when the animated goal celebration in Blades of Steel unlocks the memory of my best friend, Ryan, scoring against me in a two-player game to tie the score, standing up and mimicking the 8-bit characters while saying, “He who dances last, dances funkiest!” It’s when I instinctively remember how to get to the graveyard in Zelda, hearing the music it plays when I get there, and then getting knocked over by a sad memory like the one I wrote at the beginning of this post. These memories are priceless to me, and Retrogaming is not just the key that unlocks the chest where they’re stored, it’s the treasure map I use to find it. I feel like there is power in these memories, though I don’t know precisely what that power is, or how to use it.
I guess I’ll just have to keep playing until I figure it out.
