One Tuesday in June: Euphoria, Despair, and the Joys of Joysticks
It's Carson's darkest day of the week
Nothing good happens on a Tuesday. I say this from experience.
My beloved fish, Walter, died on a Tuesday, flipped on his back, eyes bulging. I was just 10, but the visual remains with me to this day.
My therapy then was simple: Atari. Not that I needed a dead fish to motivate me to go to the arcade. I was 10, after all.
Asteroids, Pac-Man, Defender … whatever I could get my hands on, for I am a son of Santa Clara County, the epicenter of the joystick in the 1980s.
A burning sensation would bubble up in me at the end of the school day, waiting in the auditorium for the bus, my feet in motion, tapping involuntarily. I remember running up the steps, jumping in the front seat, and counting the minutes until we reached Hamilton Street in Palo Alto.
There, in the historic district, was a simple shingle just to the right of the traffic light: GameBrain.
The noises would wash over me as I walked in the door, my hand burrowing through my right pocket for Mom’s quarters - she gave me four every day, never enough to kill the 90 minutes before she’d get home from the office. Cheap babysitting in her mind.
It was there that I met Gordon, two years my senior and my mentor in all things, it turned out.
Gordon and I had become fast friends, a bond that lasted through the years over thousands of galactic battles - battles that, in retrospect, did little else but weaken my right wrist considerably.
We were inseparable. We spoke the same language, liked the same food, ogled the same women. We both got in early decision to Stanford. The only thing that differed between us was the amount of time spent on Earth.
Our grown-up friendship yielded great gains.
PowerBreak became the sensation of the 1990s, even extended into the aughts. A combination racecar / treasure hunt / rescue challenge, the game and its ensuing permutations made us millionaires. Initially, we targeted young men our own age - in their 20s and 30s, unmarried, with disposable income. Then came the female version, one for kids, one for families, one for Minecraft lovers.
Out of the blue, on a quiet Friday in June, Gordon fielded a phone call: A consortium of game historians, each of whom was independently wealthy, didn’t want to change the game. They just wanted to own it - and they were willing to pay.
Papers were exchanged, and exactly one week later, we handed off the thing we’d spent our lives creating. We were already pretty comfortable, and yet, through no effort of our own, we’d found a home for our baby that cherished it as much as we had.
It was a Friday, so we went to Happy Hour at the Cantina, an open-air bar with $4 drafts and a California-casual vibe. Just as we had as teenagers, we began making plans.
He’d finally gone on his first date six months earlier - at 42. Tracy was her name, a Stanford professor of physics. They had decided on a Fall wedding on the Pepperdine campus in Malibu, overlooking the Pacific, where her father’s ashes had been spread the previous year.
With no such commitments on my own horizon, I decided to hit the road. Gordon adopted Buck, the husky I’d rescued five years before, and I sold my mother’s home where I’d lived my entire life in two days.
With no office to go to, I’d spent that Monday packing, signing papers at the realtor’s office and finalizing my agreement with a storage facility.
On Tuesday, the lights went out.
Like every morning before, Gordon started the French Drip. Tracy came in from her run with Buck nipping at her heels, as she later described it. She headed directly into the shower while Gordon went out to get the newspaper at the foot of their winding driveway.
Just like usual.
It was there, on the sidewalk, that a passing jogger found him in distress, newspaper in one hand while the other clenched his chest. He died before the ambulance arrived.
The funeral took place a week later. Gordon was buried with his parents in Palo Alto. Tracy took a grant to study in France and returned Buck to my care before taking a rather abrupt leave.
I spent two days in a hotel - the house had already changed hands - playing the games we grew up on. Asteroids was somehow particularly soothing. I was never able to beat him at Asteroids, never. It became a joke. I called him Master of the Universe.
Directionless, in a slightly drunken stupor of complete disbelief, I decided I had to pull myself together. I called our old admin, Frances, a New Yorker by birth. She’d moved to California with her engineer husband when he was called to manage a project in Sunnyvale. Professional, straight-forward, unflinching and loyal - we’d never met such a fantastic person. She was the one who told me of Middle Valley, of the real estate here, of River Road. Her sister lived there, she said. Go there and see what you find.
So I did. So here I am. Buck seems to like it.
What I like most so far? Elyse.
What I don’t? Just about everything else.