It was late 2002, back when such things were still possible. I was still young, living at home, going out with Kristin, and still friends with Matt.
Usually, he would come over and we would play video games in my parents’ finished basement. That’s what we did that night. We both sat on a metal futon with a dark blue mattress. He always sat on the side nearest the television, and I would sit on the opposite end with a pillow stuffed between my back and the cold metal bar of the futon’s frame. And, in keeping with his nature, Matt lounged rather than sat, his baggy jeans and black Deftones t-shirt hanging off him.
Matt looked at me and said, “Let’s get a game, yo.”
We’ve been doing this for years by 2002, the two of us passed the gate of adulthood, either too old to keep playing or playing for too long to stop. And I was 25 by then, older than him by a few years.
I motioned to the game console, and said, “Go ahead. The game’s in there.”
He turned on the black Playstation 2 and up popped our game of the moment, NFL 2K3 by Sega Sports. Video game football has always been a staple of ours, especially since we both enjoyed watching the sport at the time. We had both grown up rooting for the hometown team, the Chicago Bears, but in the years since, I stopped watching football. Too many brain injuries / domestic abuse scandals / macho bullshit made me feel wrong about it.
I have no idea how Matt feels about football now.
“Who are you going to be?” he asked me in his unhurried, dull drawl. If you didn’t know Matt, you would think he was perpetually disinterested, often muttering in a monotone and curling his bushy goatee into a mischievous smile. Hell, I knew Matt, and I often wondered how much of him was ever really there.
“Who are you going to be?” I asked him back. After a minute, he settled on the Chicago Bears, and I chose the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
“Fucking hungry, dude,” Matt stated as I kicked off to start the game.
The time was past ten p.m., and I asked, “Your Grandma didn’t make dinner?” Matt lived with his grandparents because he didn’t get on well with his stepfather, Tom, and didn’t make enough to live on his own.
“No man, I mean yeah, she made food, but I didn’t eat it. Homeless motherfuckers eat better than that!”
I got ready for my first series on defense. When playing video game football, I took the liberty of blitzing Matt’s quarterback with a linebacker. This is risky because it pulled the linebacker away from the zone he normally would be defending downfield, but it yielded great results when it worked. And it kept me from getting bored. Back then, I played a lot of video game sports, many more than I do now, and I needed to spice things up.
On the second play of the game, I lined up Buccaneer Derrick Brooks at the line of scrimmage and had him run at the Bears’ quarterback, Jim Miller. Wikipedia says that Brooks was a great player, good enough to go into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014. Miller wasn’t quite that good, but he did ok for himself. After retiring, Miller has done radio and still has a gig as a football analyst on local Chicago cable.
In the video game, my linebacker hit Matt’s quarterback as the quarterback was in the process of throwing the ball. This caused the pass to only fly a few yards downfield. One of my linemen was in a fortuitous position and caught the ball. He was soon tackled, and the ball was mine on my own fifteen-yard line.
“Cocksucker!” Matt yelled.
I said nothing and picked a pass play on the offensive menu. My quarterback, Brad Johnson, threw the ball to a receiver I didn’t know at the time, Karl Williams, and Williams caught the ball in the end zone. He danced in the digital representation of Raymond James Stadium, where the game was being played, complete with the mock pirate ship that loomed over the real end zone there. I kicked the extra point and was leading 7-0.
“So anyway, your dad got any beer?” Matt asked.
My dad had an open-fridge policy for Matt for a couple of years at that point, one of which wasn’t legal. Dad died in 2007, in the early morning after the Bears lost in Super Bowl XLI, due to alcoholism.
“Go check,” I said. “Probably. I know he bought a case yesterday. The cats were jumping in it.”
“Fucking cats,” Matt said as he received the kickoff once again.
“What’s wrong with cats?”
“They ain’t as cool as dogs, for one. Although,” he paused while his running back, Anthony Thomas, got tackled two yards past the line of scrimmage, “they can be fun.”
“I really don’t want to hear another pussy joke about my sister’s cats.”
Matt laughed as his quarterback threw a ball the receiver caught, then dropped it as my defensive player hit him. “Oh, you fucking punk! No man, when I was little, my stepfather had a cat. Did I tell you this? It was when him and my mom was going out. She brought me over to his apartment.”
I had not heard the story. I also have no idea what happened among Matt, his stepfather, and his mother after about 2009, when Matt and I had our falling out. The last I heard, his stepfather and mother still live in my parents’ old neighborhood.
Matt tried another pass, and this one wasn’t even close.
“This is some shady shit, right,” he started, “but they were like, doing it in the bedroom, and they left me with this cat in the dining room.”
I squinted back at him. “They were having sex with you there?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I guess my mom couldn’t find no one to babysit. I was pissed too. I remember I threw shit at their door and my mom made me stand and look at the wall in this little dining room.”
“Shit,” I said.
By this time, my defense stopped the Bears on three straight plays, and Matt stupidly tried to go for fourth down instead of doing the safe thing and punting away.
“Anyway,” Matt said, “I was bored, and I never liked that fucking cat anyway, so I picked him and threw him out the window.”
“How far up?”
“Like five stories.”
I stopped him again and took over on offense.
“And he lived?” I asked. I actually took my eyes off the screen long enough to watch his reply.
He nodded with a straight face. “Yeah man, he didn’t break anything either, he was fine.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
Matt didn’t admit his lie, but he didn't embellish it either. In the next series, I ran the ball a few times through my running back, Michael Pittman. Wikipedia doesn’t have a lot on Michael Pittman. It doesn’t have much on Karl Williams, either.
After that, I failed to connect on a short pass, then succeeded on a few short passes. And then I threw another touchdown pass to Karl Williams.
“What the fuck!” Matt ejaculated. “Am I even pressing the right buttons for this team?”
“Bears are good this year,” I muttered as if to apologize as I had my kicker kick the extra point again. I was referring to the team stats, meaning how strong the video game made the Bears based on their real-life attributes. What I said may have been true—I don’t remember—but the team I picked won the real championship at the end of that season. We didn’t know that yet, of course, but we knew enough to know I had picked the better team. Or, at least, I knew.
“Whatever,” Matt said. “Yeah, though, that wasn’t all I did to that cat.”
“What else?”
“This other time, I fed him some of Tom’s prescription medication.”
“Was Viagra even invented back then?” I asked.
Matt laughed. “I doubt it. He didn’t have a hard-on anyway. He was too fucked up. Dude, it was so fucked up he didn’t move at all the whole day, not even to his litter box.”
Matt was laughing by the time he finished, and I asked, a bit annoyed, “And you’re proud of this?”
“No man, fuck it, whatever, it was ok. It didn’t die. Tom’s a dick anyway.”
I didn’t argue with that. Tom was an awkward, vaguely dickish man when I knew him. Still, maybe the passage of time has granted me a little wisdom because I have to acknowledge that Tom had been dealt a very awkward, vaguely dickish hand when he married into Matt’s family. There may have been mitigating circumstances.
“That cat was cool though,” Matt drawled on. “You could kick it in its ass all day and he wouldn’t say anything about it.”
Without really expending any effort, I got the ball back once again. I chose a deep pass play and Williams got another touchdown, this one about sixty yards long. Before that game, I didn’t know anyone named Karl Williams even played wide receiver for Tampa Bay, but damned if he hadn’t just caught three touchdowns for me.
The score was 21-0 at the end of the first quarter and 35-0 by halftime. Matt had barely done anything against my defense. He had only even come close to scoring once.
“You want to call it?” I offered. We would do that on occasion, consider a game over once one of us—usually me—got so far out in front that there could be no doubt as to the outcome.
“Nah, I got nothing better to do.”
“Well, I do, if we’re going out for food later. And I’m expecting a call from Kristin. Her friend needs help on some paper.”
Kristin was my girlfriend at the time. We went out from late 2000 to the middle of 2007. Well, officially August 2007, right after my grandmother died and six months after my father died. She told me we were basically done in August 2006. For a year after that, we did a combination of me hanging on in the most delusional manner possible and her stringing us along on a wait-and-see basis.
Either way, it was her idea to break up. And to tell me—a couple of years after the fact, of course, so as not to invite blame—that she had cheated on me.
Time and wisdom have done a real number on how I think about Kristin, but all of that was ahead of us. At the time, 2002, I thought she was the one.
Matt smiled. “Great. How can I get involved.”
It wasn’t a question. Matt would speak question sentences without any inflection at the end, and you were still supposed to fully understand.
“You can’t,” I told him. “Kristin doesn’t even want you talking to—”
I won’t mention the friend’s name here. I will say that the story about her and Kristin made me uncomfortable. They had grown up together but had drifted apart so badly that Kristin actively avoided her…behind her back. To her face, Kristin was still friendly, doing things like offering her English major boyfriend’s help as if nothing had changed between them. And although the friend must have noticed her BFF barely acknowledging her after 2001 or so, she never said anything about it.
Are they like that to this day? I have no idea. Because of the nature of the women involved, they could very well still be.
Or maybe they’re like me and Matt, and all they have left are memories of fun times in basements.
“Oh, that girl,” Matt said.
I was on offense again. “Right.”
“That girl who’s drowning in a sea of chubby,” he chuckled as I threw my second incomplete pass of the drive.
That wasn't nice. The friend was overweight, but neither Matt nor I—then or now—had any room to make fun of anyone’s weight.
“Stop,” I said. “You’re the one who wants her number.”
It was this kind of misogynistic / childishly needy manner that kept Matt single for so long. He was so desperate that he latched on to the mention of single female friends like a cat high on Viagra. But once he was even close to a woman, he insulted her. I think he thought of it as courting.
“Yeah man, I don’t care. Fat is cool. I’ll bang her.”
As far as I’d been told by this point in 2002, you could count the number of times Matt had sex on one hand. Even if you lost three of those fingers in a tragic boating accident.
Since then, he’s had at least one long relationship that I knew about, and it was incredibly toxic. I believe they had a child together, so he probably had sex then.
Meanwhile, in the video game, I had done nothing positive and had to punt the ball away. Since sometime around the middle of the second quarter, I had been coasting and not really trying.
“No, you won’t bang her,” I said. “Kristin already told you she won’t hook you up with her.”
“What’s the problem?”
I told him what I had been told. “Kristin says you’re too much like her brother,” I explained. “You two wouldn’t be good for each other.”
Who knows if the thing about the brother was right or not? It seems like a story to me now. Probably, Kristin used it as a cover for both of us: Matt and me. Having Matt obsessively calling her friend day and night while joking about her weight was not something to be wished on any woman, lapsed friend or no. And Kristin didn’t want to break it to me that my good friend was an immature oaf that I needed to leave behind.
“Moooooooooooooo,” he mooed. He had completed a couple of passes by this time and was actually threatening to get past mid-field.
“Moo all you want,” I told him as he threw another completed pass to the left sideline. “Your dick wouldn't care.”
“You’re right, beer says it all.” I was prepared to question the logic of that when Matt added, “And with her, lots of it.”
“Shut up.”
Matt floundered on another couple of plays. He was stuck around his own thirty-five-yard line.
“Listen, at least let me get her screen name,” he said. “Let me fuck with her online.”
Another relic of 2002: young people still “fucked with” each other on AOL Instant Messenger back then.
“Yeah, that’s a smart move,” I said.
“Come on, let me…” and he interrupted himself as David Terrell, one of his wide receivers, caught a ball in the corner of his end zone. “Finally, I get something!”
I silently agreed. The game was getting tedious, and by then I had been silently begging for Matt to give me some competition for two quarters.
“If I gave you her screen name,” I started, “you’d have to change yours so she didn’t know it was you.”
I think I was just playing around. Would I have ever really given him her screen name? One way or another, it never actually happened.
Matt laughed. “It’s got to be something to do with a food group, like chocolate sauce.”
I laughed then too, which I’m not proud of today.
“Maybe ‘Igotcheese,’” I said.
“Whowantssyrup,” he countered.
“Mydadownsawendys.”
“Allforfat.”
“Imifyoulikewaffles,” I snickered.
“Floatacoke,” he said.
“Snickerssnickers.”
“Ineedbeer.”
“I don’t think she likes beer,” I objected.
“No, I mean I need a beer. I’m really thirsty. Want to call it?”
I did. The score was 42-7 when we laid down the controllers on the basement floor and got off the creaky futon. I turned the system off.
“I’d like food if you still want to go,” I told him as we walked to the stairs.
“Yeah, let’s get that.”
I looked at my digital clock radio—the one I got for my birthday in 1984 and still operates today—and said, “It’s late though. Probably have to get White Castle or Taco Burrito King.”
My stomach doesn’t relish either late at night here in my old age, but back then, screw it.
“That’s fine,” Matt said. “Dude, after missing dinner, I’m so hungry right now I could hit up an orphanage and try to get some food off them.”
“That would be interesting,” I said.
Matt stopped on the stairs to look back at me, an unfortunate move since his baggy jeans and baggy boxers failed him and gave me an unintended view of a hairy butt crack.
“Yeah, I bet the woman over there would be like,” and he assumed a high, feminine voice, “‘Excuse me, son, are you a registered orphan? ‘Cause if you’re not, we can’t give you any food...’”
And that’s what I miss.
The video games were cool, but they were always the conduit, not the main draw. What I really miss is sitting around and talking and firing off those riffs on the ridiculous, when Matt would hit on a line so magical and unique that I would have to write it down, and then write a whole nonfiction essay around it for class, like I did back then. That’s how I can remember this over 20 years later.
Matt had a lot of faults, and probably still does, and there were / are good reasons we stopped hanging out. It wasn’t the same in 2009 as it was in 2002, when we played that game in my parent’s basement, or in the early ‘90s when we first met, and it wouldn’t be the same now.
It doesn’t mean I don’t miss him. I’ve met some amazing people in my life since we stopped speaking to each other, including my wife, and now, our daughter. I’ve met people and done things and all of it. But no one has ever popped me quite like Matt could, and he would do it without even trying.
Registered orphans. What does that even mean?