“Yes?”
It’s amazing how much meaning my dad can pack into one word. When he says “yessss?” in that tone, he’s saying, “Now what? Can’t you see I’m busy (watching something incredibly boring and meaningless on TV, like a golf tournament without Tiger Woods)? I’d rather not deal with it at all, but if it’s absolutely necessary, then make it quick.”
So I say through the door, “It will just take a sec.”
Then he says OK and I open the door. I have to stand there, in the doorway, until some no-name golfer finishes hitting a putt from about twelve inches, possibly the most boring televised sporting activity in the world. He putts, the ball barely rotates, excruciatingly slow across the screen. The ball hovers on the edge and then, finally, drops in. Polite applause. My dad turns and says it again.
“Yessss?”
“I’ve got this great opportunity,” I begin, trying to set up the pitch. My dad once gave me this lecture about the secret of sales. He travels around the Midwest selling some obscure service to small companies that can’t afford the really good service that the big companies buy from his competitor.
He arches his eyebrows, and I see I’ve actually, for a nanosecond, got his attention.
“Yeah, I won this big online tournament and I qualified for the Nationals in San Diego. I’ll have to fly in on June twenty-sixth and fly back on the thirtieth. I won the entry fee and I get a free hotel room. That’s worth around $600, about half the cost of going.”
Dad gets this puzzled look on his face and he runs his fingers through his hair. He’s pretty vain about his hair, which is still thick on top, a little gray above the ears. He keeps it fairly long and combed straight back, sometimes with this gel or grease.
“You telling me they have Nationals for all the dweebs who play computer games? What kind of title is that? King of the nerds?”
“OK,” I say, biting my tongue. “But seriously. It’s really hard to get the invite, and it’s a great opportunity. They’ve got $150,000 in prize money.”
I let this sink in for a few seconds, while he continues to stare at the TV, as if he’s worried about missing some amazing chip shot or hole in one, which is nuts, because every time there’s a really great shot they replay it at least a dozen times.
But he turns towards me and for at least a second I’ve got his attention. “Did you say 150 Gs?”
I nod my head.
“So how much you asking for?”
“I can a get a flight for around $400 and then a little something for food…”
“Bottom line, please,” he says, like he’s some big-shot CEO.
“I’ll need about $600, I figure.”
Now I’ve really got his attention.
“Six hundred. That’s a lot of money, Seth.”
“I know.” Knowing it is, and it isn’t. He and a girlfriend once spent that much on bar bills at Vegas in a weekend. Then again, I have to work at a fast food joint every weekend for six months to save that much.
“Six hundred bucks, huh.”
“Six hundred bucks.” It’s possible to have an entire conversation with my dad where every other line is a repetition of the previous one.
“OK. Let me get this straight. You need $600 to go play computer games with a bunch of geeks from across the country. You fly to San Diego, go sit down at a computer and pay to play for three straight days. What I want to know is, how is this different from what you do every day here, for free?”
“Well, for one,” I reply. “No one is putting up $150k in prize money.”
“And you’ve got a legitimate shot at this $150k?”
“Well, not all of it. No one wins it all. It gets divvied up into different events. Different specialties, it’s hard to explain. But I feel like I’ve got a shot at a piece of it.”
After the last online win, my rating jumped up twenty points, and that makes me fifth in the country.
My dad screws up his face in this way he does when he really thinking. Like it takes an awful lot of effort.
“OK,” he says. “I’ll make a deal with you.”
“A deal?” So typical. My dad thinks he’s this great wheeler dealer sales expert.
“I’m going to give you the money for this trip. Not lend it to you. Give it to you. On one condition.” He arches his eyebrows, waiting for me to ask him what the condition is.
“What condition?”
“You can go to California. Play with your nerd buddies into the wee hours. But when you come back empty-handed, that’s it. We forget this whole idea of playing the computer for money. In the meantime, you buckle down, get off that God-forsaken computer long enough to do your homework, stop skipping classes, get your GPA up, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be lucky enough to get into a fine university like your brother.”
So then we shake on it, just like two businessmen. And I get back to my computer and start working on my moves, because I’m going to have to play flawless. Or, as Mrs. Lawson, my English teacher would insist, flawlessly.
4.
The rest of the semester I worry about screwing up and having Dad take back my ticket to San Diego. So I go to all my classes (mostly) and do my homework (as fast as possible, mostly in other classes) and concentrate on getting a seat in English and history behind Brit so I can stare at her the entire class without being too obvious. Even if it’s just the back of her soft, shiny hair, I watch the way the light plays off as if it were some hypnotic kaleidoscope. And for at least that moment, the Starfare game playing in the back of my mind goes on pause.
A couple of weeks after Dad agreed to give me the cash I get an IM from my brother.
3-PointShooter: Hey
ActionSeth: Hey
3-PointShooter: Good going
ActionSeth: ?
3-PointShooter: Heard u got the old man to cough up the dough to send u to some tourney
ActionSeth: Yeah pretty amazing
Garrett, he’s not into gaming like I am, but at least he understands. When I was about nine a friend of his lent us his Nintendo 64 and we started playing Mario Kart. At first Garrett, who was fourteen, killed me, but I spent every waking hour working on it and after a couple of weeks I started winning. It was the first time I had beaten him at anything and he just shook his head and laughed and claimed it was unfair, that I was practicing too much. I think it bothered him a bit until I showed him the times I was posting online—I was in the top hundred in the country on a couple of courses.
We IM a little bit more about nothing much and then he wishes me luck at the tournament.
I’m spending every extra hour I can online, trying to get it together for Nationals. It’s a Wednesday night and I’m at Mom’s. I’ve drawn a game against this kid from Korea. No one famous—they would never mess around playing against crap Americans, but he’s got a really high rating and I’m just barely hanging on. I’m not even sure why I’m struggling. I’ve won at least twenty games in a row and feeling like I’m on my way to a really good showing at Nationals. And then this. The action is incredibly fast and I’m pounding on the keyboard, wheeling the mouse and trying to keep track of three fronts at once.
In an intense game like this, you’re in so deep the room around you just disappears. When you’re in the middle of a battle, and your fingers are flying across the keyboard, you’re not looking at the screen, you’re not playing at a game, you’re IN the game. Like those science