I had just popped open the neon-green clamshell to Assassin's Creed 2, anxiously ready to embark on one of 2009's hottest videogames a couple of weeks after I had received the game for Christmas. Ever since I was three years old, I've spent a large portion of the winter months holed up, sitting Indian-style in front of a TV while play videogames and keeping myself as caffeinated as possible.
I powered up my XBox 360, ready to kill shit. I'm perennially three years old when it comes to videogames.
Words could not express the fury I experienced when I received the Red Ring of Death.
]]>The only other people within a visible radius were the other people who had taken the Bolt Bus with me from New York, and a couple of wandering tranny prostitutes who were clearly new at this. If there are any newbie tranny prostitutes looking to make a quick buck in our nation's capital, head over to Georgetown and Capitol Hill. That's where our closeted elected officials with deep pockets live.
After hopping on the Metro, two things quickly occured to me about the city that I used to call home:
]]>Until I somehow lost my license. Obviously.
This left me in a bit of a Catch-22: my ID was a valid Ohio driver's license. In order to get a New York state driver's license after misplacing your out-of-state ID, you need, among other things, a social security card.
]]>But when I moved to Brooklyn, I had to start from scratch.
]]>It was a Thursday in December. It was absolutely frigid outside. And at that point, I was about to lose my job.
]]>Kids at my high school in Ohio called me gay on the virtue that I carried a messenger bag as opposed to a Jansport backpack (nice purse, fag!) and because I had no passion for sports other than my aggressive pursuit of underage drinking.
As you can probably tell, I was pretty adverse to sunlight - so much to the point that when my parents would plan vacations to semi-exotic locales like Cancun or Hilton Head that involved venturing south of the Mason-Dixon, I'd skip out. Instead, I'd get a plane ticket to New York City along with a little bit of spending money. This happened annually for a three-year period, but the destination was always the same: my cousin Kevin's apartment; a third-floor walk up in a tenament around the corner from Liquiteria in the East Village.
Despite our significant age difference (11 years), we had been very close from the moment he threw a Genesis controller in my hands to play Golden Axe with him in the early 1990s. Looking back on it, I don't know how the fuck Kevin was able to tolerate the teenage version of me on an annual basis in his shotgun apartment for a week at a time.
My memory of exactly what happened is a little bit hazy. I remember sitting on Kevin's floor while his grey blob-shaped cat Quentin rubbed up against Sleater-Kinney jewel cases and Sega Dreamcast accessories. At some point, Kevin wandered over to his CD player and pressed play.