Loser Kid

I need a break from the grind of mass producing sentences which after hours of what feels like endless copying and pasting are starting to read just like the Wikipedia or About.com posts they were taken from and paraphrased entirely and that is not at all good. (It was irresponsible of me to say that but there it is.  Moving on….)

This grand break, I have decided, will come in the form of writing for real, for oneself, for release, a practice I have been struggling to avoid because of its alleged weirdness. And the topic I’ve chosen: Me. Those who have been following my blogs – three or four very close friends and family who love me — know that I do not have the slightest interest in writing about anything else. 

Or talking about anything else for that matter.  In fact, I have so many anecdotes about me that I sort of collect them in my head, and make stand-up comedy routines of them.  They are heavily and very creatively tweaked for a captive audience of some two or three people with obviously nothing better to do or too polite to leave.

One of my favorites is the loser eight-year-old story. This is how it goes.

When I was kid, I used to play by myself a lot, which was really cool because most of the time, it didn’t really feel like I was the only one there. Chita was there and so were Diane, Daisy, Toa, Twinkle and a little plastic baby, whose name I now forget. We were one big happy family who lived in a house of sheets tied to a cupboard and the bed. We had a pet cat and dog, Yomiko and Floffy respectively. And we had toys too. 

We had Barbies, a walking talking doll, an awesome Jedi sword, a couple of remote control trucks and some puzzles. In case we got hungry, we had a complete kitchenware set to make ourselves a special meal.  It was a good home.

Maybe I dance on the border a little bit but I haven’t yet crossed over to crazy. I did want to play with other kids. So I would take Chita out and wander the neighborhood streets looking for party to crash.  I was a small kid, not very athletic, so I learned at very young age, that life is full of cruel disappointments. If the game played was a race, I’d finish last. If it was basketball, I couldn’t get the ball even remotely close to the ring.

Once, when we were playing hide and seek, my friends forgot to look for me. A very long time passed; the game went on without me because I was still crouched under some furniture sweating like a waterfall. Ever the optimist, I congratulated myself for having hidden so well it must be driving my friends crazy searching for my whereabouts. Ever the poker-faced realist, Chita suggested that maybe we had been forgotten and as usual, she was right.

I was so inept at street games that when we played tag, I’d be running along with the other kids—as fast and as enthusiastically as I can fearing for real the dreaded touch of death—but none of them really bothered to come after me. After a while, I did notice. I was what they called kamatis, the kid you allow to frolic along during games out of kindness but not out of real competition.  It wasn’t fun. So I would drag my ass back to the house of sheets and tell my stuffed family and pets all about the depressing play date I just had.

But I was smart and determined to establish a network of friends. So I decided to capitalize on the fact that I was the neighborhood spoiled brat who had the most fabulous toys within a hundred meters.  For one, I was the only one who had Atari.

The suckers did follow me home. A sympathetic accomplice, my mother would make them spaghetti and sandwiches.  I was so grateful I’d let them have the toys they liked. Just come back tomorrow, I’d say.

It is true that you never really grow out of certain traits. Over the years, you just learn to mask them with manufactured adultness. 

Twenty years later, that is how it remains. Barbies and Jedi swords turn into something else. Maybe a favor. A patient ear. Light and funny company. Flattery. A shoulder to cry on. A super human display of understanding. I’ve become a state-of-the-art smart vending machine of unusual treats expertly designed to give people what they need when they need it. Vending machines are very cool gadgets; they’re just there. They’re always just there at one corner with a sort of quiet stance that says please feel free to come back for more.  Not always, but once in a while, it ceases to be funny.  It’s not that I don’t love what I do because I do. I love what I do. There are just times though when I sit around and say to myself maybe, those who came just for the toys and special treats shouldn’t have been welcome in the first place.