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My big brother Roy and I played Mario 3 until midnight, every night, all summer. We had our Nintendo in the basement. Sometimes, my mother brought my baby brother Clint downstairs, and we had to watch him. He was only two then. We never wanted to watch him. He always wanted to watch us.
In the basement were a sofa bed and a television. There was also a sliding glass door leading to the patio. My mom's friend, our neighbor, had a son in college at Wichita State University. His name was Heath. Tall, gawky guy with curly hair. Long fingers. Tinted glasses, lots of acne. He had a Casio keyboard in his basement. Sometimes, me and Roy went over to his basement, to listen to him play his keyboard, or watch him play Ultima on his PC. He was the coolest guy in the world, as far as we were concerned.
That guy came over sometime, in the mornings, before work. He worked as drive-thru guy at Spangles, a central-US burger joint. I don’t know if they're still around. My dad got promoted to a major, and we moved to Maryland the next summer. I haven’t been back to Kansas since 1990.
Heath took us to Spangles, long before I was a vegetarian, long before talk of Star Wars Episode I, the day we went to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Heath got our food for free, cementing his position as the coolest guy in the world. I always liked Spangles’ burgers: the cheese was never fully melted. They had a seating area with greenhouse windows and natural lighting. The not fully melted cheese, the natural lighting, the ice in my Dr. Pepper: these things cemented the experience as real. That’s why I still remember. As we ate, we talked of Mario 3.
“I want to beat the game, someday,” I said, “without warping.”
“Without warping?”
By the end of June, Heath had gotten better than my brother and I. He was the first one of us to beat the game. He showed us the ending, and we watched. It was like a three-hour movie, his route through the game. His playing was nearly flawless.
As flawless as mine is, right now. The game is paused. Mario is in mid-jump, halfway through the final airship in World Eight. I will unpause the game, and land the jump. When I feel like it.
Mario does not fall for me, not anymore.
Heath bought the game shortly after I did. Still, he came over to our basement to play. Seeing how I've turned out, I'm guessing he played the game until past three in the morning to get so good.
One cloudy day in late July, Heath came over to attempt “the ultimate challenge.”
We’d been talking about it for weeks.
He was to beat the game “non-warp.”
He was to beat every level.
He was to do this without any 99-life tricks. On one continue.
He did it. It took four hours. By the time he got to World Seven, it was raining horribly outside. I hadn’t even seen half of the levels in World Seven until that day.
It was raining, and the thunder was rumbling. Heath got up to go to the bathroom. Roy flipped through my Nintendo Power Mario 3 strategy guide. I stood by the sliding glass door to the patio, looking out across the courtyard, at the rain. It was getting muddy. Four inches of rain had collected on the ground. Just two days earlier, it had been 116 degrees.
It sure did rain, that day. The square of pavement my mother called a “patio” was soaked. Water was sweeping toward the door. I put my hand against the glass, and felt it. It was cold. I kept my hand against the cold glass as I looked outside.
Before Heath came downstairs from the bathroom, it stopped raining. The cold glass door started shaking. Somewhere, above the clouds, there was a B-1 bomber streaking across the sky.
I wouldn’t be moved by the ending of a videogame until, later, Roy and I watched Heath conquer Ninja Gaiden in his own basement, on his own small television.
As that non-warp game of Super Mario Bros. 3 ended, I almost felt like crying.
I recalled the Friday at the video store, months earlier, when they said they didn’t have the game. During school, I had planned my whole rainy weekend around that game. I think I might have cried, then, when they said they didn’t have the game. I don't remember. It doesn't matter.
“So what if they don't have it?” my mother asked. “Get over it. Grow up.”
She’d told me to grow up. I cried, maybe, and I don't know why I cried.
That day, the day the B-1 bombers from McConnell were flying touch-and-goes above the gray clouds, the day my neighbor's college-student son beat Mario 3 non-warp, I wanted to cry because, perhaps, I was realizing something final. Finality has a history of making one cry. This one was pretty potent. It was like the last line of a Haruki Murakami story:
Without fail, I will play this game for the rest of my life.
It meant I would never grow up.
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