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Number thirteen:
The day I touched a Panasonic Q, I'd have to say, was a pretty big deal.
It was January 5th, 2002. I was at the LAOX Sofmap in Akihabara, Tokyo. There was a Q behind a glass case. I was looking at it like I wanted to buy it. The guy who worked at the LAOX opened up the glass case, and was tinkering around with the Q. He had a little spray bottle of something, and a paper towel. He was going to clean off the Q.
I was looking at the Q -- maybe staring.
"Do you need help?" the guy cleaning the Q said.
"Can I -- touch it?"
"Sure."
So I touched the Q. That part that's reflective -- it's really smooth. It's smooth, maybe, because only the smoothest of plastic machines can play DVDs and Gamecube games.
I'm proud to say I touched a Q before any of my non-Japanese friends.
I was at that LAOX to buy a copy of Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World. I had to get home that night, to play mahjongg with my newfound friends. On my way out of the store, I grabbed a Q brochure. It hangs on my wall even today.
I played my Gameboy Advance on the way back up to Kami-Fukuoka that night. I couldn't play Super Mario World so well on Gameboy Advance -- what with the B button being up higher than the A button. In addition to this controller arrangement quirk, I was also standing up in a crowd of people. That might have had something to do with it.
That night, I played mahjongg with my new friends until two of them went home, and there were only three of us left. My hostess made tea. I helped put the mahjongg tiles into a Shanghai dragon as I talked to a married Japanese lesbian about Super Mario World. It was a little after eleven in the evening. I hadn't slept in a few days. I had a kind of buzzing headache.
We watched the evening news for a while, until the woman suggested that I turn on the Super Famicom, and check out the quests on the copy of Dragon Quest VI I'd picked up at the Trader2 store in Akihabara that morning.
On the box was a sticker: "The seal is defective."
In Japanese, a sticker, like the one used as a label for a Super Famicom game, is called a "seal."
I took the cartridge out of the box, and ran my thumb over the label. I couldn't sense a defect, not for the life of me.
I put the game in the machine, and started it. It worked like new. The music was familiar as always. The woman suggested I start playing the most-played quest.
"It's interesting to see where the last person was when they sold the game."
The last person was right at the end of the bonus dungeon. All of his/her party members were on level 91. I've saved that quest on my cartridge even today.
That night, I wandered that dungeon a little bit, destroying every monster I came across. The woman had taken up my Gameboy Advance; with the help of my Gamestop light, she could play Super Mario World even in the dark. My hostess finished in the kitchen, and joined us in the videogames. One of us played Dragon Quest VI, trying to figure out how the hell to beat the final dungeon, one of us played a level in Super Mario Advance 2, and the other removed tiles from the Shanghai while talking to the person playing Dragon Quest VI. It wasn't a bad setup.
It was my third turn at the controller when I realized I was in the middle of the oddest multiplayer gaming experience in my life, and for some reason, I kept thinking of that moment in Akihabara, me facing the Q, the guy with the spray-bottle and the paper towel:
Why was he cleaning the Q?
How dirty can it get, really, behind that glass?
Can I touch it?
[next: number twelve: no, let's not have any more fun]
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