Gamer Goo

Everyone in the world is born with some capacity to feel shame. At least, that’s what I thought before I met Ricardo. If I were in his shoes, I don’t think I’d have the balls to do half the shit he does. Not that he’s particularly brave or anything. Well, it kinda depends.

I, for one, wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror if I’d spent the last hour and a half pinging someone repeatedly in a group DM.

He, on the other hand, has no qualms with smacking down his one-hundred-and-fiftieth notification just to let me know that he knows that I came online.

“Get on call get on call get on call get on call.”

It’s annoying, but unsurprising. Especially coming from the type of guy that’ll punch a hole into his wall while getting dunked on in-game and then go cry about it to his mom as she bandages up his hand. To make things worse, his mom is the kind of person that’ll walk out of the shower with her towel wrapped only around her waist despite the fact that her son is running a subathon stream and she doesn’t allow closed doors in the house. Basically put, saying the guy’s got issues is like saying that our government has a ‘slight overrepresentation of elderly caucasian males’.

I sigh and pour myself into my chair like a jello mold. My computer boots with its usual chortling tempest, and before I know it, I’m bombarded with a piercingly loud shitpost song of indeterminate Slavic origin.

“Dude,” Ricardo yells, in his regular speaking voice. “Where were you? I’m not gonna carry myself to diamond over here.”

Brown Jim and Douglas snicker, their mics peaking over something inane in their shared boarding room background.

“Chill,” I reply, “I had to go outside for a bit.”

There’s a strange, chaotic rustling on the other end of Ricardo’s mic, and for a second I fear that the family of raccoons broke into his room again.

“A bit?” He replies, “We deranked twice in the time you were gone!”

“You’re the only person I know that can derank twice in two hours, you know that?”

“Not true, dude. BJ and Doug were right there with me. You wouldn’t believe how many hackers we had to face, right guys?”
Doug replies for the both of them. “Can’t hear you from the bottom of the scoreboard.”

“No way, dude. I was carrying you!”

I feel a migraine coming on, and I’m not even halfway to 40.

“Do you guys want to queue or not?” I ask.

A remarkably thunderous female voice echoes in Ricardo’s background, yelling something about the dishes and the trash.

“I already said I’d do it, Ma! Shut up already and calmase!”

Wrong move, Ricky. Wrong move.

Footsteps stomp up to the mic at a mile a minute, and I hear him let out a girlish yelp. Sighing, I whip out my phone. After a stall-heavy pokemon showdown match’s worth of getting impromptu facial reconstruction surgery with la chancla, I hear Ricardo’s indignant sniffles return to the PC.

“Wait,” he mumbles, “My mic wasn’t muted?”

Ya think?

BJ had deafened himself, and Doug was long gone from the call but is still spamming me invites from in-game. Ricardo plays a loud bang from his soundboard to change the subject and proceeds to also spam-invite me.

“Wait a second,” I plead, my ears ringing with blings and beeps, “God, you guys are desperate.”

“You’re the one that stood us up, dickweed.”

My monitor flickers as the game boots, and it makes this strange high pitched whine that I’ve never heard before. I look around in a panic for loose cables, knowing that I’m gonna need double the advil if I’m not in their match within five seconds. I smack the side of it out of sheer desperation. And it works. The barrage of notification sounds dies out as the menu theme deafens me in its stead.

“I told you already,” I say, “I had to go out, dumbass.”

I can practically hear Ricardo’s shit-eating grin. “On a date with your dad again?”

BJ swoops in for his habitual, singular well-timed insult before once again deafening:

“Did he at least buy you dinner first?”

I bury my face in my palms, and take a deeeep breath.

“Not that you deserve to know, but I was hanging out with a girl.”

“Ooo,” Ricardo says, “So it was your mom then.”

“My dad always told me not to stick it in crazy, so no.”

I hear him snort with glee as he readies us for the queue. “What, did she try to take you on one of her crazy roadtrips again?”

If I don’t roll with it, I’m gonna get rolled over.

“Oh yeah, it was wild,” I reply, “She pulled up to my place all covered in soot and waving a fire axe and said ‘hop in’.”

“Wait, really?”

“Of course not, dipshit.”

“Wait,” he balks, as if he’s out of breath. “Were you actually out on a date with a girl?”

I pause, watching the estimated match timer tick up. That actually… wasn’t a date. Right? I mean, she brought her friend along and everything. Then again—and not that I would know what a date was if it hit me in the face—but it was mostly just the two of us vibing. Which is most of a date, I’d think. But I shouldn’t presume anything. It dawns upon me that not only was nothing ever established, but I wasted my chance to clear it up in asking her to hang out again.

“Nah,” I reply, before Ricardo’s ADD can kick in. “We were just hanging out.”

“She hot?”

“Of course that’s the first thing you ask. But yeah, I guess so.”

“She single?”

Of course that’s the second. But on second thought, it’s not a bad question. She did seem quite insistent that ‘B-dog’ had nothing to do with her in that way.

“I think so?”

“Duuude. What the hell, man? And you’re not on it?”

The face I make in reply might just be one of the only things in the world that could make him shut up. Shame we’re on a voice call.

“She’s way out of my league,” I explain. “No way in hell a kissless virgin like me has a chance with her.”

Ricardo laughs so hard his mic breaks out in hives. The kind of effortlessly cruel, blatantly brainless laugh that probably makes his mom glad she has two other kids.

“You’re probably not wrong,” he says. “But you’re wrong about one thing, dude.”

I raise an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

“It’s not like I want to give you any credit, but you’re definitely not a virgin.”

With a sigh, I reply, “Very funny.”

“Nah, I’m serious, man. Remember that rager back in freshman year?”

Thinking back to anything before the beginning of the semester sends a raptor claw down the length of my spine. I don’t really make a habit of tracking how I embarrass myself over the years.

“What rager.”

“You know, the one at my place? I snuck some of my dad’s tequila from his cabinet before my folks left to visit home?”

“I’m surprised you’d remember anything involving alcohol.”

“You would think, right? But I know exactly who was at that party. It was me, you, and White Jim. Then Jim brought over all these seniors, and the seniors brought a bunch of chicks with them.”

“Is that so,” I reply, increasingly expectant of an impending ‘your mom’ joke.

“Yeah, I swear bro. I didn’t even drink like that, you feel me? So I remember it pretty well. One of the seniors started a chug circle, and things got kinda wild. That’s when Jim fell over and lost that tooth to my coffee table, remember?”

Amid my mindless nodding along, the most terrifying glint of familiarity shone through his idiotic epic. At the very least, I remember that WJ has definitely been down a tooth ever since that rough timeframe.

“Yeah,” I say. “That sounds about right, I guess.”

“Look, so get this. We start playing white knuckle, and you chicken out. But chicken has to chug the rest of the bottle, you know. So get this, you’re standing there pissing yourself like some kind of pissbaby, and then out of nowhere you grab the bottle right out of my hands and go to town.”

I… Admittedly, sort of do remember something of the sort.

“And?”

“Well, next thing I know, but you’re talking to this one girl. I mean, she was pretty ugly, but it’s like the only time I seen you ballsy enough to talk to a girl. Then you came back afterwards and almost threw up. So I went to get you some snacks from the kitchen, and when I came back you were gone. Things get a bit blurry, but I think me and the guys were messing around with this watermelon, like seeing who could punch it open, and then boom. I really need to take a piss.”

“Strange focus on the pee there, bud.”

“Shut up, dude, I’m still getting to the best part. So I’m going upstairs to take a piss, and I thought I heard something strange in the walls, like maybe the raccoons came back. All these shifting and chittering sounds n’ stuff. But like, it’s not my problem, it’s Ma’s. So I just keep walking. And I’m creeping past my sister’s room when the sounds get real loud for a second. Obviously, I look in the door. And what do you think I see?”

“Your…sister?”

“Your mom,” BJ pipes in, before blinking out of existence again.

“Nah, man,” Ricardo says, “It was you and that chick in my sister’s bed!”

Ah. So he’s just messing with me.

“No shot,” Doug comments, as if he’d heard anything but the last couple seconds after joining back in.

“Yeah, I don’t remember that happening at all,” I say.

I’ll admit, some bits and pieces of a rowdy party from back in freshman year are indeed coming back to me. But you’d think I’d remember something as momentous as-

“You were really going at it, dude. I had to wash the sheets before my fam came back and everything.”

Even if half of what he’s saying is true, there’s no way that last part is. For starters, his sister is actually a decent human being, so there’s no way I’d do her dirty like that. Not after all of those wholesome book club discussions we had about romance webtoons. And second off, even if I did really wind up hooking up with some random girl, it’s not like it magically changed anything. I’m still the same idiot stuck in the same cycle, talking to the same guys that’d goad me into chugging a third of a bottle of tequila.

“Whatever you say man,” I reply, increasingly convinced that this is just another one of his crappy RicanectodesTM.

“Nah bro, I ain’t lying.” He laughs like a hyena. “And the reason I’ll never forget it is ‘cuz you had her toes in your goddamn mouth!”

Shame slaps a red hot gag across my mouth and drags my stomach into my throat. I’d made a concerted effort over the years to dodge as many degenerate material-sharing discussions with the boys as possible. And as this exact kind of situation demonstrates, it was fairly reasonable of me. Because even though Ricardo shouldn’t (and doesn’t) know anything about anything, that one embarrassing detail just made his ridiculous story a single bit plausible.

I stew in silence as the after-echoes of the joke die down. Conveniently, Doug had left his mic on while his sister came into his room and started chewing him out about throwing his stained underwear in with her wash. The boys move on to their next roasting target, but I’m stuck thinking about that night. Now that it’s maybe half a lie instead of a whole lie, would that really change anything?

No, I decide. It’s not like that person’s in my life right now, regardless of whether or not they existed. Besides, I didn’t unlock some special achievement for losing my virginity—and even if I did, I don’t know a single person that looks at other people’s achievement scores unless they’re struggling to unlock them themselves. Even if it’s true—and it probably isn’t—I’ve lost nothing, gained nothing, and wound up waiting five minutes for the same mindless match as everyone else.

With a sigh, I mumble, “Could this physically take any longer?”

Instinctually, it feels like something’s watching me. I glance out my window.

Wouldn’t you know it, but there’s pigeons sitting on the power line across the street. They’re little more than black smudges through the grody glass. But they’ve been there. Just chilling in the background the whole time as if they’re set dressing. No, more like they own the place. I wonder how often they come by, and how long they stick around. Where they flew in from.

I wonder if this is how she feels.

The menu music gives way to a jarring beep. With a sigh, I click to accept the match and sign away the rest of the day.