Three Games I Don’t Know How To Play

1. Poker

I tried to learn how to play poker once. My teachers were David and his roommate, a skinny inveterate pot smoker whose hands were all but permanently stained by ink from the printer’s shop where he worked. His name was Willie.

We were sitting in Dave and Willie’s living room, and I was learning how to bet and how to call and what cards in what combination were important and what cards and what combinations were worthless. The cards were dealt and we played and I lost. The cards were dealt again and we played and I lost again. Again the cards were dealt and again I lost. I lost hand after hand.

It won’t be any surprise to anyone who knows me that I am a sore loser. I am not just a sore loser, I am the worst kind of sore loser: I am a sore loser who turns immediately into a sore winner after a single success. However losing badly, to a sore loser, is psychologically taxing. (I’m sure you feel really bad for me. Well, forget it.) The saving grace was that we weren’t playing for money so it was at least not financially disastrous.

As we played, David’s landlord (who was also Willie’s father) wandered in through the always unlocked door that connected his apartment to those of his tenants. Had David’s landlord been my landlord, I would’ve nailed several two by fours across that door to ensure that the landlord had zero access to my place, because that guy was more than a bit shady. First, there was the fact that he made his living through several pursuits that ranged from strange to disquieting. Renting apartments was the least offensive thing he did. He also owned a pet crematory that was, long after Dave had ceased to be his tenant, found to be cheating the poor pet owners who had entrusted him with their loved ones’ remains. At the same time that he was found to be handing over bags of random pet ashes to grieving pet owners, he also showed up on the news because he was wanted in connection with at least one incident that involved at least one twelve-year-old girl, a pink nightgown, and a Polaroid camera. The landlord’s name was Bill.

Bill wandered in and began to watch the game. He loved to play poker, so I asked if he wanted to help me. Glad to be asked, he immediately drew over a chair and sat down next to me at the table. I held the cards, but he played them. As he pruned the cards in my hand, throwing out cards that I would have kept and keeping cards that I would have thrown out, I shook my head at his foolish, illogical thinking--and then I won the hand. I won that hand and the cards were dealt again and I won again. Hand after hand, I held the cards for Bill as he played poker. I didn’t ask him why he was making the decisions he was making about the cards because it seemed like a kind of magic trick and I didn’t want to spoil the effect for myself. And besides, I was winning.

After a time, Bill grew bored and with a few courteous words, he stood up and left. I immediately began to lose again. Having tasted success, I was not about to return to failure, so Dave, Willie, and I ended the game. I don’t remember what we did after, but it probably involved some illegal substance and a lot of cable television and snacks.

I haven’t played poker since.

Maybe Bill was a creepy pet crematory-owning, apartment-renting pedophile, but he played poker like a dream.

2. Any Kind Of Video Game

When I was young, my brothers and I loved video games. One of the earliest technological additions to our home (after TV and radio) was a Nintendo. We loved that Nintendo and would play our only game, Pong, for hours. At the time the arcades were filled all the popular games, Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, Space Invaders and Burger Time My mom used to take us to the video arcade and hand us a bunch of quarters and let us go. Then she would take a handful of quarters herself and go and play Q-bert.

My mother loved video games then and she still loves video games now. She still plays and, having worked her way up from Nintendo, she has bought so many game players that I lost track years ago of what kind she has now. I also have no idea which games she favors, though I remember that for a long time, she loved The Mario Bros. various incarnations and The Legend of Zelda. But me? In the parlance of today’s youth, I suck at video games and I don’t play them anymore.

I think, in part, it has to do with some crossed wiring in my head. No, really. I am right handed but left eyed, and I used to have to play video games by holding the controls with my hands crossed at the wrists. They didn’t make sense otherwise.

I am also easily frustrated and generally lack the patience to try the same move over and over until I perfect it. That isn’t just with video games, it’s with everything. I would rather bash my way through a novel solution than continue to tinker with the old solution until it works. With video games, there is often only one solution--making Mario jump at just the right time to cross a bridge, for example--and that solution is a matter of practicing the timing of the move, a fact that makes me more than a bit crazy.

Having said that, I have to admit that I was, for a time, addicted to Tetris, the game where the blocks of various shapes fall and you have to turn them and fit them into an unbroken line. After Dave brought home Tetris for our computer, I played for hours and hours, day after day, week after week. I finally made myself stop because I opened a book one day and saw the uneven right edge of a printed page and tried to imagine how I would have to turn which blocks in which direction to make them fit that particular jagged edge.

Since then, I haven’t (except for a few hands of computer solitaire on the computer at the studio) played video games. Though I often habitually and enthusiastically engage in useless pursuits, when it comes to video games, my claim is that I just don’t understand the desire to engage in such useless pursuits.

3. Love

One could argue that love is not a game, but that would be a foolish argument. Love is the biggest game of all. Of all the games one plays, love has the highest stakes and casino owners weep at what people spend in quest of even the most minute payoffs. When it comes to love, I am one of those people who have absolutely no skill and no luck. I attribute this shortcoming (with no blame or gratitude whatsoever) to my father, because the first time I fell in love was, of course, with him.

My father, when I fell in love with him, was a tall, handsome man, solidly built. He was funny and sociable and people liked him though they didn’t much respect him. When I was very young, he worked in a small bakery and I would sometimes be taken by my mother to visit him while he worked. His white work clothes smelled of sugar and stale cakes and yeast bread and long after our love affair ended, I couldn’t enter a bakery without thinking of him. At home he smelled of spiced after shave and cigarettes and beer. He was almost always drunk when he wasn’t working, and when he was drunk he played the guitar. I loved singing with him. Our song was John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane.”

My father kept a large collection of pornography. His collection was so extensive that we--my brothers and I--could not help but have access to it. There were boxes and boxes of magazines in the cuartito, the shed, out behind the house. The closet in the bedroom he shared with my mother was stacked with magazines and videos. The small space beneath the sink in the bathroom off their bedroom was filled with magazines. I made my way through magazines that were filled with images of voiceless desire, white women in varying states of undress, luridly and professionally coiffed and made up, posed in a range of open-mouthed and spread-legged positions, vividly photographed in every imaginable setting. By the time I was ten, I had seen more pornographic images than most men will see in their lifetimes.

I was about three when I fell in love with my father and perhaps five when I fell out of love with him, though our relationship lasted another thirteen stormy years. Loving a man like my father was serious and disastrous and I am still cleaning up the wreckage of our breakup. Though I haven’t seen or spoken to him since I was eighteen, the consequences of our love reach far into my existence. I unthinkingly measure men against my father. It is for varying resemblance or lack of resemblance to him that I pursue the men that I pursue and spurn the men that I spurn. I adore musicians, for example, but would never love a man who kept any pornography or drank to excess.

But that said, I find that I am a failure at relationships and more often than not, I chose not to play. Yes, there have been relationships. I fall in love quickly and I fall out of love quickly and none of the lessons about this seem to stick, and I dislike the feeling of lessons repeating themselves, so I have, in the past, chosen not to play.

But I Love Games

You might think from all this that I dislike games. In fact, the exact opposite is true: I love games. I especially love mind and other games that have no rules. I say this, but I say it with the caveat that this belief about loving rule-less games is sorely tested in Japan. Let me explain.

Last Wednesday, I went to Kaisha reprogramming--er, training in Nishi-Shinjuku where I ran into M-chan. M-chan happened to be sitting at another table, across from a somewhat distressingly handsome Japanese teacher. At the first break, I went over and spoke briefly to M-chan before heading downstairs for a smoke. Because M-chan is one of those people who draws other people to him, I wasn’t surprised when I turned the corner back into the building and came across him and a couple of other foreign teachers--and the handsome teacher who had been sitting across from him, Ma-kun.

I said hello and introduced myself to Ma-kun and we chatted for a bit. M-chan being who he is, he invited a crowd of people to lunch. I was initially hesitant to join them as I had to get back to The Kaisha branch where I work to teach that evening, and I hadn’t prepped a single lesson. However, I decided to go and was glad I did because it turns out that Ma-kun was also among those going.

Ma-kun and I rode down in the elevator together and I told him about unexpectedly having run into my assistant manager in the station that morning. She had been on the way to the head office for a meeting, and as we waited for the elevator together, she had looked at a group of big Western men and said to me, in English, “There are so many gaijin!” I had taken her distress as a joke until she tried to hide behind me in the elevator. I told this to Ma-kun, and he remarked mildly that it was sometimes distressing for Japanese to be around so many foreigners.

Ma-kun and I walked with the others to the restaurant and as we walked, we talked. I say we talked, but by that, I mean that he talked and I asked questions and listened and made small comments about the things he said. The restaurant was across the street from The Kaisha head office and all we had to do was walk up a third of a block, cross the street at the crosswalk, and walk down a third of a block on the other side of the street. In the time it took to make this short walk, he told me that he learned his English in Tokyo and Canada, where he had lived for five years. He told me that he had taught English as a second language in Canada. I asked which ethnic populations he taught and he said mainly Mexican and other Asians. He told me that he had grown up near Yokohama, and that he also spoke French and some Hindi that he learned because he liked Bollywood movies. He told me that he had moved back to Japan about seven months before, that he had been working for The Kaisha for about four months. He told me that he was planning eventually to move back to the small town near Yokohama to help his parents take care of his sick grandmother.

At the small Indian restaurant where we were to lunch, our group of eight was split into two: M-chan and three other foreign teachers sat at a table, but Ma-kun and I and two other Kaisha employees (one a foreign teacher, one a Japanese assistant manager) were seated at a long counter that faced a wall. I happened to sit at the end of our group of four, and Ma-kun sat next to me and we ordered our lunch. He had curry and naan and I had tandoori and rice and as we waited for our food and as we ate, we talked. Unasked, he told me his TOEIC score. The TOIEC is an exam that students can take to measure their English abilities and his score was high enough that it put him in a category that most native English speakers couldn’t achieve. Close now to thirty, he went to Canada after graduating from college. I asked where he had gone to school and what he had studied, and it turns out that he had gone to a prestigious science university in Tokyo and had a degree in electrical engineering. He told me that now he’s trying to save money but that he had recently bought an exercise bike and gotten a gym membership. I asked which gym and it turns out that he is also a Konami-ist. He also told about wanting to return to school for a master’s degree so that he could continue to teach English. We talked about The Kaisha method of teaching and it’s relative advantages and disadvantages.

You may be asking why was he was doing most of the talking. Well this is Japan, which is on the planet Earth, and here, on planet Earth, men do most of the talking. As is the case the world over, women still have the reputation for being the noisy sex, but as is the case the world over, it is the men who talk the most. Unlike in the US, the men here feel no compunction about being the talkers. They don’t even pretend that to give equal time to women here. This is Japan, and this is the right of Japanese men.

But I still found him hellishly attractive. It was clear that he also found me attractive and he was definitely flirting. He was flirting, but it was as though he had learned how to flirt from a book. He didn't touch me--this is still Japan--but he bragged mildly as he tried to show himself off in the best possible light. He complimented me and made a very slight--so slight as to be barely perceptible--sexual reference to test me. I responded lightly and could see that he was pleased with my response. Later, as we were leaving the restaurant, he gave me his e-mail.

The next day I emailed him and told him that I had enjoyed talking with him. I suggested that I would like the opportunity to talk with him again. I sent my phone number with my e-mail, putting the ball in his court. He didn’t call, but he did send back an e-mail thanking me. He wrote that he would definitely like to get together again and to that end, he sent his own phone number. The ball in my court again, I sent an e-mail suggesting that we get together for coffee this weekend. His reply was that he was busy this weekend, but would reexamine his schedule and see if he could find time for a coffee.

Enough, I though.

My reply began with a cheerful “No worries!” and veered through the expected territory of “maybe another time” before finally ending up with a “Have a nice weekend!” And then I let it go.

You might at this point be asking: What about the Ex-Student? Well, of course, that’s all done, just petered out. They don’t do drama in Japan really, so that the thing with the Ex-Student has just sort of faded out, ending the way movies often end, with some bit of forgettable moral. This time that moral happens to be about about dating men a decade younger than oneself and I choose to go with that moral rather than with the “dating outside of one’s culture” moral because, of course, I am still interested in dating in Japan. Anyway, the point is that the thing with the Ex-Student is finished and that it finished more pleasantly than not (which is a welcome change) and now it’s time to move on.

And move on.

And move on.

I’m lousy at games. I can’t play most of them and I don’t play the rest. I don’t like to gamble and I like even less to lose when I do gamble, so of course I always lose. I’m a sore loser and I’m a sore winner and this is the worst possible combination. And, too, love is a lousy game. It’s a lousy game and I’m a lousy player. It’s a lousy game and I’m a lousy player and I’m sore when I win and I’m sore when I lose, but I’ve decided to play anyway. Because I love games.