When I was a kid I was forced to play with my cousins, as all kids are as far as I know. Maybe it’s a southern thing, but everyone I know has pretty much been forced to play with their cousins from time to time. My sister and I were four years apart, and one set of our cousins, Chris and Leslie, were about the same apart.
The only problem was that Chris and Leslie were a few years advanced, but in the world parent forum, that doesn’t mean shit. Kids are kids. We tried to make the best of it, though, I guess, although I’m pretty sure Chris hated me completely. I think this because he was into war and guns and I was into being an idiot and dirt and trucks, but also because he used to say “I hate you.”
I remember his parents wouldn’t let him have MTV, but he could get it on the stereo somehow, so we would listen to the MTV music while watching whatever was on the other channels. His parents were really religious.
“Look,” he said, “Sometimes the words match up to what they’re saying.”
I watched Ronald Regan on the TV and tried to imagine he was actually singing Thriller along with Mike, but it didn’t really match up. This was fine with me because the spooky voice at the end of Thriller scared me a lot. Vincent Price is far too spooky for an 8 year old kid.
My parents would usually drop my sister and me off over at the cousins house early in the morning on their way to work, and then we’d go ride our bikes around. I spent a great deal of time on a BMX bike as a kid, but I never really learned any proper tricks. For me it was solely a transportation solution.
Years later as a 29 year old man I would find myself without a car and would begin riding a BMX bike as transportation once more, but that is neither here nor there.
The point is, as a kid at 8am with no parents around, there’s really nowhere to ride to with your cousin who is a lot bigger than you and can barely stand you. If we had any money, we would ride to the Showbiz Pizza and wait around until they opened at 10 so we could play the arcade games inside. Our money went pretty quickly, and we never had enough to actually buy pizza, but a few games of Ski Ball are better than nothing.
Sometimes our parents would take us there for our birthdays and whatnot, and then we really got to live it up. You sat at park bench style tables in a big room while big robotic animals put on a show. It was really wierd and mildly unsettling, but the arcade games were well worth it. Some research I have just done on our friend the Internet has revealed detailed histories of the chain’s mascot, Chuck E Cheese, and the animatronic shenanigans of which he was the figurehead, but these records are wierd and do not bear linking.
They had this one game there called something like Billy Bob Speaks. Billy Bob was a cohort of Chuck E Cheese. It was one of the big climb-in type arcade games and inside it had a coin slot, a TV and a keyboard mounted to the wall. You put in a quarter and typed in a word, and then the machine would say the word and a picture of a head on the TV would move its mouth. The head was supposed to be that of Billy Bob, but as Billy Bob was a bear and the head was vaguely human, that didn’t make much sense. You may refer to the image above for a firly good artist’s rendering of said head (complete with fancy photoshopped scan lines).
I was old enough at 8 to be familiar with nonsensical shit, so I was not deterred by the non-bearish head and put my tokens in. I guess they used tokens rather than quarters because if you cash in ten dollars for tokens, you are probably going to stay until you have spent them all, whereas you could just walk out with regular quarters and spend them elsewhere.
Of course, making a machine say regular words is boring, so I would try to get it to swear. If you typed in “Shit”, the head would frown and say “BILL LEE BOB WILL NOT SAY THAT” in a computerish monotone. Making it sound the words out phonetically yielded some promising results, but real swearing was elusive.
Eventually my tokens would be gone and we’d get on our bikes and ride back to the cousin-house to see what the girls were doing and maybe throw something at them.
It was the 1980′s and I was a kid.
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