“There, there…over there, get him!”

I’m sitting on the edge of the couch, frantically pointing my finger at the television. On the flatscreen a man wearing a long, dirty tunic and sandals is racing across a rubble-strewn field. A missile explodes thirty yards behind him, sending the remnants of a destroyed shack sailing through the air. The man dives over a rock wall and crawls behind a jumble of boulders.

“Crap…missed him.”

I look over at my fourteen year old son, who’s squeezing a joystick with both hands. Underneath the communication headset his face is crumpled with displeasure. I reach over and pat his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “there’s always a next time.”

My son exhales and sulks for a moment. I can tell he’s dying to whip the controller across the room. He’s been at this all week, yet success remains elusive, a difficult thing at this age. But then he brightens suddenly. He flashes a grin and says, “Guess what…last week Billy took out a whole group of bad guys…it was awesome.”

I get up off the couch and head into the kitchen, thinking about how much fun these kids are having with Young Patriot. The “game” is pretty damn expensive, but parents are somehow finding the money as kids everywhere clamor for it. It’s a whole new concept for gaming that started when the Defense Department came up short in their funding last year. With budgets tightening, their solution was to turn real Predator drone attacks into a highly competitive online sport played by everyday private citizens. A few years ago this wouldn’t have been possible, but wireless technology and data packeting has come so far so fast that now it is.

Here’s how it works. Each family pays $500 per month to participate. For that, you get two guaranteed missions each day, and as your kill rate improves you get assigned more missions with increasingly difficult objectives. The kids that excel also see their monthly costs go down. Take out enough terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and pretty soon you’re playing for free. My son’s friend Billy is up to three missions per day and is only paying $250 per month now. It’s pretty ingenious, if you ask me – why pay some guy $60,000 plus benefits to do the work that a teenager can do just as well for free? And, the department gets to enjoy the windfall from a million other hopeful kids paying $6,000 a year for the same chance. Money like that can fund a lot of missions.

“Dad, I’m on again!”

I race back to the couch and drop into position. My son adjusts his headset and says, “This is Agent Orange, go ahead Command Center.” The flatscreen snaps to life with a real-time video showing two men sprinting away from a stone hut. My boy swivels his joystick and aligns the crosshairs on the back of the guy that’s falling behind. He thumbs the Fire button on his controller and we lean forward, holding our breath. A missile screams past the man’s head and slams into a pack of goats. A small puff of white appears on the screen. Then nothing.

“Damnit!!”

My son rips off his headset and tosses it across the room. His face goes slack. Then it reddens in pure, adolescent frustration.

“I’m no good at this.”

I lean towards him and say, “Hey now, let’s think about this for a moment. The terrorists need to eat, right?

I’m surprised by how quickly I’m thinking on my feet here. Those parenting classes must really be paying off. My son looks at me through watery eyes.

“I guess.”

“And what do they eat.”

My son looks at the parched landscape on the TV, seeing nothing but red sand and bone-dry hills. He sighs and says, “I don’t know…goats?”

I smile and say, “Yup, that’s right. They can’t eat sand, that’s for sure. So you’re helping indirectly, on the starvation front.”

He wipes a hand under an eye and looks up at me with doubt.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your kill soon enough.”

My son smiles and says, “Thanks dad, I think you’re right.”

I grin with relief and say, "Hey, wanna watch SAW again?"

"Exciting!"
Copyright: © 2010 Thomas Sullivan

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Thomas Sullivan's writing has appeared in 3AM Magazine and Bad Idea Magazine, among others. He is the author of Life In The Slow Lane, a comic memoir about teaching drivers education (available from Uncial Press at http://www.uncialpress.com/books/lifeinth/lifeinth.html) To view more of Thomas’ writing please visit his author website at http://thomassullivanhumor.com/

The members of the planet Xandau gather for another Friday night hour of interstellar television. The dozen inhabitants of the flat, island-sized world slump into barca loungers quietly stolen from pawn shops during their last visit to planet earth and halfheartedly debate which show to watch. They have four options, being that there are five inhabited planets in the known universe including their own (on which filming people is strictly prohibited -- the Xandans are fierce defenders of their personal privacy). As usual they quickly opt for So You Still Want To Rock, currently the premiere show in the universe. The shows from Xypo, Mando, and Yerbo are informative and interesting and all, but they lack the flair and excitement of real-life rockumentaries from planet Earth.

The show opens in the middle of a concert by Unholy Trinity, an aging heavy-metal trio from Cleveland, who are thrashing about on stage in tight fitting spandex outfits that strain to contain the musicians expanding girth. The band is less physically nimble than they were during their snort-coke-off-chicks-tits heyday, but they still rock just as hard. The Xandans cheer the return of their favorite dysfunctional band. During the last episode they watched in disbelief as Craig, the goateed guitarist with crazy eyes, spit on audience members while dodging airborne beer bottles. The concert audience wasn’t yet privy to the news of Craig’s nasty divorce, in which he lost three homes to a groupie who, two months earlier, had left him and moved on to Chuck, the bassist. The tension between the two musicians had been heading into overdrive for a few weeks, and the Xandans had watched each messy backstage altercation with awe and bemusement. When Craig secretly took a leak in Chuck’s pre-show bottle of Jim Beam the Xandans stared at the screen, completely bewildered. Having no such thing as art or artists on their staid planet, the befuddled Xandans had no way to understand these people. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy watching them.

The image on the screen zooms past Craig and lands on Rob, the drummer, who is pounding a drum with monstrous sticks as if he’s trying to kill a prizewinning fish on a bass boat. The Xandans roar approval. Rob has quickly become their favorite member after last week’s profile of the percussionist’s history with the group. The flashback was quite amusing, for viewers at least:

Rob had decided once again, after another futile stint in rehab, to get out of LA and the band for good. Both were killing him, as was his second wife Loretta, so he fled the city with a twenty-two year old he’d met in rehab and snuck off to Oregon to grow Christmas trees. He knew almost nothing about forestry or agriculture, but the scene sounded clean and peaceful, a far cry from the late nights, booze, and strangers the rock world had plunged him into. And how hard could it be, really, to plant trees?

When Craig and Chuck finally tracked him down, Rob was living in a special-ed school bus surrounded by thin, dying evergreens and subsisting on a diet of roadkill and wild mushrooms. The twenty-two year old was nowhere to be found and the struggling tree farm was littered with garbage bags full of stinking trash. The locals were circulating a rumor that Rob was cooking meth to sell to local teenagers, and the word in town was that people were getting ready to do something about the situation. Craig and Chuck loaded Rob into their van with the Arizona sunset mural and got him out of there pronto. No one wanted a repeat of Rob’s incident in Bulgaria, where leather-clad, unfriendly mobsters accustomed to protection payments had chased him off with guns and death threats and then taken possession of his new recording studio.

The Xandans watch in awe as Rob’s arms fly around his drum set, the sticks a blur in the smoky nightclub air. The noise from the drums and the cheering crowd builds into a roar. Suddenly, Rob stops playing and raises his hands towards the lights in a touchdown sign of victory. He’s back, he’s bad, he’s done with silviculture, and he knows it. When the crowd erupts Rob whips his hands forward, sending the huge chunks of wood toward the audience. One sails over Craig’s head but the second crashes into the back of Chuck’s head, slamming his mouth into the microphone.

Chuck spins, lifts the instrument strap over his head, and slams his base onto the stage. He breaks into a sprint, races toward the back of the stage, and dives into Rob, wiping out the drum set. As drums roll across the stage, the two start pulling hair and throwing punches.

The Xandans break into raucous laughter and cheer the combatants on the screen. They love these humans that call themselves artists. They’re so entertaining yet oh so serious, unaware that their lives are meant to be messy and confusing. That, the Xandans realize, is where their art comes from, and without it there’d be no art. Like on Xandau, where everyone lives a neat and clean existence with no strife but plenty of boredom.

"Checking In"

Copyright: © 2009 Thomas Sullivan
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Thomas Sullivan's writing has appeared in Whispers Of Wickedness, Word Riot, and Underground Voices, among others. His comic memoir Life In The Slow Lane is forthcoming from Uncial Press in Fall, 2009.