Here’s another section from the Fame tome I mentioned in my previous post, in which our hero, Subject #263, tells interviewer Carrie-Anne Moss a story, only very slightly embellished, straight from my real life, about fame and its allure in one particular manifestation:
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Q: (looks at her notes) Okay, I’ll give you a break: here’s an easy one: Have you ever felt famous?
A: Well . . . I’ve had a Sally-Field-“You-really-like-me!” moment or two after performing in front of a good house. And I’ve enjoyed seeing stuff of mine in print now and then. But famous? Nope. . . . Wait! Yes, of course I have. I’ve felt famous, once, when I was a sophomore in college.
Q: When you were . . . (She gets up, goes to the desk and taps at her laptop.) For what? We don’t have anything remotely noteworthy on you in college.
A: Gee, thanks. For playing a video game.
Q: For playing a video game? (laughs)
A: No, seriously. I felt totally famous. An arcade game, two of them actually, now long forgotten, one called Robotron, the other, Pole Position. Most of my freshman and sophomore work study money went into those games, quarter by quarter. Robotron was a two joystick game set in this apocalyptic world in which you had to save the last remaining humans from–. The details aren’t so important, huh?
Q: (shakes her head)
A: The short of it is that I got to be one of the best in New York City at those two dumb games, which probably made me one of the best in the world. I’d skip class and play in the campus pub during the afternoons with this geeky engineering student named Kal, and, get this – you know Zach Galligan, the guy in the Gremlins movies? He was in my year in school and used to play all the time. And he looked up to me because I was such a kick-ass Robotron player! I played a five hour game on a quarter once.
Q: No way.
A: Way. Rolled the score over from 10,000,000 to zero, twice. Then I went from the Pub to playing all over the Upper West Side, then at other pizza joints and arcades throughout the city whenever I had a chance. And my three initials (FDR!) were up as high scorer on machines all over Manhattan. Sometimes, usually when I played somewhere new, a crowd of kids would gather round. Once, I had had a really great Pole Position game in a pizza joint on Broadway at 111th, I think I broke 52,000 that night – which they said couldn’t be done, by the way – and a couple of kids were watching as I was trying to be nonchalant but very carefully entered my F. . . .D. . . . R on the screen, because sometimes you could slip and after all that work your initials would be one off, FDQ or something, and that would just suck, and this young latino kid, maybe 16, who’d been looking over my shoulder the whole time (a great game of Pole Position took a matter of minutes, not hours) says, “Wow! You FDR, man? Check that shit out. Yo, man, check it out – FDR! Yo, what’s that about anyway, F-D-R? You from FDR drive, FDR?” I didn’t explain that, no, actually, I was actually a big fan of the president with those initials, his New Deal and its WPA and all that. Telling him that would’ve stripped me of all street-cred in a matter of seconds, would’ve sent me back to being just some upstate white-boy college-boy, FDR just a punk they’d say. So I just said, no, man, not from FDR drive, I’m from the West Side, and walked out. I was cool, a big shot, velvet ropes had opened. When I played those games, I felt huge, I felt like a star. . . . Pretty silly, huh?
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Not that they don’t exist, but I have not known a single woman who craves this kind of fame, stardom at a videogame or some similar frivolous, useless competitive-gaming activity. Annie Duke, whom I mentioned previously, has succeeded at playing a game in a world of antisocial, extremely competitive men, though with the end rather pragmatic end of making lots and lots of money, not just getting to put the initials of your favorite president on the screen (Back when I was enterring "FDR," Annie was busy finishing the Friday Times puzzle in minutes in our Renaissance lit class – English, as I reacall, was one half of her double major; Psych was the other.). She’s succeeded through freaky talent and extremely hard work and, as important as any of it, the perfect use of controlled aggression and of the aggression of her opponents. In the profile I wrote of her, Annie talks about aggression, about how even talented and ordinarily disciplined professional male players will play badly against her:
“My mere presence enrages them. Guys can be, on the whole, winning players, but when they come up against a woman, they can’t help themselves. They can’t stand to be beaten by a woman. It happens again and again. They just call, call, call, when they should be folding.”
I sometimes like to think of myself as a poker player, but any envy I have of Annie is well-tempered by the fact that I could never be a fraction of the player she is. She’s had a lot going for her: on top of being initially taught the game by a big brother who’s one of the best players in the world, she also has that perfect combination of skills and the aforementioned controlled aggression that I utterly lack. The lack of that aggression (or that control, or both) extends to other arenas that I don’t quite “succeed” at, at least not to the level that I think I’m capable of. The less I care about winning, the better I do, which is fine, except that the converse is also true, and I will stiffen up, choke, when I really want to kick ass.
Luck counts for a lot in poker and in writing and in just about any kind of success I can think of, but so does good old putting yourself out there. Only in recent years have I begun to let myself do much of that manly putting-out, and the more I do the more luck has come my way, and the less I envy the success of my peers. This all just touches the tip of one big-ass iceberg for me, but perhaps this is more suited perhaps to Fame and Its Malcontents than here, so for now I’ll try to stick with fame’s role as “fickle mistress” to lusty men.
