Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny
TomChick - Columns - Comments - 07/11/04
"Man, she was pissed," Donny says, coming into the kitchen where I've retreated now that Lisa has left. "How come she's not your girlfriend any more?"
"Well, it's complicated."
"Can I have a beer?" Donny asks.
"What do you mean 'can you have a beer'? No way, you're a kid."
"My brother used to have beer."
"Yeah, he also used to steal money from your Mom and Dad. Look where it got him. He's in the Marines."
I inwardly wince at bringing this up, but Donny doesn't miss a beat. He says, "I bet they let him drink beer in the Marines."
"Not if he's not 21 they don't."
"That's bullshit, I bet he gets beer all the time. If he's old enough to die for his country, to get his hands blown off, he's old enough to drink beer."
"What? Where'd you hear that? Who told you that? Trevor, can you come in here?"
"Just a sec, I'm about to take this flag," Trevor calls.
"Look, you can't have a beer. You can have a Coke."
"Jesus, I was just kidding anyway. I hate beer."
"Hey. Language."
"It's okay, 'Jesus' isn't a cuss word since we're Methodists."
"And how do you know what beer tastes like?"
"My dad let me have a sip once. That's stuff's nasty."
"Yeah, come back and tell me that when you're in college. Are you done playing Joint Ops?"
"I am until you turn friendly fire off. Do you need me to show you how you do that?"
"How would you know about that stuff?"
"Dude, I was in a Counter-Strike clan with some guys at school. We installed it on the computers in study hall. K-Mart donated these sweet computers with GeForce 3's. We'd play when the teacher went out for a smoke. He'd stay gone the whole hour. We had to get past the firewall, but it wasn't too hard. Of course, we haven't played anymore since they made you install Steam. Can you believe that shit?"
"Yeah, tell me about it. Hey, I'm pretty sure even Methodists can't say 'shit'."
Donny takes his Coke and goes back to the game. Pretty soon he's playing it like a deathmatch, shooting everyone he sees. His team consistently loses, because Peter has to spend so much time with his head between his knees and Trevor keeps getting killed once Donny figures out how to use the sniper rifle. Donny camps outside the bunker and shoots Trevor whenever he spawns.
"Fucking snipers," Trevor mutters.
"Language," Donny says as he takes a range reading with the binoculars from his new position.
"He's on the hill to the east of the last bunker," Trevor yells to the other team in the next room.
After a while we go online, playing on one of the hundred-player servers. Donny makes a great sniper. He takes up a position over the enemy base and snipes the pilots while they're warming up their helicopters. He calls out enemy sightings and even uses the target designator for me, Jude, and Eric, who hang back with mortars. Peter is playing a medic, waiting for people to get shot and then running in to save them. This gives him time to put his head down when he feels sick. We're all high-fiving each other between games.
Trevor sits in the living room, looking miserable, convinced he's failed. I can tell he's imaging Donny at the recruiting office first thing tomorrow morning. After everyone has left, I'm cleaning up the kitchen while Donny tries to help Trevor figure out the web swinging in Spiderman 2. I can see them through the doorway while I'm washing glasses.
"Dude, you're not doing it right. This trigger makes you swing faster and this one makes you shoot out your web. Right before you swing up, like, as high as you're going to get, press A. Then shoot another web."
Trevor smacks into the side of another skyscraper and blurts out, "You're not going to join the Army, are you?"
"No way. I'm going to be a fireman. Or maybe a vet. It would cool to work at Sea World."
"Oh. Your Mom's freaked out that you're going to join the Army or something."
"No way. Especially after what happened to my brother."
"That sucked, didn't it? I'm glad he's okay."
"He's not okay, dude. They burned up his arms."
"Yeah, but it could have been worse. You know?"
"I know."
They sit there. Trevor leaves Spiderman standing in the street. Donny is looking at his hands. He weaves his fingers together and maybe thinks about how his brother will never be able to do that.
"I bet he'll be glad to see you," Trevor offers.
"Right before he left, we got in a fight," Donny says. "I had some Yu-Gi-Oh cards I won in a tournament when I was a kid. He was saying they were for babies, so I was pretending like I didn't care about them. So he started, like, tearing them a little bit. I still kept pretending I didn't care, so he ripped a bunch of them in half. I fucking hated his guts when he did that. I even said that. I go, 'I fucking hate your guts'. So after he was gone, I got scared that was going to be the last time I saw him, you know, the last thing I said to him. 'I fucking hate your guts.'"
Trevor doesn't say anything.
"I'm glad he's coming home," Donny says. "I miss him."
He's leaning into Trevor and now he looks a lot younger. Teenagers can do that. One minute they almost look like grown-ups, but then you look at them a certain way or they say a certain thing and you know that basically they're still kids. Trevor puts his arm around Donny and they just sit there for a minute.
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