Joystick Junkies
By Sandra Tsing Loh

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles, a book by Sandra Tsing Loh. All material is Copyright of its original owner.

About the Author: Sandra Tsing Loh writes the "Valley" column for Buzz magazine and is a commentator on National Public Radio. As a solo performer, she has been featured in the HBO New Writers Project and at the U.S. Comedy Festival in Aspen. She has won a Pusheart Award, and her writing has appeared in Glamour, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan. She lives in Van Nuys, California.

I'm a generous person. I'll give money, I'll give clothing, I'll give food. When my doorbell rings at five P.M., I answer it, cheerful and ready. Five dollars for a plutonium-hard candy bar to benefit a summer camp for runaway teenagers? Sure. My entire collection of circa 1991 Payless sandalwear for the poor? Of course. Six cans of Del Monte peas? No problem. Just don't push me too far....

It was a searing valley afternoon. He came scraping up our driveway on his bigwheel -- five years old, ninja-turtlewear cape. I heard the doorbell sound unevenly. I opened the hatch.

With nary a hello, he shoved a plastic cartridge upward.

"Super ... Mario?" He demanded.

All right. We obviously had Nintendo. Floating out over our yard was the telltale ka-ching! ka-ching!  of dancing coins, mushrooms, and flowers; any canny neighborhood kid could hear it. My boyfriend, Mike, after his tough workday, had already been on it for a whole hour. Surly he wouldn't mind if little Martin (his name was scrawled on the cartridge in a swift mother's hand) had a turn....

Suddenly something inside me snapped. Involuntarily, my lips pulled back into a sneer and one shocking word came out: "no!"

And with it, I knew elation. It was the no I'd wanted to say one hundred times before. There I'd be at some dinner party, taking a much-needed break from the rigors of adult social interaction by amusing myself quietly in the corner with a Game Boy I'd found in the kitchen. I wouldn't be there two minutes before some seven-year-old would wrest it away. "Hey," he'd shrill. "Let me show you how to get to the waterfall land."

Children assume that Nintendo belongs to them and to them alone. Don't you dare grasp the joystick of a Super Nintendo demo system at Toys "R" Us: "Can I do it?" asks a snub-nosed blond ten-year-old, elbowing his way in.

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