Outside

I came home and my childhood playground was missing. No, I didn't misplace it, it was gone. Torn out of the ground. My slides, my fort, my tire swing, even my cypress tree. All gone. Now it's just a big dirt field across the street from my house.

I can remember playing with plastic green soldiers in the sand. I would dig in the sand until I hit clay, then dig a little more before giving up. I was part of an afterschool program called "Latchkey Kids" run by SF parks and rec. And everyday I'd come back home, but before I could come into the house, I'd have to shake the sand out of my shoes and pants and hair.

Inside the big cinder block building at the park there was a kitchen, an office, some bathrooms, and a common area with some old MacIntosh computers. There was this one vector game I was pretty good at, where you get to drive a tank. For a while, I had the high score, which made me pretty damn proud.

I remember the other kids who went there after school, though not too well. I was probably about 9-10 years old when I went, and there were some other kids who went who were probably in middle school, I don't know where. Well, I guess that they were just at the age when the opposite sex starts to become mysterious and fascinating and despicable, so they'd play these games that really made no sense to me.

I suppose that some of the older boys had seen Starship Troopers, and thought that it was pretty awesome, being a rated "R" action movie and all, complete with human brains sucked out through a translucent tube and the obligatory one second flash of female nipple. Well, the way that this plays in is that the boys would play the part of the Starship Troopers, and the girls the part of the alien bug species bent on destroying the human race.

There was this pile of scrap wood near the door in the cement blockhouse that Latchkey Kids was based out of, old pieces of wooden picture frame mostly. Well, when you're a boy in a certain age range, anything and everything that can resemble a gun is a gun. And so, in their post-modern version of cowboys and indians, the boys and girls played starship troopers and aliens.

Basically, the way it went, as in the movie, was that the alien girl species would charge the boy troopers, armed with their picture frame machine guns, sputtering off rounds as rapidly as their sounds effects could allow. Most of the bugs would get blasted away, their dead strewn by the swing set and the slides. But occasionally, one would make it through the hail of gunfire sounds, and leap onto a hapless trooper.

At this point, no one really knew what to do. The girls usually didn't make it this far, and when they did, there was a sense of "now what?" And so, in this moment of weakness, picture frames at the ready, his comrades would rescue him from certain ... I don't know what.

I didn't know what. I was in fourth grade then. My favorite color was red and the best show on TV was Arthur, the anthropomorphic aadrvark. But even then, I could sense that the game was more than just cowboys and indians the way that your dog senses your bad day. There was a tension in the air whenever they played the game. I did not play.