Niko and Caro, American Dreamers

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the plot of Grand Theft Auto IV.

It's been ten years now since I graduated from college, and that fact put me in a bit of a reflective mood for much of the past few weeks. Thinking of what I've done with the past ten years, and where I hope to be when another ten years have gone by.

When I graduated, in May of 1998, the future was anything but certain. I mean, a degree in theater from a small liberal arts college is not exactly a license to print money, and at that point, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do professionally. But I had a dream for my life. Not a big dream at all, really. It's quite simple, but it's mine. Maybe it's yours, too.

It's a dream that was expressed pretty well in this exchange on Showtime's entertaining Dexter:

Dexter: Do you have a dream for your life? Your future? Yes?
Rita: Of course. Do you?
Dexter: It might sound weird. I want to someday be content. Just feel comfortable, like everyone else. I want...
Rita: ...a normal life?
Dexter: Yeah, a normal life.
Rita: That's all I want. Just that.

Dexter, in case you don't know, is a sympathetic character who kills people, and he has the same dream for his life that I have for mine. That seems appropriate here, as I've been spending a lot of time lately with another sympathetic character who kills people: Niko Bellic, the protagonist of Rockstar's truly superb Grand Theft Auto IV.

Yes, as I was playing GTA IV, I was also thinking a good deal about my life, and my dreams for my life. My life since college has had its ups and downs. After graduating, I fell into teaching. That was a job that I think I knew immediately, as a transgendered person, I wasn't going to stay in, because it was neither safe nor, some might argue, appropriate, for me to attempt to transition while teaching high school students. Some people may have been brave enough to attempt that path. I am not one of them. And I suspect that, even were it not for my gender issues, I would have wanted to seek out other professional experiences. Teaching is simply not my calling. Since then, I've worked in coffee shops and customer service call centers, trying to inch my way closer to my dream, and also to work towards getting a job doing something that I'll find truly satisfying.

Niko Bellic comes to Liberty City with dreams of his own, dreams that have been fueled by letters from his cousin Roman, who wrote of living a life filled with cars, women and money in the land of opportunity. When Niko arrives, he finds that Roman has overstated his success just a tad, and that in fact Roman is deeply in debt, and in trouble with just the sort of unsavory characters Niko came to Liberty City hoping to get away from. What's Niko gonna do when he arrives in LC and needs to make some money, get a job at the local Bean Machine? No, that's what suckers like me do. Niko is not the latte-slingin' type. He's been through a little too much. He's a little too broken. Early on, a character named Dimitri Rascalov (Niko should have known better than to ever trust someone with that name) says to Niko, "We can choose the game, Niko Bellic, but we cannot choose the rules of the game." Niko has, for better or worse, chosen his game.

It's not unusual for a good film or book or television show to make me think about my own life in some way, or about the world around me, but a video game? That's pretty much unheard of. GTA IV, though, did just that. I'm not saying that the characters could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those on The Wire, but I am saying that while The Wire is, in my opinion, the best television show in recent years about the America we're living in today, GTA IV is the best videogame ever about the America we're living in today, and that, like all truly good crime fiction, it is not the immoral or amoral product so many right-wing crusaders would have you believe it is, but it is, in fact, deeply moral, a story of choices and consequences.

There's a moment near the end of GTA IV where I really believed that Niko might end up with a simple, honest life, that he might fly off into the sunset, heading for the American Midwest with a nice woman at his side, leaving the crime network of Liberty City that he's fallen into behind. Of course, I realize that I was naive to think this, but it's just that I'd come to feel really attached to Niko as a character, and that I really wanted it for him, wanted him to have his own little American dream, and when it was all taken away from him in an instant, it was genuinely upsetting. Money is the closest thing you have in Grand Theft Auto to a score, and by the end I'd racked up well over a half million dollars, but as another character declared, "You won!", it all felt so hollow to me, and, I suspect, to Niko as well. Yes, Niko wound up with tons of money, and had established for himself a seemingly pretty safe and secure place in Liberty City's underworld, but at what cost?

It would take forever for me to list all the reasons I love this game so much. I love the razor-sharp satire of things like the Republican Space Rangers cartoon, Weazel News and the Bastion's Buddies right-wing radio talk show. I love the huge, diverse, vibrant soundtrack, filled as it is with wonderful details like jazz great Roy Haynes DJing the jazz station and sharing poignant, heartfelt anecdotes about the musicians he's featuring, but, in a nice touch, referring to events as taking place "here in Liberty City" instead of New York. I love the exhilarating beauty of unplannable moments like finding yourself flying over the city by helicopter on a rainy night as Pruit Igoe by Philip Glass swells up on the radio. I love the living, breathing city, where people walk down the street talking on their cellphones, or wash shop windows, or do tai chi in the park. But most of all, I love the characters who populate it, and the story it tells. When Niko finally comes face-to-face with the man who betrayed him so many years ago, a moment he has built up in his mind, been obsessed with, for years, he finds that the man is an utterly pathetic figure. This is one of the moments where the game gives the player a crucial choice. You can kill him, as Niko has intended to do for so long, or you can walk away. GTA IV certainly isn't the first game to offer choices of this kind, but it sure does it better than any game before in my opinion. Your choices in games are frequently between the most saintly of goodness and the most diabolical of evil, and so they never feel quite real to me. I'll do one to see what happens, then play again to make the other choice, but I never feel any real investment in it. It's just a game, after all. But so well-drawn are the characters in GTA IV, and Niko in particular, that I really felt personally invested in these choices. In this case, I chose to walk away. In the moments that followed, on a quiet car drive back home, Roman said some things to Niko about forgiveness, about letting go of the past. Things that were simple and true. That was beautiful. And while Niko's victory against the predatory forces of the underworld may seem hollow, there are other victories, smaller but more meaningful. Niko meets a young woman who had, like so many, come to Liberty City from the Midwest with big dreams of making it as a star, but had fallen into drug addiction and prostitution. Niko helped her get on a train back home to her parents, and she sent a nice email to thank him and let him know she was doing all right. That meant something.

Of course, like so many, I'm already wondering what's next for Grand Theft Auto. How do you follow this game? Will Rockstar continue along this more serious, contemplative path for the next few games in the series, or will we see things veer back towards the more cartoonish violence of earlier games? Will we return to the neon-drenched streets of Vice City, or visit someplace entirely new? And, I can't help but wonder, when the next game rolls around, will I be any closer to my own little dream? In any case, I won't stop trying, and that's what matters. I'll just keep on cranking up the LCD Soundsystem and walking through this world like the badass superstar I am.

Berkeley Coffee Voodoo Magick!

I currently work at a coffee shop in historic downtown Berkeley, California. Our clientele always features a significant number of crazy people, homeless people, and crazy homeless people. We had a few remarkably hot days last week. This heat only made things much, much crazier.

At one point, after a particularly lengthy, stressful, exhausting rush, a customer, who was clearly gifted with some sort of cosmic ability to peer deep into my soul because somehow she could tell that I was a bit stressed and a bit exhausted, looked deep into my eyes and said, "There is so much trouble there." She then took a few ice cubes from out of the iced tea I had just handed her, grabbed my hand, and squeezed tightly. Her face contorted in a look of powerful concentration as she bent her will on purging this trouble from my soul. She began to shake as she fought an epic battle with the demons of stress and exhaustion that were inhabiting me, as I stood there wondering if I was supposed to be shaking too, or if she was doing all the work and I was supposed to appear increasingly serene. Finally I settled for focusing my effort on just trying not to look like I thought she was crazy.

When it was over, I made a half-hearted attempt to appear grateful for her efforts and to indicate that I was feeling better. A few minutes later, I realized that I actually was feeling better. The sheer unusualness of the experience, and her desire to help, oddly expressed as it was, had helped me relax and laugh a bit and forget the stress brought on by the mobs of irritable high school kids demanding free cups of ice water.

I love Berkeley.

Americaffe

In Rockstar Games' hugely anticipated release Grand Theft Auto IV, which comes out tomorrow, the Statue of Liberty has been rechristened the Statue of Happiness, and she holds aloft not a torch, but a cup of coffee. "Give me your tired," indeed.

I think this is a brilliant little detail. I've spent my fair share of time working in coffee shops, and I'm of the opinion that while many people come in because they genuinely appreciate coffee as coffee, plenty of others have made Starbucks and other coffee shops part of their daily routine not because of any particular appreciation of espresso, but because the act of drinking a grande vanilla soy latte or a caramel Frappuccino each morning is a way of saying to others and to themselves, "Yes, I am someone in our consumer society! Behold, I can afford to spend four dollars each day on a cup of coffee! And with every precious sip, I keep the voices of doubt at bay, and restore meaning and value to my life! Doesn't this branded coffee cup in my hand go great with my iPod and my RAZR?" Meanwhile, despite the tremendous success and proliferation of such shops, the people who work them can often barely afford to shop them. From Naomi Klein's blistering 2000 book No Logo:

"They expect us to look like a Gap ad, professional, clean and neat all the time, and I can't even pay to do laundry," says Laurie Bonang of Starbucks. "You can buy two grande mocha cappuccinos with my hourly salary." Like millions of her demographic coevals on the payrolls of all-star brands like the Gap, Nike and Barnes & Noble, Bonang is living inside a stunning corporate success story -- though you'd never know it from the resignation and anger in her voice. All the brand-name retail workers I spoke with expressed their frustration at helping their stores rake in, to them, unimaginable profits, and then having to watch that profit get funneled into compulsive expansion. Employee wages, meanwhile, stagnate or even decline. At Starbucks in British Columbia new workers faced an actual wage decrease -- from Can$7.50 to $7 an hour -- during a period when the chain was doubling its profits and opening 350 new stores a year. "I do the banking. I know how much the store pulls in a week," Laurie Bonang says. "They just take all that revenue and open up new stores."

Anyway, enough quoting of left-wing text on my part. I just want to say that to me, in addition to everything else that they were, the earlier GTA games were also truly incisive satire of American culture, and that I'm really looking forward, not only to wreaking havoc in Liberty City and getting into plenty of shootouts and high-speed car chases (though I am most definitely looking forward to that stuff -- A LOT!), but also to discovering the game's humor, to cruising around and listening to Fox...er, sorry, Weazel News, and to seeing what GTA IV has to say about the America we're living in now.

Get a haircut and get a real job.

Yesterday, I had my hair cut for the first time in years. I liked having it long, and I was scared to trust it to anyone new, but I was also starting to feel like maybe my hair was a factor in me not getting the jobs I was interviewing for--maybe potential employers were inferring that I was one of those pot-smoking ne'er-do-wells or something.

Naturally, after deciding to get it cut, rather than doing research and making an informed decision about where to go, I decided to just go any old place, so long as it didn't look too expensive. I walked to a shop that obviously caters to the Spanish-speaking population in my area.

At one point the woman who was about to cut my hair asked me, "Do you want letters?" "What?!" I said. "Small letters in your hair?" I was just about to run screaming, but then I decided she was actually saying "lattice." This, I understood perfectly. "Uhm." I said. "A little?"

I didn't really know exactly what I wanted, except for it to be shorter, and I probably wouldn't have been able to communicate what I wanted to her that well regardless, so I sort of just let her do her thing. I thought about telling her not to do anything too "boyish" with it, but I was, as usual, too much of a wuss to try to communicate this sentiment.

It's a pretty drastic change and is shorter than I went in wanting. My first horrifying thought was that it looks sort of like a Sawyer-on-Lost haircut (!!!) but it's not that bad, nor quite so boyish. Now that I've had a bit of time to adjust, I kind of like it, and anyway, it'll grow out again.

Today, I had a job interview. It's hard for me to say how it went. I felt a bit iffy when I walked out, like I stumbled over a few of my answers, and didn't give the best responses to those kinds of dumb, generic job interview questions like "What's the one quality that's most important to you in a co-worker?" ("Ummm...hardworking? Hardworking is good, right? Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with hardworking on this one. Next question!") But I've learned that how I feel about something isn't necessarily the best gauge of how it went. This dates back to college, when frequently the papers I felt the least confident about would be the ones on which I got the highest marks. In this case, who knows? Things I make a big deal of in my head may not have been a big deal to them. On the whole, I think it went fine. Now it's just a matter of waiting to hear back from them. I'm also sending a thank-you letter in the mail tomorrow, since that seems to be customary these days if you want a job.

Wish me luck!

"Watch this"

I was walking to work the other day. It was a truly glorious spring morning. Obama signs abound on the lawns and in the windows of many a house along my way, but one in particular caught my eye, homemade, with rays of sunlight emanating from the O. It seemed a genuine sign of hope. And right around that moment, "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits got shuffled up on my iPod. That's not a song I ever thought was especially great, until I saw the finale of season two of The West Wing. And now, every time I hear it, I see that scene again in my mind. A storm is raging against the president in both a literal and figurative sense. A question is asked. Jed Bartlet, great showman that he is, lets it hang in the air for a moment. The flashbulbs crackle, the air is electric, and Leo says "Watch this," and the president's hands go into his pockets, and he fixes his gaze, and I get chills. It's almost enough to make me proud to be an American.

Barack Obama, like Jed Bartlet, understands that a large part of politics is theater, and that's just fine with me.

World War II, now in convenient beverage form!

Sure, World War II may be played out as a setting for video games, but what about as a setting for...that's right...energy drinks! I was perusing the aisles at my local Grocery Outlet here in Berkeley when I found all three varieties of ACE Energy Drink available for just $.50 a can, so naturally I grabbed one of each.

The cans have a pin-up girl/bullet-riddled airplane motif that's actually kinda cool. They also helpfully remind us, "It's a dog fight out there! To win, you need to stay sharp. Crack open an ACE Energy for an immediate physical and mental lift. Ace will get you flying high and keep you in control. THROW DOWN AN ACE!"

The drink's official website says, "The can design strongly communicates the brand’s core values. ACE Energy’s bullet riddled cockpit with alluring imagery directly connects with the danger, excitement and honor of military fascination." Why yes, it is a tremendous honor to be fascinated by the military. It's also extremely dangerous.

If ACE Energy is any indication, WWII tasted like somewhat flat orange soda cut with cough syrup, and noticeably hit you with its jolt of caffeine and taurine and stuff within just a few moments of your first sip.

Yeah, I think five sips of ACE is about enough for me. I'm gonna switch to the Thomas Kemper Vanilla Cream Soda which I also scored at the Grocery Outlet. That's delicious, and it doesn't carry with it any of the dangers of military fascination.

Outside

She started her lunch break by reading the end of a short story by Raymond Carver. She wasn't a big fan of short stories, but she liked finishing things, and she could finish a few of these a day, even during her broken up workday.

After she finished the story, there was nothing to take up the space in her head, so it went where it often went during lunch breaks, to that point in the very near future when the break would be over. She could see it in her mind. It was like a photograph of herself back behind the counter, and it started out so small it was almost invisible, like a fixed point of light in the center of a tremendous movie screen, but it was flying towards her, getting bigger and bigger until it would swallow her up. She shook her head and decided to do something instead of sitting there thinking about this. Acting was usually better than thinking, she believed. Maybe she should eat something. She considered for a moment buying a sandwich. Then her mind calculated roughly what percentage of one hour of work that sandwich would represent, and the number was like a little weight inside her. She sighed. Then she wondered what percentage of people who came into her shop ever thought about what percentage of an hour they were eating and drinking up on the things they bought. Then she thought that this thought was a clear sign that she was at least a little bit crazy. She knew that some people said that if you think you're crazy, you're not crazy, because crazy people never think they're crazy. She thought that was a bunch of crap.

It was only a few hours until her shift was over. She decided she could wait to eat, and that she would go over to the drugstore across the street and maybe buy some things to use for making a sandwich when she got home.

It was hot outside. She saw a young woman with pigtails walking down the street strumming a guitar. The woman wasn't doing it for money. She didn't look angry or lost. She looked well-loved. She was, it seemed, just walking down the street and strumming the guitar because she wanted to. Seeing this woman made her glad. Of course, she knew she could be wrong about the woman. But she felt she had a good sense about these things. It was strange to her that even though people mystified her in the easy way they spoke to each other, she still felt she had a good sense of the inherent goodness of some people. But that was the way it was. And she figured that maybe someday, if she felt more like herself, she might understand how people spoke to each other, too, that everything there might fall into place and it would all be easy. Then she thought that might be too much to hope for, that maybe it was a little hard for everyone from time to time, but maybe it would be a bit easier, anyway.

In the drugstore, she walked to where they kept things you might use with sandwiches. There were two young men standing nearby. They looked to her like they might be students at the university.

"Well," one of them said, "I mean, she feels pretty strongly about her feelings, you know?"

"That's the point, though," said the other. "I sort of attacked her to upset her," he said. "That was kind of the point."

"But you don't really know her very well," said the other. "You haven't really earned the right to attack her like that yet, you know?"

There was nothing here that she had any desire to put on a sandwich. She sighed and walked out.

As she walked back up the street to her shop, she glanced at the image in her mind to see that it was now almost at the size where it was going to swallow her up. She came to the door of her shop. She knew she really should go in.

She grabbed her ponytail and pulled it over her eyes, but she couldn't block out the sun.