Bodied

By Eli Horowitz

Maya is a 20-year-old with a graveyard shift at the post office, a ma whose temper rises even faster than the rent, and all of the million daily headaches of life as a young woman of color in New York in 2011. Her one saving grace is her local arcade, home of New York's feisty, burgeoning fighting game tournament scene. But that respite is taken away from her after she gets banned for standing up to a trash-talker who goes too far. To get back into the arcade and fight for her independence and respect, Maya will partner with a team of up-and-coming players and learn to defeat not just her opponents, but also her own worst instincts.

Beneath Maya's quest for FGC glory shines a deeper story about how all of us are made by history—and how we can make history in our turn. The connections between Maya, the women who raised her, and the generations who come after her, examine how our moment in time determines—often unjustly—the risks we take for the rewards we desire for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Bodied is a unique coming-of-age story with sneaky literary chops, a modern mashup between The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and A League of Their Own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578729909

Eli Horowitz

ELI HOROWITZ was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney's for eight years. He is the coauthor of The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery; Everything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong; and The New World, a collaboration with Chris Adrian. He was born in Virginia and lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

conceive."

I

Fall 2011

1

See, the thing is, fighting games will always be older than eSports. Before the days when video games became a career that got you corporate sponsorship, TV deals, six-figure paydays, and celebrity endorsements, people played fighting games in laundromats and student unions. They ran weekly tournaments in grimy low-rent neighborhood arcades where the prize money wasn’t even enough to buy a new pair of shoes. They laid their hearts on the line because they believed in something that you couldn’t see in a highlight reel or write on a check. That’s why, when Maya got clipped by a white 4Runner while riding to her local weekly—her one night of ecstasy after six days of the rat race—she stood up, dusted herself off, and walked the rest of the way to the arcade before she even tried to get patched up.

In her defense, it could’ve been way worse. She’d been riding her old secondhand ten-speeder when somebody’s side mirror bopped her handlebar. Next thing she knew, she was in a dizzy heap on the concrete while the truck that’d hit her drifted coolly into the distance. She’d picked up some ugly scrapes and bruises, and when she peeled herself off the road she felt shaky and weak-kneed, but that was it. Between the pain and her anger at the asshole who’d hit her, she didn’t even stop to think how lucky she was to walk away. After all, as far as matchups go, truck versus bike is ten-zip—truck wins that shit free.

So there she was, dragging her busted-ass bike and her busted ass down the sidewalk while pedestrians gave her that side-eye like: Well, looks like it’s another night in the big city. By the time she made it the ten blocks to the arcade, it was like she had a slow dialup connection to reality, walking through a video that was constantly buffering. Inside the building, the scene kept shifting around in glitchy flashing blocks and the noise buzzed and squeaked at the edges like the sound from the old subway speakers.

What eventually snapped her out of it was when Aldo, one of her friends, pointed out that she’d brought her bike inside and locked it to a table even though the front wheel was practically bent in half. He nudged her and said: What, you think somebody’s gonna steal a half-crushed bike from inside a packed house and then wheelie that shit through the middle of the hood back to wherever they live?

Maya looked at Aldo, looked at her bike, looked back at Aldo, and laughed. Then, for good measure, she added: Man, fuck you.

Right on cue, Adler, Aldo’s partner in crime, leaned through the crowd to tug on Aldo’s sleeve and say: Sorry, Maya, you gotta get in line. Me and this guy have a match. You’ll have to wait for my sloppy seconds.

Aldo: Whoa, now, buddy. We definitely agreed that I was the top. Also, Maya, are you, uh, bleeding?

Maya looked down at herself. She was, indeed, bleeding: from her hand where she tried to catch herself, from her leg where she landed, and from a few other places. Despite the twinge that told her to go home and heal up, she raised one eyebrow and tried to play it off: Am I bleeding? Motherfucker, I got hit by a car, what do you think?

Adler: Oh, shit! You got hit by a car?

Maya waved him away: Yeah, but, like, only a little. I’ll be aight. Go, I’ll tell you about it later.

And off they went, a matched pair, still dressed in their business casual clothes from work and bickering like old men. Maya grinned for a moment until she caught on to what Adler had said: even by the generous standards of timeliness employed by the Fighting Game Community, she’d showed up late, and the tournament had started without her. Part of her refused to get frozen out like that because of some shit that wasn’t even her fault. She swept her eyes through the crowd for the one man who could make it right. When she found him, she marched over to him through the crowd and said: Lawrence, you gotta let me in the bracket.

Lawrence, the guy who owned the arcade, organized the tournaments, ran the stream, did commentary, repaired the machines, chugged energy drinks instead of sleeping, and then wondered why he was losing his hair at thirty, took one look at her replied: Jesus fucking Christ, Maya, what happened to you? Wait—are you bleeding on my floor?

Maya: Some asshole ran me off the—

Lawrence grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her towards the front desk, away from the action at the back: "No, no. Are you bleeding on my floor? You can’t do that. That’s, like, eighteen different kinds of health code violations. Let’s go, I can’t let you walk around like that. I gotta get you some band-aids."

Maya let him push her, but she still said: Okay, fine, but after that, you gotta let me play.

Lawrence shook his head: Mm-mm, no. I can’t just be sticking people into the bracket late anymore. I do it for you, I gotta do it for everyone. Then the viewers start accusing me of collusion and saying I’m part of some secret fighting game Illuminati and all kinds of weird shit. No. I like you—you know I like you—but no. You can still play casuals, but you gotta show up on time. Even if you get, whatever, hit by a car. Sorry.

So then Maya just stood there for a while as Lawrence bandaged her wounds. By the time he was done, her post-crash adrenaline had totally dropped out, cut off like the music after you accidentally jerk the cord on your headphones and they fly off your head. Only, for Maya, it wasn’t the sound of the world she came back to but the weight of her own exhaustion. Right there, standing at the signup desk but not signing up, she deflated. She had a limp on one side, and her eighteen hundred other little bumps and bruises started to throb, and she felt the draft coming in through the holes that the street had torn in her jeans. It all made her want some space and a chance to breathe, so as Lawrence made his way to the stream setup in the back, Maya made her way to the door.

—

Outside it was calm. Or, at least, it was calm compared to a room full of intoxicated loudmouths trying to yell over speakers that were all set at max volume while banks of high-def monitors flashed candy-colored lightning around the room. Outside, in the sort-of quiet and the sort-of dark and the ghost smell of every cigarette that the players weren’t allowed to smoke indoors, there were no distractions. All she had was her aches and her thoughts, and the longer she stood there, the more they lit her up like a fucking pinball machine.

As cars coughed past, she thought about how, up until her vehicular misadventure, her first concern had been her rent and how her greasy landlord was about to raise it again in a couple months. Her plan had been to ask her ma to help out, but that would be a much easier conversation to have when Jasmine was in a good mood, which was not the type of mood she would be in after she heard about Maya’s crash.

For one thing, she was always giving Maya shit about riding her bike in the first place: New York drivers this, You’re my only daughter that. Maya had more than enough experience with that conversation to know where it ended up, and it wasn’t anywhere good. Worse, Jasmine hated the fact that Maya went to the arcade every week. So if Jasmine found out that her daughter almost got killed on her way to play some video games, she might just decide to finish what the driver started.

Maya’s hand twinged and looked down at it, the bandage turning some ungodly color in the poisoned orange streetlight. She almost pulled out her phone to look at the time, like an hour would have passed in the five minutes since she got out there, but she checked herself. There was a reason why she left her phone off when she was at the arcade. She couldn’t be at Two Up texting her ma, or helping her roommate deal with her shit, or reading listicles, or stalking the internet for one cheap pair of women’s high-tops that didn’t have a fucking heel in them. If she wanted to be at the arcade, she had to be at the arcade, period.

Anyway, she knew it was a little after eight, a good seven-plus hours until her shift at the post office started. Probably she could still work. She’d have to tell everybody all about it, though—listen to the women click their tongues, take the wrap off so the men could wince at it, all that shit. Not that Maya minded. She knew old people didn’t have to deal with that nosy stuff. So, really, it was only another forty-whatever years to go before people started minding their own business. She could make it without slapping the shit out of someone. Probably.

Maya shook her head, pushed all that out of her mind, and let her eyes wander. It only took a few seconds until they snagged on the Chinese script on the restaurant awning across the street. Then she had The Thought.

It was a thought that everybody in the American FGC had sooner or later, but no good ever came of it: Maybe I should take a trip to Japan. Just, y’know, a short visit, just to see what it’s like, just to say that I went, just to… Whatever—it didn’t matter what it was just for, everybody wanted the same thing: to get to the promised land. Wherever you were, Japan was where you weren’t. New York was dirty, but Japan was clean. People in SoCal didn’t ever come out to tournaments, but people in Japan played every night. The Midwest was boring as fuck, but Japan was eighteen carnivals taped together with a cherry on top. Florida was full of racist lunatics and alligators, but Japan was, well, Japan.

And, really, why not go? Half the people in the scene already watched Japanese cartoons, listened to Japanese pop music, wore Japanese clothing, ate Japanese food, read Japanese comics, knew at least eight or ten Japanese phrases, and, oh yeah, played Japanese video games. Motherfuckers were practically half-Japanese already! So why the fuck not, right? Why not spend a couple grand on plane tickets and more on hotel rooms, take a bunch of unpaid time off your hourly job, and get jetlagged up the ass—twice—all so you could spend a few days eating small portions and feeling too much like a foreigner to just do whatever it was you thought you would do?

That’s why it was The Thought and not The Plan or The Lifestyle. Even Maya knew that running away wasn’t the answer. She just didn’t know what was. Shit, right then, she wasn’t even sure she knew the question. Only, as soon as she had that thought, she remembered a line from a sword-story anime she’d been watching:

Kimi wa ittai nan’ no tame ni tatakau?

And that was that. The fog lifted. There had always been a lot of unknowns in Maya’s life, but she never had any doubt about what she was fighting for.

She looked around at the grimy storefronts that had passed through their glory days years before she was born, saw the weeds slowly cracking the sidewalk under her feet, and knew that she needed to quit feeling sorry for herself. She wanted to strike out against the rough parts of the world and bring some light and heat back into her life. She wanted to be with the people who fit with her. Most of all, she wanted to take her frustration out on someone’s digital ass. Taking a breath, she clenched her ragged fist and ripped the arcade door open, determined to find a match.

2

Back in the arcade, everything was back in its place for Maya, her vision clear, her hearing crisp. Even the pain was exactly where it belonged: the swollen broken-glass feeling was the minor sprain in her wrist, the low tingling burn was her body trying to grow scabs up and down her arms and legs, the stiff clenching was the strain in her neck, and the gnawing pull was her gut telling her to stop with the dramaqueen act.

In fact, the only real problem was the usual one: that she was a female in an arcade, which meant that she stood out worse than a tourist in Times Square. Everywhere else in her life, Maya was normal—a little shorter than most, a little cuter than most, the type to know how to wear makeup and clothes so that she looked more like herself. But to the casual member of the arcade scene, she was so suspicious they had to use jokes and code words just to acknowledge that she was real. They called her thicc because she weighed more than an empty soda can. They called her a grill, like a girl could only show up at the arcade if she was mixed up somehow. They typed hearts and penises at her in chatrooms for reasons unfathomable to human science.

And then there was Owen. Everybody knew someone like Owen, an ignorant dickhead who was born smirking and didn’t even stop when he went to sleep, a class clown with no class who knew how to stop just short of ever getting expelled for good. When he got a look at her that night, Owen called out to nobody: Ay, somebody get a tampon—this bitch bleeding all over the place! And even though nobody laughed but Owen, nobody said anything to him about it, either.

So Maya did what she always did and tried to ignore him. To make that easier, and to stop herself from bouncing Owen’s head off a wall, she made her way over to the crowd that was gathered around the main monitor and sidled up next to Adler and Aldo. They were out, both having lost once in the winners’ side of the tournament and then again in the losers’ side. She asked: Who put you two in the spectator bracket?

Aldo turned to her and replied: "Shit, what I wanna know is who put you in the spectator bracket. Looks like you almost ended up in the fucking hospital bracket."

Adler added: Yeah, are you okay? You look like Aldo would look if I beat his ass in real life the way I beat his ass in Marvel tonight.

Aldo: "Oh, you beat my ass?"

Adler: I knocked you out the tournament, didn’t I?

Aldo: That shit was luck and you know it. Tell me this: who put you into losers’ in the first place, asshole?

Adler: "Now that was luck. Winners’ bracket doesn’t count anyway, that’s just for getting warmed up."

Maya cut in: How do you two play each other every week? Out of like thirty, thirty-five people who show up, how do you two always find each other?

Aldo put on a stony samurai face: It is our destiny. We are connected by the red string of fate.

Adler: Plus we show up at the same time, so Lawrence always puts us near each other in the brackets.

Still stoic, Aldo nodded: Yes. The red string of fate—and that.

Maya asked: "So who’s still in? I mean, if it’s not you two, I dunno who it could be."

Adler: It’s—

Maya: Because you guys are so good, right? So good!

Adler: Okay, ha ha. I—

Maya: "Like, you don’t ever lose unless you get unlucky and you’re always talking about how you body people all the time. So if you guys aren’t still in, who is?"

And with that, slowly but surely, Maya climbed out of the trash heap of a night she’d been having. It was a good thing, too, because it was a party atmosphere at Two Up. The stream was going nuts—they had something like eight hundred viewers, damn good for a weekly tournament, and just about all of them were buzzing about the big story from the past weekend. After weeks of smack talk from both sides, two New York Street Fighter players who Maya barely knew named el.treyn and Odds had traveled to southern California to compete in a regional tournament there. They’d gotten their asses handed to them.

Maya didn’t care about that one way or the other. Street Fighter wasn’t her game and she thought it was nuts to spend real money just to fly cross-country just for a tournament. She had heard the name el.treyn before, and she seemed to remember him hanging out with the Street Fighter crowd, back straight, leaning slightly into the cool glow of the monitors. He always held himself tight and kept his facial hair trimmed thin, always showed up with t-shirts that looked like they’d been pressed and dry-cleaned. But Maya looked at him and foresaw a forty-five-year old man eating microwaved pizza rolls on his couch, practicing for hours by himself so he could keep up with the young guns. So he wasn’t exactly one of the bigger dots on Maya’s radar. As for the other guy, he wasn’t on it at all.

Still, to the viewers at home, their downfall was a golden opportunity to engage in some good old-fashioned posturing as a part of the FGC’s age-old inter-coast rivalry, and when it came to posturing the stream monsters had perfected the art:

fiveRingz: man, el.treyn is fucking washed up

fiveRingz: flew all the way out there just to get bodied

09er: man, he has to be used to it by now, fucking choke artist

mta_cammy_thighs: it’s true, that guy is the picasso of choking

09er: latrell sprewell n shit

MillyT: WEST COAST BEST COAST

fiveRingz: this woulda never happened with lee edwards, man

SuperSteve: Come on, guys, he’s not that bad. Everybody loses sometime, right?

09er: oh yeah, he’s good (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

And so on and so forth. As for the people who were physically present, they were having a grand old time acting like they were at a combination wake/homecoming/roast. Meanwhile, el.treyn himself and a few of his friends looked like they only got as far as the wake. Nobody was allowed to drink in the arcade, but that just meant people showed up drunk already, and that night they were drunk. Luckily, the FGC knew how to handle its alcohol, so the room was relaxed but energetic, loud but friendly, competitive but sporting—and, when Maya’s favorite game rolled around, loud as fuck.

With some contests, people quiet down when the action starts. Baseball, tennis, poker, golf—most of the time, people wait for shit to happen before they get loud. Not Marvel. With Marvel, people started off loud and only shut up if they got bored. Behind the players, people shouted inspiration and imprecations, motivation and denigration. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to put it into words. Match after match, Maya cupped her hands around her mouth and roared into the noise. People around her elbowed each other and pointed. Someone next to her clapped three times and then grabbed her sleeve, but she didn’t even turn to look at who it was, and she knew that he wasn’t turning to look at her, either.

If the players heard a thing through their fist-sized headphones, they didn’t show it. They were too busy with the cartoon disco warzone playing out on the screen. Giant men with car-sized arms slammed craters into the ground using each other’s bodies, neon laser beams zipped and fizzed, missiles exploded, gunshots popped, and every touch threw off sparks. The two players battled blow for blow, not trapped but braced between the delirious lightshow blasting from the screen in front of them and the wall of sound behind them, until one of them put the other down for good.

Maya cheered along with the rest of the arcade, not so much for the result but in appreciation for the show. As always, she felt like she could’ve stayed there watching and playing forever. But eventually Lawrence, fresh out of fucks to give, came through to wrap everything up. Handing a thin envelope of cash to the winner and another, even thinner one to the guy who came in second, he said: Okay, guys, good shit, but you know the drill. Pack it up, I need to get home. And they did know the drill: against the post-tournament buzz, backpacks slid up over shoulders, chairs rattled against tables, the names of bars and Chinese restaurants rolled back and forth around the room, and car keys and subway passes filled hands. Too slowly for Lawrence’s liking and too fast for everybody else’s, they got moving.

Adler and Aldo waited while Maya tossed her mutilated bike in a Dumpster behind the arcade. When she rejoined them and they all set off down the street, the two of them got to talking about the el.treyn situation. Maya didn’t want to hear it: Really, though? Who cares? That game sucks. Nothing happens. Street Fighter is, like, Marvel for dummies. I can’t be worried about that shit. I got real problems I need to deal with.

Aldo: I mean, if you wanna call getting hit by a car a real problem.

Maya stopped under a streetlight: See, but that’s not even it. My fucking landlord’s talking about raising my rent again. Man’s about to push me out my own fucking neighborhood.

Adler: Yeah, me, too. That shit sucks.

Aldo: Me three.

Then Adler sensed a chance to make some trouble: But wait, though—that shouldn’t be a problem for you. You can enter the Street Fighter bracket. I mean, you just said it was easy, right? So it should be free money.

Maya: Yeah, if I didn’t fall asleep in the middle of a fucking round. That game’s so slow I’d have to play two matches at once just to stay awake. Fucking, learn to play with my feet or play with a blindfold or some shit. But yeah, actually, if I get serious about Marvel maybe I can get the money that way. I guess not all in one week, but it might add up, right?

Aldo: Yo, but hold up. Street Fighter is the reason we have fighting games in the first place. How can you disrespect the architects like that?

Maya: What, I gotta like it just because it’s old? Fuck all that. That el.treyn guy is old, too, right? But apparently he’s trash. And his boring-ass, slow-ass, old-ass game is, too.

As luck would have it, the players of that very same boring-ass, slow-ass, old-ass game had been walking in the same direction, and their leader did not appreciate what he was hearing. With no preamble, stepped into the light, got up in Maya’s face, and said: I don’t know who you think you are, but I want you to listen. Some games are real popular just because they look fresh on the surface. And, yeah, that’s nice. But who cares about that if there’s nothing underneath? Marvel is orange soda, kid shit. You wanna talk that trash, take a shot of something real.

That got Maya heated faster than a microwave: Excuse me?

That was when she noticed that it wasn’t just him. He had a whole little team with him: two taller guys, one spindly and the other built like an army vehicle, and a third who was shorter and younger-looking and wearing a pair of ridiculous camo pants. But the rest of them were still clustered near a bodega in the shadows, and it was only el.treyn who spoke: You heard me. A child can drink soda and feel grown up, but if you wanna drink gin, you gotta learn how.

Maya snorted: Of course you fucking do—gin is nasty. Know why people like Marvel? Because it’s fun. The only reason you Street Fighter fanboys don’t play it is because you can’t keep up.

The tank took a step forward and said: Damn, bro! You gonna let her talk to you like that?

Then the skinny one joined him: Are you…my judge?

The two of them snickered and looked at each other like they could’ve gone back and forth all night, but el.treyn held out his hand and they fell silent. The whole time, he had never taken his eyes off her.

He said: Play me, then.

And just like that, all of Maya’s heat blew back in her face, like she’d tried to burn down a house only to find she was still in it. But she gathered herself and said: Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Get me in your game so you can make me look bad.

For an instant, a smile curled his lip like a lone snowflake floating across a window in a blue winter night. He said: We can play Marvel. I don’t mind.

Maya felt like she was walking into a trap, especially because Adler and Aldo weren’t walking in with her. In fact, they had both moved behind her on the sidewalk, out of the way and out of the light, which should’ve been all the warning she needed. But she couldn’t stop herself: Okay, fine then. How much?

el.treyn: I don’t want your money. Play me for pride or don’t bother.

All kinds of thoughts flashed through Maya’s head, most of them R-rated or worse. She narrowed her eyes and began to tell him off, but he spoke first: You got an ID?

Maya: What, like a driver’s license?

el.treyn: "Driver’s license, state ID, school ID, gym membership card, country club portrait—anything with your name and picture on