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Patch has a beer in the smokers. The pokies are through the glass doors. A little thing with dusty blonde hair escapes the restaurant area and gazes up at the big console. Patch can tell that the boy knows, even then, that he wants it. He wants the lights and cartoons and big tactile buttons. His squishy arms reach up to whack the buttons when they flash. Patch sips and inhales. The late arvo sun blasts the terrace and he scrapes his stool to the corner. The machine’s idle sequence restarts and all the buttons and screens flash together in kaleidoscope, and the little head whose arms have been hitting the console rushes with dopamine from winning its imagined game. It takes a minute before dad, tattooed and jacked in a slim-fit tee, scoops him up and glares.
This happens a lot. Patch drinks here a lot. Afterwards he goes home.
Whenever Patch sees bored children attempting the pokies, he’s reminded of his first games console, a Nintendo DS. His was a later version with a camera and some of the internet. He remembers it fondly. Patch, but aged ten or eleven, had this rectangular navy clamshell device which folded open on plastic hinges, the main screen on the top panel and a resistive touchscreen surrounded by buttons on the bottom panel, and he could do all sorts of things with it.
Patch liked to play Pokémon and now he wonders whether this is why he enjoys butterflies and orchids so much. The inventor of Pokémon was very interested in butterfly hunting and wanted to share the feeling. This morning, waiting for the bus, a Blue Triangle whisked past Patch like a side-quest with an electric swoosh on its wings. But Patch couldn’t follow its looping flight, because he had to go to work. When Patch is done with work, he goes for his beers. Patch sometimes thinks himself lucky. For all his addictions over the years — drinks, smokes, drugs, Pokémon — he’s never touched a pokie.
On the right side of the bottom panel of Patch’s DS was a cylindrical cut-out that housed a stylus pen for the touchscreen. Patch had lost his stylus. Maybe he chewed at it too much and it didn’t stay locked into its cut-out and fell out at some point. Patch still chews when he’s concentrating. Chewing sometimes got him into trouble at school and one time at work. Focused on a difficult task sheet for Maths or that one time a meeting, he chewed at his indigo pen and pierced the plastic casing and ink split over the desk and into his lips and tasted like metal or like the callouses he gets inside his cheek the day after he tried to eat his very hot dinner before it had cooled off, even when mum told him to wait.
Patch had lost the stylus pen and so he used his index finger to press the resistive touchscreen, which was quicker, anyway, for switching between the buttons and the touchscreen without having to change tools mid-game.
In the back of his Nintendo was a square cut-out for the cartridges, which sometimes crashed when the device was booting up. Patch would click the cartridge from its cut-out and blow into the slot to clear away any dust and then blow along the metal part of the cartridge. Once he ran the tip of his tongue along the metal part, to see what it tasted like, and it tasted blue like ink.
Patch wasn’t so tanned back then. He spent the holidays in the shade of the living room tending to his creatures. When mum started to worry about him, she made a chart that limited his DS time per week, which she pinned to the fridge with magnets, but more magnets crept over the sheet like ivy, and she would forget about it, and Patch could do his thing again.
Patch’s favourite feature on his clamshell gaming device, and the reason that he remembers it so fondly now, especially when he sees children at the pub trying to use the buttons on the pokies, is that Patch’s device is the first such device to include a web browser. It was rudimentary, without Google or Flash or whatever else smartphones come with now.
Clicking through the web on the touchscreen with the pad of his index finger, Patch found porn for the first time. This was an exciting shock. The secret became a game. The ergonomics of his DS were useful here. He would snap the clamshell shut when he heard his parents about to walk behind him. If he was in the sitting room with his parents, lying on the sofa with his parents sitting opposite, with the fire burning to their left, sometime in winter and under a blanket with cat hair, he would angle to top screen of the clamshell to create a more private angle. His face was red hot.
Patch knew that there were limitations to his game. He could only access the six still thumbnail images that flicked through as previews, because his DS couldn’t play videos. And Patch hadn’t quite learned the word ‘porn’ yet. Whenever he wanted to get to the website with the tantalising thumbnails he followed the original route of searches and links between websites that first led him there. Patch didn’t understand what porn was, or how he should use it, or why he preferred the men, but he liked the feeling. Like striking gold. But his friends at the school don’t want to talk about his game, they only wanted to talk about the one that Grandma gave them for Xmas. A new Pokémon. Patch was over it. And he was over his Nintendo when he got his first laptop. The DS is somewhere far away in a drawer at mum’s place.
Patch isn’t particularly nostalgic about childhood. He only calls mum if he’s feeling drunk or guilty. He’s grabbed another beer and is rolling another cigarette. The child has escaped again, straight back to the pokies, and thrashes against the buttons. He knows that time is short. Dad appears more quickly, grabs his thing by its raised wrist, and delivers a colourful whack that chimes like jackpot. Patch doesn’t see this, googling emulators for his phone.
