The Impossible Fortress Read online

  Alfred counted twelve dollars into his palm. “Just three Playboys.”

  “We really appreciate it,” I told him. “Thank you.”

  “Three Playboys,” Jack Camaro repeated. “No problem. You guys sit tight.”

  He stepped inside Zelinsky’s, and the three of us stared after him, slack-jawed. It was like we’d summoned a magical genie to obey our every whim and command. A moment later Jack Camaro exited the store and returned to us, still clutching the twelve dollars.

  “I just had a crazy idea,” he said. “Are you guys sure three copies is enough?”

  “Three is plenty,” I said.

  “One for each of us,” Alf said.

  “Just hear me out,” Jack Camaro said. “I bet your school is full of horndogs who want to see these pictures. If you bought a couple extra magazines, you could charge whatever you wanted.”

  We all realized the brilliance of his proposal and everyone started talking at once. Most of our male classmates would happily spend ten or fifteen or even twenty dollars to own the Vanna White photos for themselves. Jack Camaro suggested that we allocate “rental copies” for everyone else; we could loan them out for one or two dollars a night, just like the movies at Video City.

  “You’re a genius!” Clark exclaimed.

  Jack Camaro shrugged. “I’m an entrepreneur. I look for opportunities. This is what we call supply and demand.”

  We dug deep in our pockets and pooled the rest of our money—another twenty-eight dollars. Jack Camaro would buy ten copies for a total of forty bucks, but we insisted that he keep one of the magazines as a service fee.

  “That’s too generous,” he said.

  “It’s the least we can do,” Alf insisted.

  He took our money into the store and we returned to our bench. Suddenly our futures seemed alive with hope and possibilities. With Jack Camaro’s help, we could all be entrepreneurs.

  “And make a fortune!” Alf exclaimed.

  “Take it easy,” Clark told him. “Let’s not get carried away.” He urged us to be sensible and invest our profits into more magazines—not just Playboy but Penthouse, Hustler, Gallery, and Oui. “I’m talking hundreds of copies. If we have enough inventory, there’s no limit to this thing!”

  Alf announced his plans to buy a Ford Mustang; Clark said he would pay for surgery to remove the Claw; and I would help my mother with bills so she wouldn’t worry all the time.

  These dreams lasted all of six or seven minutes.

  “Sure is taking a while,” Clark finally said.

  “It’s rush hour,” Alf reasoned. “The store gets crowded.”

  But we’d been watching the door the whole time, and no other customers had entered or left the building.

  “Maybe he’s an undercover priest,” I suggested. “Maybe he and Zelinsky are calling the Vatican.”

  Alf turned to me, angry. “That really happens, Billy! You don’t hear about it because undercover priests don’t want the publicity, but it happens!”

  “Take it easy,” Clark said softly.

  We counted to a hundred Mississippis before sending Clark into the store to investigate. He promised he wouldn’t say or do anything to upset the plan. He would simply locate Jack Camaro and report back. He disappeared through the door. Alf and I remained frozen in place. The second hand on my Swatch ticked off a full minute, then another, then another. We didn’t move. We just watched the door, waiting for Clark to return.

  “Something’s wrong,” Alf said.

  “Something’s definitely wrong,” Clark said.

  Suddenly he was standing behind us, like Doug Henning or David Copperfield escaping from a locked box.

  Alf whirled around. “What the hell? How did you—”

  “There’s a rear entrance, dummy. You can park behind the store.”

  “So where’s Jack Camaro?” I asked.

  My question hung in the air as the truth settled in. Jack Camaro was long gone and forty dollars richer. Our dreams of entrepreneurship and financial prosperity went spiraling down the toilet. Between the three of us, we had just $1.52 left over, barely enough to rent a movie.

  “Kramer vs. Kramer?” Clark asked.

  We trudged off to Video City.

  300 REM *** TRANSFER CHARACTER SET ***

  310 PRINT "SETTING UP THE GAME. . ."

  320 PRINT "PLEASE WAIT. . ."

  330 POKE 56334,0

  340 POKE 1,51

  350 FOR ADDRESS=2048 TO 6143

  360 POKE ADDRESS,PEEK(ADDRESS+51200)

  370 NEXT ADDRESS

  380 POKE 1,55:POKE 56334,125

  390 RETURN

  BEFORE I GO ANY further, I need to stop and tell you about Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley. This was a video game we played on my Commodore 64 computer, a simulation that pitted human against supermodel in five-card stud. The machine acted as Christie Brinkley, the most beautiful woman in the world before Vanna White came along, and she stood center screen throughout the game. Every time she lost a hand, her blouse or skirt or bra would disappear; the goal was to win her clothes before she won yours. The most remarkable thing about Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley was that you couldn’t buy it in any store. My friends and I were the only people who’d ever played it. I created the game myself by typing many hundreds of lines of BASIC code into the computer.

  Alf loved to mock the game’s simplicity. I’d illustrated Christie Brinkley using ASCII characters—a mix of punctuation and mathematical symbols—so she wasn’t much more than a stick figure:

  I knew I hadn’t illustrated the Mona Lisa, but I was proud of the game anyway. I’d spent weeks trying to teach the computer the difference between two pair, three of a kind, and a royal flush. I even found a way to make random cards “wild.” Alf didn’t appreciate any of this. He just complained that Computer Christie didn’t have any pubic hair; she didn’t even have wrists.

  “Plus her legs aren’t long enough,” Alf complained. “She’s not contortionated.”

  “You mean proportional?” I asked.

  “Exactly. It’s terrible!”

  I tried not to take Alf’s criticisms personally. I reminded myself that he had no idea what went into making a computer game—none of my classmates did. Our high school had a lab full of new TRS-80 computers, but this was 1987 and none of our teachers knew what to do with them. They used the machines to teach typing skills and drill vocabulary words.

  Most kids still didn’t have computers at home. I was one of the lucky ones. My mother won the Commodore 64 through a contest at the Wetbridge Savings and Loan. When she first brought it home, I thought it just a fancy game machine—a turbocharged Atari 2600. But after plugging everything together and reading the owner’s manual, I was astonished to learn that the Commodore 64 allowed you to create your own games—space adventures, fantasy battles, race cars, anything you wanted. And just like that, I was hooked.

  While my teachers droned on about algebraic equations and the American Revolution, I sat in the back of the classroom, sneaking looks at the Commodore Programmer’s Reference Guide and sketching 8-bit images on graph paper. I subscribed to hobbyist magazines filled with pages of dense BASIC code (FOR X=1020 TO 1933 STEP 3) that readers could type directly into their machines. I often stayed awake inputting programs until one or two in the morning. It was slow, tedious work, but every program taught me something new, and I’d sometimes copy patches of code into my own games. Alf and Clark were the only people who ever played my creations, and Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley was my most ambitious game to date—custom-designed to win their approval.

  “Her nipples are zeros!” Alf complained. “That’s the worst part. Who wants to play strip poker with a zero-nippled Christie Brinkley? Can’t you round them off a little?”

  This was a few days after the Jack Camaro incident, and we were gathered around the computer in my bedroom, guzzling RC Cola and bored out of our minds.

  “I could switch them to asterisks,” I suggested, bu
t Alf and Clark agreed that asterisks looked even worse.

  “Forget it, Billy,” Alf said. “Let’s just play something else.”

  He ejected the floppy from the disk drive. I tried to grab it before he could see the label, but I wasn’t fast enough. This is what it said:

  STRIP POKER WITH CHRISTIE BRINKLEY

  A GAME BY WILLIAM MARVIN

  COPYRIGHT © 1987 PLANET WILL SOFTWARE

  Alf read the label and snorted.

  “William Marvin?” he asked.

  I blushed. “That’s my name.”

  “What, like William Shakespeare?”

  Clark leaned over to see. “What’s Planet Will Software?”

  “My company,” I said.

  Alf laughed even harder. “Your company?”

  It was one of those ideas that doesn’t sound stupid until someone says it out loud.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  But Alf was just getting warmed up. He gestured around my tiny bedroom, pointing at my wall posters of Spuds MacKenzie and bikini supermodels. “Is this your corporate headquarters? Can I be CEO?”

  “It’s just a goof,” I told him. “I wrote it on the label to be funny.”

  Alf didn’t seem convinced, so I grabbed the closest distraction at hand—the 1987 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition—and flung it into his lap. “Check out page ninety-eight. Kathy Ireland’s swinging from a jungle vine, like Tarzan.”

  The ruse worked—Alf opened the magazine and stopped teasing me—and I was relieved. Even though he and Clark were my best friends, I hadn’t told them about my secret plan to grow up and make video games for a living. I wanted to be the next Mark Cerny, the whiz kid game designer hired by Atari when he was just seventeen years old. I wanted to partner with visionaries like Fletcher Mulligan, the legendary founder of Digital Artists, and I wanted to have my own software company. These all seemed like crazy things to say out loud—like announcing you were going to be an astronaut or president of the United States. When adults asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I just shrugged and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

  Alf stuck his nose in the magazine, trying to inhale the scent of Kathy Ireland, but Clark was still pinching the floppy disk in his claw, as if he’d been seized by a remarkable idea.

  “Planet Will is a real business,” he said.

  “It’s just a joke,” I insisted.

  “But it could be real,” he explained. “There are real teenagers who make video games and sell them. They run real businesses out of their garages. And they buy their office supplies at stores like Zelinsky’s.”

  Clark opened my closet and started removing clothes that I hadn’t worn in years—the sports coat from my sixth-grade graduation, the slacks I wore to church on Christmas and Easter, scuffed black shoes that couldn’t possibly fit me anymore.

  “Put these on,” he told me.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Operation Vanna, take two,” he said. “I’ve got a better idea, and this one is going to work.”

  400 REM *** PLAY THEME MUSIC ***

  410 L1=54272:POKE L1+18,128

  420 POKE L1,75:POKE L1+5,0

  430 POKE L1+6,240:POKE L1+14,12

  440 POKE L1+15,250:POKE L1+24,207

  450 FOR L=0 TO 25:POKE L1+4,17

  460 POKE L1+1,PEEK(L1+27)

  470 FOR T=0 TO 100:NEXT T

  480 NEXT L:POKE L1+4,0

  490 RETURN

  EVERYONE KNEW YOU HAD to be eighteen years old to legally purchase Playboy, but we never stopped to wonder if the law was state, federal, or local, or which government was responsible for enforcing it.

  Clark insisted that we dress up. He said that a proper coat and tie would age anyone’s appearance by eighteen months.

  “But that only gets me to fifteen,” I said. “Fourteen plus eighteen months is fifteen, maybe sixteen.”

  “You’ll be close enough,” Clark promised. “We’ll have so many other distractions, Zelinsky won’t think twice.”

  My shirt was too small and my shoes pinched my feet; every step hurt and I wobbled like a woman in high heels. Clark had the opposite problem; he wore a teal polyester suit that was two sizes too large. Ever since his father went out of work, Clark survived on hand-me-downs shipped from weird relatives in Georgia. These items arrived once a year in black plastic trash bags, reeking of mothballs and adorned with mysterious brands we’d never heard of: U-Men, Bootstrap, Kentucky Swagger.

  Alf was the only kid on our street who always dressed in new clothes. Both of his parents worked—his father hung wallpaper and his mother was a secretary in a Realtor’s office—so they were rolling in dough. For our trip to Zelinsky’s, Alf dressed up-to-the-minute in the latest Miami Vice–inspired fashion—white linen pants, a mauve jacket, and a blue T-shirt, no belt or socks. We were supposed to be businessmen coming off the train after a long day in Manhattan, but Alf looked like he was ready to seize cocaine from a Colombian drug lord.

  “This is all about confidence,” Alf assured me.

  “Exactly,” Clark said. “If you act like you’re old enough, Zelinsky is going to think you’re old enough.”

  It was easy for them to say. Even though Clark hatched the plan and Alf was the oldest of our group, they agreed that I looked the oldest and had the best chance of purchasing the magazine. We arrived at Zelinsky’s at four in the afternoon, long after school let out but before the evening rush hour. An empty store was vital to our mission. I knew that if I found myself in a long line of customers, I’d probably lose my nerve.

  “Are you ready?” Clark asked.

  “Give me the money,” I said.

  Alf pushed a wad of wrinkled bills into my hand. He had pilfered the cash from the dresser drawer of his oldest sister, Janice, who spent all of her free time babysitting. “This is thirty-seven bucks,” he said. “Make sure we don’t go over.”

  A tiny bell dinged when I pulled open the door. Zelinsky’s had existed in some form or another since World War II, so entering the store was like stepping into the past; the air was heavy with the smells of pipe tobacco, fresh cedar, and ink. The first thing you noticed was the enormous wall rack of newspapers and magazines—everything from the Wall Street Journal to Good Housekeeping. The second thing you noticed were all the signs around the display, handwritten in an angry Sharpie marker scrawl:

  NO ONE UNDER 18 ALLOWED DURING SCHOOL HOURS!

  ATTENTION STUDENTS: This is NOT Your LOCAL LIBRARY!!

  We DON’T SELL COMICS so please STOP ASKING!!!

  Sal Zelinsky stood behind the checkout counter, fifty years old with ruddy skin and the high-and-tight crew cut of a U.S. marine. He wore a shirt and tie under a filthy ink-smeared apron. He was skewering a long screwdriver through the back of an IBM Selectric; scattered all around him were greasy knobs and levers and keys. It looked like he’d slaughtered the typewriter and ripped out its guts.

  At the sound of our arrival, Zelinsky adjusted his bifocals with blackened fingertips, studied our faces, and frowned. There was a swollen artery on his forehead, zigzagging from his hairline to his right eyebrow, throbbing like he’d just finished an arm-wrestling contest. He couldn’t have looked more pissed off.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  “We just need a few things,” I said, then forced myself to spit out the rest, because Clark insisted these words were crucial: “. . . for our office.”

  “Your office.” Zelinsky said it the way another person might say “Your pirate ship” or “Your space shuttle.” Just over his shoulder, behind the cash register, I saw Vanna White on a rack of magazines labeled ADULTS ONLY, and sure enough, her butt was on the cover. My heart did a little flip.

  “Just some odds and ends,” I said, but the words came out all mumbled.

  Zelinsky turned the Selectric facedown and speared a second screwdriver into its bottom. “This isn’t a toy store,” he said. “You get what you need and you leave.”

  “Right,” I said.r />
  “No problem,” Clark said.

  “Understood,” Alf said.

  We were barely through the front door and already I wanted to turn back. But Alf and Clark were grabbing wire baskets and moving ahead with the plan. I grabbed a basket of my own and followed them.

  I’d shopped at Zelinsky’s dozens of times but never ventured past the magazine rack. Behind the checkout counter, the store divided into three long aisles filled with office supplies: calendars and stationery, staples and staple removers, markers and mailers, and a million other doodads. We spread out and went to work.

  Clark’s plan was to fill our baskets with many large but inexpensive items. I grabbed a three-ring binder, a pack of A13 batteries, and a massive tub of Elmer’s Glue. If it cost less than a buck or two, I put it in the basket. There were no other customers. The store was silent except for the radio; Phil Collins was repeating the fade-out chorus of “Invisible Touch.” But as soon as the song ended, it inexplicably started from the beginning all over again.

  At the back of the store was a large showroom designed to look like a working office, complete with desks and swivel chairs, typewriters and wall clocks and file cabinets. Everything had a price tag; the whole showroom was available for purchase.

  A fat girl sat at one of the desks, typing on a Commodore 64 computer.

  The monitor was full of code and I was too far away to read it, but I could hear the results streaming from the speakers: a tinny, synthesized version of “Invisible Touch,” the same song playing on the radio. The melody wasn’t quite right—there were a few wrong notes—but as a copy, it was pretty damn close.

  The girl looked up. “Can I help you?”

  I grabbed the closest item on a shelf—it looked like a white paper hockey puck—and dropped it in my basket.

  “No, thanks.”

  I turned down the next aisle but felt her eyes tailing me; none of the shelves were taller than my shoulders, and her desk in the showroom allowed her to observe the entire store. I grabbed some #2 pencils and then topped off my basket with old, bulky typewriter ribbons that were marked down to fifty cents apiece. Alf was in the next aisle over, scooping Styrofoam peanuts into a plastic bag. Clark walked past him with a dozen mailers wedged beneath his arms. They’d already gathered more stuff than we could carry.