Supply-chain issues were not on Victoria de Grazia’s mind when her beloved chocolate-brown dachshund, Luca, was stolen on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last December. In fact, when I contacted de Grazia, a professor of European history at Columbia University, she initially replied that I’d “do better to cover more important issues”.
The details of the heist, first reported by a local news blog called the Upper West Side Rag, suggest the motive was money, which would involve some calculus on the thief’s part. Since the pandemic began, an imbalance of supply and demand has been bedevilling markets from Houndsditch (in England) to Dogtown (in Missouri).
The pooch-pilfery occurred when de Grazia’s partner, whom she refused to name for reasons that will become apparent, tied Luca up outside a grocery store on Broadway, a wide Parisian-style boulevard that is one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Spotting an opportunity (after all, dognapping is the ultimate crime of opportunity), the thief nabbed the pet and promptly began hunting for a buyer.
His first try, a shopkeeper a few doors down, was a bust. The canny clerk deduced that a random guy whose entire inventory consisted of a single, scared-looking dachshund was probably up to no good, and called de Grazia, who contacted the police. The thief had moved on swiftly. New York officers located Luca four days later in the Bronx, with new owners who bought her for about $300 and fed her jam donuts.
This chain of events surprised de Grazia, especially because Luca was already seven, and her breed tends to live only 12 to 14 years. “My first supposition was that the person who’d taken the dog was somebody who thought the dog was treated badly because she was left outside, the sort of egotistical person who thought she’d be a better owner,” said de Grazia, on the phone from Tuscany (I could hear Luca barking in the background).
The thief didn’t seem to be part of one of the “puppy stealing mafias” that sprang up earlier in the pandemic. “He would steal anything he could – nappies, bottles of soda, a small dog...real dognappers are after puppies,” said de Grazia, who’d picked up information about the crook from court filings and the local rumour mill. All of which may be true – but hey, $300 for a seven-year-old dog that de Grazia originally bought for about $1,500 from a “renowned breeder” is pretty respectable.
This story briefly went viral, and de Grazia told me she got emails from all over the world and “scores of letters from little kids”. Some congratulated her on Luca’s recovery; others were “nasty” and advised her to “dump the guy” who dared to leave her wiener dog unattended. (True fact: the sausages were named after the dog, not the other way around; the meat treats were first called “dachshund sausages”.)
It wasn’t until a couple of months after Luca was safely home that dognapping stories flooded the media, instigated by the theft in LA of Lady Gaga’s two French bulldogs (a breed worth up to $10,000 apiece) and the shooting of her dog walker in the chest. (He recovered, and Koji and Gustav were dropped off at the police station after Gaga offered a $500,000 reward.) Buttressing these stories at the time were statistics from outfits like Doglost, a British canine lost-and-found agency, which reported a 170% year-on-year increase in thefts.
The trend made sense. Wild demand for pandemic puppies during lockdown had led to a shortage of dogs so extreme that shelters had as many as 50 owners vying for a single pup. Combine that with pandemic-related conditions such as high unemployment and reduced foot traffic and you have a perfect storm for dognapping.
There’s anecdotal evidence that the mutt market is now softening. Several pet-store owners told me that almost everyone who thought about getting a dog during lockdown has done it. And as offices reopen, “some people are rethinking those pandemic puppies,” says Mark Drendel of Canine Styles, a boutique in Manhattan where a cable-knit cashmere dog-sweater costs $200. Nevertheless, it’s no time to be careless with Fido – pandemic or not. “You wouldn’t leave your child outside tied up,” said Drendel, “why would you leave your dog outside tied up?” ■
Amanda FitzSimons is a writer who lives in New York
A bicycle shop without bikes...or chains or tyres
When covid-19 hit in March 2020, everything was shutting down and I was looking at my bank account thinking, I can survive for six months making no money, no more. I panicked and started fire-saleing some of my inventory, dumping stuff at cost to get cash. I regret that now. I really regret it. Because a little over a month later, business exploded as people got tired of being cooped up and the weather started to get better. One day I sold 20 bikes – on a weekday! – where normally I’m happy to sell one or two.
The bike factories were shutting down as everything else was, and my Cannondale rep told me: “You just gotta keep ordering bikes, because we’re going to run out.” I did what he said until early June, when they pretty much did run out. Then I had a bike shop with almost no bikes.
I’ve worked in bike stores since I was a teenager. My family came over from Laos in 1978, when I was five, and all of a sudden I was in kindergarten with a bunch of white kids. I didn’t play football or baseball, but there was a triathlon that came through my neighbourhood every year, and I thought the bikers were so cool. I started riding and then racing bikes, and made friends that way.
My parents wanted me to get a real job when I graduated from college. My sister is a software designer for Microsoft. Me working in a bike shop for $8 an hour wasn’t really in their plan. I finished college, but I stuck with bikes.
Eventually, I decided to open my own place. I’d been selling high-end road bikes, but I wanted a shop for anybody. I found a space near new housing developments: I realised that every one of these families is going to want a kid’s bike or two, and maybe a bike for the mom or dad to go along. I love selling someone their first bike. It’s not really about the money. I see it as, What can I do to bring you the same joy I feel when I’m riding?
Last year, the problem was bikes. This year, it’s parts too. Even simple things like chains are impossible to find. In February, I realised that I was going to have to stock up on bike parts as well as bikes, so I ploughed even more money into inventory – I’ve got 200 mountain-bike tyres, which is crazy. And there were some things I just couldn’t get, like tubes for kids’ tyres. Someone came in to fix their kid’s flat, and I said I couldn’t get a tube for a month. They didn’t believe me, so they wrote a bad review of my shop on Google.
Every day this summer, I probably lost $2,000 in sales from telling people that I can’t get this bike, or these tyres. Every day. It’s hard to run a business like that. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve got an alert on my phone that tells me when my distributor gets certain items in. It went off the other night at 2am. I got out of bed, logged onto my computer and ordered 15 chains before I hit the limit and they cut me off. When I checked again at 7am, the chains were all gone. It’s like the lottery.
Some big companies are hoarding bikes for big retailers. Or for themselves. They’re not admitting it, but they are. Last night a customer came in, he was able to buy an $800 mountain bike on a company’s website, direct-to-consumer. Then they shipped it to my shop, and I had to build it for him. When I’d tried to order that same bike, it didn’t exist.
But it doesn’t keep me up at night that some bike companies sell online. With Amazon and stuff, I’ve come to see myself as a product. People come to me because they want my experience, my customer service, or just to hang out and talk. They can’t sell me online. ■
Saysana Inthavongsa of Leeds Cyclery was speaking to Bill Gifford, a writer in Utah
If the hottest new toy isn’t available, make your own. Queen Victoria did
Kensington Palace, that pilastered Jacobean mansion with an orangery, Cupola Room and views of the western flank of Hyde Park, also holds evidence of childhood deprivation. It’s displayed on the first floor: a large cupboard-like object subdivided into two spaces, one representing a kitchen, one a dining room. Beside it, a glass case houses some of the 132 dolls that were once its tenants. These are the well-dressed, hand-painted, carefully inventoried wooden people that kept Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent company in the years before she escaped these rooms to rule the British Empire.
On the wall nearby hang the rules of the notorious Kensington System, devised by Victoria’s mother, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, and her boyfriend, Sir John Conroy, who wanted to produce a biddable regent through whom they might advance their own interests. The System (it always took a capital) prescribed plain food and workouts with weighted clubs, and prohibited sleeping alone, using a staircase without adult supervision or playing with other children. “I had a very unhappy life as a child,” Queen Victoria later reflected, “[and] “had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection.”
The dolls, however, did not resist her passions. She stitched their clothes, brought them on royal road trips and ventriloquised their correspondence. (“I hope [baby] is almost recovered and that this serious bruise has no influence on its general health, and that it is not the less in favour for having been beheaded for a short while.”)
In his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny”, Sigmund Freud writes about the haunting power of objects that resemble human beings. The uncanny effect arises, he argues, when “the subject identifies with someone else…So that he is in doubt to which self he is.” All dolls, from glassy-eyed Edwardian babies with china skulls and cloth bodies, to the sleekly sexualised ethylene-vinyl acetate of Barbie, carry this potential. Their little bodies receive our desires and emotions. Unlike ours, they never change or grow. We endow them with life, and they can do nothing with it. Sometimes we put them in houses and fill their larders with inedible food.
Dolls have other people’s nightmares. New technologies do not banish them. Thomas Edison manufactured a talking doll in the 1890s: a miniature phonographic disc allowed it to recite “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Now Lay Me Down to Sleep”, a popular children’s bedtime prayer of the 18th century. The surviving recordings don’t sound at odds with the great project of Edison’s last years: building a machine to contact the dead. If you’ve ever heard a modern talking doll when its battery is running down, you might wonder if he’d succeeded. I was once forced to destroy a Woody from “Toy Story”, whose line “I’ve got a snake in my boots” – delivered in the chirpy voice of Tom Hanks – eventually slurred into a threat from the hellmouth.
The uncanny power of dolls seems as strong and mysterious as the impulse to make them: a desire that, the record shows, persists even in the most desperate circumstances. In the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem, examples from Auschwitz include a friendly looking cloth policeman and a beribboned girl with a body crafted from an empty food can. These speak to experiences beyond the reach of psychoanalysis.
Freud, though, is still the legislating authority. In “Spencer”, Pablo Larraín’s recent biopic of Diana, Princess of Wales, the heroine returns to her childhood home, which stands behind a barbed-wire cordon within the grounds of Sandringham, where she’s spending a miserable Christmas with her in-laws. Like a good Gothic protagonist, Diana ascends the mouldering stairs and finds the nursery, which, through some dark miracle, retains the doll’s house she used to play with. Sandringham, of course, is also a kind of doll’s house – a vast aristocratic version of the one that traps Ibsen’s Nora – but the crumbling nursery of Park House is a bricks-and-mortar representation of Diana’s pre-royal past. It’s the repository of the youth she put aside when she moved into her first marital home: apartments eight and nine of Kensington Palace.
Her predecessor at Kensington, Queen Victoria, kept her dolls into adulthood, and almost all still survive. When she was in her 70s, she co-operated with a writer who planned to publish an illustrated book about them. (“Queen Victoria’s Dolls” appeared in 1894.) The monarch answered Frances Lowe’s questions in the third person. In doing so, Victoria showed how much her dolls meant to her – how, even though they were carefully packed away, their frail wooden limbs were still carrying the weight of her unhappiness, still telling a story about what she lacked. “The Queen has no hesitation in saying that she was quite devoted to dolls,” Lowe wrote. “None of her children loved them as she did.” ■
Matthew Sweet is a regular contributor to 1843 magazine, and a writer and broadcaster in London
Confessions of an IKEA obsessive
It’s August 2020 and I’m standing at the IKEA information kiosk in the Etobicoke store in Toronto, having a heated argument with a salesperson who won’t sell me the floor-model of Mackapär, a white shoe rack. It’s only fair! It said online they were in stock. It’s impossible that someone has all the remaining Mackapär in their cart, I got here when the doors opened!
I grabbed the shoe rack from the hands of the man in the yellow-and-blue striped polo shirt and debated running down the wide self-checkout aisles, through the automatic doors and into my waiting hatchback. My only other option – escalating the fight with the employee – posed an even greater risk than arrest for a middle-aged white woman in America. Someone in the long line behind us would have been delighted to video the scene and post me screaming, “Get your supervisor!” on the Karen subreddit. Or is there already an r/Karën?
Yes, it’s hard to write about IKEA without making umlaut jokes, but that facile humour belies the embarrassing truth. My relationship with the chain is deep, long-standing and, as the pandemic has forced me to acknowledge, sadomasochistic.
The Dutch-based, Swedish-born company is dealing with a pandemic hangover: a 16% fall in profit between August 2020 and August 2021. I’m coming to terms with my own pandemic hangover in the form of an existential question that haunts me like a stripped hex screw – had I mastered IKEA, or had IKEA mastered me?
Though I pride myself on my auction, Craigslist and Kijiji shopping agility, IKEA has played a part in every key transition in my life. When I was 13 and allowed to decorate my own room, with prescience I juxtaposed cottage-core Laura Ashley wallpaper, antiques and contemporary white IKEA veneer. Thirty-five years later I bought a modest brick semi-detached house in Toronto and designed my first IKEA kitchen. (The cabinet- and drawer-fronts painted up beautifully in Farrow & Ball “Skylight”.) That’s why I needed Mackapär. Eleven months of the year I rent the Toronto house out furnished so that, come August, I can pretend that my family and I still live there.
Just as I juggle two countries, I maintain two IKEAs, the one in Etobicoke and another in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The latter’s cafeteria has a fantastic view of the Statue of Liberty, the former of the freeway, which looks quite cool framed by the oversized windows. This isn’t an aside. What keeps mass-consumer allergics like me coming back are these little appeals to humanity. An hour shopping for headphones at Best Buy can crush you for a week, whereas IKEA lets you build your spirit back up again with a lingonberry juice and soothing vista.
Although the monolithic furniture retailer is obviously in it for profit, the vaguely socialist promise behind IKEA’s “democratic design principles” (form, function, sustainability, quality and low price) typically translates into offering the nicest version of a thing that can be made affordably. Any design snob could tell you that. (The shoe racks I found at furniture e-tailers were ugly and depressing, but Mackapär is cheerful and pretty.)
Despite IKEA’s relative virtue, my friends and I treat the store as a shameful concession, a stopgap on the way to realising our slow decorating dreams. “Jane! Your deck looks amazing! Where’d you get your patio cushions?!” Eyeroll. “I finally just went to IKEA. I don’t need to spend $200 per cushion for the deck, and these are actually fine.”
Even as we have scorned the place, we’ve all prided ourselves on knowing how and when to use it. IKEA tap? Never. IKEA range hood? Yes. I had such a sense of control over the calmly evolving inventory that I was in denial about how much I relied on the store to keep my daily life going.
When any denial loses its cover, it’s painful. Mine was shattered during lockdown in spring 2020. My family of four were stuck together in our Brooklyn row house listening to non-stop sirens. The misery for me, though, was peppered with moments of ecstasy in the backyard away from the Ingrates (as I’d named the others), where I marvelled at the variegated greens unfurling into the clear – clear – air.
I just needed a few more seating options to take advantage of my newly relevant yard. After Craigslist, Etsy, eBay, Apartment Deco and random vintage websites didn’t bear fruit I turned, as usual, to the IKEA website.
The interface was a kind of palimpsest, old and new IKEA rudely smashed together. You could put items in your cart, but couldn’t check out. A message flicked at worker safety. Dates and times were all fugacious. The phone lines disconnected, or had recorded voices with mixed messages.
“IKEA”, I gasp-shouted to the disinterested Ingrates, “IS BROKEN.”
At the time, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the mess, revealing that this multibillion-euro global corporation simply hadn’t bothered to develop a strong online sales infrastructure. It also seemed to have a shamefully small IT staff. The click-and-collect was mass chaos. It billed credit cards with no plans in place as to how to get the products out.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Witnessing this unmapped faultline open in the neutral meadow where we consumer cows had peacefully grazed made me feel what I’d previously registered only numbly: the world was falling apart. The etched leaves in my garden took on a menacing cast, once I knew that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them from a Bondholmen loveseat. Then it kept getting hotter, the mosquitoes came, our local park was invaded by jostling, masked, accusatory, possibly contagious zombies.
A year after the first attempt, I tried and failed to get Mackapär in Red Hook, then again in Etobicoke this August. But why was I even there for the third time (OK, fifth)? My family – and my tenants – could throw their shoes in a heap. I was so brainwashed by decades of rushing through the showroom floor that not having inoffensive, if ubiquitous, shelving systems in the foyer and laundry room seemed inconceivable. Now that I couldn’t get those systems, I was under IKEA’s thumb.
A tense moment at my sister-in-law’s new cottage confirmed my changed relationship with the shop. Noticing her beds, I commented, “Oh, you got Bergpalm in pink and brown?” This tasteful, striped cotton duvet cover is a perfect example of what IKEA does so well. When I looked, I couldn’t find a single one in that colour scheme.
“I raced through and grabbed everything good,” my sister-in-law said. She probably didn’t mean it, but in my fevered scarcity mindset, it almost sounded like she was criticising my shopping prowess. And was it weird that she hadn’t invited me to go to the store with her?
Like all affairs where the power balance shifts, IKEA was making me paranoid, needy, grasping. I wanted to talk to someone in upper management and had a brief, naive image of an honest chat with the chief executive, or even with one of the three sons of Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder.
I wasn’t going to ask any hardball questions such as whether its complex ownership model was a tax-evasion strategy. Or if its claims to sustainability were rendered meaningless by manufacturing and selling furniture as inexpensively as possible. I just wanted to know what some of the conversations were when the company had to shut all the stores. Was everyone freaking out?
The IKEA press office wouldn’t facilitate an interview. Instead it sent a statement assuring me that, among other things, “Our Customer Service offerings have been expanded so that we can answer all questions and continue to prioritise the safety of both our employees and our customers.” What is a customer service offering? You can now have that but “we have no idea when” served with a Swedish meatball?
To give credit, Andrea, my correspondent in the press office, apparently noticed that the official response had ignored my question about Mackapär. “Our MACKAPÄR shoe rack is quite popular,” she wrote. “It is available in a lot of our IKEA stores across the US at the moment.” So I checked the website again. Sure enough, there was the little green dot next to “in store in Brooklyn”.
It has 70 reviews and a five-star rating. This makes me uneasy, like texting someone who might not text me back. Can I wait, and get it when I’m in Toronto next, or will it be gone again?
I want to turn my back on IKEA, which has finally awoken from its long PR nap and now admitted what its customers already knew: that it was struggling to keep its shelves stocked and its phones answered. The problems would continue well into 2022 and oh, they’ll be raising prices.
This is a good opportunity to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to globalised disposable consumerism. Though IKEA’s furniture isn’t all that disposable – the Ivar shelves in my office are an expansion, using an ingenious corner shape, of the basic shelf I got off Craigslist 15 years ago.
Listen to me, rationalising, as a good co-dependent will do. It’s both beautiful and disturbing that IKEA has had such a consistent role as a peripheral player in our lives that it forms our centres – a marketer’s dream come true. This mirrors the experience of the pandemic, which, at least briefly, shifted the ground beneath essential and marginal.
For some of us, the pandemic opened up a wellspring of hope for real change, along with self-examination. For me, it was the breaking of IKEA that forced me to assess whether I could really handle dismantling capitalism as we know it. Was I just a phoney who could afford to hold my au courant views because they’ll never be more than castles in the air (furnished by faux DIY flat-pack furniture)?
I don’t know. But I haven’t gone to pick up Mackapär...yet. ■
Miranda Purves is a writer who lives in Brooklyn
Bare supermarket shelves? How to make chicken soup without chicken
When I was 15 I became a vegetarian (part of a longer story involving coming home to a kitchen smelling of freshly charred-in-a-bad-way ground turkey patties). In all honesty, I didn’t miss meat much. I supplemented my former life as a steak and pork taco-loving Californian with lots of vegetables and Jack-in-the-Box tacos that I was told were made of soy (they were not, in fact).
One evening a few years later, I went to my best friend’s home for dinner. Her mom was making her famous (to me) chicken wings – sticky, salty, sweet, fall-apart-slow-roasted in a sauce made of soy sauce, brown sugar and so much garlic. When I walked in, the smell alone determined that would be my last day as a practising vegetarian.
All that is to say: I really, really love chicken. The way the skin melts into gorgeous golden drippings in which to roast potatoes and plump cloves of garlic. The simultaneously crispy exterior and juicy interior of an expertly fried breast. The tender bits of shredded thigh that have been braised in a white-wine laced broth I’d like to drink. Those sticky sweet wings! I still dream of them.
What other protein can be so readily transformed, can shine among so many different flavour profiles? Try as I might not to play favourites, in my heart I know that nothing compares, no stand-in comes close.
Sure, we’ve made strides switching out our red meat with plant-based options, slipping a pea- or soy-based patty between our potato rolls with little or no sacrifice in flavour or texture. But there simply isn’t yet a satisfying replica for chicken. Which is why poultry shortages in Britain this year – caused by a scarcity of farm- and factory-workers, among other pandemic and Brexit related breakdowns – struck fear in so many hearts (especially when Nandos, a popular chicken joint, ran out of its popular peri-peri dish).
Yet still, we must eat. While we dream of chicken, here are some replacement options for some of my favourite chicken dishes – minus the bird. Though the texture and flavour will be forever unmatched, come dinner time, these alternatives should still thrill.
Chickpea noodle soup
Are chickpeas a suitable substitution for chicken? Not always. But simmered in an olive oil slicked vegetable broth alongside celery, toasted garlic and plenty of leeks, finished with a handful of cooked noodles (fusilli for me, please), a smattering of freshly chopped herbs like parsley and chive, plus a quick shave of parmesan cheese for good measure, they just might heal you like the original. Dried chickpeas take longer but give you a decidedly more delicious broth – canned will work if you’re short on time.
Mushroom pot pie
There is no version of chicken pot pie that tastes as good as one made with, well, chicken. But here we are. Mushrooms, with their incomparably meaty texture, deep savoury flavour and wild abundance make them an excellent candidate for your next pie, something that I’d eat every single day from the start of Daylight Saving to Memorial Day.
Cook your mushrooms with thinly sliced onion like you would chicken thighs: in olive oil and butter in a cast-iron pan, followed by a dusting of flour for a quick roux. Add a bit of vegetable broth and soy sauce to make a thick gravy from the scrapings in the pan. Maybe throw in a few sprigs of thyme or chopped fresh parsley and plenty of black pepper. Top with a pie crust or shop-bought puff pastry, brush with egg wash and bake until puffed, bubbling and golden brown.
Crispy eggplant schnitzel
For most of my life I was unaware that there was a chicken version of eggplant parmesan. Despite knowing it exists, I have no reason to choose it over what I declare to be the superior version: eggplant. This is less a new idea and more a reminder that eggplant, when breaded and fried (or simply roasted with a ton of olive oil and plenty of salt and pepper until deeply browned and crisped at the edges), is a ringer for your thin cutlet-style chicken preparations – including a schnitzel-esque style dish.
Brush the eggplant with a light egg wash and press it into salted panko bread crumbs. Pan fry in a healthy glug of olive oil and finish with some capers popped in brown butter, followed by a healthy squeeze of lemon. ■
Alison Roman is a writer and cookbook author who lives in Brooklyn
No chips, no problem: why old video games are better than new ones
My mother and father believed that video games would ruin my life. Which is something to think about when I’m at my writing desk and look over my left shoulder to a wall of 446 video games, arranged like paperbacks on 34 shelves in a cabinet six-feet wide by five-and-a-half-feet tall. In the alphabetised vastness of this collection, I see my parents trying to shoo me away from “Super Mario Bros.”, begging me to go outside. It was 1986, and I was seven years old. They were both educators, both from poor families in the Bootheel of Southeast Missouri, and by the time I was born they’d saved enough money to move out of a trailer and into an actual house. It was in the living room there that my mother begged me, her only child, to move back from the screen because she’d decided this brand-new technology would make me go blind.
I remember playing “Star Fox” so much that I got an F in Algebra III in my junior year of high school and was sent to the principal for cheating on a quiz. Then I made it all worse by fudging my mother’s name on the note she was supposed to sign in acknowledgment of all this for old Mrs A, who had a mole like a decimal point on her maths teacher’s mouth. A son not only a failure, but a forger.
No game in the collection is without a memory. When I take a dust cloth to the plastic spine of Nintendo’s original “Baseball”, I think of my father, the thick moustache, the ironed shirts, the professional knot in the tie of the school superintendent in Scott City, Missouri, whose own dad – a fire-and-brimstone minister – demanded he start working when he was 12. In my complete-in-box “Final Fantasy” (with a fold-out world map!), I picture the paternal pride leaking from my Dad when I decided to quit Little League at nine to devote myself to role-playing games. And when I never signed up for any extra-curricular activities or tried out for any other sport or brought home a girl. When I refused to go fishing with the other men in my family on those excursions to Kentucky Lake – all of them returning from my uncle’s boat with their shoulders red and stomachs distended with alcohol, lugging a trophy-cooler of bluegill and catfish, only to find an amoeba on the living-room shag of the vacation-trailer playing “Renegade” on the Nintendo Entertainment System he’d stashed in his backpack for the trip. My father’s only son, a gamer – before that was an actual word or careers were forged with its title.
I smell shitty weed and feel the leather seat of a Cape Girardeau police car when I’m holding “Madden 64”, the game I played when I withdrew from the world in embarrassment after getting arrested for possessing marijuana and drinking Mickey’s malt liquor at 19, my name printed in the police blotter of my hometown paper. So, when I take stock of the collection I’ve accrued over the past eight years – hunting down classic games on road trips, reporting trips and vacations – what else is there to think about but the shame of it: the wasted hours on “Final Fantasy III” and “Super Metroid”, the winters alone in my bedroom sitting close enough to the TV to kiss it, the football games and parties that I missed?
One game I have is “Gyromite”, still in its original packaging. When I read the back of the box – “This game is so intense you can’t play it alone!...Help a mad scientist deactivate all the dynamite in his laboratory…while trying to avoid the lethal Smicks” – my first real best friend comes back to me, another six-year-old, named John Miller, each of us with a game controller, desperate to stay clear of the jaws of the Smicks. Afterwards he and I would ride down to Vicki Lynn Circle, me on my Huffy with the white spokes, trying to keep our bikes parallel by pedalling at exactly the same speed; or we’d take flashlights and climb through the broken windows of abandoned houses – once I gashed open my chin – or loiter around a junkyard that smelled like dirty nickels and rain. I cried when he moved to Denver because I was losing someone who understood me, losing a brother.
I made a point a few years ago of acquiring the entirely forgettable “Section Z” (for around $200 sealed in its original plastic, now worth a couple of grand), as a nod to the only game my old man ever bought me, on a lark when I was learning to play. He was on a business trip during his second career selling office equipment when he plucked the game from a toy-store shelf, without a clue what it was about. (This was before he began to pronounce Nintendo as Intendo, with everyone in the world being able to say the word correctly by then, like he was purposely messing it up to signal his disapproval.)
I wanted “Goonies II” in my collection because my mom bought it for me at the Kay-Bee Toy in West Park Mall when she was a young school teacher with a blonde perm who marked tests on the kitchen table by the gingham curtains so late on weeknights that she left me in front of the TV to watch David Letterman or play “Wrecking Crew” (there on the top shelf) instead of making me go to bed. I don’t even have to play “Nightmare Creatures” – I can just glance at it to recall the summer I practically lived in the basement of Rahul Kamath’s house, his favourite band Red Kross cranked up, and us taking turns on the original PlayStation, when we weren’t writing the script of a horror movie on a yellow steno pad. While other kids were drinking Natural Light and possibly even getting laid, we actually filmed the movie in a town called Appleton, before Rahul went to Berkeley in California and I went to Mizzou.
“Ocarina of Time”, “F-Zero 64”, “NCAA Football”: I’m driving halfway across the country in my grandfather’s Chevy Lumina for an internship at the Los Angeles Times, where, if I’m not on assignment or walking the beach, I’m playing one of those games in the bedroom I rented in a house 20 minutes from downtown. Or I’m in New York City, for a summer at ESPN The Magazine, the garbage bags arranged like throw-pillows along the curbs, corner pizza any time I want it, and the Bear Bar, where I really tried to overcome my social anxiety, dragging myself into public. Then taking the subway 83 blocks north to my friend Seth’s apartment, the clatter and sigh of the stopping trains, so he’d sit and play a few games of “NCAA Football” with me – he always chose Texas with Chris Simms at QB.
“Wind Waker”! That puts me on the 28th floor with a view, where I got my first job as a professional writer at Atlanta Magazine, and video games cut some of the pressure when I couldn’t finish a sentence; sometimes I’d just watch my friend Luke play “Resident Evil 4”.
I have a mint copy of “DuckTales” only because of a beautiful woman with curly hair and upstate South Carolina in the way she spoke. Amanda sat on the floor next to me playing her childhood copy of that game just as we started to date – and then a few years later took my name, and gave me her game. I bought “Color a Dinosaur” off eBay in the waiting room of a fertility clinic four years ago, when the doctor told me and Amanda that on the fourth try of IVF we had an 85% chance to conceive – a purchase I made before the dream died, before I knew I’d never be teaching our child how to play the only colouring-book game ever made for the Nintendo.
When my wife and I evacuate from our home in Charleston, South Carolina, pretty much every hurricane season, we take family photos, a fire safe with valuables like her grandmother’s ring, and my father’s army jackets and army blanket. We also take the games, even though it’s a pain to remove them from the shelves and pile them into four giant plastic bins. I never imagined that “Donkey Kong Jr. Math”, complete in box, would be worth more than our Tiffany’s wedding rings – the literal value of the games is another reason we want to save them.
Sometimes I close my laptop and sit on the floor of my office and play a game like “Mega Man 2” or “Bubble Bobble”. Amanda and I saved an old Magnavox tube TV from the dump and I have a beanbag chair and my original Nintendo. Playing gives my fingers a rest from typing, and I relax in the muscle-memory of holding a controller, of moving that cross-shaped directional pad. I’ve been playing games for 36 years.
I made it a kind of mission a few Christmases ago to spend the holiday teaching my five-year-old nephew, my wife’s brother’s son, to play video games. I showed him how to hold a controller – how to move the plumber around with your left thumb in the original “Super Mario Bros.” – before putting him in front of the collection. I pulled out a couple of the earliest games, like “Balloon Flight”, and tried to explain how when I was his age I’d learned to manoeuvre in the sky of the game without getting popped. After only a few tries, he wouldn’t let me hold the controller at all. My in-laws shrugged, because their son was bonding with his uncle. My wife sat with us on the floor drinking sodas, my nephew later holding the Zapper plastic gun right up against the screen of the ancient Magnavox trying to shoot at the digital birds, while a hound snickered at us from the weeds. That is what I think about now when I see “Duck Hunt” on the shelf.■
Justin Heckert is writer who lives in Charleston, South Carolina
White lies: the scarcity of fake tan reveals some naked truths
We may be on the verge of a new kind of white Christmas. There’s a shortage of self-tanner in the British Isles, and it could go global. The culprit is an unpronounceable solvent called ethoxydiglycol: the price has surged from £12/kg ($16) to £103/kg in recent months as supplies have dwindled. The impact of the missing ingredient is something of a for-want-of-a-nail situation: ethoxydiglycol is not the component that makes skin change colour, but it’s critical to making the product spread evenly on skin. Think fake tans look blotchy now? Imagine what you’d look like without this stuff.
Perhaps it’s time to ask why we love a faux glow so. I know one famous beauty editor who has, for decades, slathered her face every morning with an old-school Estée Lauder self-tanner intended for legs. I know another who shirks the sun like a vampire but never misses her monthly spray tan. It’s a weird thing. After all, a tan is nothing more than a visual record of sun damage, an SOS from skin cells that have been warped and fried by ultraviolet radiation. Yet, as a planet, we spend nearly $1.5bn a year on products that simulate the appearance of toasted flesh.
It wasn’t always thus. Unlike most other beauty practices, which can be traced back to time immemorial in some form or other (or at least to Cleopatra, who has been credited with pioneering everything from eyeshadow to exfoliation), deliberate bronzing dates only to 1923. That was the year that Coco Chanel happened to get a little too much sun on a yacht trip in the South of France and returned to Paris with a tan. Pre-Coco, any signs of sun exposure indicated that one might be (horrors!) a common labourer – in the Elizabethan era, women drew blue veins on their skin to emphasise their ghostly pallor. But by 1929, looking like you’d been basking on a beach in St Barth’s raised your social status, even if you never left New Jersey.
The ingredient that powers self-tanners, a derivative from sugarcane dihydroxyacetone (DHA), was first recognised in the 1950s by Eva Wittgenstein, an American researcher. While administering it as an oral solution to children with a rare metabolic disorder, she noticed that splashes of it darkened their skin – essentially, she determined, sparking a Maillard reaction, the same chemical interplay between amino acids and sugars that causes a steak to brown on the grill, or bread to darken as it toasts.
The first commercial self-tanners hit the market in the 1960s, and iterations have proliferated ever since. Devotees have persevered through unsophisticated formulations that left them looking burnt to a crisp, even choosing to overlook the distinctive scent of the crucial tanning ingredient, which smells like cat pee or biscuits, depending on who you’re talking to.
Here’s the truth: a little self-tanner evens out blotches, blurs breakouts, contours blobby body areas and imparts an elusive lit-from-within radiance that many of us can’t help but find damnably seductive. That’s why we pale women want it, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s cautionary tale of a face.
What will we do when the last of the tanner fades away – can we call it a white lie? – and we’re forced to confront our bare-skinned truths? Maybe we’ll come to accept our lily-white complexions (and imperfections) – after all, the pandemic has made us Victorian in so many other ways. Maybe we’ll become resourceful, like the women in the second world war who stained their legs with tea bags and gravy when stockings became scarce. Perhaps we’ll eat a glut of carrots. Or maybe we’ll just wait it out, stoically, grateful that the faux-glow famine has struck in winter, when we’re mostly covered up anyway. Eventually ethoxydiglycol will be plentiful again, just like loo paper and sanitising wipes before it, to give us the illusion not only of glowing skin, but that normal life has returned. ■
April Long is a writer and beauty editor at Town & Country magazine
ILLUSTRATIONS: MARI FOUZ