Psst, hey kid! Wanna buy some gear?

I am 15, its 1991 and I'm waiting for my GCSE English lesson to end. I quickly grow tired of waiting and get thrown out for being abusive to the teacher. Mr Blackburn is an easy target and is yet to realise that I am using his weakness of character to better my position in the playground pecking order. Mr Blackburn says I am a disruptive pupil and he's right, but it's not without reason: I do it to gain popularity. I can make the tough kids laugh by abusing the weak and I must stay popular with them so that they won't ridicule me. The tough kids aren't into computer games, but I am. I cannot let them find out because the tough kids like to beat up the computer club kids.

"This series is just as good as the classic of '84 and don't you forget
it fat boy."

I am a secret computer games addict living in the middle of nowhere in the rolling hills of Shropshire. There is nothing to do except climb trees when it's light and play games when it's dark. I'm a lucky kid living a tranquil childhood, but the ever present darkness of school popularity looms over me.

Tom knows my secret, he's two years younger than I am and lives nearly three miles away but I'm often cycling to his house to play games at weekends. We swap and listen to mixes we've made with Soundtracker and I read his copies of Amiga Format which I can't afford to buy. He plays Battle Isle for hours on end whilst I play Shinobi on my Game Gear.

Tom has a new friend over at his house. John goes to a different school to Tom and me, one that has a reputation for being a bit rough. I'm playing with my Game Gear again and then John says he knows someone who can get them really cheap via dubious methods.

Tom and I discuss this at some length and come up with a plan to make a bit of cash. A friend of John's family works in a warehouse near Halesowen and reckons he can get us 30 Game Gears and 25 Gameboys out the back door, the price to us is going to be 20 and 15 quid respectively. Tom and I decide to sell them on at 30 and 25 quid, which means that all round everyone is onto a good little earner.

I'm on a coach heading to London for a school outing and I'm waiting for an opportune moment to pull out my Game Gear. My plan is to boast to the tough kids that I nicked it and I can get more if anyone wants one. I'm a little worried for two reasons. Firstly the Game Gear I'm hawking around is actually my own and not nicked at all. Secondly I'm about to give the tough kids an excuse to beat me up for having a portable computer game system. I take a deep breath and go for it; I pull the Game Gear out of my bag and put Afterburner in the cart slot.

Teenage Game Gear wet dream.

An hour later and I am wetting my pants with excitement. The tough kids seem to like the Game Gear and all of a sudden half a coach-load of school kids are fighting over who has the best Afterburner score. The batteries in the Game Gear have gone flat, but something weird is happening. One of the leading tough kids is taking the batteries out of his walkman and demanding someone else's walkman to fulfil the battery shortage! I can't believe that he's putting more batteries into my Game Gear! He likes it, he actually likes playing Afterburner! Suddenly and completely out of the blue he admits to owning a Sega Master System and turns out to be a demon Alex Kidd player.

The computer club kids at the front of the coach are quietly rejoicing, for years they've been bullied for being computer game geeks and the head tough kid is sitting at the back blasting away on Afterburner. For the first time they feel safe to talk about the relative merits of Game Gears and Gameboys in public. In the time it has taken us to get to London, I have taken 8 orders for Game Gears and liberated my fellow game playing classmates from their enforced silence.

Tom and I have had to take cash up front so we can pay for the gear. I don't know how we've managed it, but we've taken orders and cash for all 55 systems. We're half way to pay day and I am shitting my pants because I'm the smallest kid in the year and am carrying about 900 quid in cash on me. Tom has the other 600 and we're worried by the prospects of one of our bags being nicked. If that happens, one of us is going to end up half dead. I'm thinking of ways I can blame Tom if something does go wrong.

I am with Tom in his bedroom again. We're counting the cash we've taken to fulfil our orders. We laugh in excitement and we take it in turns to hold all 1,525 quid in cash. It is the most money both of us have ever seen in one go. Tom rolls up the notes and puts 1,525 quid of cash in his mouth. I take the cash from him and put it all in my pants. We leave the house giggling like idiots and meet up with John to sort out the exchange of goods!

I am feeling terror. It was all bullshit; John and the fucker in the warehouse were leading us up the garden path all along: the warehouse doesn't stock anything game related at all. We fell for it completely; we trusted John and he turned out to be a lying git. I feel like such a twat and I want to kill John for being a complete cunt.

"It was 'im, he's the one yer want."

Tom and I quietly work our way through the receipt book we've been keeping and start splitting the cash to return it to our punters. The rumours are spreading at school and I fear I may be receiving a kicking in the playground at some point. It has taken a couple of days to return all the cash to its rightful place and thankfully I haven't received the kicking I expected or possibly deserved.

I am happy. It has been a few weeks since the deal went bad and I am in a Physics lesson chatting to the Alex Kidd player. We have a bit of a laugh about my failed attempts at black market dealing and we talk about swapping some games. I only have Amiga and Game Gear games and he can't play them, but it feels good because both of us are no longer hiding our secret passion.

I tried to make some quick cash, but I ended up doing something better. I liberated a bunch of kids who were scared to talk about the things they liked. We can now talk about games safe in the knowledge that some of the tough kids do it too. I still get thrown out of English, I don't need the credibility anymore but Mr Blackburn is just too much fun to resist.

------

I have felt it necessary to change some names to protect the guilty. Particularly John-the-cunt who went on to try and sue my sister for GBH after she smacked him around the head with a chair in an unrelated incident.

JIMAROID, July 2003.

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