Controlled Scribbling

Spider

Let me tell you about my friend Jack. I've known him since time out of mind. Back around when we were about fifteen, he decided he wanted people to call him Spider. He had mentioned it to me a few weeks before anyone else. "Spider, whatever," I thought. We both agreed that people called us what they did simply because that is the way we introduced ourselves. "Spider," he could get away with it, he thought that would be the coolest. Now we are both aging in our late twenties and everyone calls him Spencer, even his mother. He, to this day, still thinks of himself as 'Spider'; kind of an alter-ego. How did 'Spencer' come out of 'Spider' you ask, well I guess that's mostly my fault. Like I said, Jack had told me of his plan a couple of weeks before he told anyone else and I was all for it. The problem was, even as his best friend, I couldn't quite bring myself to calling him 'Spider.' He is quiet and skittish like a spider, sure, but he has reddish-brown hair, is a little on the chubby side, and moves in a slow, clumsy kind of way. It is quite common for good friends to skew each others 'real' names to form nicknames. As it turned out, I gave his new name a nickname: 'Spencer.' All was fine and all made sense: I would call him, close good buddy, 'Spencer,' and the rest of the world would call him 'Spider.' On a hot July afternoon, in the back garage of my parents' house, a long established "anything goes" hangout, 'Spider' had what amounted to a coming-out party. We gathered back there in the early days for refuge from the grown-ups. Sanctuary. Party: everything we did we tried to fit under that heading. Get some beer and hopefully some dope, gather up back there or anywhere and call it a party. Well, we had plenty of dope that day and Brian, someone I'll tell you about later, scored a full bottle of Tennessee's finest product, none other than good old number seven - Jack Danny yells. Van Halen II was fresh and we must have played 'Bottoms Up' a hundred times on my beat-up boom box. Jack was late. We all joked he would be late to his own funeral - I can't speak for the rest of them but I didn't even know what that meant. Barely do now, I mean really. Everybody knew Jack was coming with his new name, and everyone was cool on calling him whatever made him happy. He was quiet, never made trouble with anyone, but you could always count on him coming through for you if you were in a bind. We were all baked when he arrived, me especially. I was doing my best Monty Python impressions - good or bad, I had everybody rolling. I was on a roll, getting louder and more animated as the moments passed. The reaction I was getting was fueling my fire. Katie just finished a shot as I finished a punch line, it shot up and out her nose as she burst into laughter, her face turned Ferrari red - the laughter that ensued damn near killed us all. That is when Jack arrived. "Spencer - old buddy!" I screamed, and his fate was sealed. 'Spencer' was forever burned into our laughing, baked minds. Nothing he could ever say or do would remove that name from him. 'Spider' became 'Spencer's' nickname, but no one but Jack ever used it. Everyone called him 'Spencer' from that day forth, so consistently that teachers the following year started to, and finally his mother. His father, on the other hand, mostly called him 'Hey you' with varying profanity mixed in occasionally, but when he called him proper it was always 'Jack.' I, myself, never could understand why any of the name-changing even started. 'Jack,' why would you want to change your name from 'Jack'? - share a name with the great and powerful Jack Danny yells. Spencer didn't drink or smoke. Smartest guy I ever met. I am not saying that because he didn't drink or smoke, mind you. Einstein, Edison, Lincoln, Page: they all drank and smoked. Spencer was never very street-smart or book-smart. Maybe I lost you on that one - you just have to know him to know he's smart. A recent example might be his Tetris binge. The game seems to have a short-term, addictive affect on most people and it did on Spencer. After the game-playing thrill wears off, most of us go on to search out the next meaningless stimuli, not Spencer. He got bored with playing but got hooked on wanting to know how the game ran. "Such simple code, it must be," he would tell me over and over. He couldn't get over the fact that it hadn't been written years and years before it had, "so simple." I tried to compare it to the Rubics Cube fad. Instead of the common 'oh yeah, I guess things like that happen' response, the conversation just drove him into deeper contemplation. He spent countless hours on countless on-line services and BBS's trying to get a copy of the source code. One day, night, or whatever you refer to four a.m., he called me up with great urgency and demanded I come visit him immediately. He wouldn't tell me what it was all about, so I rushed over. The sun was starting to peek over the horizon when I walked into his apartment. Spencer was hunched over his computer terminal, as always. He turned, smiling and elated. "Look, look! Simple code, I told you!" I rubbed my weary face and looked at the screen. Tetris! "Yes, you mentioned before that it was simple code." If it was any of my other friends, I would have thought 'drugs' and just left. But I guess the truth is, if it was any of my other friends, I would have thought 'drugs,' said 'oh yeah - be right there,' and went back to sleep. "Tetris!" I yawned, "and..." Spencer bouncing off the walls with elation and coffee "sit down and play it!" The sun was piercing through the windows as I sat down to play a game of Tetris - what else could I do? The short-term addictiveness flared briefly and I surprised myself as I ended the game on level seven. I slowly came back to reality and turned and ask Spencer, "Tetris!?" "That is not Tetris!" he squealed back at me. I looked back at the screen and saw the title bar: "Spider" instead of "Tetris"! Simple trick, so he changed the title bar, wow. "What gives, Spencer? I was sound asleep!" "I couldn't get the source code, you know how I tried - fuck, I couldn't even buy it." I could tell Spencer was excited because he never uses profanity; too many words to choose from, he always says. I was tired and to me profanity contains some of those 'many' words to choose from. "What the fuck? This is the bullshit you wake me up for? Title bar changes?" "It looks like Tetris, but I wrote it all, I reverse-engineered the whole thing. I got fed up with my source code search, I made it almost identical!" He did it, alright. I thought to myself again that this is the smartest guy I know and I think he might be the dumbest. "Why? Why on God's green Earth would you waste your time on this?" Spencer stared at me blankly for a second, sighed, and ignoring the question, responded, "I said almost identical, I added an option." Now we're talking, a new twist, my interest came back to peak level, "What?!" "Pull the 'Skill' menu down." Point, click, and sure enough there was an extra option, 'Spider.' Without turning back to ask about it, I selected it and started another game. I was ready for anything, fingers poised and pupils dilated. I was ready to attack the 'Tetris Spider.' Not much time needed to pass before I realized what the new option was all about, every block that came down was the same four section cube. "You would have to be asleep or dead to lose, this is stupid!" "I always hated that game." "So this is what you've been doing with your time." "Better then getting beat by it!" "Spencer you are something else!"