Fight Song A Novel

Scroo Dat Pooch


Dumper Games is decorated like a dignified day care. That’s all the rage with greedy corporations these days, disguising themselves as elaborate romper rooms with Ping-Pong, billiard, and foosball tables, entire walls of vintage video games from the 1980s, kegs of microbrewed ale available whenever an employee fancies a pint. None of the young workers wear shoes, all lollygagging around in argyle socks.

Malcolm Dumper, wearing his patented #99 Gretzky uni, invites Bob and his team into the conference room to plop down on one of the beanbags (of course, there’s no conference table or regular chairs in the conference room) and brainstorm. To powwow. To spitball ideas. To come up with a game so good it will boomerang DG back to its glory days. Specifically, Dumper wants this new game to corner the highly desirable and highly stunted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old male demographic: a land where scatology is king, a sad, lonely world where a certain segment of guys game and game and game their lives away, only taking breaks to jerk off or eat a Hot Pocket. And then quickly back to gaming. And then maybe another jerk. Another Pocket. Ad infinitum …

Once everybody takes a seat on a beanbag, as is his tradition, Dumper launches these brainstorms with a speech, macerating his metaphors to pulp: “The Dumper family needs to make some immediate changes to our catalog and make them fast. Imagine Dumper as a massive ship. This ship of ours needs to bore full speed ahead to generate revenue, yet it also needs to do a 180-degree about-face to get away from the boring titles we’ve already put out this year. Of course, no sailing vessel can do these two contradictory things at once. But we have to try to accomplish them, or who knows how long our doors will be open. Am I saying there’s imminent door closage? Not exactly. But the Great One is saying that our doors might get antsy to slam if we don’t start raking in some serious bacon.”

“Are you talking about buying a company yacht?” the mouth-breather says. He’s almost half Coffen’s age, has only worked at DG for eight months. Bob can’t wait until he gets fired, pursues an industry more suited to his talents, say a tenured position as the chief mouth-breathing lackey at a sleep apnea clinic. “For, like, fishing trips?”

“The Great One is talking about us. I’m talking about us taking the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old male demo and bouncing it on our knee and entertaining them with something edgier than they’ve ever imagined. And you’re the team to do it. So dazzle me with your pitches. Let me wet my beak on your fantastic ideas. Let me douse my beak. Submerge it underwater, deeper than the Titanic.”

“What about a stoner’s quest,” says the mouth-breather, “in which a guy goes on a journey to find the perfect bong? Early levels give him pretty good bongs—nice draw, a properly placed carb—but each new level the bongs grow by a foot. The last level he can get a ten-footer. That’s like the Sistine Chapel for bong aficionados.”

“You suggest that same idea at every meeting,” Dumper says, his humungous tongue safely stowed in his mouth, alerting everyone that he’s not impressed.

“I’m pretty sure I nailed the pitch this time,” the mouth-breather says.

“These drug ideas are a different demo. Teens. Maybe preteens.”

“Bongs never go out of style, like turtlenecks.”

“Dude, turtlenecks are completely out of style,” another young team member says to the mouth-breather.

“Focus,” says Dumper. “Please. Shock me with your edginess. Let’s get back to our rightful Disemboweler throne.”

Coffen had masterminded the whole Disemboweler franchise: Disemboweler I: Flesh for Breakfast; Disemboweler II: Tasty Comrades; Disemboweler III: Zombie Happy Hour; Disemboweler IV: Let’s Get Bloody! The first game had been Bob’s breakthrough success, and he built it back before computer advancements made it so simple to design games. Coffen did this before all the drag-and-drop technologies simplified the process so any novice could put a half-assed game together. He learned the trade back in a dark age when, god forbid, humans had to do the coding themselves. He constructed entire ecosystems from his imagination, dreamed up elaborate, sinister narratives for his characters. Bob saw this creation as pure beauty, on the same level as writing a sonata or chiseling a sculpture from a slab of marble. But at a certain point, technology ruined it for Coffen. Talent didn’t matter if any idiot could cut and paste stock images, drag them into a prefab world, and pass that schlock off as a game. His job, once ripe with art and self-expression, was spoiled. The sonatas were silent. The marble was safe.

Now Dumper says, “Let’s get our company back to being the big men on campus.”

“And one woman,” the only woman on our team says.

“Of course,” Dumper says. “Beaucoup apologies. Anybody have another idea?”

A normally quiet team member launches into his pitch: “What about this gem: a game called Hey, That’s My Meth Lab! You’ll be a rival speed dealer trying to blow up all of your competitors’ meth labs.”

“How would you win that game?” the mouth-breather says, no doubt feeling competitive since his suggestion also covered narcotics territory.

“Once everybody’s buying your crank, you are crowned the champion of meth. You are the sultan of amphetamines.”

“No more ideas that have to do with drugs, okay?” Dumper says. “Next time we brainstorm like this, there will be a moratorium on illicit substances. Anybody else?” Dumper looks more and more like he’s regretting asking this team to think in an impromptu way.

Another team member quickly seizes the moment to showcase his immense potential for design: “Everyone I know—and I’m right smack in the heart of the demo we’re discussing—loves conspiracy theories. So what if we built a game that’s like a puzzle to solve an ancient riddle about how extraterrestrials aren’t extra at all. They’re us; they’re terrestrials. We are all aliens, bro! Extraterrestrials are terrestrials and vice versa. Can you imagine? People would wig out!”

“Is that what ‘terrestrial’ means? It means human?” the mouth-breather says.

The showcaser continues: “Yeah, humans. Us. We are us, but we are also aliens. We’re all god’s terrestrials. It’s like a metaphor for racism.”

“And why would your demo want to play a metaphor for racism?” Dumper asks.

“Because racism metaphors don’t have to be boring. There will be kickass explosions and topless ladies, sir. Lasers. Flying, time-traveling Cadillacs. If it has the potential to be awesome, it will be a highlighted component of the game. No questions asked.”

“So what’s the conspiracy theory exactly?”

“We’re aliens! What’s more of a conspiracy than finding out you’re something other than what you thought you were?”

“It’s the best bad idea so far,” says Dumper.

“We’re all something other than what we thought we’d be,” Coffen says.

Everybody stares at him.

Dumper says, “So you like the terrestrial idea then, Coffen?”

“I hate the idea.”

“Me, too,” Dumper says. “Have you got anything that might impress the Great One? Can you astound me like you used to do back in the good old Disemboweler days?”

All of us in this room are imbeciles, Bob thinks, working for a man-boy in a Gretzky sweater. He’s our pimp. He profits on laying our imaginations on their backs or bending them over a barrel and banging them from behind or reverse-cowgirling our imaginations until he gets all he wants, leaving them spent and soiled, discarded like losing lottery tickets.

Coffen decides to defend his imagination’s honor by pointing out to all in attendance how vapid Dumper is: The Great One wants something to tickle the lowest common denominator? Bongs and meth labs be damned. This meeting is about to hit the basement. The denominator at the center of the earth.

“Bestiality,” Coffen says.

“What now?” Dumper asks.

“What’s edgier than bestiality? I could see this becoming a cult classic. Do you know how many drugged-up undergrads would love this?”

The team starts tittering.

After several seconds, Dumper says, “How would it work?”

“May I stand up to demonstrate?” Bob asks.

“Of course,” Malcolm Dumper says, and here comes his humungous tongue, slowly slithering out.

It takes Bob about ten seconds to jimmy his weight off of the beanbag. He’s still pretty woozy, only about twelve hours removed from the oleander incident. Jane had tried to talk him into taking the day off, but he’d insisted on coming to work. Why had he fought her to come here? For this? For beanbags? For bestiality?

Coffen is finally standing up. His imagination needs a neighborhood watch with Dumper around, a rape whistle.

“It would be a game,” Bob says, “without any handset controls. No, a game of this transgressive magnitude would need to work with user movements. We’ve seen Wii games where a user’s body movements can translate to the screen, the character in the game mimicking what the user is doing at home. This title would require that sort of technology. It would be an advancement for us in many ways, as we’ve never built anything in this style.”

Bob holds his hands out, waist high, pretending that somebody—or some animal—is positioned in front of him, bent over. Then Coffen begins maniacally thrusting his hips in a coital-inspired manner. He strikes a rather rollicking pace with his thrusts and keeps them up while continuing the pitch.

“I imagine a game where the character meanders the mean streets trying to have sex with every stray dog he can find. As the game progresses, soon the avatar has to prowl into the homes of private citizens to defile man’s best friend. Finally, for the grand finale, the sneaky, horny, mal-adjusted avatar must evade Secret Service and screw the president’s dog right in the Oval Office.”

Coffen gets winded as he continues to give the business to the imaginary dog while talking.

“Dude, that’s disgusting,” the mouth-breather says, smiling, “and I would play it all day, every day, until I died.”

“What about the rest of you?” Dumper asks the remaining team members.

“I’d totally play that!”

“It’s awesome!”

“My friends are gonna love this filth!”

“What’s it called, Coffen?”

Bob grins, plunges aimlessly into the invisible pet. “Scroo Dat Pooch,” he calls out, and the juniors clap.

One of them says, “Dude is a genius.”

“He was just hibernatin’ since Disemboweler.”

Another: “It’s like watching da Vinci paint a masterpiece.”

“The bestiality Mona Lisa!”

“Jesus, stop gyrating like that,” Dumper says to Bob.

Bob concludes his coital parade, sags back down into his beanbag. His head hurts. It feels good to make a mockery of this, good to suggest something so far over the line that despite the enthusiasm of the juniors, Dumper has no choice but to say no chance in hell. Edgy’s one thing, but this idea is too taboo.

But apparently, there is chance in hell.

Apparently, Coffen hasn’t been making a mockery of anything, at least not to the only person whose opinion on the subject matters: the Great One. Dumper reels his tongue back in his mouth, says, “Build a test level, Bob. I want to see how it plays.”

“Are you sure?” Coffen says.

“I’m not sure. But I’m window-shopping, snooping in the store. Now grab the bull by the horns and make the final sale. Can you do that for me?”

“I can try.”

“DG needs this. Our doors are getting itchy trigger fingers for some closage. Don’t let that happen. Now say it with some enthusiasm: Can you make the final sale to this window-shopper and appease our moody doors?”

“Bob is me,” Bob says, dejected—he can’t even sabotage his job correctly.

“Scroo Dat Pooch,” Dumper says. “Now that’s funny. Sick, but funny. No guarantees we’ll continue with it, but I’d like to see what it looks like. This might be a new direction not only for DG, but your titles, Coffen. You’ve never done anything comic before. This might be your renaissance.”

“That’s a reasonable suggestion,” says Bob.

“Get something rough together for next Monday’s status meeting.”

“That’s not much time.”

“It’s not. But you’re a pro’s pro. Make it happen.”

Dumper and the juniors skedaddle from the conference room, leaving Bob alone on his beanbag. He stays like that for some time.