Chapter 5: Binge and Urge

The afternoon ritual of my brothers and I had always been the same as the ritual of most American children: hours of the pleasant vacuousness of television, the Internet, and video punctuated by dinner, homework, and bed. The system had worked very well. The violence and sexuality of such media had never led my brothers and I to the atrocities of rape, assault, prostitution, drug abuse, drive-bys, or the equally sinful cursing that were touted by more reactionary individuals, so no one fully understood my father’s actions when he came home that evening.

My mother was fortunate enough to get off work at four o’clock, which still left an hour in which my brothers babysat me (mostly by letting television and video games babysit them). This was a perfect opportunity for me to get rid of the evidence of what happened last night. I waited until my brothers were sufficiently slack-jawed, then hauled the soiled sheets down the hallway to the laundry room. Once I made it there, I unfolded a chair and clamored onto it to open the washing machine. I then shoved the cause of my shame into it among the clothes that were already there. I made-believe it was like a cotton-polyester family reunion, although the newest arrival would have a story that would not portray me in a very favorable light, especially since I did not know how to turn on the hot tub jets for them.

My mother was especially doting that evening, which could’ve been because of what happened when my father came home or because of the sheets. I always suspected the latter, but it is one thing I’m probably lucky not to know. When she came home I was playing with my dollhouse. She went to the kitchen to start making dinner. The wonderful smell of garlic and steak wafted throughout the house, almost washing away the memories of last night.

My father came home shortly. My brothers were playing a Resident Evil game and the second my father saw it, we all knew. “What is this!?” he roared, incensed by the violent game, “I will not allow you to turn your father’s house into a den of…what the heck are those?” he asked in disgust in reference to the walking plague victims of the game. I wasn’t old enough to catch it at the time, but my mom found it ironic that my father’s behavior had been influenced more by the Good Book than my brothers’ behavior had been influenced by the game.

“Um…zombie…sinners…” Eli answered.

My dad sat, transfixed by the horror and graphics. “How’d they get that way?”

“Some sort of disease or parasite,” Zach said in monotone, still playing. “It’s like the Black Death; we’ve been learning about it in school.”

“Really?” my dad asked, thinking back to that holy time in history.

Zach changed angles, revealing the character to be a beautiful, curvaceous, scantily clad female. My dad scrambled back, almost tripping over the couch, pointing at the TV and screaming, “They said Satan would be tempting! We are getting rid of all these violent, sex-crazed games right now!” He abruptly turned off the game, took it out, and stomped it to death, evidently to show my brothers just how wrong violence is. He then picked up every game but the most obviously childish ones and threw them out. Eli was crying and Zach was trying to plead with him to no avail.

I crept to the doorway and peered in silently. My mother remained in the kitchen like a statue. Her husband’s behavior may have been eccentric, but she knew he would never be violent to the family. She just listened, taking solace in her cooking, as so many wives have done for time immemorial.

My dad then turned on the TV. It was Comedy Central, so anything on the channel would have validated his prejudice – and it did. “I am calling our provider this instant and we will only have quality channels and DVDs in this house from now on.”

What followed was a purge that couldn’t have been more complete if Stalin had done it. The video games were destroyed, Comcast lambasted and almost deprived of a customer, the V-chip activated, and a Christian web-filter purchased and enacted.

The most ironic thing of the situation was that, had my brothers simply called the protagonist Deborah and identified the zombies as demons, it could have been delayed. Nothing could have prevented it from being an eventual eventuality, but perhaps we could have kept sanity on life support for a few more weeks.

My brothers were eventually placated with violence-free movies like The Passion of the Christ and the fire that came out of the pastor’s mouth ameliorated the shock for them, so they recovered quickly. I was stuck with VeggieTails.

The show didn’t indoctrinate me, and I was aware that most vegetables have a very different kind of fiber than the moral kind attributed to them. The campaign somewhat backfired on my father, as the anthropomorphic produce turned me off of vegetables for years.

In later years, I would come to find that the absurdness of VeggieTails lay as much in the inability of audiences above four to suspend disbelief as in the phallic appearances of the characters.