Another ridiculously enjoyable piece from BLCKSMTH contributing editor Jennie Kay. If you like this piece of hers, check out this one too.

Everybody Wins

Poetry is important to kids. It really is, even though we are all sucky poets as kids. Except that eight-year-old-Appalachian-savant that makes words out of twigs and becomes a poet-laureate, when they are the only ones in their extended family that know how to read. Except for them, we are all sucky poets as kids, but I believe it is really important to be a poet as a kid. Everything is so much more real then. I always said I wouldn’t get jaded, but as I look back, I was pretty well done by the age of ten. As a kid, you spend so much time looking around you can’t help but notice what’s really going on.  You learn things like: staring someone directly in the face after you have lied, will make you win. You shouldn’t know about winning before you are at least seventeen. I didn’t have a lot of wins growing up, but there were a few.

Yes, mom, I took that piece of fudge. It was the Christmas of 1984, you had counted how many pieces of fudge you cut (of course you did, why wouldn’t it be a free for all, it was Christmas, for the love of…well, yeah, the love of Christ. Your belief that it’s his birthday, not mine), and put in the brassy-enamelette-type tin that you always put special treats in. Which, for the record, I have never seen washed with soap in its life.  You asked us who took the extra piece.

You called each of us out, asked us one by one, and I stared you straight in the face and lied. You knew I was lying. I was a chubby kid. Of course the chubby kid took the goddamned fudge. I apologize, not chubby: SOLID (the only word ever used to describe me before the age of 12, solid, as though I had no other trait).

But I won. Why did I win?

Who is neurotic enough to ask each family member exactly how many slices of fudge they each had, when it was a big pile of presumably uncounted fudge to begin with? We all knew you were nuts. I could have said I just grew a tail, and you were still in no position to call me a liar, you were already on thin ice. I knew this, I knew this and I was nine. As kids, we don’t really understand the win, we just know when it happens.

I don’t really feel bad about it, my family was always putting me on the spot. We used to have family game nights and were forced to play “The Ungame”.  I don’t know if any of you remember this horrific communication device of the late seventies, but if a happy patchwork of photos containing at least two dozen families enjoying each others company and the tagline “The World’s Most Popular Self Expression Game” doesn’t ring any bells, let me explain to you The Ungame.

The Ungame is a “non-competitive, everybody wins!” game that claims to allow you to “speak out and touch someone” in the funnest way possible, allowing you are within the appropriate age range of between 5 and 105 (adding one hundred to the lowest suggested playing age was a great gimmick in the 70s as a way to show how much fun all generations could have together. I can only imagine the litigation that led the industry to adopt the current nomenclature of minimum-age-“and up”). The Ungame prided itself on this air of non-competitiveness. There was no beginning, there was no end. One just moved pieces around the board, falling on various spaces such as “Compliment Clubhouse” and “Cheerful Chalet”. There were a variety of emotional-accountability commands such as “If you feel happy right now, go to Happy House”, and “If you feel sad, tell the room why, and make sure you don’t leave out the part about your uncle”. The back of the box suggests the game be used to produce harmony in the home, fun in your friendships, and meaning in your marriage. In smaller print, it also suggests the game be used by drug education counselors, special education instructors, and probation departments. This game was made for children to hate their parents. You can imagine how much fun a Friday night can be, playing a game with no determined end (or winner) that demands you to bare your inner soul and force you to pretend like you are having fun. I can still remember sitting at the huge oak table, my feet not only unable to touch the ground, but not even able to rest on the rungs of the chair, looking at the other members of my family seem to have a good time while I was experiencing what seemed to be some type of inpatient therapy session.

“What lifetime dream are you still trying to make come true, Jennie?”

“How would you define Joy?”

“Make a statement about success!”

“Complete the statement “words can’t describe how I felt when…””

“Jennie, What do you dislike most about yourself?”

“Describe your life at age 70”

These were good things to mull over on a Friday night….at age six.

It wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I realized my childhood might have been slightly different than the rest of my generation. And for this, yeah: I stole the fudge. I am still trying to jog that motherfucking piece of guilt fudge off my hips, but I took it, I ate it, and it was GOOD.

Winning.