My Favorite Non-Places I: Where I Once Played Hacky Sack in Sight of the Golden Gate

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California Games hit the Commodore 64 in ‘87, but it was probably a few years before it made its way to me, and it would be many years more before I looked on the Golden Gate Bridge with my own eyes. Epyx’s smash hit included an assortment of summery California pastimes, like surfing, roller-skating along the beach, and doing stunts on a half-pipe with the HOLLYWOOD sign in the background. But it was the zen tranquility of hacky sack that made the game a refuge to me. (The game calls the sport “footbag,” but it’s always been hacky sack to me.) 

At first, I fumbled and failed every time, and the experience was anything but tranquil. In time, though, and with practice, I learned to keep the hacky sack in the air, seamlessly transitioning from one trick to another to another, racking up scores that topped the charts. It was a kind of flow that made me feel so much more present on that mythic stretch of green than I ever did in my actual day-to-day life. 

I guess the closest thing to this place is Crissy Field, but I don’t think a spot like this actually exists, a spot from which you can see both Alcatraz and the Gate like that. And even if such a spot does exist, it’s still not this place. Not really. Because every time I go here, it’s always exactly the same. There’s that little sailboat out on the water, a tiny detail that makes my heart ache as I wonder who’s out there, what cares they’re forgetting in each other’s company, and don’t they wish it could last forever? It can, but only here, in this place that isn’t real to begin with. 

California Games was ported to every conceivable platform at the time but most of them got it wrong. Here it is on the NES, the iconic Golden Gate nonsensically replaced with a bridge of featureless gray, the hills of Marin looking more like the Rocky Mountains, the whole scene feeling cold. 

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The Genesis version went too far in the other direction, approaching photorealism in its desire to be faithful to the game’s California setting and losing the original’s potential to become the California of our dreams. 

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Speaking of California dreams, the other day I heard “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley playing at a restaurant and it took me back, as it always does. I remembered walking along the beach in Santa Monica with the first woman I ever loved. I remembered her playfully yelling “SHOCK!” and jumping over the water as it rolled in, mimicking a moment from a live performance of “Shock the Monkey” by Peter Gabriel, then and still one of my favorite singers. She was a brilliant and extraordinary young Muslim woman from Pakistan, and I was her blue-eyed, blonde-haired all-American “boyfriend.” We hid our relationship from her disapproving parents and I hid the truth of myself from her. There was so much shame inside me then. In some ways, there still is. For all that’s changed, I still remain awkward, out of sorts, a misfit, unable to inhabit my body or the present moment the way so many people around me seem to do so effortlessly all the time. All of that can fall away though, sometimes, when it’s just me, and the controller, and this instant, the need to be there, the need to react, and nothing more.

I realized, hearing that song at that restaurant the other day, that there’s no going back to that beach. That beach now simultaneously does and does not exist. I can return to Santa Monica and remember being there with her, but the beach I visited with her was the beach it was then because it was then, because I was with her. The song knows this. “Those days are gone forever, I should just let ‘em go but…”

But from my Southern California home back then, I could travel to a Bay Area that doesn’t really exist, but that, unlike that beach at Santa Monica, will always semi-exist, exactly the same as it was all those years ago. The same sailboat is still there making its leisurely turns out in the bay, the same seagull is still flying overhead. And still when I look at that place, I can remember standing there, listening to the waves, feeling the wind in my hair, and being so completely in the moment, so responsive and alive, so damn good at something, that for a little while, there was no shame.

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(My Favorite Non-Places is a series of indeterminate length and frequency on some of my favorite spaces and locations in games.)