Almost Credible: Out of Work Game Journalist vs. Los Angeles

Marion Cox flies thousands of miles to have sex with a woman he met on Xbox Live.

I arrived at LAX with a maxed out credit card and a bag full of socks. I had traveled to there to meet a 31-year-old English major I’d fallen in love with over Xbox Live. She had invited me to visit – maybe invited isn’t the right word.

We’d spent the last 2 weeks on Xbox Live playing Crackdown, Borderlands and most recently: Gay Tony. The night I made my mind up to visit her, we were playing robbers and were losing badly. Jessica, who I believe swears more than me, shouted “Fuck me, the cops have rocket launchers.”

“I would if you weren’t a couple thousand miles away,” I said jokingly.

“You could if you would get your pussy ass off the couch and buy a plane ticket dummy.”

A cacophony of laughter erupted from my team. “Daaaaamn son,” taunted one of the miscreants who had helped us rob the bank.

That was too much; I’d been called out on Xbox Live. I knew what I was going to do, I had languished on the couch too long, it was time to say goodbye to dad, and buy a ticket.

I maxed out my credit card on a plane ticket and packed a bag. Nothing mattered; I was headed to Southern California to get laid, and turn my miserably lazy life around. In retrospect, perhaps I should have been slightly less hasty.

That’s because, it wasn’t until I arrived in LA that I realized I didn’t have any money or clothing. I could always call collect from a payphone, but was harder than it seemed. When did they remove all the payphones from LA? I tried to barter some socks to use someone’s mobile. Eventually a guy let me use his if I would stop frightening his children with my erotic sock puppet show.

I called the number that Jessica had given me, I was a little nervous about calling her so early on a Sunday. The phone rang for about a minute; and the dad was growing impatient, put up my finger to indicate that I needed a few more moments.

He kept staring at me as if I would run off at any moment with his phone. I smiled at him to reassure him I wasn’t a criminal, at least in California. After another 10 rings or so, someone picked up the phone.

“Yes?” The voice of a boy, or a woman with a husky voice answered the phone.

“Jessica?”

Silence for a few seconds, I worried I had come all the way to LA to wind up alone and penniless in LA. I asked again, and as if finally waking up the voice shouted, “¡Eh! Mami!”

I pretended that the Spanish didn’t mean what I thought it meant. What did I know? My Spanish was limited to things I picked up from Speedy Gonzalez and a couple episodes of the last season of Weeds. I tried not to ponder the implications as I heard footsteps coming down a staircase.

“Yes?”

“Jessica? It’s Marion, I’m at LAX.”

“Really? Lol!”

I lied, “Yea, and my bags with my stuff got lost on the flight.”

She explained that I’d have to take a bus from the Airport to Arleta and Van Nuys, walk a block to her house on Woodale. I countered by telling her that I had no money. She told me she was sending her son. up. That confirmed that I had indeed understood Spanish — I must have a natural talent for language.

I sat outside the airport and waited for the bus. I contemplated the nutritional value of my socks. No breakfast on the redeye flight, and the stewardess refused to give me any more peanuts, saying it was people like me who were putting airlines out of business. I think she wanted to say “fat.”

I guess it was about an hour later when a security guard shook me awake. He told me that there was a good soup kitchen a ways from the airport. I thanked him for the information, and I might have taken him up on it had I not been waiting for a kid to take me to meet his mom who had promised me sex over the internet. Plus I was sleepy, I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

“Hey,” a small brown hand shook my shoulder waking me. “You Marion?” a diminutive voice asked.

I groggily swatted the hand, believing that it belonged to a smaller, browner security guard.

“Huh?” I examined my antagonist.

“Marion, right?” The kid was no older than 13. He wore a short sleeved white shirt with a brown tie. Some sadist, perhaps Jessica, had parted his hair in a most unnatural fashion. I already felt sorry for him.

“Yea, you Zack?” I asked but already knew the answer, “What do they have you dressed up like a Mormon for?”

Zack explained that Sunday dad took them to church and that if we hurried we wouldn’t be late. I suggested, in that case, we take our time and maybe stop by the Cinnabon and pick up some of those awesome frosted cupcakes.

Zack didn’t have much money so we loitered awhile at the bus stop. I helped him to invent a good excuse why were late, then Zach asked, “How do you become a game reviewer?”

“Blowjobs,” I joked. He seemed confused, so I added used a word I’d heard my old editor use many times. “Congruence too.”

“What’s that?”

I looked at him, I was surprised; here was a teenager who didn’t know what a blowjob was. I, of course, had learned what one was when my older sister explained why I was gay for having a GI Joe named Snowjob .

“Well when a woman loves a man, or a man really wants a job…” he cut me off.

“Jessica said I need to go to school if I want to be a game reviewer.”

I snorted, “You could learn as much from an RSS feed about games as you could in school.”

He looked up at me with his soft brown eyes drinking in my bullshit wisdom. I felt bad for potentially turning him off to education. But it was only potential damage, so I locked the guilt away in the same place I keep my irrational fear of rabbits. (Their eyes are freaky as hell man!)

The bus came and Zack interrogated me about my meeting with Cliffy B all the way to his house. He wanted to know if he was awesome in real life, I told him the truth: I didn’t know. The two tabs of acid I’d taken before E3 had left me at his booth unable to do anything but stare at the octopus growing out of his spiky hair.

It was about 11am when we reached the house. Zach made me a sandwich and asked if I wanted to play Xbox with him. Jessica and dad were still out. We started up the Xbox with GTA4 still in it. Not but 24 hours ago I’d been on the other end of the connection, propositioning its owner.

Zack tapped my arm, and held out a roach, he exhaled a cloud of Marijuana smoke. Still stunned by my existential revelation that I was now holding Jessica’s controller I took the joint from her son and inhaled without a second thought.

I counted to ten and spoke while exhaling, “Fuck, that’s pretty good.”

“Yea, it’s my mom’s, don’t tell her, k?”

I nodded and took another puff. Today was going to be a good day in LA.

Marion Cox is the world’s foremost authority on getting high and with your 13-year-old son. You can follow him on twitter or visit him here every weekend.

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