Pretty quickly the stories all begin to sound the same.
- I wanted something I couldn’t have.
- I made a sneaky attempt to acquire it somehow.
- The situation escalated to either make or break from there.
My parents hated Pokémon. They did not want to support my interest in the cards. They thought it made me an obsessed maniac with no self-control. So without legitimate access to Pokémon I had to get creative and that creativity usually resulted in something immoral.
My parents wouldn’t buy me Pokémon Yellow for my birthday, so I stopped eating school lunch for several weeks and kept my lunch money in secret. When the eternity that was “a few weeks” passed and I still didn’t have enough, I mercilessly popped all the coins out of my father’s coin collection albums. I had my grandmother take me to K Mart and bought Pokémon Yellow with a bulging Ziploc bag of silver dollars, half dollars, quarters, and all the other small change I could muster. I was still short at the register, so my grandmother had to pay the rest. My parents were extremely angry, but I had gamed the system by “buying it with my own money.”
I went to a grown up party with my mother at the house of one of her coworkers. It was all adults drinking wine and talking about work and eating off of cheese plates. The only other kid at the party was younger than me and, to me, he was basically still a baby. I was supposed to go play in his room with him while the adults mingled in the main rooms of the house.
Unable to find anything to talk about or anything we wanted to play together, I just went through the other boy’s toy box while he told me what everything was and what it did. In his toy box was a Mew figurine in a Master Ball. I had never seen this before. I wanted this. Because I had no self control or shame, I immediately asked the boy if I could have it. He said no. I asked if I could just play with it for now and he said okay. I clung to it like treasure and tried to think of a way to steal it. It was too big to fit in my pocket.
When the moms came to check on us I said to his mom the other boy told me I could have the Mew. The boy heard me and said no he didn’t. I accused him of lying (zero shame) and that he was “going back on his promise.” His mother politely diffused the situation and said she herself liked the toy and didn’t want to give it away, but I could come play with it next time I visited. These lines might work on her younger son but they didn’t fool me. I asked if I could keep playing with it until it was time to go and she conceded.
When I got the chance, I stuffed the Master Ball up my pant leg. It was very obvious, but it was secure. Maybe if I just stood a certain way nobody would notice. As we got ready to leave I put my shoes on and tried to hide the hyper-extended pant cuff. I wore a lot of sweat pants at this time because my family was poor and they took longer to outgrow, so it was contained by the elastic cinch at the base of the leg. As long as I didn’t move too quickly, it should stay put.
When we got back to the car and started driving away, I desperately wanted to look at and play with my Mew toy. But I couldn’t do so without my mother seeing it and finding out I had taken in. Trying to “act natural”, and without the patience to just wait until we got home and play with it in secret, I exclaimed “it’s a good thing they didn’t let me have that toy, I forgot I had one in the car!” This was an insipid little kid attempt at deception, birthed from a brain that believed random coincidences such as that actually happened regularly. But I could tell my mother did not believe me, and I understand in retrospect she was way too humiliated to say anything to her coworker about it. Ever avoiding conflict, my mother said nothing of it at all.
All the stories are just like this. Sinister, selfish, and full of pathological deception to get what I wanted by any means necessary.
While I have a lot of stories like this from my boyhood and I try to look back on them with good humor I do feel embarrassed by these things I would do. I am not like that anymore, I have not been like that in an extremely long time, and I attempt to atone for my long first act of selfishness by practicing generosity today. I was not capable of empathy at that age. It is now one of my stronger qualities.