The One Time I Asked my Friend For a Lift and Left my Soul in an Arcade Car Park
So this is a quick one, but I need to get it off my chest. Purely because this is the most distilled instance of a hobby matching the hobby-goer I’ve ever seen in my life.
Arcade Club
is a wonderful place in the middle of Bury. I have this terrible condition known as ‘Rhythm Game Brain Fungus’, which means I have a compulsive need to check if a rhythm game arcade cabinet is within any distance of my current location, constantly. Arcade Club is run by people who also have a terrible case of RGBF, making it a holy grail in the north of every Bemani game I absolutely adore.
As I’m the kind of person to spread brain fungus as an act of love, I pestered and pestered my friends to come with me for a day out. We’re all gamer nerds, and at least one person had to get hooked onto them like I had. And hell, even if they don’t care about the rhythm games there’s plenty other cabs there, and Mario Kart set up in the corner as a last resort. Everyone wins.
But the actual happenings mean little for this story. I had a great time, my friends had a great time, great times all around. Good day.
Now, the main problem with going to Arcade Club, as much as I adore the place, is that it’s quite the way out from where me and my friends live. It takes both a tram and a train to reach it, so if one is delayed or we’re late to one regardless of the other, we’re a bit snookered for making our way back. But we’re not stupid, are we? We’d leave ourselves with plenty of time to account for any public transport mishaps that could befall us, and give ourselves more than enough time to make the connections.
So the last tram leaves in 10 minutes.
I run the numbers, and realise we’re not going to make it in time. It takes 20 to walk to the tram stop from the arcade. I’m starting to think through alternatives, seeing if there’s a weird train connection that loops back on itself that google can’t figure out, and thinking of the final possibility of us all splitting a cab.
When I realise, one of us drove here.
Introducing Tavi. Tavi is insane.
There are so many things to say about Tavi I would be here all day. Here’s a selection of favourites.
Tavi wanted a nice speaker system, paid for the entire thing upfront, and offset the cost by eating nothing but cereal for a month. It’s so loud that at 15% volume it registered at 80db, and at maximum caused the posters on the walls to fall off. When she watched Inception, her friend who lived in the house next door asked her to stop making her window frames rattle.
Tavi regularly says ‘owo’ out loud in public. She pronounces it ‘oh-woh’.
Tavi is terrifyingly good at Rocket League. She joined her university’s esports league, and caused enough decimation during inter-uni matches she caused several people to quit permanently.
Tavi came down to Manchester for Halloween, and everytime she saw a Genshin Impact cosplay would point at them and happily declare “There’s an oomfie!” She does not play Genshin Impact.
Tavi is completely obsessed with the game Hatoful Boyfriend, that one dating sim where you go out with a bunch of pigeons. In her home lives a collection of plushies of every single character and when we visit she pelts us with them at random. She has a full dakimakura of one of the guys you can date and proudly displays it in her room. I say ‘guy’ like he’s not a bird. He’s a bird.
Tavi is wonderful.
“Hey Tavi,” I say, “we’re not going to make it to the tram stop in time, would you mind swinging us up there before you go?”
“Oh, sure!” she says with an angelic rasp.
Everyone’s rounded up and we make our way out. I’m still running numbers in my head. 5 minute drive to get to the station. It’s a bit of a walk to the platform; 2 minutes. We should make this if we get a move on.
So we pile into her shitty little student car — and forgive my homosexuality, I couldn’t tell you the model even if I tried — which we manage to fill every seat of.
Now. Let me tell you a few more things about Tavi.
- Tavi is a huge fan of eurobeat
- Tavi is a huge fan of Initial D
- Arcade Club has several Initial D cabinets
- Tavi has spent the last 2 hours doing nothing but playing Initial D
Tavi pops her phone in, brings up the tram stop on google maps, which starts to chime out the directions. As we’re fastening our seatbelts the engine roars to life with the turn of a key.
And among its bombastic cry, is eurobeat.
This was not some pussy shit. This wasn’t your ‘Night of Fire’ or ‘Running in the 90s’. These were cuts deeper than the mariana trench, from a woman who has listened to all two hundred and fifty Super Eurobeat albums, from a woman who has a dedicated spot in her living room for a full driving simulator setup.
The English language does not have the words to describe the speed we ripped out of this car park.
You see, the car park does not have direct access to the road. It’s one of those where it’s two or three turns to hit a parking spot. She, somehow, transcended the need for right turns. Gravel parted in her wake like Moses leading a speedrun of the Exodus.
My soul, the titular protagonist of this whole story, I feel eject out my back and straight through the car seat. Whatever hold it had on my corporeal form was shattered as soon as my stomach hit my throat. There was nothing to be done. I was that stunned by the literal 0 to 60 I was thrust through.
If you go to Arcade Club, it will still be there. Curled up in a puddle and weeping into the asphalt. The puddle is not from the English weather, but instead from its tears.
We’re on a road. Then a different road. I don’t know what road this is. Not the one we walked down, is all I know. The spare part of my brain grappling what common sense it can says a prayer to God, and every god that does and doesn’t exist between Him.
During this experience, I remember speaking. I don’t remember what. Words left my mouth without consulting my brain.
I think I yelled one or two times.
My friends certainly did. One friend does almost constantly, occasionally evolving into a full howl. Others laugh in combined astonishment and terror. Another tries, and fails, a bid to get Tavi to slow down.
“Yeah,” she said, completely levelled, “that’s the thing about drifting, it’s all in the throttle control.”
At least three people scream ‘NO’ at the top of their lungs.
I do wonder what we looked like to the denizens of Bury from the outside. We did hit a red light at some point, which I only remember for the screeching the engine made when Tavi launched us off again. Did someone look through a window while we were stopped? To see a gaggle of screaming university students held hostage by a lunatic of a woman entirely fueled by the most gottagofast-inducing music known to man?
I’m too scared to look at the road ahead. I don’t know where we are anymore. Where are we going? Some vague notion of ‘in time’ floats around my mind and slips between my fingers. The notion that did stick around was ‘I am going to Fucking Die’.
Everytime we turn, it feels like my body is a sack of organs in a washing machine. I’ve never felt car sick before, but this would be the closest I’ve ever gotten to —
The cacophony stops in an instant as she yanks the key out.
“Okay, we’re here!” she chimes with a smile.
It’s the tram stop, I realise. The world slowly comes back into focus around it.
We leave the car, because what the fuck else were we going to do? That’s the correct move when the driver says you’re at your destination. I was running entirely on social etiquette and the survival response of being seconds from hurtling into a wall.
I wave goodbye. I think. I don’t remember.
Her car roars to life again, the pounding of eurobeat resuming. She sped out of the tram stop with all the fury she took us here with, burning rubber on the bus stop markings.
We watch her leave our line of sight.
We walk into the station.
It takes ten minutes before any of us can speak again.
And you know what? We made that goddamn tram. We were all sat down with the familiar doots of the best thing to happen to Manchester around us, when our usual conversation starts picking up, realising we made this thing. Felt like death was seconds ahead of us, but we made it. The circumstances that brought us here started to matter less and less.
And it’s left me with this story to tell.
I guess, in all, I learnt two things that day:
- If you want to get there on time, sans sanity, ask your eurobeat-obsessed friend to take you.
- Never give a transwoman the aux cord.
