This sort of thing often happens in Mario Kart, because the question boxes know if you’re in first place. If you are, you’ll usually get a banana peel, or a coin, which are minimally useful. You’ll never get one of those sweet bullets. But if you’re in last place—because, say, you’re an eight-year-old playing a grizzled Mario Kart veteran—you’re much more likely to get lightning or Bullet Bill or an infinite supply of speed-boost mushrooms.
In a Mario Kart game, the best player still usually wins, but luck plays a significant role. Mario Kart is more poker than chess.
Depending on your worldview, the question boxes either make the game fair, because anyone can win, or they make the game unfair, because the person with the most skill doesn’t always win.
In that respect, at least in my experience, real life is the precise opposite of Mario Kart. In real life, when you are ahead, you are given lots of power-ups to get further ahead. After one of my books became commercially successful, for instance, my bank called to inform me that I would no longer be charged ATM fees, even if I used an ATM from a different bank. Why? Because people with money in the bank get all kinds of perks just for having money in the bank. Then there are the much bigger power-ups, like the graduating-from-college-with-no-debt power-up, or the being-white power-up, or the being-male power-up. This doesn’t mean that people with good power-ups will succeed, of course, or that those without them won’t. But I don’t buy the argument that these structural power-ups are irrelevant. The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefited from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life. Almost every time I’ve driven through a question box in my life, I’ve been given at the very least a red turtle shell. It happens so routinely that it’s easy for those of us who benefit from these power-ups to see them as fair. But if I don’t grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I’ll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity.
Some might argue that games should reward talent and skill and hard work precisely because real life doesn’t. But to me the real fairness is when everyone has a shot to win, even if their hands are small, even if they haven’t been playing the game since 1992.
In an age of extremes in gaming and elsewhere, Mario Kart is refreshingly nuanced. I give it four stars.
BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS
IN THE WINTER OF 2018, Sarah and I traveled to Wendover, a small town that straddles the border between Utah and Nevada. While there, almost as an afterthought, we visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, an otherworldly valley of salt-encrusted land on the western shore of the Great Salt Lake.
Sarah is, by a wide margin, my favorite person. After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.” Hall goes on to note that third things might be John Keats or the Boston Symphony Orchestra or Dutch interiors or children.
Our kids are critical sites of joint rapture for Sarah and me, but we have other third things, too—the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, the books we read together, the TV show The Americans, and so on.
But our first third thing was art.
Sarah and I attended the same high school in Alabama, so we’ve known each other since we were kids, but we never really had a conversation until 2003, when we were both living in Chicago. Sarah was working at an art gallery then, and after we crossed paths a couple times and exchanged some emails, she invited me to the opening of an exhibition at the gallery featuring sculptures by the artist Ruby Chishti.
I’d never been to an art gallery before, and at the time I could not have named a single living artist, but I was fascinated by Chishti’s sculptures. When Sarah took some time away from work that evening to talk with me about Chishti’s artwork, I felt for the first time one of my favorite feelings in this world—the feeling of Sarah’s gaze and mine meeting and entwining as we looked at a third thing.
A few months later, after we’d exchanged dozens of emails, we decided to start a two-person book club. Sarah chose The Human Stain by Philip Roth as our first book. When we met to discuss it, we found that we had both underlined the same passage: “The pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”
* * *
Fifteen years later, we were in Wendover to film for The Art Assignment, a series Sarah produced with PBS Digital Studios.* We saw an installation by the artist William Lamson, as well as some of the monumental land art of the American West, including Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. At night, we stayed at a casino hotel on the Nevada side of town. During World War II, the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima trained out of Wendover. But the Air Force left a long time ago, and these days people mostly visit for the casinos, or else for the nearby salt flats.
For some reason, I really like casinos. I recognize that they prey on vulnerable people and enable addiction, and that they’re loud and smoky and gross and horrible. But I can’t help myself. I like sitting at a table and playing cards with strangers. On the evening in question, I was playing with a woman from the Texas panhandle named Marjorie. She told me that she’d been married for sixty-one years. I asked her what the secret was, and she said, “Separate checking accounts.”
I asked her what brought her to Wendover, and she said she wanted to see the salt flats. And the casino, of course. She and her husband gambled one weekend a year. I asked her how it was going, and she said, “You ask a lot of questions.”
Which I do, when I’m gambling. In every other environment, I am extremely averse to encounters with strangers. I don’t tend to chat with airplane seatmates or cab drivers, and I am an awkward and strained conversationalist in most situations. But put me at a blackjack table with Marjorie, and suddenly I’m Perry Mason.
The other person at my table, eighty-seven-year-old Anne from central Oregon, also wasn’t much of a talker, so I turned to the dealer, who was required to talk to me as a condition of his employment. He had a handlebar mustache, and a name tag identifying him as James. I couldn’t tell if he was twenty-one or forty-one. I asked him if he was from Wendover.
“Born and bred,” he answered.
I asked him what he thought of it, and he told me it was a nice place. Lots of hiking. Great if you like hunting and fishing. And the salt flats were cool, of course, if you liked fast cars, which he did.
After a moment he said, “Not a great place for kids, though.”
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I was one.”
There’s a certain way I talk about the things I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don’t ever get directly asked what we can’t bear to answer. The silence that followed James’s comment about having been a kid reminded me of that, and reminded me that I had also been a kid. Of course, it’s possible that James was only referring to Wendover’s shortage of playgrounds—but I doubted it. I started sweating. The casino’s noises—the dinging of slot machines, the shouts at the craps table—were suddenly overwhelming. I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of. I played out the hand, tipped the dealer, thanked the table for the conversation, and cashed out my remaining chips.