Making Out With My Atari

[Pantechnicon]

Making Out With My Atari
By “Pantechnicon”

If you’ve ever owned an Atari 2600, chances are pretty good at one point while you had it that the protective rubber covering around the shaft of one of your Atari-manufactured joysticks managed to work itself loose from under the slip-ring which is supposed to keep it affixed to the joystick’s base. Lifting the covering exposes the thin white plastic of the stick assembly. It was a fairly common problem with supplied controllers. My system was no exception. After a few years of regular use both of my joystick covers were likewise fully removed from their slip-rings.

One lazy Sunday back when I was sixteen I was loafing around the house watching movies on television all morning. My hands, being somewhat more restless than the rest of my body, drifted over to the nearby Atari console and removed one of the loose rubber stick coverings. Fumbling around with the covering I realized that by squeezing the open end against a smooth surface I could create a vacuum suction effect - much like a toy dart or a bathroom plunger - that would stick the covering to a tabletop or a window for a brief time. I attached the joystick cover to the bottom of my face which gave me the comical appearance of having an elongated Van Dyke-style beard. Mentally distracted by the droning television, I kept sticking this thing to same spot on my face for another hour or so until I became bored with television and decided to walk to the mall to waste even more of my day off.

Traipsing through the mall, I noticed that an unusually high number of my fellow teenagers that kept giggling and/or pointing at me as I walked past them. After a while I sought out a mirror to see what was so funny. Looking at my reflection outside of a JC Penney, I saw that by fooling as I did with that joystick cover that I had given myself a very dark and perfectly round hickey centered squarely on the edge of my pale adolescent hairless chin. I promptly left the mall, wishing desperately for a scarf or a turtleneck or something to cover up this self-inflicted deformity.

School resumed the next day and the kids there proved to be no more forgiving than the ones at the mall. The string of taunts whilst walking between classes never let up: “Nice hickey!” “Who’s your new girlfriend?” I just kept my mouth shut and waited for the bruise to go away, which took almost a week. In my high school days I was considered nerdy enough as things were. It would have been the end of me if it were revealed that I got my first hickey not from a girl, but from a videogame.

[Nicola]

I did exactly the same with an hard rubber, taken from a toy, when I was 16-17.
I left it on my forehead for 1 hour. It lasted several days.
Going at school was funny that way! I was very popular due to that big red dot.

[BydoEmpire]

Hah, that's a great story. =)

[Vigilante]

By looking at the title I was thinking this was going to turn into a sort of "fleshlight" story.....

[rbudrick]

Awesome story. I remember suctioning those things to various surfaces.

In the late 80s/early 90s there were these stupid toys that were half domes about 2 inches wide and made of rubber. You could get them out of gumball machines and shit or buy them in stores. Short-lived fad. Anyway, you'd turn the half-dome inside out and put it on a surface. After a few seconds, they would fly pretty high up in the air from turning rightside out again.

I knew a kid who stuck one of these in the middle of his forhead and walked around for about 2 periods in 6th grade. I saw him a couple periods later and he had this perfectly circular hickey bruise in the middle of his forhead about 2 inches acrosss. Funniest fucking thing EVER.

He had this bruise for a very long time. It was something rediculous like 6 months or 6 weeks or something. It was a very inordinate amount of time for a bruise though. It lasted rediculously long.

Not long after this I started seeing these same toys with a little hole in them to prevent suction while still launching into the air. I can only image that hundreds of people started doing exactly what this kid I knew did all over the country and people complained.

-Rob

[Blackcrow]

I like this story.

[Flack]

Ah yes, the Atari hickey -- who didn't have one of these as a kid? I was the proud owner of a forehead one, myself. In fact, I distinct remember learning what a hickey was from that incident (I hadn't heard the word before). I wonder if Atari engineers in retrospect got a kick out of the wave of hickeys they distributed across the teenage populace?

Great story, P!

[rbudrick]

I like this story.

Man, how do you do all the smileys? I haven't figured it out since the new boards went up....that and bolding, italicizing and changin text size.

-Rob

[rustblackend]

Good story.

If you ever get an Atari hickey again, or if it runs in the family for those of you with kids here's what you do. Put a metal spoon in the freezer. Once it is ice cold apply to the bruise, do this as much as you can and the bruise will be gone in a day or 2.

[NE146]

ok.. I laughed at this one

Strangely enough, despite all the years of playing the VCS as a kid, I never had a rubber sleeve come off unless I did it purposely (to try and fix a broken stick or whatever)..

Anyway.. Good story. I dug it

[Flack]

Strangely enough, despite all the years of playing the VCS as a kid, I never had a rubber sleeve come off unless I did it purposely (to try and fix a broken stick or whatever)..

Did you play much Video Pinball? It seems like that's the game did it the most in our house. That and Pac-Man ...

[NE146]

Did you play much Video Pinball? It seems like that's the game did it the most in our house. That and Pac-Man ...

Yep.. for sure. Both of course. I guess I just had a lighter touch

[cyberfluxor]

By looking at the title I was thinking this was going to turn into a sort of "fleshlight" story.....

I was thinking that for a little bit, then realising it was posted by Pantechnicon I expected it to be less XXX rated. Great story anyhow!

[Pantechnicon]

...realising it was posted by Pantechnicon I expected it to be less XXX rated.

I had a dream once that I spent a $6000 hour in a Nevada brothel with one of the working girls (who, IRL, worked at a now defunct local game shop) playing Video Olympics as opposed to Hide The Weenie. That's as much game-related erotica as you're going to get out of me.

Oh, and I have a sealed copy of Custer's Revenge. But beyond that, I swear, that's it.

[DefaultGen]

.....