One day back in the early 1980s, when I was a young teenager, I was hanging out at a friend’s apartment. We both had Atari computers, I had the 400 and he had the fancier Atari 800,  and spent a lot of time copying games and trying to figure out how to play them.

You see, if you pirated a video game back then — in the pre-Internet age — you didn’t get an instruction manual telling you how the game worked. Were there keys on the keyboard you had to use? What happened if you did one thing during this screen and something else during another screen? All that basic stuff you would have known if you had purchased the game outright.

So, part of the process of video game pirating— at least for me and my small circle of software pirating friends — was doing some primitive, improvised digital “forensics” to figure out how these games worked. And when I say “digital” I don’t mean just 1s and 0s and bits and bytes. Often the hacking method we used was to just smash our hands across the keyboard to see what happened. It was a simple method of figuring out how software worked without having to do things like decompile a binary and wade through raw, undocumented code.

Anyway, my friend and I were playing and copying video games. It was a tedious process back then since storage media and devices were slow and unreliable, and even more-so for a poor kid like me who couldn’t afford a disk drive and only had a measly, slow data cassette tape drive to use.

While we were waiting for games to copy, we’d listen to pop music and talk about different things, including, on that day, my friend’s new guitar.

“So, what do you think,” he asked while holding and strumming it in his lap. The guitar in question was a classic black and white Fender Stratocaster. He had just got it along with a basic amp about a week earlier. He wasn’t an expert or anything like that — I don’t recall him ever really studying music in the formal sense — but he was definitely into his guitar.

“Seems cool,” I said as I looked it over. “What can you play?” I asked.

He then plugged the guitar into the amp and proceeded to play that classic of novice guitarists worldwide: The opening riff to Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.”

“Here,” he said as he passed the guitar to me. He then showed me which strings to hold and which to strum, and I gotta’ admit, the “Smoke on the Water” riff may be basic, but playing it was fun. At least it was fun for the couple of minutes.

After four or five minutes though, I got bored and started looking around the room and that is when I saw it on the wall. A brand new blacklight poster of the cover of Iron Maiden’s album, Number of the Beast, freshly pinned to the wall, right behind me.

“Whoa! When did you get that!” I asked as I turned around and put the guitar down.

“About a week ago,” my friend said. “Pretty cool, right?”

Cool was an understatement.

Even without the requisite glow of a blacklight bulb, the poster was amazing in the normal incandescent daylight of the sun. The flocked blacks were so deep and black, and the yellows and other fluorescent colors were still vibrant and full even in the afternoon light.

But beyond the aesthetics of the image itself, the message of the poster blew my teenage mind. There on the poster was Iron Maiden’s mascot “Eddie” standing larger than life. And Eddie in this context was somehow the puppet master of the Devil who was in-turn the puppet master of some small dude in the middle of a pile of flames in hell. The message was loud and clear: Eddie was evil. In fact, Eddie controlled the Devil and all of his actions.

“I’m gonna get a blacklight for it next week,” my friend said.

“Really? Let me know when you get it,” I said as I stared at the poster some more.

Just then — as if on cue — I heard the sound of someone coming out of a nearby bathroom. It was my friend’s dad. I had no idea he was even in the apartment, but suddenly there he was in the doorway of my friend’s room wearing just a bath towel and some slippers. I guess he’d just taken a shower.

“Jack!” he shouted enthusiastically, “Come here! I want to show you something.”

“Pa!” my friend said. “Come on,” he added a bit frantically.

“Don’t worry! Don’t worry!” he said, “Jack come here let me show you something,” he said as he walked into the bedroom next door.

I followed him and saw him rummage through a nightstand next to the bed. The bedroom itself was decorated in what can best be described as basic, aspirational Russian gaudy. That meant it was tricked out with all kinds of ornate over-decorated flourishes that aspired to make the place seem as if it was a fancy, luxurious mansion, despite the fact that it was just a small bedroom in a dumpy medium-sized post-war apartment building in Brighton Beach located next to a highway off-ramp.

“Here!” he shouted, “I have it now!”  And he stood up, turned around and showed me what he was so excited about. There in his hand was a small, silver-plated handgun. While I had seen   and collected bullets that I would find on the ground in the neighborhood, I had never seen an actual gun before in my life. But this gun looked legit. Could have been a .22 or .38 caliber.

“Jack,” he implored, “Why do I need to have this?” he said shaking the gun in his hand as he talked, “Look at this Jack,” he said, “I never use it so why do I need this?”

I stood there dumbfounded and speechless. What could I say? He seemed a little red faced and wobbly. Was he a bit drunk? Or maybe he was just shower drunk and happy to be freshly clean?

All I know is that I simply said, “I don’t know…”

All this time his son stood behind me in the doorway and was repeatedly saying some variation of “Dad! Please… Stop… Stop it… Please…”

I looked at his dad again and was trying to find a clean way out of this when he suddenly blurted, “Jack, do you want this?” And he pushed the gun in his palm it towards me.

“Here, let me show you,” he said as he leaned forward.

I backed off a bit, shook my head no, laughing and smiling, and headed back to my friend’s room. As I backed out of the room, my friend looked at me and slowly walked up to his dad, put his hand on his shoulder, and started talking to him in Russian and telling him to put the gun away.

I walked away from the bedroom, turned into my friend’s room, sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the guitar and dawdled with it a bit.  Occasionally, I’d peer into the other bedroom to see what was happening. I could see my friend’s dad push close the drawer of the nightstand where he kept the gun and climb into bed. All the while his son was talking to him in Russian in increasingly hushed tones.

Eventually, my friend left his father in the bedroom, closed the door and came back into his room. He looked at me, but didn’t say a word. I shifted myself around so he could squeeze into the room while still futzing around on the guitar and staring at the poster of Eddie on the wall.

It was dusk and the sun was setting. After a few minutes, I put the guitar down, stood up and said, “So let me know when you get that blacklight, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, and I gathered my stuff and headed out the front door.

***

Jack Szwergold is a skilled web developer who has worked for Artforum and the Guggenheim Museum. He founded the Onion’s website in 1996 and currently works for the New School.