Hammer Plays Monopoly

                                                Plays

When I call upon leisure, it's common for me to play video games with friends. Willy and Swinkle have the same tendencies, and during a recent summer which marked for me the start of another inglorious chapter in a frustrating narrative, we'd gather to unwind and perhaps revamp our mindsets at Swinkle's studio apartment above a church that used to be a pawn shop. Our game of choice was an adaptation of a classic board game Swinkle had downloaded onto his computer: Super Monopoly.


With components of luck and some semblance of financial savvy, Super Monopoly allowed us to compete without losing real money or going through all the tedium of doling out fake money and plastic houses and straining to do basic math. We could roll the dice and then buy a property by pressing a button on the controller. Rolling dice by hand onto an actual surface had become too much of a chore, I suppose.

While I usually avoid the wizards and elves and all the other magical shit associated with role playing games, when I enter my name in Super Monopoly, I'll admit it, I get tickled by calling myself “Hammer.” I think of myself as MC Hammer in a frenzy of enterprise, constantly buying properties and overindulging, fully convinced I will never go broke. Occasionally I make jokes and observations from Hammer's perspective. Win or lose (and in this particular game I lean toward the latter), I feel like I'm enacting an episode of VH1's Behind the Music and I get a kick out of that.

I share some economical tendencies with Hammer. In life and Monopoly, as we see it, we only get so many opportunities, which means we should spend-spend-spend while we can and accept the consequences even if they turn out to be dire. In America as well as life, there is no hope for Socialism. They're both ventures for capitalists. The winners are rare, and the rest are left to scrounge for remnants of rancid chicken wings in the trash cans of back alleyways downtown. That's the bad news, but Hammer and I realize that in order to get rich, the first step is to at least try to get rich. Flawed and defective as we may be, we still owe effort to the game. It takes a lot of gumption to buy a second yacht or Park Place on a shoe-string budget, but even so, we'd forfeit our self-respect if we didn't purchase these extravagances when the opportunities presented themselves.

What follows is me (as Hammer) playing Monopoly with my friends—and if this premise seems outdated, bare in mind that Hammer appeared at the New Year's Eve countdown to 2013 on ABC. He performed a duet with that Korean pop-singer who resembles the late Kim Jong Ill.

It all begins with a pixelated hand rolling pixelated dice.


Act I: “Too Legit to Quit”

They say snake eyes are a bad omen, but Hammer just started this party by landing on the Community Chest. Runner-up in a beauty contest. Deal with that, haters. Gonna roll again, but before I do that, I gotta air a grievance about how they put Hammer in the same beauty contest with an unbeatable Goddess like Halle Berry.

Guess who just purchased the hell out of Oriental Avenue? My investment portfolio is gonna be so sound I'm destined to make Bill Gates look like a brain-dead chump.

It was a quiet turn for Hammer this time around, but at least I got to visit jail and counsel Chris Brown. “The good lord and Hammer both know that the ladies can drive a man mad and make him see red. But please, don't hurt 'em.”

More Stories, and Additional Stories is the name of that eBook.