In the loneliest times in my life, there are a few hobbies I fall back on. There have been a few times in my life I’ve had minimal enough contact with the outside world that I’ve gotten desperate enough to go hunting for it.

In the case of this story though, I was just looking for an old big-box TV. Maybe if you’re old enough you’ve got a memory of sitting on a carpet somewhere holding any manner of controllers in your hand. For me, these kinds of TV’s always make me think “Super Nintendo”. In this case though, I was actually trying to play one.

My way of coping with stress and reality is to fall back into old videogames. There’s a closet in every apartment I’ve lived in filled with an esoteric collection of deep-cuts for the Playstation 2 and Dreamcast. Most of the time, all of those old plastic boxes and rainbow-hued discs are far and out of my mind.

Let’s get out of the way with all of that though. I’m not usually a purist, but when I start playing old games on an almost hourly basis I want the experience to be how I remember it. Videogames are chiefly a domain of nostalgia fetishism, so this meant I had to find the right TV. Had to have those scanlines that give everything a touch of artificial depth.

There was no reason for me to be as specific as I was in my search. I trolled neighborhood yardsales for about a week. I saw many TV’s and flipped through old longboxes that belonged to dead parents and forgotten action figures from other peoples childhoods. Nothing I found caught my eye, maybe because nothing needed to.

My search eventually took me online, and at the bottom of a market listing on Facebook I found a Sony that was the exact model I’d owned probably a decade ago the first time I lived on my own.

It was in the possession of a guy named we’ll call Dustin. He was basically just looking for someone to come get it and take it off of his hands. There was too much information in the description: he was on house-arrest and needed the extra space to move in some more of his things from storage. Dustin was scruffy in the only picture that was available and had a tattoo on his neck.

Dustin was a lot like me, I’d come to find.

Our first meeting took me about thirty minutes outside of where I live, a smaller town between two hills in an area around a creek. Mostly residential, the kind of place with two country stores and one local lunch spot.

Dustin lived in a trailer that was parked outside of his parents house: There he’d also set up a small porch he could sit out on that was mostly protected from the rain. I drove up into the dirt driveway and first saw him sitting in a pair of slippers and jeans, smoking a cigarette with a controller in his hand.

“Hey.” I called as I walked up: the informal greeting of an awkward “are we the people that shake hands or slap them together” played out messily before any words were exchanged.

Dustin was playing a copy of Resident Evil: Code Veronica. Before I’d even introduced myself I mentioned it to him, his response was something about disliking the newer games.

I asked if I could see the tv.

The TV was in fair condition, basically exactly as reported. I offered to give him about thirty bucks to take it off of his hands. “You sure?” he’d ask me repeatedly every time I brought it up.

The first time though, Dustin asked me if I wanted to smoke. I figured I had nothing to oblige by smoking some weed with a stranger. So we sat down, and that’s what we did. The very first time I’d ever met him, I got a good picture of who he was.

Dustin was just slightly younger than me. Local to California, his parents moved to Arizona when he was still in high school. Where he’d had trouble in school before, the fact that the desert offered him little to do and a lot of avenues for getting high meant he got arrested within months of coming to Arizona for having a pipe in his pocket on the wrong day a cop thought he looked suspicious.

We took a hit, and I tried to move Dustin away from talking about his past. It’s not that I didn’t care, but I got the sense he hadn’t talked to anyone in too long and his oversharing made me uncomfortable.

He asked me why I wanted the TV and I explained about needing it for an SNES. He was “something of a gamer” he said: showing me a massive collection of games across a breadth of systems. Mostly, he told me that the Playstation 2 was his favorite console and the Dreamcast a close second.

Dustin would frequently launch into diatribes about how he missed the way videogames felt on the PS2. He couldn’t imagine picking up a newer console because of it. After the first one of these, I got the very funny feeling that Dustin had a lot in common with most of my friends online.

He was a guy without the internet (it wasn’t available where his parents property was) who was stuck on house arrest. Really, I don’t think Dustin had a connection to the outside world besides work release and the few other friends that came by his house. Either to give him weed or talk to him about the old days (conversations I’d end up sitting in on only once).

After talking about Alundra on the Playstation having an incredible soundtrack, I got too high and forgot about the TV. I didn’t end up leaving with it that day.

I send him a message when I got home about forgetting the TV at his place with a short apology. No big deal, he assured me. I’d just have to come back over and get it when I was free. He liked it was going to someone who would use it for videogames and not just an art project or something.

Dustin was the kind of friend that I’d only recently got in my life, the kind of person that I shared a nascent obsession with videogames with. I saw myself back over at his house by the end of the week.

As I pulled up to his parents house, he was outside again. Both of his parents looked like the stereotypical middle-aged California white hairs. They waved to me as they pulled out of the driveway.

I could tell something was wrong that time. Dustin sat next to an ashtray that was filled with a pile of half-smoked cigarettes. “My parents.” He said “Are kind of disappointed in me.” I sat down in one of the lawn chairs. He told me a little about going from smaller private schools as a little kid to giant ones in Arizona. That he felt almost identity-less in the giant classes of three hundred kids. Every time he got kicked out of a school his parents moved to a smaller and smaller town.

By the time he’d made it to this one, he’d barely managed to graduate only because his parents promised to move back to California. They never did, settling into their large four bedroom house and retiring early. “They vacation a lot.” He said.

I moved the conversation back to videogames. I can’t remember what Dustin was playing that day, it might have been a JRPG, because we talked extensively about them.

Funny to me was that Dustin only had a small flip-phone to connect with the outside world. This was a guy who, juggalo face tattoo and all, had the kind of energy and attitude that would fit in well as a youtube personality.

When we’d talk about videogames as something more than just a simple hobby, he’d light up. “Aw man, do you remember Abbadox.” He said once, launching us into a conversation about Natsume NES games.

Dustin knew only a little about videogame companies themselves. The guy had a knack for describing how a game feels that was in line with a lot of videogame criticism of the last couple years. I never knew if he could write at all, but his knack with the spoken word was fun to be around.

We smoked more weed that day, and I forgot about the TV again. “No big deal” He said when I got home. “You’re a chill dude come by any time.” (sic) He’d message me on Facebook.

I started to get the feeling even more now, that I was maybe one of the only people Dustin met who shared similar interests. We still very seldomly talked on facebook, but I ended up back at his house a week later.

Every time we hung out followed a similar pattern: I brought him some soda or something, we sat and talked about videogames. Every once in awhile, he’d watch me play or we might go a few rounds on in my copy of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike.

Broken up in our conversations about videogames were small details about himself. Using videogames as company for how little his parents talked to him as he got older. Getting into more drugs, more violence the more places they moved and the less people he knew.

One time he told me he didn’t remember the names of anyone at the first highschool he went in Arizona. I told him he’d be free to hang out with some of the people I knew when he got his ankle bracelet removed. He laughed: Dustin had spent so long on probation or house arrest that he knew it was finally time to “grow up” he’d say.

I still never got the TV, and my initial depression had faded. Not knowing if we were friends, I just used it as an excuse to hang out when I got bored. I told Dustin that there were plenty of communities he’d fit in online, he’d show me one of his many pets.

Besides videogames, Dustin had three dogs. All of them were incredibly well behaved: you’d assume a guy with a hatchet tattooed on his face to be one of those people who’s dogs would jump all over you. Dustin’s dogs would generally just sit and watch the two of us play videogames.

I’d always tell him things he didn’t know. About people like Yoko Taro the first time we played Drakengard or Kenji Eno the day I brought over a burned copy of D for the dreamcast. We spent the whole day trying to get it to work. Mostly I told him how I’d heard about the game. I had a friend who was a cartoonist, I said. He was making his own “sequel” to the game that was kind of a parody – I couldn’t promise him that D was any good but I promised to show him my friends game as soon as I could.

Dustin had dreams of developing videogames, recently. He’d show me some of his notebooks that were filled with ideas. Platformers, stealth games. Mostly they all fit the interests he’d talk frequently about. Dustin loved Metal Gear Solid but couldn’t stand Siphon Filter or Splinter Cell.

“I’ll come get the TV next week.” I told him: I didn’t know it would be the last time we actually got to hang out.

The next week I came by to get him, there was nobody at the property. I sat in my car and eventually knocked on the door to his parents house, asking about him.

They told me that the night before, one of his dogs got off of the property. They weren’t home and none of his friends answered their phones. He didn’t know what to do so he left the property to find it. His parents figured one of the neighbors must have called the cops when they saw a guy walking around with a house monitor ankle bracelet on.

Dustin was just looking for his dog, but his probation officer didn’t care, they said. He’d be going back to jail and possibly being transferred to prison.

I wondered on the drive home what might have happened to a guy like Dustin if he’d had friends around that liked the same things. If the guy had ever really found a community where he belonged, or had any of the opportunities I did.

I also thought about how I was only a hair away from turning out like he did. Some of us don’t find the places we belong until it’s too late.