Green Yamo and me

grew up with the usual suburban trappings of the Eighties: rusty dirt bikes, questionably engineered tree forts and summer adventures that ended in the ER so often everyone knew our names. And then we had him.

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He was the kind of kid who, when handed a water gun, thought, “This would be better filled with urine.” Dodgeball? He never went for the torso. He went straight for the groin, every… damn… time. It didn’t take long to realise there was no bottom to the well of his demented imagination. We absolutely hated him.

And yet, sometimes, he surprised us. Like the afternoon he hauled his older brother’s painstakingly assembled World War II models onto the lawn, crammed them with firecrackers of dubious legality, and blew them to smithereens. It was mayhem, sure, but there was a lunatic joy in the way he did it. When his brother inevitably pounded him, he took the beating with something that looked disturbingly like pride.

Then one day he singled me out. I braced myself – running would only delay the inevitable. But instead of torment, he pulled me inside to show off his new home computer: the Atari 800XL. For the first time, I saw Choplifter, where POWs actually looked human, and