Do you remember the game Pujkamaunka Splash?
I do.
Not that there weren’t memorable events aplenty in 1993. Clinton was inaugurated. Jurassic Park was in theaters. And the ATF botched the Waco Siege so badly that David Koresh and his Branch Davidians were all immolated inside their compound.
And me? I had dreams, of course.
I’d been saving up for a new Mongoose Villain freestyle bike. A friend had shown me a homemade video of Mat Hoffman doing tailwhips and tabletops, and I’d become a BMX freestyle and ramp-riding nut. I was convinced that I was destined for California and superstardom, a life of rad stunts and sun-kissed bleach-blonde beach-bunnies loving all over me until I was almost sick of it (almost).
But I pushed all that aside when they announced the release date for Pujkamaunka Splash. And I never did buy that bike.
I have memories of all the other middle-schoolers saying stuff like “we’re going Puji”, of tearing ads out of GamePro magazine and geeking out over them, not understanding that ads weren’t the product itself and a game’s graphics could only blow your mind as far as all sixteen bits would let it.
But you say that you don’t remember it. I guess I’m not surprised. Nobody ever does. Nobody can find it, can even find any mention of the game. And if you Google it—and go ahead, right now, if you’ve got the time, so you can see I’m not lying—you won’t find it. You’ll find YouTube videos about “Splash World Punta Cana” and someone’s TikTok about puka lava backsplashes.
But nothing about the game.
Why does nobody but me remember Pujkamaunka Splash?
#
The plan was for my grandfather to bring me and my dog Pistol in his Country Squire station wagon, to the Bavaria Galleria mall.
He picked me up out front of my mom’s tract house, our wild yard littered with my sister’s Fisher-Price toys and a Slip ‘N Slide that never got put away. Our neighbors hated us.
It was early in the morning when my grandpa showed up, early enough that the streetlamps were still on, and so that my mother had to watch me get into his car from the TV room window.
I sat in the back with Pistol. I felt funny sitting up front with my grandfather and avoided it whenever I could. He always seemed like he was about to shake his head at me or exasperatedly sigh, even though he never did that. What he did, if I irritated him, was say, “Stop being trouble or I’ll leave you where trouble lives…with the poor kids.”
To which I would reply, “Mom says we are the poor kids.”
“I mean the really poor kids,” he replied, “the ones with fleas who don’t eat anything but cold cheese and knuckle sandwiches.”
I didn’t know if he was serious. But I made sure to never push him far enough to find out.
#
We got to the Bavaria Galleria at about seven in the morning. I couldn’t believe it, the sun was only just coming out and the line was hundreds of people long, stretching out of the mall entrance and all the way up the sidewalk that snaked around half the lot.
I frowned. This was a bad sign. It was definitely something that would irritate Grandpa. Because my grandfather hated three things more than anything else in this world—Japanese cars, fake cripples parking in real cripples’ handicapped spaces, and waiting in lines.
He looked back at me through the rearview mirror as I tried to wipe the frown off my face. I didn’t want this whole ride to be for nothing. I figured he’d seen the line and we were just going to drive back home.
But he looked at me in the rearview, and instead of chastising me, grinned a co-conspirator’s grin. “Don’t worry, kid. We’re not standing in line.”
We pulled up to an entrance with a reinforced door next to a loading dock and dumpsters, and got out of the car.
“Hey Sam,” an elderly security guard said to my grandpa, “how’s tricks?”
“Hanging further port than starboard, but at least the wedding tackle’s still operational. Not that anything’s biting. This is my grandson, Trevor. Trevor, this is my buddy Spetz.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Spetz,” I said, and shuffled Pistol’s leash over to my left hand so I could offer a handshake.
“Just Spetz, kid,” he said, shaking my hand. “I see you been raised right. That’s quite a grip you got, kid.” He leaned in toward Grandpa and gave him a nudge in the ribs. “Kid’s been practicing the five-knuckle shuffle, huh?”
“Easy, Spetz.”
“I’m just joshing you.”
“I know, Spetz. If you were serious, you’d be collecting your teeth.”
#
Spetz deposited me, grandpa, and my dog Pistol right out front of Babbage’s. I guess Spetz had been expecting and planning for us, because there was a younger guard holding our place in line; he left right when we showed up. I looked around at the other adult chaperones fencing in the queue of teens and pre-teens waiting to get in. It looked like everyone had shown up with their grandparents. Only people younger than sixteen and older than sixty.
Behind us, there were fluorescent lights the same color as the ones you see underwater in a dirty pool. Near those were little tiled plant beds interspersed with random shrubbery, benches for husbands to park themselves, and bistro tables favored by gossipers who shrieked at secrets too quickly to cover their mouths in time.
In front of us there was a huddle of men in coveralls and workcoats, trucker caps and beanies, all of them laced up in their workboots, too. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but they all stood around the big wishing well, yelling in the direction of the fountain in the middle of it.
“What are they doing over there?” I asked.
“Where?” Grandpa said.
“Right there.” I pointed.
Grandpa looked up from the newspaper he was reading. “I don’t see anything. It’s just an empty fountain.” He brought the paper back up in front of his face. “It’s empty. They’re probably waiting on someone to fix it.”
“You don’t see those guys?” I said.
Grandpa peeked over his paper again and stared right where I was pointing long enough that he couldn’t have missed it. But he still showed no sign that he’d seen what I saw. He reached in his slacks and I heard his pockets jangling. He pulled out a few dimes, a quarter and a dozen pennies. He gave me one of the pennies. “Go ahead, make a wish.”
I started in the direction of the wishing well, but Grandpa stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Leave the dog,” he said.
“You don’t mind watching him?”
“Leave the dog.” He sounded the way people who go a long time without sleep sound when they’re woken up too soon after they finally pass out. I handed him the leash.
I walked over to the wishing well, nudging between two bearded men that were really tanks with beerbellies and acid reflux breath. The wishing well had been emptied out. Now that I was close enough, I could see two pitbull mixes in the dry well, baring their teeth at one another as they snapped and growled.
Someone shoved into someone else and then that someone else shoved into me, and I bumped into one of the beerbellied human tanks. Malt liquor spilled in my hair and down my back, reeking like candy-flavored medicine and liquid sheet-metal. All of the maintenance workers had either a tallboy or a bottle. The well and all around it reeked of cheap malt liquor and unhygienic men’s sweat-soaked workclothes.
A drunk maintenance man was yelling himself hoarse somewhere near me. “I want to see a throat out, show me a mutt’ll rip another’s throat out!” The others cheered. A cloud of cigarette smoke grew or dissipated in proportion to the drunken noise, so that it seemed like all the men together were one organism breathing smoke and alcoholic fumes. Some slapped each other’s backs with cigarettes or beer still held in their hands. Sparks flew off of embers as rough fingers struck burning cherries mid-air; cans of Schlitz malt liquor and Old Style bashed lip to lip and sloshed beer on men’s uniforms; bottles were smashed on the ground in celebration every time one of the dogs edged in on the other.
One of the pitbulls got the other by the throat, The men around the dried-out well cheered, spewing raucous noise along with blue-gray smoke. I covered my face when the one pitbull necked the other. The weaker dog whined and squealed; it was a terrible sound, like the time Mom dropped a paint can on Pistol’s foot, but worse. And then I felt rough hands that smelled like grease and piss and drugstore liquor; the hands grabbed my face and vise-gripped my skull and forced me to look forward. A phlegmy voice croaked in my ear, “Watch it, boy. Watch, now. This is where he takes the cunting throat.”
I was terrified.
I thrashed at the stranger’s hands, I struggled free, I shoved at every meaty, sweat-stinking body around me. No one did anything, no one tried to stop me. I wasn’t even remotely as entertaining as the dog’s slaughter.
I came back and stood in line. My grandfather wasn’t reading the paper, now he was just fidgeting, checking his wristwatch. It took him a half-minute to even notice me. When he looked down, I handed him back the penny and said, “I didn’t use it.”
I thought for sure Grandpa would notice that I was shaken up, but he didn’t say anything, only accepted the penny and returned Pistol’s leash in exchange.
Cheering started and rippled through the line like a daisy chain of applause. I looked ahead: they were opening the store.
#
When it was your turn, a man with a mouth- and eye-holeless bag over his head unhooked a red velvet rope to let you in. But only one kid at a time.
I remember it was a black sackcloth bag over the man’s head and the velvet rope was stain-spotted and worn. Baghead’s body was very scoliotic and knobby, flesh pinks hued into gray by time, his skin prune-wrinkly like hourlong-bathtub-fingers, and I could tell he was so, so old—much older than my grandpa or any of the others waiting on line with their grandchildren—I could tell even with his face covered.
I was next. The ancient baghead was close to shouting. “Give your dog to your minder and hold out your hand.” His voice was a soundboard of reptile noises respired through pneumonic lungs, punctuated by a hacking cough here, a rumbly growl there. He was speaking in English, but it was a foreign English; his syllables and consonants were where they were meant to be and his diction was spot-on, but it was like the sounds were degraded, like their meaning had mystically shifted so that the words I ought to’ve known meant something new now.
“Give up the goddamned leash, I said, you scuttling little whelp.” Baghead’s wretched voice was more powerful than a man one-quarter his age.
I looked up at my grandpa, expecting to see him give back a lipful. But when I turned and held out the leash—the leash, with a very nervy and whining poodle attached to it by his collar—Grandpa was staring up into the sickly glowing fluorescents overhead, a small spot of drool formed at the corner of his mouth.
“You go wait there,” the baghead said to—no, commanded—my grandfather, nodding toward a flock of grandparents huddled by a shelf full of Super Mario All-Stars and other Nintendo properties. They all looked so bent and gray, I thought. I thought that they were even grayer and further bent because they were here.
I had just enough time to see Grandpa take Pistol over to the seniors’ huddle. He bent down on one knee to gently pet our family poodle’s fur. I’d never seen Grandpa pet Pistol before. For a second, I couldn’t move. I was trying to grasp something that I now understand was a sense of the uncanny, something strange and powerful enough to change the air we breathed and the blood in our veins, something strange and powerful enough that Grandpa would choose to pet Pistol. “If it’s not a German Sheperd, it’s not a dog,” he’d told me once.
I was gobsmacked to see a very young girl—the only young girl who wasn’t there to buy the game—bring over a stainless steel dish for Pistol to drink from. Her head was roughly shaved and her whole skull was scabbed in congealed red chicken scratch. And she was completely nude.
#
I don’t know how we all knew not to tell our parents or other adults what we did in that black-curtained room. And I don’t know that my memories on the day I bought Pukjamaunka Splash, or the day after, or all the days after that, would have made sense to anyone but me. Because they weren’t memories, not really. They were sensations, images, acts:
A bright green screen on the largest cathode-ray TV I’d ever seen, blood oozing from between the screen’s glass and the TV housing; sun-flare-bright lights flashing and burning my retinas; the feel of a cold, bony hand gripping my wrist and putting a steel hammer in my fingers.
I remember urinating on the floor, and howling along with my dog Pistol, while a carpet-wide bed of worms bigger than any I’d ever seen, their wriggling bodies so dark green they were almost black, made slushing and squirting sounds as they crawled over the body of another naked girl. I think that the girl was dead before the worms began groping at her.
And then I saw the glass screen of the giant TV split apart and open, a mouth with glass shards for teeth and dark-green ooze instead of spit; the television’s mouth cried out in a sound of animal anguish so terrible that Pistol’s knees gave out. A puddle of urine spread underneath him on the floor.
After that, I remembered nothing until we’d got to the car.
#
We sat in the station wagon, my copy of Pujkamaunka Splash resting on the dashboard in front of me. It was like I’d only just woken up.
I looked down and saw that my hands were stained red and there were bunches of bloodied strings, of curly white fur, in between my fingers. I looked over at my grandpa, still holding Pistol’s unattached leash. Pistol was gone. Grandpa softly cried through a bloody nose and split lip that I didn’t remember him getting.
My grandfather was in the 20th Armored Division when the US Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I’d never seen him cry before.
I went home and I played my game. I never saw my grandfather again after that day.
#
So now you understand some of the mystique, the violence, the sheer lust and ruin of Pukjamaunka. Though you can’t trust what I say—how could you? I sound like a nutjob—a video game that dominated the market for years and then just disappeared with no one remembering anything about it? I might as well say I’m the King of England.
And even though I remembered those things I’ve described, I didn’t understand their meaning until the time was right. Not until I found the game again, hidden for all these years. I blew the dust from the cartridge and wiped down the Super Nintendo. I put the game cartridge in, and I started to play. And my television opened its mouth, like the TV in Babbage’s more than thirty years ago. And inside my television’s mouth, I could hear them calling out for me, from deep inside Pukjamaunka Splash, I heard them. I heard Pistol, and I heard Grandpa, and I heard the ancient baghead, too. They were telling me something.
I heard that strange voice, that bagheaded voice speaking its incomprehensible language in an English tongue:
“The time is right. Now bring others to play.”