Slaying Zombies: The House of the Dad

Of all the activities I plan for weekends with my daughter, our semi-regular visits to Dave & Buster’s offer the best odds of landing my ugly mug on Why the Fuck Do You Have a Kid?

“Why’s that?” you ask. (OK – maybe you didn’t really ask but I’m gonna tell you anyway…)

Well, you see, Olivia turns six later this month so you might think we’d spend our time inside the mad-house-masquerading-as-an-arcade popping tokens into some harmless game featuring SpongeBob or racking up the points in skee ball or maybe even testing our skills in a grab machine or two. And we do. But not until after we’ve spent a good 30 minutes or so blasting the shit out of zombies and other b-movie monsters in the decidedly kid-unfriendly The House of the Dead 2.

So picture this:

It’s Sunday afternoon, just after lunchtime. The local D&B’s is bustling with activity and noisy with the sound of game-play. Along one wall of the arcade, midway down a long row of first-person shooters, you’ll find Olivia and me firing molded plastic semi-automatics at the steady barrage of undead horrors that bear down upon us. Skinny zombies, fat zombies, mutant toads and blood-thirsty slugs. Giants, winged gargoyles and 7-headed dragons. All with a taste for human flesh and determined to make a meal out of us — until we ready, aim, fire, reload, fire again and stop them dead in their tracks (or undead in their tracks, as the case may be.)  Until we reduce them to graphic smudges of blood and guts on the floor of the game’s namesake “house.”

Amanda sits beside Olivia. She isn’t playing but she’s an accomplice nonetheless. She’s pumping money into the machine so we don’t lose our flow — replenishing our life lines as we advance from level 1 to level 2, through levels 3, 4 and 5. She’ll probably toss and turn all night, tormented with nightmares brought on by The House of the Dead’s violence and gore.

But Olivia won’t — she’ll sleep just fine. She’s unphased by the prospect of her character’s demise at the hands of imaginary monsters, and is remarkably level-headed as she assesses our progress: “Daddy, I’m killing more zombies than you. You keep missing everything.” The scoreboard says otherwise — if you go by the points, I’m doing just fine but Olivia has barely hit her targets at all. But what would you expect — she’s only five. Right?

And besides, at moments like this I’m dead certain I’m not missing anything at all.

So I don’t correct her. Instead, I give her a high five. I hug her and say, “I know, sweetie. You’re an awesome zombie killer.” She nuzzles me for a moment then fires a round directly into the chest of an advancing corpse. Her eyes dance with delight and she’s grinning ear to ear. I’m grinning too. Amanda later tells me that the sight of daddy and daughter blasting away at an army of undead menaces was one of the cutest things she’d ever seen. Ummm, OK… we’ll see how she feels once we turn out the lights.

But I know what she means. This is hands-down the best half-hour of the entire weekend. And it reminds me exactly why I have a kid and why this particular kid blows me away every time.

Tags: arcade, dave & busters, fatherhood, greg verdino, house of the dead, Life, love, olivia, verdino, zombies