To be 14. So much to learn. So many choices. So much to do:
Aaron Wolf, at the moment, is choosing to watch TV. He's in Silver Spring, in his house, in the den, in a recliner, with a remote in one hand and a microwave burrito in the other. On the screen, some women are rubbing their chests. "This is Shaggy. 'Boombastic,' " he says. "It's pretty good." He watches for a few seconds, grows bored, clicks the remote. On comes VH-1. "Janet Jackson. 'You Want This,' " he says. "I don't like Janet Jackson." He clicks the remote again. "Nickelodeon." Click. "The country station." Click. "Bette Midler?" Click. "O.J." Click. Jenny Jones, talking to a pregnant 15-year-old. "I like Ricki Lake." Click. Click-click-click. Back to MTV. "Jodeci," he says. " 'Every freek'n night, every freek'n day, I wanna freek you, every freek'n way' . . . I hate this group." Click. "I'm screwed. Nothing's on."
Now he's at a video arcade, playing a fighting game called Mortal Kombat. He mashes a row of buttons, and his fighter kicks the other fighter in the head. He mashes the buttons some more, and his fighter keeps kicking as blood drops fly across the screen. "Finish him!" a computer-generated voice commands. He mashes the buttons again, and his fighter reaches into the mouth of the other fighter, roots around and pulls out his skeleton. "Fatality," announces the voice. So much for that.
Now he's back at his house, playing the home version of Mortal Kombat against his older brother, Nick. He has stalked Nick's character. He has punched him repeatedly. "Finish him!" says the voice. Time for the uppercut. Nick's character goes flying upward, off the screen, and comes raining back down in pieces. There's an arm. There's the torso. "There's the head," Nick says, watching it bounce.
Now he's signed on to America Online, in an area called Rabbit Jack's Casino, playing poker against a few other people, strangers all, who are also signed on. Here come the cards. He wins. Here comes a message from one of the other players. "Eat this," it says.
Now he's turning on the stereo and putting on one of his favorite CDs:
"I knew the girl was ready . . .
"She started getting sweaty . . .
"But all was in my head was kill that bitch like Freddy . . ."
Now he's talking about movies, about how much he likes them and about some of the things he's seen in them, such as shootings: "I've seen someone up close get shot in the head. I've seen just about any kind. I haven't seen anybody get shot in the eye. I've seen somebody do this" -- he puts a finger in his mouth and pretends to pull a trigger -- "and you see blood come out the back of the head. I've seen people shot in the leg, shot in the back."
And stabbings: "In the back. In the stomach. Slice their neck. Scar their face. I don't think I've seen eyes gouged out. I've seen after, but I didn't see the process. I saw someone slit their wrists for a suicide."
And sex: "Oh I've seen a lot of that. I've seen people where, like, they choke the other person in the process . . . I've seen someone stabbed, I guess, in the process . . . I've seen just about everything. I haven't seen men and men. I have seen women and women. I've seen a threesome."
And now he's back in the recliner, back in front of the TV, this time with a bowl of Cheerios and a slice of chocolate cake, talking about the common theme of his days.
"I like violence," he says.
He elaborates:
"I like seeing violence."
And elaborates further:
"I just really like watching violence."
He has a good face. He has a nice smile. He has a direct, unapologetic gaze.
TO BE 14 IS TO BE a work in progress, and that's what Aaron Wolf is.
Physically, he's big for his age: 5-foot-10, 145 pounds, size 11 shoe. Mentally, he's smarter than average: He spent seventh and eighth grades in a magnet school for students gifted in math and science. But otherwise, to see Aaron in a mall, or in an arcade, or in the recliner, or anywhere, is to see someone who might be any 14-year-old, especially one whose back yard is a neat suburban patch of lawn. He wears the same cap, baggy Levis, XXL Stussy shirt, and high-top Nikes as every other 14-year-old boy. He swims. He bowls. He's interested in girls. He likes baseball. He gets good grades. In every way, he seems to be doing well enough as he comes of age, except he is doing so now, in 1995, a time when every aspect of popular culture seems awash in violence and explicitness, and there's increasing debate over what the effects of this will ultimately be. Are we becoming more violent? Debased? Desensitized? Is American society in the midst of a moral decline? These are the questions of the moment, and there's Aaron, at the very age most vulnerable to the sway of popular culture, in the middle of it all.
To those for whom popular culture has become a moral crusade, he's a victim.
To those who see it as a business worth billions of dollars, he's the marketplace.
To his parents, he's a child to be proud of, doing fine so far.
All, in their own way, have an interest in Aaron. They want to know what he's thinking, what he's doing, what he's feeling, how he's developing, because, in theory, to know Aaron is to perhaps know a thing or two about where we're headed.
As for Aaron himself, he, at the moment, is headed no farther than up the stairs of a medium-sized house in a middle-class neighborhood. "Here's my room," he says at the top, motioning to the left. His brother's room is to the right. His parents' room is downstairs. They rarely venture upstairs, rarely go into either boy's room. Nick's door is open, Aaron's is shut. He twists the knob, and the door opens a few inches. He pushes against it, and it opens a few inches more. He pushes against it with one of his feet, and it opens far enough for him to squeeze in, and then, whatever is on the far side of the door begins to push it closed.
It turns out to be piles of clothes. And sheets. And swim flippers, a chair on its side, soda cans, dishes and plastic bags of trash, so much stuff that it is impossible to tell whether the floor is carpeted or bare wood. Aaron makes his way to his bed, sits on a corner, looks down at his feet, and is surprised to see that on the top of his right foot is a lengthening trickle of blood. It must have happened when he was pushing against the door. Or when he was plowing his way through one of the piles, maybe he hit a soda can. Whatever, he ignores it and points out a few things: the desk at the far end, the stereo, the TV, the VCR, the Nintendo system. The Nintendo is one of four game systems in the house. The TV is hooked up to cable, including all the premium movie channels. The stereo system has a five-disc CD player. Now he shows off his CDs, which are mostly rap, with an emphasis on gangsta rap, one of which he decides to play. He gets up, scuffs his way through the clothing, turns on the stereo, comes back, sits down, listens to the music, nods his head, taps his foot, looks down, and sees that somewhere during the journey between the bed and the stereo, the trickle of blood has been wiped away. He keeps the sound at a moderate level. Not that his parents would say anything if it was loud. They mostly leave him alone, trusting him to do the right thing. There are no limits on what he can listen to, no limits on what he can watch. If it's midnight, and he can't sleep, and he wants to watch "Leprechaun 2," the movie that showed him what it's like when someone's puckered lips touch the whirring metal blades of a fan, he can do that. If he wants to go to an R-rated movie, he can do that, too: In his wallet is a card, approved by his parents and issued by one of the movie theater chains, that says he can go to any R-rated movie he wants, with or without an adult.
None of this is because Aaron's parents are uninvolved in his life, but precisely the opposite. When he was little, they took him to museums and read to him at night; when he was 9, they told him he couldn't have a Nintendo system until he was 10; when he was 12, they told him he couldn't see horror movies until he was 13. Once he hit 13, however, they decided he was mature enough to make his own decisions about these kinds of things, and that limiting his choices from then on wouldn't be guidance, but censorship.
"I don't want to cut anything off from him," says his mother, Lynne, 45, who works out of the house doing transcription for medical practices so she can be home in the mornings, and afternoons, and whenever else might be necessary, for her sons. "I want him to experience everything he can experience."
"I don't believe people should be sheltered, because if you're always sheltered as you're learning your thought processes, how do you deal with the world?" says his father, Bryan, 49, a manager with a defense contractor. "He knows: 'If I can conceive of the extremes, then I know there's a place in the middle where there's balance.' "
Or so is the hope. They don't know if he knows this for sure, can't know. It's too early. At this point, all they can be sure of is that the world Aaron is coming of age in is far different than the one they inhabited when they were 14.
For Bryan, that was in 1960, when he was in New York City, attending a yeshiva. There was no TV in his life, no music, and only an occasional movie. Days were devoted to prayer and study, and nights were spent taking long walks around Queens with an older rabbinical student who would argue with Bryan about philosophy, about the existence of God, about evolution, about fairness. For him, 14 was an essential year in his intellectual development, and much of the reason why, years later, when he was living in Germany and visited the remains of some of the concentration camps, he decided that any limitation of information is censorship, and that he would never inflict that on his children.
Lynne, meanwhile, turned 14 in 1964, when she was living in California. "You want to know what I was trying to do? I was trying to survive," she says. "Two years before, my sister had died, and what was left of my family after that was disintegrating. My parents were alcoholics, and this made it worse, and it was the defining event of my adolescence: Any semblance of family life we'd had fell apart." For her, 14 was a tailspin, which is much of the reason why, earlier this year, when she saw Bob Dole on CNN and, as she describes it, "they were interviewing him about the morality of youth today, and he was saying with all the videos and movies coming at kids there's moral confusion, I was saying, 'Oh, please.' The confusion comes from kids not having someone to come home to, or give them a bowl of cereal in the morning, or hug them when they've had a bad day."
Out of their own experiences, then, both Bryan and Lynne decided that Aaron, at 14, was mature enough, and felt loved enough, to be able to make his own decisions, even if that means listening again and again to the song that is now playing in his room, which includes the line, "I dug between the chair, and pulled out the machete, she screamed, I sliced her up until her guts were like spaghetti."
"I don't mind him listening. I do mind the lyrics," Bryan says.
"We both mind the lyrics, and he knows it," Lynne says.
"But how will he know what something is unless he listens to it?" Bryan says.
Of the two, Lynne is slightly less certain about all of this than Bryan. "Ninety percent of me is comfortable with this, but 10 percent of me has Jeffrey Dahmer lurking in the background," she says one day. She is joking, of course, but unlike Bryan, who is confident that Aaron, at 14, has enough solid values in place to carry him past such lyrics, Lynne talks to him constantly, trying to add some perspective.
"When we listen to the car radio," she says, "and they say, 'We're gonna do it, do it, do it, all night long,' or, 'We're gonna yo yo yo with your ho ho ho,' I say, 'What are they doing, Aaron?' He says, 'They're having sex, Mom.' And I say, 'Are they using protection?' He says, 'I don't know.' I say, 'Why do they have to do it, do it, do it? Why can't they do it and have a conversation?' I try to say things to make him think about all of this. Most of the time, what he says is, 'Mom, I don't even listen to the lyrics.' But the thing is, if I can hear them, how can't he?"
So it is that on the way to the video store one day, when the song on the radio says, "I want to be your sexual chocolate," she says to Aaron, " 'I want to be your sexual chocolate?' What does that mean?" And when another song says, "Yeah, baby, I like it raw," she says, "What does he like raw? Is it life? Is it sex? What is he saying?"
Aaron, in turn, shrugs. Maybe he's listening, maybe he isn't. Into the store they go, and he begins searching while Lynne, standing away from him, thinking about what she would have been doing on an idle day when she was his age, says, "The only thing we had in my little town was, do you remember Andrew Carnegie? Who would go around and build libraries in little towns where they didn't have one? Well, we had a Carnegie library. And a big afternoon was you'd ride your bike to the country store and buy a Coca-Cola and a Twinkie, and you'd ride to the creek with your Twinkie and Coke and two library books and spend the afternoon. And now, to stand here and look at all the choices Aaron has, it's kind of overwhelming."
Patiently, she waits. He keeps looking. He goes through the movie titles. He moves on to the video game section. It takes him 15 minutes, but at last he makes a selection.
"Jeopardy," he says, handing it to her.
"Jeopardy?" she says.
"Yeah," he says.
"Fine with me," she says, surprised.
They get in the car. He turns on the radio. She'd rather hear oldies, or opera, or Bruce Springsteen, but, as always, she lets him put on what he wants.
"Who's this?"
"This," he says, "is Ol' Dirty Bastard."
HE PLAYS JEOPARDY ONCE. He plays it twice. He gets bored. So long, Jeopardy. Now he puts on Mortal Kombat, which he never gets tired of. Once, he played for four hours without stopping.
"All right, we're starting our game," he says, explaining what he's doing as he presses various buttons on his controller. First he has to decide which of a dozen characters he wants to be. "I'm choosing Jax because he's fun to use, and I like one of his moves where he pounds you to bits," he says. Now he begins stalking, kicking, and punching the opposing fighter. "Right now I'm staying my space . . . Now I'm jumping at him . . . Now I'm trying to trap him in the corner . . . Now I got him. No I don't. Yeah I do. There!" The other character crumples. He wins. But he's disappointed. "I was going to do a pit move. I was going to knock him into the acid. But I was unsuccessful."
So he tries again, again, again.
He pulls his opponent's arms out of their sockets.
He becomes a female who kisses her opponent, stands back and watches him explode.
He becomes metal blades that chop off the opponent's head.
He freezes his opponent, hits him and turns him into flying shards.
He does an uppercut that causes his opponent to fall off a bridge and keep falling until he hits concrete and his head splits open.
He becomes Jax again.
"Finish him!" comes the command.
This time he does it right. It isn't the pit move, it's one he likes even better. He stretches Jax's arms out to the side and brings them together as if clanging cymbals, but there are no cymbals here, just two fists and an opponent's head that is in the way. Boom! The head is crushed, and Aaron laughs. "It's the best one."
All of these moves are secret moves, not part of the general instructions, not known to the casual player. Rather, Aaron has learned them from scanning the Internet, and, in some cases, from reading a glossy monthly magazine Nick gets called GamePro, which shows how to perform moves such as the "head inflation," the "skull rip" and the "death scream." And this is where the marketplace implications of Aaron's choices begin to emerge.
The cost of GamePro: $ 19.97 a year.
The cost of the home version of Mortal Kombat, which he and Nick got as soon as it came out: $ 60.
The cost of Mortal Kombat's successor, Mortal Kombat II, which he and Nick also got as soon as it came out: $ 60 again.
The cost at the arcade, where they go at least once a week to play the latest version of the game, Mortal Kombat 3: 50 cents to play until you lose, which can add up quickly, even for a good player. Aaron imagines he easily spends more than $ 100 a year at the arcade; three years after the first version of the game was released, that's how much pull it continues to have. He plays it constantly, and he, of course, is just one player in a universe that Roger Sharpe, director of licensing for Midway Manufacturing Co. in Chicago, where Mortal Kombat was invented, says includes 60,000 arcade machines, more than 10 million copies of the home versions, and 60 licensed spinoff products from posters, to calendars, to lunch boxes, to clothing, to a live-action road show, to a feature-length movie that, a week after its premiere, has people at Midway feeling a little giddy. "How are we doing?" Sharpe says into his phone, getting the daily update. "Outstanding . . . I love it!" He hangs up. "God, we're over $ 30 million already. I love it."
When Mortal Kombat was first introduced, Sharpe says, the thinking was that it would be popular, but no one in their wildest dreams expected it would gross $ 800 million its first year in the arcades. Likewise, the hope was that the movie also would do well, but $ 30 million? In one week? The No. 1 movie in the country? "Pac-Man was a phenomenon, the best-selling game of all time," he says, searching for a comparison. "Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man together sold over 200,000 [arcade] units, plus apparel, and cereal, and 'Pac-Man Fever' -- it was a hit single -- but has there been anything of this enormity? Across the board? Like this? No."
"Thirty-two million," says John Tobias, the co-creator of Mortal Kombat, the next day, as he sits in an office crowded with a drawing table, a computer and piles of the latest Mortal Kombat products, including Halloween costumes. Tobias, a 26-year-old artist, first came up with the idea for Mortal Kombat in 1991, and four years later, he seems as amazed by what has happened as anyone else.
The point, he says, was merely to design a new game. He was finishing up a game called Total Carnage, which was a sequel to a game called Smash TV. At the same time, Ed Boon, a programmer, was finishing a game called High Impact Football. Both wanted to do a martial arts game. Neither had anything specific in mind at first, but gradually the game developed through a series of decisions: that it should be a side-view game rather than revolving 3-D, that the characters should be a certain size on the screen, that the impact of a kick should make a certain sound, that a foot or a fist should move at a particular speed, that it should be based on digitized images of actual actors rather than cartoonish figures, that there should be flying drops of blood. The goal was realism, Tobias says, and early on they knew they were onto something. "I believe it was when we put the uppercut in, and the other character went flying in the air. It really felt like he had hit someone," he says. "There was a generic sound in there, and it all seemed good."
But not great. Something, they decided, was missing at the end of the game. "There was this awkward moment where the other character is standing around dazed, and then you hit him again, and that was it. It seemed anticlimactic. We wanted every ending to seem like, boom. If you win, you should get a reward for winning," he says, which is how they came up with the idea of finishing moves, or fatalities, something that is common in games now, but, at that point, hadn't been done.
By the time they first tested the game at a Chicago arcade in early 1992, they had come up with only one. They were sure no player would discover it. It was too well hidden. It required pushing the buttons on the control panel in too complicated a sequence for someone to stumble upon. There were no hints on the Internet or in the gaming magazines, and the machine they wheeled into the arcade on a Friday night came with no instructions to help a player figure anything out about the game, much less a fatality. The machine didn't even have any kind of design on it or decals, just a hand-lettered sign. But that was enough to get kids lined up to play, and before the weekend was out they had of course found the fatality, and the oohs and aahs were so wonderful, Tobias says, that he and Boon went to work Monday knowing they had to think of more.
"What if he ripped his heart out and held it up? Wouldn't that be cool?" he says of the creative process that followed that first weekend. "What if you pull off his head and his spine is still attached? . . . It was almost like Ed and I were trying to reduce ourselves to 15-year-old kids. That's what you have to do in this industry, think like a 15-year-old or 16-year-old game player."
In all, they thought of seven fatalities for the first version, 24 for the second, and 28 for the third, rejecting only one idea along the way that had one of the characters getting sliced in half by a sword, causing his guts to spill out. "We decided we didn't want to see anyone's guts," Tobias says about that. "If it makes us queasy, there's no way we want to push it. We already thought we were pushing it. Even we have our limits."
In spite of that, the game was, to put it mildly, controversial from the start. It was called disgusting. It was called damaging to children's psyches. It was accused by one U.S. senator, Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), of adding to America's "epidemic of real violence." It was the subject of a congressional hearing, which led to the wide use of a ratings system for home versions of video games, which led to Tobias and Boon adding something called friendship moves to the second version, moves in which, as Tobias describes them, instead of decapitating an opponent, "somebody would plant a flower, somebody would bake a cake, really stupid things." On and on this went, and meanwhile, between the arcade versions and home versions, Mortal Kombat was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and becoming the most popular game of its time. And in spite of the criticisms, the fatalities remained an essential part of the game because, as Tobias says of the players, "They're adamant about having violent, gory fatalities. That's what they want."
Including Aaron. One other thing Tobias says about the game is, "I think the violence almost, after a while, becomes transparent. I mean, the fact that there's gobs of blood flowing out of somebody when you punch him, I don't think that that's the attraction any longer." Rather, he says, it's the fun of the game, the competition.
But to Aaron, it's the blood as much as anything else. Competition is Jeopardy, he says on the day that he has put Jeopardy aside after two plays, while in Mortal Kombat, which he has now been playing for almost an hour, "You can do a finish move, and it's like, yeah! Got you! And your opponent, like, dies."
So strong is the appeal of this that when the movie comes to Silver Spring, it plays in two theaters simultaneously. Aaron, of course, is there. He goes with the rest of his family, sitting, as they always do at movies, in the second row. It's where they sat for "Pulp Fiction," in which a guy in a car gets shot in the head and bits of his brain go flying about; it's where they sat for "Apollo 13," of which Aaron said afterward: "They went into space, they had their troubles, they came back, they made it. My parents thought it was nonstop action, but I must have missed it"; and it's where they sit now for two hours, watching one fight after another, until the last bad guy is impaled on a spike, and the credits fade, and the lights come up, and Lynne stands and says, "That's the second worst movie I've seen this summer."
"That was about exactly what I expected," says Bryan.
"I loved it," says Nick.
"I liked it," says Aaron. "But I think they should have made it rated R so they could show more stuff."
"So they could show more stuff?" says Bryan.
"Like they could show their fatalities. Like when Johnny Cage fought Scorpion? You know how he just blew up? He could have, like, uppercutted his head off or something like that."
"Or tore him in half," says Nick.
"Yeah," says Aaron. "And what they should have done at the end is, you know when Liu Kang pushed him? They should have done this fatality where he did a double kick and then uppercutted him. A cartwheel, and then, bam."
"So," says Bryan, "you liked it better than 'Apollo 13'?"
"Oh yeah," says Aaron.
"Why?" says Bryan.
"I like action," says Aaron. "I mean, what was 'Apollo 13'?"
"Drama?" says Nick.
"No," says Aaron. "More like . . ."
"History?" says Nick.
"No," says Aaron.
"Suspense?" says Nick.
"No," says Aaron. "It's, um . . ."
"Boring?" says Lynne.
"Yeah. Boring."
"So it doesn't have to make a lot of sense to you?" she says. "It doesn't have to challenge your mind at all?"
"I like watching them fight."
BACK HOME. AARON WATCHES ESPN, reads the Sports section, starts flipping through his CDs. "I can remember back when I was 6 or 7," he says. "I liked 'Born in the USA' by Bruce Springsteen; and I liked the Beatles, like 'Twist and Shout'; I liked Yes back then; I think I liked Paula Abdul for a little bit, maybe when I was 9 or 10 or 8; I remember Def Leppard back when I was 8 or 9, 'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' that was heavy metal; and then I heard this song by Young MC called 'Bust a Move,' and then I started getting into rap, I started getting into Public Enemy, and LL Cool J, and then, from three years ago, it's been whatever's up. Whatever's playing."
What's playing now is the Geto Boys, a CD he got a few years ago when he first started listening to rap almost exclusively, one that contains a song called "Assassins," which is the song about slicing a woman "until her guts were like spaghetti." And goes on to say:
"A maniac, I stabbed the girl in the tits.
"And to stop her nerves from jumping, I just cut her to bits.
"And I'm an assassin . . ."
The song is one of Aaron's favorites. "I like the way they rap," he says of the song's appeal. "I really don't care about what they say. That doesn't bother me. I don't pay attention." Maybe so, but he does know most of the words, including the line about the girl being stabbed in her breasts, which is so graphic that it can't help but create an image in his mind. "I see [someone being] stabbed," he says of what that image is. Anyone in particular? "I don't have a face." Does he see breasts? "Yeah." Does he see a knife? "I see a machete." Does he see anything else? Blood? The machete actually embedded? The machete being drawn out? "I don't know," he says. "I don't pay attention." It's just an image, he says, no big deal, no dire consequences, one that quickly fades as the song moves on:
"My father was a priest, cold-blooded, he's dead, hypocrite, I caught him basing, so I shot him in the head . . ."
Like a dozen other CDs Aaron owns, this one has a label on the cover that says, "Parental Advisory -- Explicit Lyrics." It's there because of a long-ago battle, brought on in 1985 by Tipper Gore and several other wives of politicians, who were so bothered by certain lyrics that they formed the Parents' Music Resource Center and got record companies to start putting warning labels on music most likely to be considered offensive. Aaron, who was 4 years old when this began, knows little about it. He knows about the stickers but ignores them. He's heard of Al Gore, but he hasn't heard of Tipper. Neither has he heard of the PMRC and its current head, Barbara Wyatt. Nor has he heard of William Bennett, former secretary of education and current head of Empower America, or C. Delores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, whom Wyatt got to join forces earlier this year for an attack on Time Warner over some of the music it had been distributing. And neither has he heard of David Chamberlin, who, when all of this was beginning in the mid-1980s, was a 14-year-old himself, living in Ohio and listening to Van Halen, and 10 years later found himself sitting across from Wyatt at the Stage Deli in Manhattan, scribbling some notes on a napkin. He wrote down: Nine Inch Nails. He wrote down: Red Hot Chili Peppers. He wrote down: Slayer. He also wrote down a few song titles and lyrics and gave the napkin to Wyatt, who hurried from the deli to a Time Warner stockholders meeting, where she passed the information to Tucker and Bennett to use in their attack.
"Every day of my life, I listen to music," Aaron says. "Everywhere I go, there's music" -- and so it is for David Chamberlin. "I love music," he says. "You'll never come into my office and not hear music unless the CD runs out and I'm on the phone." But while Aaron spends his days consuming it, Chamberlin, who moved to Washington last October and first met Wyatt in April, has begun helping in the crusade against what he considers its most extreme forms, largely because of the role music played in his life when he was growing up.
This goes back to Ohio, when he was living in the suburbs, in a house with a pool, and 2 1/2 acres of woods, and his own room with posters on the walls of astronauts and baseball players, and parents whose marriage was falling slowly apart. When they were home, he says, they were often fighting, and when they weren't home there was a lingering tension, and either way he spent a lot of time in his room, door shut, volume up, listening to music: Van Halen, Bon Jovi, the Scorpions, Hanoi Rocks. All of it helped, he says, especially, for a brief time, Twisted Sister, whose song "We're Not Going to Take It" filled him with a kind of defiant hope that he would one day get away. Which is what happened. He went off to college, to a small, Christian, liberal arts school in Indiana, where he arrived hoping not only for an education, but for escape. Except his parents' marriage was growing worse; and his high school girlfriend was calling him every week, every day, every hour, wanting to know what was happening to their relationship; and school was hard; and living alone was difficult; and the music he was listening to at that point wasn't so much about defiance as alienation; and one night he went for a walk, in the dark, with a knife, wondering whether to commit suicide, fairly certain he would. That night, he says, was the beginning of a realization that came to him more fully years later, that some of the music he was listening to, while certainly not the cause of his despair, helped to exaggerate it. The music, he says, "gave me clarity because there was a lot of stuff I was feeling that I couldn't put into words, emotions of hurt, of anger, of anxiety, and these guys captured that. After a while, though, it increased the anxiety. It kept me from getting past the issues and dealing with them . . . You just wallow in it. 'Wow! Other people feel this way, too.' "
So it was that years later, after surviving that night, receiving his degree, moving to Washington, and getting a job at the Family Research Council, a conservative research and lobbying organization, he found himself in a meeting one day with Barbara Wyatt, telling her that he had been keeping files on certain musical trends, and lyrics, and groups for years, from those he liked, such as U2 ("my favorite group in the whole wide world"), to those he found disturbing, such as Nine Inch Nails. She, at that point, was casting about for ways to raise the profile of PMRC, and though she had been in touch with Bennett and Tucker, she didn't know enough about music specifically to be of maximum help. And here, suddenly, was someone who not only knew that there was a group called Nine Inch Nails, but that their music was industrial alternative, and that their latest album was recorded in the very house where the Manson killings occurred, and that one of the songs, "Closer," included the lyrics, "You let me violate you, desecrate you, complicate you, penetrate you. I want to [expletive] you like an animal."
That was in mid-April. A month later, the two of them were on their way to New York for the assault on the Time Warner stockholders' meeting, and, since then, Chamberlin says, he has been volunteering, on average, a dozen hours a week, helping the PMRC with its latest idea, a 900 number for parents to call to get information about what their children are listening to. The number, which has room for 85 short reviews and went into operation over the summer, is only one part of Wyatt's plans for the PMRC. She hopes to establish some kind of youth advisory board that would meet regularly and discuss the implications of music. She hopes to start some kind of annual awards show that would recognize music for being positive rather than destructive. "The repetition of certain types of music -- I'm not talking about all music, I'm talking about the ones that preach violence, that preach illicit sex, that preach violence against women, that preach rape, that are filled with profanities -- these, at the least, compel you to think about these things," she says. And so the 900 number, which is, in essence, Chamberlin.
He is the one who chooses what music to highlight by scanning the Billboard Top 100, reading music magazines, buying CDs, and playing them often enough in his office, his car, his home, to chronicle their profanities and themes. He is the one who writes the reviews, and his is the voice on the recordings. The point isn't to tell a parent what to do -- "that's between the parent and child," he says -- but simply to inform anyone interested enough to pay $ 1.75 a minute what a particular album contains. From his own experiences, he says, he knows the power of music and the vulnerability of adolescence, which is why, with the best of intentions, he picks up the phone in his office one day, dials a special access number, and dictates his latest review, written over his lunch break: "The Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Warner Brother Records artist, has released 'One Hot Minute.' The album uses numerous obscenities and vulgar language; extols such behaviors as theft, homosexuality, substance abuse and casual sex . . ."
Of which Aaron says, upon hearing this review, "Pretty stupid."
He is at home. He is in the living room. He has recently been listening to Tupac Shakur, who, Chamberlin points out in one of his reviews, "is currently in prison for sexually assaulting a fan," and now, with the music off, he listens to more of what Chamberlin has had to say.
"Salt-N-Pepa, a London Records artist, has recorded 'Very Necessary,' " begins the review of that album.
"What's wrong with Salt-N-Pepa?" Aaron interrupts. "I mean, my parents like Salt-N-Pepa."
"The female rappers glorify promiscuity and prostitution and advocate violence," the review continues. "Their song 'Shoop' includes these lines: 'Felt it in my hips so I dip back, through my bag of tricks, then I flipped for the tip made me wanna do tricks. Gonna lick him like a lollipop . . ."
"Should be licked," Aaron says, finishing the line from memory. "What's wrong with that?"
He listens to another:
"Dr. Dre, an Interscope Records artist, has recorded his latest album, 'The Chronic.' "
"Yeah, I got that," Aaron says.
"The album encourages drug abuse, views women as strictly sex objects and has obscenities throughout . . ."
"I don't think he views women as sex objects," Aaron says. "Maybe he does. Yeah, probably he does."
Another:
"Snoop Doggy Dogg, a Death Row/Interscope Records artist, has recorded 'Doggystyle.' Violent themes predominate, as well as highly sexual content advocating oral and group sex. The album portrays women as sex objects and advocates drug abuse and murder . . ."
"Yep, got that," Aaron says. "Everybody has that. And everything they say about it is probably true."
Another:
"The Stone Temple Pilots, an Atlantic Records Artist, released their latest album, entitled 'Purple' " . . .
"What's wrong with 'Purple?' I want to hear this."
"The album is bleak . . ."
"Bleak?"
". . . and portrays life as basically meaningless . . ."
"What?"
". . . and slams self-control while promoting indulgence."
"It's music," Aaron says. "Please! So dumb."
WHEN AARON WAS 3 YEARS OLD, he saw his brother Nick step on a nail. It was a long nail, sticking up through a piece of discarded wood in the back yard, and Nick, who was 5 at the time, came down on it so hard that it went through his sandal and deep into his foot. He screamed. He fell. Lynne came running, and so did Bryan, while Aaron, standing at a distance, watched.
Eleven years later, this remains the worst thing Aaron has seen in his life. He has seen fistfights at school. He has gone by accidents on the Beltway. He has seen his father emerge from heart bypass surgery. But seeing Nick like that is the only time he has seen somebody truly in pain, which is why Lynne, who finds herself thinking about this one day, says that after 14 charmed years, Aaron has no firsthand understanding that all human beings, including himself, are ultimately mortal. "There's been nothing in his life to give him that sense," she says one morning, sitting on the beach at Ocean City, where the family has come for an end-of-the-summer vacation before Aaron begins high school. As she talks, she is watching a Coast Guard helicopter sweeping low above the water. The word is that a child is out there somewhere, missing since the night before, presumably drowned. Back and forth the helicopter goes, and Lynne can't help but scan the water, too.
Aaron, meanwhile, has no interest in this whatsoever. What is there to see, really, except a helicopter, a lot of water and now, cruising past, some kind of search boat? In his life at the moment, he has a more immediate concern, namely that there's a new video game being released this day called Killer Instinct. He and Nick have been saving for it. He wants it, wants it now, wants that game cartridge locked into the Nintendo system he has brought from home along with a TV, and that is what's on his mind as he begins calling store after store in Ocean City, trying to track down a copy. Finally: "Do you have Killer Instinct? You do? How much is it? What's the price? Do you have any copies left?" He hangs up. He's found it -- except that it's at a store in Salisbury, a 40-minute drive away, and when Bryan says he's not up for driving that far, Lynne becomes his only hope.
"Move your toesies," she says, coming in from the beach and looking for room on the sofa, where he's stretched out. She pats his foot, which has a slight mark on it from a day a couple of years ago when he was running around the neighborhood, and a kid with a pellet gun took aim at him, and the pellet hit his foot. It stung a little and made a dent, but there was no blood, and the sting went away, and that's been his only experience with a gun. Now he moves his foot. She sits. He asks if she'll take him to Salisbury. She says she can't because she's supposed to go shopping with a friend. He doesn't know what to do.
He has got to have that game.
"Are there any buses?"
"No, babe."
"It's only a half-hour."
"Honey, I don't want to go."
"It might be fun."
"What's fun about going to Salisbury? Salisbury's a place you drive through, not to."
"So, like, there's no buses that go there?"
"Honey . . ."
He thinks. His best friend, Morgan, who has come along on the vacation, thinks as well. "Give it up," he suggests.
"Thank you, Morgan," Lynne says, and then to Aaron she says, "Enjoy vacation. Live it up before you go back to school. Go to the arcade. Be a kid. Go to the beach. Put on your suit. Just promise me you won't go beyond the second wave."
Which, of course, he does. He goes so far out that, at one point, the lifeguard has to whistle him and Morgan in, and they come in laughing, and then they go play some games, and then they go bowling, and then they go to a fast-food restaurant where Morgan tells about how, at high school orientation, the principal was saying they can't bring anything to school that even resembles a weapon, that they can't have beepers, that they can't even wear caps, and then it is 9 p.m. and there is nothing really to do. So they go back to the condo, and as soon as Aaron opens the door, Nick comes hurrying down the hall.
"Can I see you a minute, Aaron?" he says, trying to sound calm.
Aaron follows him back to their bedroom. The TV is on. The Nintendo is hooked up. And there, on the screen, is Killer Instinct. "Dad went and got it," Nick says, and Aaron can hardly believe it.
"Is it sweet?" he says. "Is it sweet? Is it sweet?"
"It's pretty good," Nick says, laughing, and they immediately begin playing against each other.
Aaron's character hits Nick's character, and out oozes a green liquid.
Nick's hits Aaron's, and out flies blood.
Aaron's lands an uppercut, and Nick's character goes flying. "Ho!" Aaron says. "That was kind of nice."
On this goes, past 10, by which time Nick has mastered a combination move of 10 punches in a row; and 10:30, when Bryan pokes his head in the door and says, "So what is this thing I did?"; and 11, by which time Aaron has learned several finishing moves, such as the Sword Stab and the Falling Car. There's also the Needle Stab, the Acid Puddle, the Neck Breaker, the Lava Pool, the Skeleton Grab and the Heart Attack -- every conceivable fatality in the world, it seems, except for one involving a drowning, perhaps of a child, particularly at Ocean City, which is the subject of conversation in the living room.
Now the word is that the child was a boy, 10 years old, out for a swim when he got caught up in the current. His father and his uncle did their best to save him but couldn't hold on. And the boy was swept away.
"I let go of my son," Bryan says. "I can't imagine coming home and saying, 'I let go of my son.' "
The door to the balcony is open. The sound of the waves is coming into the room. The search, so far, has found nothing. The body is still out there.
Once, years ago, during another trip to Ocean City, Bryan was on the boardwalk with Nick when he lost him. He looked everywhere he could think of, growing more and more frantic, and then, not knowing what else to do, knowing only that he didn't want to go to Lynne and tell her he had lost their son, he went to the police station. And there was Nick, waiting. "That was the worst," he says.
No, Lynne says, the worst was last summer, when Aaron didn't come home from school on the bus, and in the course of several hours she went from thinking he was late, to hurt, to abducted, to dead, until he walked in and said he had been at the arcade.
There are so many things that can go wrong. Lynne especially knows this. Sometimes, to her, it seems a wonder they have made it this far. But they have, and now they sit together in the living room, listening to the ocean, until she goes into the bedroom to read, and Bryan, after trying to sleep, goes onto the balcony. It must be past 1 a.m. He watches some police officers roust a man and a woman entangled in the sand. He watches for shooting stars. He watches the dark water. Sometime after 2, the wind dies down and the humidity comes up, and at 3, he looks in on Aaron and Nick.
They're still awake. Still playing. It's been six hours straight.
"Go to bed," Bryan says, and they do, and now it is the next day, and Aaron and Nick are at it again, and Bryan and Lynne are on their way out to lunch.
They're in Lynne's Lincoln, what she calls her menopausal car. Bryan's driving. He loves to drive. Sometimes, at home, he'll drive up and down Rock Creek Parkway for no reason other than to drive, and look around, and remind himself how beautiful things can be. Lynne, meanwhile, is fiddling with the radio, and comes upon an old Righteous Brothers song. She turns up the volume and settles back. "Now this was music," she says, getting a little dreamy. "God, my kid's not going to have memories like this. Twenty years from now, he's going to get nostalgic over . . ."
But what?
"Oldies rap?" says Bryan.
"I stabbed her in the tits?" says Lynne.
And they laugh, because they believe in their hearts that everything is going to work out fine.
MAYBE IT WILL, TOO. "Aaron Wolf. Your son. Very intelligent little kid. Very smart. Going to be a lawyer when I grow up, and maybe even a baseball player," Aaron said in a message he left on his father's voice mail a few years ago, a message so sweet and spoken so happily, in such a sing-songy voice, that Bryan has preserved it. Maybe that will happen.
Or maybe, in eight years, he'll get a job designing video game fatalities.
Or maybe, in 10 years, he'll join the PMRC.
Who can know? It's too soon. He's only 14. There's so much ahead. "I'm not, like, worrying about that now," he says one day on the subject of how he'd like his life to work out. Instead, he has more immediate concerns on his mind because it is a Friday afternoon, and he's home from school, and he's got an English assignment that involves reading a book. And on this subject, he says, "I don't really like books . . . I don't like sitting down and reading. I'd much rather watch TV . . . If it's boring, I can switch to another channel. But in a book, I have to keep reading until I find the next interesting part. It takes too long."
It was different, of course, for his parents. When Lynne was 14 and her sister had died and her own life was falling apart, she came across The Grapes of Wrath. "That's what I got from books, realizing there were other people out there whose lives weren't so good, that they had to struggle, and they survived," she says. Bryan, meanwhile, was reading Crime and Punishment, which led to The Brothers Karamazov, which led to Sinclair Lewis and Arrowsmith, a book whose main character, an idealistic young doctor, filled him with such hopefulness that it pushed him toward becoming a scientist, and then a teacher in D.C., and fostered in him an optimism that has continued to this day.
And now they have Aaron:
"I can't even get him to sit down with me and WATCH The Grapes of Wrath," Lynne says one day.
"He's never going to read The Red Badge of Courage," says Bryan.
"Let's put it that way," says Lynne.
Neither thinks this will necessarily make the world a worse place -- "It'll be a different place, that's all," Bryan says -- but just the same, every Christmas, they get Aaron a book. Just in case. One year it was The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. "I don't think he read it," Lynne says. Another year, it was The Dreamtime, a book of Australian aboriginal myths. Another year it was The Man Who Knew Infinity, a biography of the Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan. Another year it was Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, a book written in 1884 that uses math, satire and spirituality to tell the story of a man living in a two-dimensional world. "Bryan gave him this and said, 'Aaron, this affected me. Give it a try,' " Lynne says. And did he read it? "Are you kidding?" She is in his room, looking through his books, all stacked on a bottom shelf, all coated with dust. But there they are for him, if and when he's ready.
And now comes a new book: To Kill a Mockingbird. That's his assignment.
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," is how it begins and goes on from there to explore how cruel and hateful people can be. There's an attempted lynching. There's a killing. There's an attempt to murder some children. There's plenty of violence, in other words, but unlike in a video game or most of the music Aaron listens to, it is violence that occurs within a larger context of decency and love, and that is the book he has brought home to read. He's had it now for a week. "I'm on Page 2," he says. "Some guy hurt his arm playing football or something." He needs to finish it. He will.
But now, on a Friday afternoon, the weekend ahead, there are so many other choices, all infinitely more appealing. Maybe they do involve violence, he says, but he isn't worried about the effects. It's not like he doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy; it's not like he can't handle it; it's not like he's going to kill anyone, or hurt someone, or become so numbed that he can't tell the difference between right and wrong. "Maybe like a flower," he says, thinking about this. "If you keep seeing it, do you still keep seeing it? Or is it just there? You don't care. That doesn't mean you're desensitized. You're used to it."
And besides, he goes on, "If I hadn't seen anything violent, I probably wouldn't be who I am, and I probably wouldn't have much of a life."
He elaborates:
"If I hadn't seen all this, I'd be different."
And elaborates further:
"I wouldn't even have an outside life.
"I'd be scared to be with anyone else.
"I wouldn't be able to relate to anybody else."
And further:
"Because they've all seen it."
So: What will it be this afternoon? Music? TV? Video games?
He makes a decision. He turns on the computer, and on comes a game given to him by another student in school a few days before, called Druglord.
He starts with $ 500 cash. The computer asks him to choose what he wants to buy: "cocaine, crack, heroin, acid, crystal, grass, speed, ludes."
He makes his choice, and now the computer shows him some prices.
He decides to spend all $ 500, and now he has to decide where he wants to sell the drugs: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego or Washington.
He chooses San Diego, hits the button and is told that he's just made a $ 500 profit.
"Pretty nice," he says.
Now he has enough money to buy and sell some heroin.
And with the profit from that he's able to buy and sell some speed.
And now he's up to $ 3,500 when a character named Juan appears, selling some AK-47s -- except the price is $ 5,000, firm.
"Ooh, I can't believe it. Those are the nicest guns. I could kill some cops."
And wouldn't you know it, here come the police.
They're closing in. They're surrounding him. They're opening fire. They're blasting away, shooting and shooting until a message comes up on the screen:
"Everything has a strange misty look to it . . . you start to feel heat under your feet . . . you see flames licking all around . . . I guess this is the end."
And there it is.
Aaron Wolf, 14, is dead.
But not for long.
"Would you like to play again?" the game asks.
He presses 'n'. For no.
There are too many other things to do.
GRAPHIC: John Tobias, the co-creator of Mortal Kombat, has watched the much-criticized game generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from youthful customers. "They're adamant about having violent, gory fatalities," he says. "That's what they want." Aaron Wolf, with cap, plays Mortal Kombat II with his older brother, Nick. "If I hadn't seen anything violent, I probably wouldn't be who I am, and I probably wouldn't have much of a life," Aaron says. "I wouldn't be able to relate to anybody else." David Chamberlin, a rock music lover whose "favorite group in the whole wide world" is U2, has helped establish a 900 number that parents can call to get information about the violent, sexually explicit song lyrics their children are listening to.
Aaron Wolf, at the moment, is choosing to watch TV. He's in Silver Spring, in his house, in the den, in a recliner, with a remote in one hand and a microwave burrito in the other. On the screen, some women are rubbing their chests. "This is Shaggy. 'Boombastic,' " he says. "It's pretty good." He watches for a few seconds, grows bored, clicks the remote. On comes VH-1. "Janet Jackson. 'You Want This,' " he says. "I don't like Janet Jackson." He clicks the remote again. "Nickelodeon." Click. "The country station." Click. "Bette Midler?" Click. "O.J." Click. Jenny Jones, talking to a pregnant 15-year-old. "I like Ricki Lake." Click. Click-click-click. Back to MTV. "Jodeci," he says. " 'Every freek'n night, every freek'n day, I wanna freek you, every freek'n way' . . . I hate this group." Click. "I'm screwed. Nothing's on."
Now he's at a video arcade, playing a fighting game called Mortal Kombat. He mashes a row of buttons, and his fighter kicks the other fighter in the head. He mashes the buttons some more, and his fighter keeps kicking as blood drops fly across the screen. "Finish him!" a computer-generated voice commands. He mashes the buttons again, and his fighter reaches into the mouth of the other fighter, roots around and pulls out his skeleton. "Fatality," announces the voice. So much for that.
Now he's back at his house, playing the home version of Mortal Kombat against his older brother, Nick. He has stalked Nick's character. He has punched him repeatedly. "Finish him!" says the voice. Time for the uppercut. Nick's character goes flying upward, off the screen, and comes raining back down in pieces. There's an arm. There's the torso. "There's the head," Nick says, watching it bounce.
Now he's signed on to America Online, in an area called Rabbit Jack's Casino, playing poker against a few other people, strangers all, who are also signed on. Here come the cards. He wins. Here comes a message from one of the other players. "Eat this," it says.
Now he's turning on the stereo and putting on one of his favorite CDs:
"I knew the girl was ready . . .
"She started getting sweaty . . .
"But all was in my head was kill that bitch like Freddy . . ."
Now he's talking about movies, about how much he likes them and about some of the things he's seen in them, such as shootings: "I've seen someone up close get shot in the head. I've seen just about any kind. I haven't seen anybody get shot in the eye. I've seen somebody do this" -- he puts a finger in his mouth and pretends to pull a trigger -- "and you see blood come out the back of the head. I've seen people shot in the leg, shot in the back."
And stabbings: "In the back. In the stomach. Slice their neck. Scar their face. I don't think I've seen eyes gouged out. I've seen after, but I didn't see the process. I saw someone slit their wrists for a suicide."
And sex: "Oh I've seen a lot of that. I've seen people where, like, they choke the other person in the process . . . I've seen someone stabbed, I guess, in the process . . . I've seen just about everything. I haven't seen men and men. I have seen women and women. I've seen a threesome."
And now he's back in the recliner, back in front of the TV, this time with a bowl of Cheerios and a slice of chocolate cake, talking about the common theme of his days.
"I like violence," he says.
He elaborates:
"I like seeing violence."
And elaborates further:
"I just really like watching violence."
He has a good face. He has a nice smile. He has a direct, unapologetic gaze.
TO BE 14 IS TO BE a work in progress, and that's what Aaron Wolf is.
Physically, he's big for his age: 5-foot-10, 145 pounds, size 11 shoe. Mentally, he's smarter than average: He spent seventh and eighth grades in a magnet school for students gifted in math and science. But otherwise, to see Aaron in a mall, or in an arcade, or in the recliner, or anywhere, is to see someone who might be any 14-year-old, especially one whose back yard is a neat suburban patch of lawn. He wears the same cap, baggy Levis, XXL Stussy shirt, and high-top Nikes as every other 14-year-old boy. He swims. He bowls. He's interested in girls. He likes baseball. He gets good grades. In every way, he seems to be doing well enough as he comes of age, except he is doing so now, in 1995, a time when every aspect of popular culture seems awash in violence and explicitness, and there's increasing debate over what the effects of this will ultimately be. Are we becoming more violent? Debased? Desensitized? Is American society in the midst of a moral decline? These are the questions of the moment, and there's Aaron, at the very age most vulnerable to the sway of popular culture, in the middle of it all.
To those for whom popular culture has become a moral crusade, he's a victim.
To those who see it as a business worth billions of dollars, he's the marketplace.
To his parents, he's a child to be proud of, doing fine so far.
All, in their own way, have an interest in Aaron. They want to know what he's thinking, what he's doing, what he's feeling, how he's developing, because, in theory, to know Aaron is to perhaps know a thing or two about where we're headed.
As for Aaron himself, he, at the moment, is headed no farther than up the stairs of a medium-sized house in a middle-class neighborhood. "Here's my room," he says at the top, motioning to the left. His brother's room is to the right. His parents' room is downstairs. They rarely venture upstairs, rarely go into either boy's room. Nick's door is open, Aaron's is shut. He twists the knob, and the door opens a few inches. He pushes against it, and it opens a few inches more. He pushes against it with one of his feet, and it opens far enough for him to squeeze in, and then, whatever is on the far side of the door begins to push it closed.
It turns out to be piles of clothes. And sheets. And swim flippers, a chair on its side, soda cans, dishes and plastic bags of trash, so much stuff that it is impossible to tell whether the floor is carpeted or bare wood. Aaron makes his way to his bed, sits on a corner, looks down at his feet, and is surprised to see that on the top of his right foot is a lengthening trickle of blood. It must have happened when he was pushing against the door. Or when he was plowing his way through one of the piles, maybe he hit a soda can. Whatever, he ignores it and points out a few things: the desk at the far end, the stereo, the TV, the VCR, the Nintendo system. The Nintendo is one of four game systems in the house. The TV is hooked up to cable, including all the premium movie channels. The stereo system has a five-disc CD player. Now he shows off his CDs, which are mostly rap, with an emphasis on gangsta rap, one of which he decides to play. He gets up, scuffs his way through the clothing, turns on the stereo, comes back, sits down, listens to the music, nods his head, taps his foot, looks down, and sees that somewhere during the journey between the bed and the stereo, the trickle of blood has been wiped away. He keeps the sound at a moderate level. Not that his parents would say anything if it was loud. They mostly leave him alone, trusting him to do the right thing. There are no limits on what he can listen to, no limits on what he can watch. If it's midnight, and he can't sleep, and he wants to watch "Leprechaun 2," the movie that showed him what it's like when someone's puckered lips touch the whirring metal blades of a fan, he can do that. If he wants to go to an R-rated movie, he can do that, too: In his wallet is a card, approved by his parents and issued by one of the movie theater chains, that says he can go to any R-rated movie he wants, with or without an adult.
None of this is because Aaron's parents are uninvolved in his life, but precisely the opposite. When he was little, they took him to museums and read to him at night; when he was 9, they told him he couldn't have a Nintendo system until he was 10; when he was 12, they told him he couldn't see horror movies until he was 13. Once he hit 13, however, they decided he was mature enough to make his own decisions about these kinds of things, and that limiting his choices from then on wouldn't be guidance, but censorship.
"I don't want to cut anything off from him," says his mother, Lynne, 45, who works out of the house doing transcription for medical practices so she can be home in the mornings, and afternoons, and whenever else might be necessary, for her sons. "I want him to experience everything he can experience."
"I don't believe people should be sheltered, because if you're always sheltered as you're learning your thought processes, how do you deal with the world?" says his father, Bryan, 49, a manager with a defense contractor. "He knows: 'If I can conceive of the extremes, then I know there's a place in the middle where there's balance.' "
Or so is the hope. They don't know if he knows this for sure, can't know. It's too early. At this point, all they can be sure of is that the world Aaron is coming of age in is far different than the one they inhabited when they were 14.
For Bryan, that was in 1960, when he was in New York City, attending a yeshiva. There was no TV in his life, no music, and only an occasional movie. Days were devoted to prayer and study, and nights were spent taking long walks around Queens with an older rabbinical student who would argue with Bryan about philosophy, about the existence of God, about evolution, about fairness. For him, 14 was an essential year in his intellectual development, and much of the reason why, years later, when he was living in Germany and visited the remains of some of the concentration camps, he decided that any limitation of information is censorship, and that he would never inflict that on his children.
Lynne, meanwhile, turned 14 in 1964, when she was living in California. "You want to know what I was trying to do? I was trying to survive," she says. "Two years before, my sister had died, and what was left of my family after that was disintegrating. My parents were alcoholics, and this made it worse, and it was the defining event of my adolescence: Any semblance of family life we'd had fell apart." For her, 14 was a tailspin, which is much of the reason why, earlier this year, when she saw Bob Dole on CNN and, as she describes it, "they were interviewing him about the morality of youth today, and he was saying with all the videos and movies coming at kids there's moral confusion, I was saying, 'Oh, please.' The confusion comes from kids not having someone to come home to, or give them a bowl of cereal in the morning, or hug them when they've had a bad day."
Out of their own experiences, then, both Bryan and Lynne decided that Aaron, at 14, was mature enough, and felt loved enough, to be able to make his own decisions, even if that means listening again and again to the song that is now playing in his room, which includes the line, "I dug between the chair, and pulled out the machete, she screamed, I sliced her up until her guts were like spaghetti."
"I don't mind him listening. I do mind the lyrics," Bryan says.
"We both mind the lyrics, and he knows it," Lynne says.
"But how will he know what something is unless he listens to it?" Bryan says.
Of the two, Lynne is slightly less certain about all of this than Bryan. "Ninety percent of me is comfortable with this, but 10 percent of me has Jeffrey Dahmer lurking in the background," she says one day. She is joking, of course, but unlike Bryan, who is confident that Aaron, at 14, has enough solid values in place to carry him past such lyrics, Lynne talks to him constantly, trying to add some perspective.
"When we listen to the car radio," she says, "and they say, 'We're gonna do it, do it, do it, all night long,' or, 'We're gonna yo yo yo with your ho ho ho,' I say, 'What are they doing, Aaron?' He says, 'They're having sex, Mom.' And I say, 'Are they using protection?' He says, 'I don't know.' I say, 'Why do they have to do it, do it, do it? Why can't they do it and have a conversation?' I try to say things to make him think about all of this. Most of the time, what he says is, 'Mom, I don't even listen to the lyrics.' But the thing is, if I can hear them, how can't he?"
So it is that on the way to the video store one day, when the song on the radio says, "I want to be your sexual chocolate," she says to Aaron, " 'I want to be your sexual chocolate?' What does that mean?" And when another song says, "Yeah, baby, I like it raw," she says, "What does he like raw? Is it life? Is it sex? What is he saying?"
Aaron, in turn, shrugs. Maybe he's listening, maybe he isn't. Into the store they go, and he begins searching while Lynne, standing away from him, thinking about what she would have been doing on an idle day when she was his age, says, "The only thing we had in my little town was, do you remember Andrew Carnegie? Who would go around and build libraries in little towns where they didn't have one? Well, we had a Carnegie library. And a big afternoon was you'd ride your bike to the country store and buy a Coca-Cola and a Twinkie, and you'd ride to the creek with your Twinkie and Coke and two library books and spend the afternoon. And now, to stand here and look at all the choices Aaron has, it's kind of overwhelming."
Patiently, she waits. He keeps looking. He goes through the movie titles. He moves on to the video game section. It takes him 15 minutes, but at last he makes a selection.
"Jeopardy," he says, handing it to her.
"Jeopardy?" she says.
"Yeah," he says.
"Fine with me," she says, surprised.
They get in the car. He turns on the radio. She'd rather hear oldies, or opera, or Bruce Springsteen, but, as always, she lets him put on what he wants.
"Who's this?"
"This," he says, "is Ol' Dirty Bastard."
HE PLAYS JEOPARDY ONCE. He plays it twice. He gets bored. So long, Jeopardy. Now he puts on Mortal Kombat, which he never gets tired of. Once, he played for four hours without stopping.
"All right, we're starting our game," he says, explaining what he's doing as he presses various buttons on his controller. First he has to decide which of a dozen characters he wants to be. "I'm choosing Jax because he's fun to use, and I like one of his moves where he pounds you to bits," he says. Now he begins stalking, kicking, and punching the opposing fighter. "Right now I'm staying my space . . . Now I'm jumping at him . . . Now I'm trying to trap him in the corner . . . Now I got him. No I don't. Yeah I do. There!" The other character crumples. He wins. But he's disappointed. "I was going to do a pit move. I was going to knock him into the acid. But I was unsuccessful."
So he tries again, again, again.
He pulls his opponent's arms out of their sockets.
He becomes a female who kisses her opponent, stands back and watches him explode.
He becomes metal blades that chop off the opponent's head.
He freezes his opponent, hits him and turns him into flying shards.
He does an uppercut that causes his opponent to fall off a bridge and keep falling until he hits concrete and his head splits open.
He becomes Jax again.
"Finish him!" comes the command.
This time he does it right. It isn't the pit move, it's one he likes even better. He stretches Jax's arms out to the side and brings them together as if clanging cymbals, but there are no cymbals here, just two fists and an opponent's head that is in the way. Boom! The head is crushed, and Aaron laughs. "It's the best one."
All of these moves are secret moves, not part of the general instructions, not known to the casual player. Rather, Aaron has learned them from scanning the Internet, and, in some cases, from reading a glossy monthly magazine Nick gets called GamePro, which shows how to perform moves such as the "head inflation," the "skull rip" and the "death scream." And this is where the marketplace implications of Aaron's choices begin to emerge.
The cost of GamePro: $ 19.97 a year.
The cost of the home version of Mortal Kombat, which he and Nick got as soon as it came out: $ 60.
The cost of Mortal Kombat's successor, Mortal Kombat II, which he and Nick also got as soon as it came out: $ 60 again.
The cost at the arcade, where they go at least once a week to play the latest version of the game, Mortal Kombat 3: 50 cents to play until you lose, which can add up quickly, even for a good player. Aaron imagines he easily spends more than $ 100 a year at the arcade; three years after the first version of the game was released, that's how much pull it continues to have. He plays it constantly, and he, of course, is just one player in a universe that Roger Sharpe, director of licensing for Midway Manufacturing Co. in Chicago, where Mortal Kombat was invented, says includes 60,000 arcade machines, more than 10 million copies of the home versions, and 60 licensed spinoff products from posters, to calendars, to lunch boxes, to clothing, to a live-action road show, to a feature-length movie that, a week after its premiere, has people at Midway feeling a little giddy. "How are we doing?" Sharpe says into his phone, getting the daily update. "Outstanding . . . I love it!" He hangs up. "God, we're over $ 30 million already. I love it."
When Mortal Kombat was first introduced, Sharpe says, the thinking was that it would be popular, but no one in their wildest dreams expected it would gross $ 800 million its first year in the arcades. Likewise, the hope was that the movie also would do well, but $ 30 million? In one week? The No. 1 movie in the country? "Pac-Man was a phenomenon, the best-selling game of all time," he says, searching for a comparison. "Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man together sold over 200,000 [arcade] units, plus apparel, and cereal, and 'Pac-Man Fever' -- it was a hit single -- but has there been anything of this enormity? Across the board? Like this? No."
"Thirty-two million," says John Tobias, the co-creator of Mortal Kombat, the next day, as he sits in an office crowded with a drawing table, a computer and piles of the latest Mortal Kombat products, including Halloween costumes. Tobias, a 26-year-old artist, first came up with the idea for Mortal Kombat in 1991, and four years later, he seems as amazed by what has happened as anyone else.
The point, he says, was merely to design a new game. He was finishing up a game called Total Carnage, which was a sequel to a game called Smash TV. At the same time, Ed Boon, a programmer, was finishing a game called High Impact Football. Both wanted to do a martial arts game. Neither had anything specific in mind at first, but gradually the game developed through a series of decisions: that it should be a side-view game rather than revolving 3-D, that the characters should be a certain size on the screen, that the impact of a kick should make a certain sound, that a foot or a fist should move at a particular speed, that it should be based on digitized images of actual actors rather than cartoonish figures, that there should be flying drops of blood. The goal was realism, Tobias says, and early on they knew they were onto something. "I believe it was when we put the uppercut in, and the other character went flying in the air. It really felt like he had hit someone," he says. "There was a generic sound in there, and it all seemed good."
But not great. Something, they decided, was missing at the end of the game. "There was this awkward moment where the other character is standing around dazed, and then you hit him again, and that was it. It seemed anticlimactic. We wanted every ending to seem like, boom. If you win, you should get a reward for winning," he says, which is how they came up with the idea of finishing moves, or fatalities, something that is common in games now, but, at that point, hadn't been done.
By the time they first tested the game at a Chicago arcade in early 1992, they had come up with only one. They were sure no player would discover it. It was too well hidden. It required pushing the buttons on the control panel in too complicated a sequence for someone to stumble upon. There were no hints on the Internet or in the gaming magazines, and the machine they wheeled into the arcade on a Friday night came with no instructions to help a player figure anything out about the game, much less a fatality. The machine didn't even have any kind of design on it or decals, just a hand-lettered sign. But that was enough to get kids lined up to play, and before the weekend was out they had of course found the fatality, and the oohs and aahs were so wonderful, Tobias says, that he and Boon went to work Monday knowing they had to think of more.
"What if he ripped his heart out and held it up? Wouldn't that be cool?" he says of the creative process that followed that first weekend. "What if you pull off his head and his spine is still attached? . . . It was almost like Ed and I were trying to reduce ourselves to 15-year-old kids. That's what you have to do in this industry, think like a 15-year-old or 16-year-old game player."
In all, they thought of seven fatalities for the first version, 24 for the second, and 28 for the third, rejecting only one idea along the way that had one of the characters getting sliced in half by a sword, causing his guts to spill out. "We decided we didn't want to see anyone's guts," Tobias says about that. "If it makes us queasy, there's no way we want to push it. We already thought we were pushing it. Even we have our limits."
In spite of that, the game was, to put it mildly, controversial from the start. It was called disgusting. It was called damaging to children's psyches. It was accused by one U.S. senator, Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), of adding to America's "epidemic of real violence." It was the subject of a congressional hearing, which led to the wide use of a ratings system for home versions of video games, which led to Tobias and Boon adding something called friendship moves to the second version, moves in which, as Tobias describes them, instead of decapitating an opponent, "somebody would plant a flower, somebody would bake a cake, really stupid things." On and on this went, and meanwhile, between the arcade versions and home versions, Mortal Kombat was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and becoming the most popular game of its time. And in spite of the criticisms, the fatalities remained an essential part of the game because, as Tobias says of the players, "They're adamant about having violent, gory fatalities. That's what they want."
Including Aaron. One other thing Tobias says about the game is, "I think the violence almost, after a while, becomes transparent. I mean, the fact that there's gobs of blood flowing out of somebody when you punch him, I don't think that that's the attraction any longer." Rather, he says, it's the fun of the game, the competition.
But to Aaron, it's the blood as much as anything else. Competition is Jeopardy, he says on the day that he has put Jeopardy aside after two plays, while in Mortal Kombat, which he has now been playing for almost an hour, "You can do a finish move, and it's like, yeah! Got you! And your opponent, like, dies."
So strong is the appeal of this that when the movie comes to Silver Spring, it plays in two theaters simultaneously. Aaron, of course, is there. He goes with the rest of his family, sitting, as they always do at movies, in the second row. It's where they sat for "Pulp Fiction," in which a guy in a car gets shot in the head and bits of his brain go flying about; it's where they sat for "Apollo 13," of which Aaron said afterward: "They went into space, they had their troubles, they came back, they made it. My parents thought it was nonstop action, but I must have missed it"; and it's where they sit now for two hours, watching one fight after another, until the last bad guy is impaled on a spike, and the credits fade, and the lights come up, and Lynne stands and says, "That's the second worst movie I've seen this summer."
"That was about exactly what I expected," says Bryan.
"I loved it," says Nick.
"I liked it," says Aaron. "But I think they should have made it rated R so they could show more stuff."
"So they could show more stuff?" says Bryan.
"Like they could show their fatalities. Like when Johnny Cage fought Scorpion? You know how he just blew up? He could have, like, uppercutted his head off or something like that."
"Or tore him in half," says Nick.
"Yeah," says Aaron. "And what they should have done at the end is, you know when Liu Kang pushed him? They should have done this fatality where he did a double kick and then uppercutted him. A cartwheel, and then, bam."
"So," says Bryan, "you liked it better than 'Apollo 13'?"
"Oh yeah," says Aaron.
"Why?" says Bryan.
"I like action," says Aaron. "I mean, what was 'Apollo 13'?"
"Drama?" says Nick.
"No," says Aaron. "More like . . ."
"History?" says Nick.
"No," says Aaron.
"Suspense?" says Nick.
"No," says Aaron. "It's, um . . ."
"Boring?" says Lynne.
"Yeah. Boring."
"So it doesn't have to make a lot of sense to you?" she says. "It doesn't have to challenge your mind at all?"
"I like watching them fight."
BACK HOME. AARON WATCHES ESPN, reads the Sports section, starts flipping through his CDs. "I can remember back when I was 6 or 7," he says. "I liked 'Born in the USA' by Bruce Springsteen; and I liked the Beatles, like 'Twist and Shout'; I liked Yes back then; I think I liked Paula Abdul for a little bit, maybe when I was 9 or 10 or 8; I remember Def Leppard back when I was 8 or 9, 'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' that was heavy metal; and then I heard this song by Young MC called 'Bust a Move,' and then I started getting into rap, I started getting into Public Enemy, and LL Cool J, and then, from three years ago, it's been whatever's up. Whatever's playing."
What's playing now is the Geto Boys, a CD he got a few years ago when he first started listening to rap almost exclusively, one that contains a song called "Assassins," which is the song about slicing a woman "until her guts were like spaghetti." And goes on to say:
"A maniac, I stabbed the girl in the tits.
"And to stop her nerves from jumping, I just cut her to bits.
"And I'm an assassin . . ."
The song is one of Aaron's favorites. "I like the way they rap," he says of the song's appeal. "I really don't care about what they say. That doesn't bother me. I don't pay attention." Maybe so, but he does know most of the words, including the line about the girl being stabbed in her breasts, which is so graphic that it can't help but create an image in his mind. "I see [someone being] stabbed," he says of what that image is. Anyone in particular? "I don't have a face." Does he see breasts? "Yeah." Does he see a knife? "I see a machete." Does he see anything else? Blood? The machete actually embedded? The machete being drawn out? "I don't know," he says. "I don't pay attention." It's just an image, he says, no big deal, no dire consequences, one that quickly fades as the song moves on:
"My father was a priest, cold-blooded, he's dead, hypocrite, I caught him basing, so I shot him in the head . . ."
Like a dozen other CDs Aaron owns, this one has a label on the cover that says, "Parental Advisory -- Explicit Lyrics." It's there because of a long-ago battle, brought on in 1985 by Tipper Gore and several other wives of politicians, who were so bothered by certain lyrics that they formed the Parents' Music Resource Center and got record companies to start putting warning labels on music most likely to be considered offensive. Aaron, who was 4 years old when this began, knows little about it. He knows about the stickers but ignores them. He's heard of Al Gore, but he hasn't heard of Tipper. Neither has he heard of the PMRC and its current head, Barbara Wyatt. Nor has he heard of William Bennett, former secretary of education and current head of Empower America, or C. Delores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, whom Wyatt got to join forces earlier this year for an attack on Time Warner over some of the music it had been distributing. And neither has he heard of David Chamberlin, who, when all of this was beginning in the mid-1980s, was a 14-year-old himself, living in Ohio and listening to Van Halen, and 10 years later found himself sitting across from Wyatt at the Stage Deli in Manhattan, scribbling some notes on a napkin. He wrote down: Nine Inch Nails. He wrote down: Red Hot Chili Peppers. He wrote down: Slayer. He also wrote down a few song titles and lyrics and gave the napkin to Wyatt, who hurried from the deli to a Time Warner stockholders meeting, where she passed the information to Tucker and Bennett to use in their attack.
"Every day of my life, I listen to music," Aaron says. "Everywhere I go, there's music" -- and so it is for David Chamberlin. "I love music," he says. "You'll never come into my office and not hear music unless the CD runs out and I'm on the phone." But while Aaron spends his days consuming it, Chamberlin, who moved to Washington last October and first met Wyatt in April, has begun helping in the crusade against what he considers its most extreme forms, largely because of the role music played in his life when he was growing up.
This goes back to Ohio, when he was living in the suburbs, in a house with a pool, and 2 1/2 acres of woods, and his own room with posters on the walls of astronauts and baseball players, and parents whose marriage was falling slowly apart. When they were home, he says, they were often fighting, and when they weren't home there was a lingering tension, and either way he spent a lot of time in his room, door shut, volume up, listening to music: Van Halen, Bon Jovi, the Scorpions, Hanoi Rocks. All of it helped, he says, especially, for a brief time, Twisted Sister, whose song "We're Not Going to Take It" filled him with a kind of defiant hope that he would one day get away. Which is what happened. He went off to college, to a small, Christian, liberal arts school in Indiana, where he arrived hoping not only for an education, but for escape. Except his parents' marriage was growing worse; and his high school girlfriend was calling him every week, every day, every hour, wanting to know what was happening to their relationship; and school was hard; and living alone was difficult; and the music he was listening to at that point wasn't so much about defiance as alienation; and one night he went for a walk, in the dark, with a knife, wondering whether to commit suicide, fairly certain he would. That night, he says, was the beginning of a realization that came to him more fully years later, that some of the music he was listening to, while certainly not the cause of his despair, helped to exaggerate it. The music, he says, "gave me clarity because there was a lot of stuff I was feeling that I couldn't put into words, emotions of hurt, of anger, of anxiety, and these guys captured that. After a while, though, it increased the anxiety. It kept me from getting past the issues and dealing with them . . . You just wallow in it. 'Wow! Other people feel this way, too.' "
So it was that years later, after surviving that night, receiving his degree, moving to Washington, and getting a job at the Family Research Council, a conservative research and lobbying organization, he found himself in a meeting one day with Barbara Wyatt, telling her that he had been keeping files on certain musical trends, and lyrics, and groups for years, from those he liked, such as U2 ("my favorite group in the whole wide world"), to those he found disturbing, such as Nine Inch Nails. She, at that point, was casting about for ways to raise the profile of PMRC, and though she had been in touch with Bennett and Tucker, she didn't know enough about music specifically to be of maximum help. And here, suddenly, was someone who not only knew that there was a group called Nine Inch Nails, but that their music was industrial alternative, and that their latest album was recorded in the very house where the Manson killings occurred, and that one of the songs, "Closer," included the lyrics, "You let me violate you, desecrate you, complicate you, penetrate you. I want to [expletive] you like an animal."
That was in mid-April. A month later, the two of them were on their way to New York for the assault on the Time Warner stockholders' meeting, and, since then, Chamberlin says, he has been volunteering, on average, a dozen hours a week, helping the PMRC with its latest idea, a 900 number for parents to call to get information about what their children are listening to. The number, which has room for 85 short reviews and went into operation over the summer, is only one part of Wyatt's plans for the PMRC. She hopes to establish some kind of youth advisory board that would meet regularly and discuss the implications of music. She hopes to start some kind of annual awards show that would recognize music for being positive rather than destructive. "The repetition of certain types of music -- I'm not talking about all music, I'm talking about the ones that preach violence, that preach illicit sex, that preach violence against women, that preach rape, that are filled with profanities -- these, at the least, compel you to think about these things," she says. And so the 900 number, which is, in essence, Chamberlin.
He is the one who chooses what music to highlight by scanning the Billboard Top 100, reading music magazines, buying CDs, and playing them often enough in his office, his car, his home, to chronicle their profanities and themes. He is the one who writes the reviews, and his is the voice on the recordings. The point isn't to tell a parent what to do -- "that's between the parent and child," he says -- but simply to inform anyone interested enough to pay $ 1.75 a minute what a particular album contains. From his own experiences, he says, he knows the power of music and the vulnerability of adolescence, which is why, with the best of intentions, he picks up the phone in his office one day, dials a special access number, and dictates his latest review, written over his lunch break: "The Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Warner Brother Records artist, has released 'One Hot Minute.' The album uses numerous obscenities and vulgar language; extols such behaviors as theft, homosexuality, substance abuse and casual sex . . ."
Of which Aaron says, upon hearing this review, "Pretty stupid."
He is at home. He is in the living room. He has recently been listening to Tupac Shakur, who, Chamberlin points out in one of his reviews, "is currently in prison for sexually assaulting a fan," and now, with the music off, he listens to more of what Chamberlin has had to say.
"Salt-N-Pepa, a London Records artist, has recorded 'Very Necessary,' " begins the review of that album.
"What's wrong with Salt-N-Pepa?" Aaron interrupts. "I mean, my parents like Salt-N-Pepa."
"The female rappers glorify promiscuity and prostitution and advocate violence," the review continues. "Their song 'Shoop' includes these lines: 'Felt it in my hips so I dip back, through my bag of tricks, then I flipped for the tip made me wanna do tricks. Gonna lick him like a lollipop . . ."
"Should be licked," Aaron says, finishing the line from memory. "What's wrong with that?"
He listens to another:
"Dr. Dre, an Interscope Records artist, has recorded his latest album, 'The Chronic.' "
"Yeah, I got that," Aaron says.
"The album encourages drug abuse, views women as strictly sex objects and has obscenities throughout . . ."
"I don't think he views women as sex objects," Aaron says. "Maybe he does. Yeah, probably he does."
Another:
"Snoop Doggy Dogg, a Death Row/Interscope Records artist, has recorded 'Doggystyle.' Violent themes predominate, as well as highly sexual content advocating oral and group sex. The album portrays women as sex objects and advocates drug abuse and murder . . ."
"Yep, got that," Aaron says. "Everybody has that. And everything they say about it is probably true."
Another:
"The Stone Temple Pilots, an Atlantic Records Artist, released their latest album, entitled 'Purple' " . . .
"What's wrong with 'Purple?' I want to hear this."
"The album is bleak . . ."
"Bleak?"
". . . and portrays life as basically meaningless . . ."
"What?"
". . . and slams self-control while promoting indulgence."
"It's music," Aaron says. "Please! So dumb."
WHEN AARON WAS 3 YEARS OLD, he saw his brother Nick step on a nail. It was a long nail, sticking up through a piece of discarded wood in the back yard, and Nick, who was 5 at the time, came down on it so hard that it went through his sandal and deep into his foot. He screamed. He fell. Lynne came running, and so did Bryan, while Aaron, standing at a distance, watched.
Eleven years later, this remains the worst thing Aaron has seen in his life. He has seen fistfights at school. He has gone by accidents on the Beltway. He has seen his father emerge from heart bypass surgery. But seeing Nick like that is the only time he has seen somebody truly in pain, which is why Lynne, who finds herself thinking about this one day, says that after 14 charmed years, Aaron has no firsthand understanding that all human beings, including himself, are ultimately mortal. "There's been nothing in his life to give him that sense," she says one morning, sitting on the beach at Ocean City, where the family has come for an end-of-the-summer vacation before Aaron begins high school. As she talks, she is watching a Coast Guard helicopter sweeping low above the water. The word is that a child is out there somewhere, missing since the night before, presumably drowned. Back and forth the helicopter goes, and Lynne can't help but scan the water, too.
Aaron, meanwhile, has no interest in this whatsoever. What is there to see, really, except a helicopter, a lot of water and now, cruising past, some kind of search boat? In his life at the moment, he has a more immediate concern, namely that there's a new video game being released this day called Killer Instinct. He and Nick have been saving for it. He wants it, wants it now, wants that game cartridge locked into the Nintendo system he has brought from home along with a TV, and that is what's on his mind as he begins calling store after store in Ocean City, trying to track down a copy. Finally: "Do you have Killer Instinct? You do? How much is it? What's the price? Do you have any copies left?" He hangs up. He's found it -- except that it's at a store in Salisbury, a 40-minute drive away, and when Bryan says he's not up for driving that far, Lynne becomes his only hope.
"Move your toesies," she says, coming in from the beach and looking for room on the sofa, where he's stretched out. She pats his foot, which has a slight mark on it from a day a couple of years ago when he was running around the neighborhood, and a kid with a pellet gun took aim at him, and the pellet hit his foot. It stung a little and made a dent, but there was no blood, and the sting went away, and that's been his only experience with a gun. Now he moves his foot. She sits. He asks if she'll take him to Salisbury. She says she can't because she's supposed to go shopping with a friend. He doesn't know what to do.
He has got to have that game.
"Are there any buses?"
"No, babe."
"It's only a half-hour."
"Honey, I don't want to go."
"It might be fun."
"What's fun about going to Salisbury? Salisbury's a place you drive through, not to."
"So, like, there's no buses that go there?"
"Honey . . ."
He thinks. His best friend, Morgan, who has come along on the vacation, thinks as well. "Give it up," he suggests.
"Thank you, Morgan," Lynne says, and then to Aaron she says, "Enjoy vacation. Live it up before you go back to school. Go to the arcade. Be a kid. Go to the beach. Put on your suit. Just promise me you won't go beyond the second wave."
Which, of course, he does. He goes so far out that, at one point, the lifeguard has to whistle him and Morgan in, and they come in laughing, and then they go play some games, and then they go bowling, and then they go to a fast-food restaurant where Morgan tells about how, at high school orientation, the principal was saying they can't bring anything to school that even resembles a weapon, that they can't have beepers, that they can't even wear caps, and then it is 9 p.m. and there is nothing really to do. So they go back to the condo, and as soon as Aaron opens the door, Nick comes hurrying down the hall.
"Can I see you a minute, Aaron?" he says, trying to sound calm.
Aaron follows him back to their bedroom. The TV is on. The Nintendo is hooked up. And there, on the screen, is Killer Instinct. "Dad went and got it," Nick says, and Aaron can hardly believe it.
"Is it sweet?" he says. "Is it sweet? Is it sweet?"
"It's pretty good," Nick says, laughing, and they immediately begin playing against each other.
Aaron's character hits Nick's character, and out oozes a green liquid.
Nick's hits Aaron's, and out flies blood.
Aaron's lands an uppercut, and Nick's character goes flying. "Ho!" Aaron says. "That was kind of nice."
On this goes, past 10, by which time Nick has mastered a combination move of 10 punches in a row; and 10:30, when Bryan pokes his head in the door and says, "So what is this thing I did?"; and 11, by which time Aaron has learned several finishing moves, such as the Sword Stab and the Falling Car. There's also the Needle Stab, the Acid Puddle, the Neck Breaker, the Lava Pool, the Skeleton Grab and the Heart Attack -- every conceivable fatality in the world, it seems, except for one involving a drowning, perhaps of a child, particularly at Ocean City, which is the subject of conversation in the living room.
Now the word is that the child was a boy, 10 years old, out for a swim when he got caught up in the current. His father and his uncle did their best to save him but couldn't hold on. And the boy was swept away.
"I let go of my son," Bryan says. "I can't imagine coming home and saying, 'I let go of my son.' "
The door to the balcony is open. The sound of the waves is coming into the room. The search, so far, has found nothing. The body is still out there.
Once, years ago, during another trip to Ocean City, Bryan was on the boardwalk with Nick when he lost him. He looked everywhere he could think of, growing more and more frantic, and then, not knowing what else to do, knowing only that he didn't want to go to Lynne and tell her he had lost their son, he went to the police station. And there was Nick, waiting. "That was the worst," he says.
No, Lynne says, the worst was last summer, when Aaron didn't come home from school on the bus, and in the course of several hours she went from thinking he was late, to hurt, to abducted, to dead, until he walked in and said he had been at the arcade.
There are so many things that can go wrong. Lynne especially knows this. Sometimes, to her, it seems a wonder they have made it this far. But they have, and now they sit together in the living room, listening to the ocean, until she goes into the bedroom to read, and Bryan, after trying to sleep, goes onto the balcony. It must be past 1 a.m. He watches some police officers roust a man and a woman entangled in the sand. He watches for shooting stars. He watches the dark water. Sometime after 2, the wind dies down and the humidity comes up, and at 3, he looks in on Aaron and Nick.
They're still awake. Still playing. It's been six hours straight.
"Go to bed," Bryan says, and they do, and now it is the next day, and Aaron and Nick are at it again, and Bryan and Lynne are on their way out to lunch.
They're in Lynne's Lincoln, what she calls her menopausal car. Bryan's driving. He loves to drive. Sometimes, at home, he'll drive up and down Rock Creek Parkway for no reason other than to drive, and look around, and remind himself how beautiful things can be. Lynne, meanwhile, is fiddling with the radio, and comes upon an old Righteous Brothers song. She turns up the volume and settles back. "Now this was music," she says, getting a little dreamy. "God, my kid's not going to have memories like this. Twenty years from now, he's going to get nostalgic over . . ."
But what?
"Oldies rap?" says Bryan.
"I stabbed her in the tits?" says Lynne.
And they laugh, because they believe in their hearts that everything is going to work out fine.
MAYBE IT WILL, TOO. "Aaron Wolf. Your son. Very intelligent little kid. Very smart. Going to be a lawyer when I grow up, and maybe even a baseball player," Aaron said in a message he left on his father's voice mail a few years ago, a message so sweet and spoken so happily, in such a sing-songy voice, that Bryan has preserved it. Maybe that will happen.
Or maybe, in eight years, he'll get a job designing video game fatalities.
Or maybe, in 10 years, he'll join the PMRC.
Who can know? It's too soon. He's only 14. There's so much ahead. "I'm not, like, worrying about that now," he says one day on the subject of how he'd like his life to work out. Instead, he has more immediate concerns on his mind because it is a Friday afternoon, and he's home from school, and he's got an English assignment that involves reading a book. And on this subject, he says, "I don't really like books . . . I don't like sitting down and reading. I'd much rather watch TV . . . If it's boring, I can switch to another channel. But in a book, I have to keep reading until I find the next interesting part. It takes too long."
It was different, of course, for his parents. When Lynne was 14 and her sister had died and her own life was falling apart, she came across The Grapes of Wrath. "That's what I got from books, realizing there were other people out there whose lives weren't so good, that they had to struggle, and they survived," she says. Bryan, meanwhile, was reading Crime and Punishment, which led to The Brothers Karamazov, which led to Sinclair Lewis and Arrowsmith, a book whose main character, an idealistic young doctor, filled him with such hopefulness that it pushed him toward becoming a scientist, and then a teacher in D.C., and fostered in him an optimism that has continued to this day.
And now they have Aaron:
"I can't even get him to sit down with me and WATCH The Grapes of Wrath," Lynne says one day.
"He's never going to read The Red Badge of Courage," says Bryan.
"Let's put it that way," says Lynne.
Neither thinks this will necessarily make the world a worse place -- "It'll be a different place, that's all," Bryan says -- but just the same, every Christmas, they get Aaron a book. Just in case. One year it was The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. "I don't think he read it," Lynne says. Another year, it was The Dreamtime, a book of Australian aboriginal myths. Another year it was The Man Who Knew Infinity, a biography of the Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan. Another year it was Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, a book written in 1884 that uses math, satire and spirituality to tell the story of a man living in a two-dimensional world. "Bryan gave him this and said, 'Aaron, this affected me. Give it a try,' " Lynne says. And did he read it? "Are you kidding?" She is in his room, looking through his books, all stacked on a bottom shelf, all coated with dust. But there they are for him, if and when he's ready.
And now comes a new book: To Kill a Mockingbird. That's his assignment.
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," is how it begins and goes on from there to explore how cruel and hateful people can be. There's an attempted lynching. There's a killing. There's an attempt to murder some children. There's plenty of violence, in other words, but unlike in a video game or most of the music Aaron listens to, it is violence that occurs within a larger context of decency and love, and that is the book he has brought home to read. He's had it now for a week. "I'm on Page 2," he says. "Some guy hurt his arm playing football or something." He needs to finish it. He will.
But now, on a Friday afternoon, the weekend ahead, there are so many other choices, all infinitely more appealing. Maybe they do involve violence, he says, but he isn't worried about the effects. It's not like he doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy; it's not like he can't handle it; it's not like he's going to kill anyone, or hurt someone, or become so numbed that he can't tell the difference between right and wrong. "Maybe like a flower," he says, thinking about this. "If you keep seeing it, do you still keep seeing it? Or is it just there? You don't care. That doesn't mean you're desensitized. You're used to it."
And besides, he goes on, "If I hadn't seen anything violent, I probably wouldn't be who I am, and I probably wouldn't have much of a life."
He elaborates:
"If I hadn't seen all this, I'd be different."
And elaborates further:
"I wouldn't even have an outside life.
"I'd be scared to be with anyone else.
"I wouldn't be able to relate to anybody else."
And further:
"Because they've all seen it."
So: What will it be this afternoon? Music? TV? Video games?
He makes a decision. He turns on the computer, and on comes a game given to him by another student in school a few days before, called Druglord.
He starts with $ 500 cash. The computer asks him to choose what he wants to buy: "cocaine, crack, heroin, acid, crystal, grass, speed, ludes."
He makes his choice, and now the computer shows him some prices.
He decides to spend all $ 500, and now he has to decide where he wants to sell the drugs: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego or Washington.
He chooses San Diego, hits the button and is told that he's just made a $ 500 profit.
"Pretty nice," he says.
Now he has enough money to buy and sell some heroin.
And with the profit from that he's able to buy and sell some speed.
And now he's up to $ 3,500 when a character named Juan appears, selling some AK-47s -- except the price is $ 5,000, firm.
"Ooh, I can't believe it. Those are the nicest guns. I could kill some cops."
And wouldn't you know it, here come the police.
They're closing in. They're surrounding him. They're opening fire. They're blasting away, shooting and shooting until a message comes up on the screen:
"Everything has a strange misty look to it . . . you start to feel heat under your feet . . . you see flames licking all around . . . I guess this is the end."
And there it is.
Aaron Wolf, 14, is dead.
But not for long.
"Would you like to play again?" the game asks.
He presses 'n'. For no.
There are too many other things to do.
GRAPHIC: John Tobias, the co-creator of Mortal Kombat, has watched the much-criticized game generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from youthful customers. "They're adamant about having violent, gory fatalities," he says. "That's what they want." Aaron Wolf, with cap, plays Mortal Kombat II with his older brother, Nick. "If I hadn't seen anything violent, I probably wouldn't be who I am, and I probably wouldn't have much of a life," Aaron says. "I wouldn't be able to relate to anybody else." David Chamberlin, a rock music lover whose "favorite group in the whole wide world" is U2, has helped establish a 900 number that parents can call to get information about the violent, sexually explicit song lyrics their children are listening to.
