Chauncey Millington and the Lure of Vice City

as told to Aaron Starmer

Ah, adventure, a lover of uncommon generosity, yet a lover with a womb of venom. I have lived a life dipping into adventure, so often as my passions have dictated. Has my soul grown richer for it, dear readers? Immeasurably. Have I also suffered? Indeed I have.

Mine is perhaps a story with the gentle reek of familiarity. Your father may have scuffed your hair and told you a Millington yarn or two, proclaimed, “My boy, that is why you mustn’t travel beyond the borders of our blessed hamlet. Out there be savages, women of loathsome loins, and creatures that will make outwards of your innards and not think but once of supping upon your Christian heart. Millington has seen it so that you may never have to!”

More than a lark, yet less than an epic, my story is one of wanderings, musings, of buggerings unbelievable in their decrepitude. I am not proud of all I have done with the time the Lord has given me. Still, I am proud to tell the tale. For the sake of the impatient, I shall start with one of my more slender endeavors.

Ever since my first foxhunt at the age of four, when I took mount to my pygmy pony and set chase to that rascal of fur and teeth (cornering him, impregnating him with pellet, and tearing his pelt from his mongrel bones with natural glee), I have been a grand admirer of sport. Now, as a man of wisdom and experience, I still partake in pursuits of leisure. The game of gentlemen this day, however, is the noble distraction known as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

On the surface it may seem a vulgarity, a horror-show of spewed liquids and dreadful grammar. Penetrate, you must, for then you will see the intricate butterfly within its cocoon. It is a contest of costumes, of daylight folly, of dandies shown the business end of a revolver.

I was not enamored of it at first, I assure you. “Such rampant insolence!” I shouted at the images confronting me. “Hardly the way to pilot a carriage! Hardly the way to court a mistress!”

Yet with time, I grew fonder of the jacking, the pistol-whipping, and, dare I say, the cap-busting performed with such gaiety and youthful panache. Soon I was spending all my waking hours meting out the fates of these wanton vagabonds. No time was left for my study of phrenology or my moonlit visits to the opium dens and bi-genitaled performers on Portobello. My passions and my diet were now one and the same - a steady dose of PS2.

As my thumbs calloused, so too did my heart. Yet my imagination! Oh, that bubbled forth with perversities the likes of which have not been known since Caligula discovered the legacy of the Sodomites. No longer was I content with acting out these fantastical scenarios in the confines of televised theatre. What I truly craved was to make these adventures come to fruition on the stage of life.

So one autumn morning, as the dew tickled the nippled teat of St. Paul’s Cathedral, I abandoned my beloved Vice City, and with a double-shot pistol tucked snuggly in my knickers and a miniature rapier held tight to my leg by garter, I set forth upon Queensway a man of will and purpose.