(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began to reminisce about a New Year's Eve spent in a basement, playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to the Top 100 Rock Songs of All Time. Today, more of this memory.)
JERRY HOPEN HAD INVITED YOU, because in middle school he had been in Kelley's game.
Jerry Hopen, because he was half Norwegian, was the biggest Chinese guy any of us had ever seen. We played in his basement, and when his mother came home, she stood on the threshold and asked him in Cantonese if he'd walked the dog. The name of the dog, Alamo, floated in her wavering syllables. Jerry often played the half-orc fighter character, decked out in heavy, sparkling armor. He dated Betsy Toth after Betsy finished with you, Justin, and would have married her if she hadn't dumped him.
Greg Shupah was the first to go into the refrigerator and make everyone take a can of beer. He opened mine and told me to drink it. Greg was two years older than us and his friends had gradually stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, one by one, until he was playing with kids a year younger, and then he was playing with us.
Greg never attended school, and always showed up to the game an hour early and sat in the basement reading comic books. He read The Uncanny X-Men and kept the issues in Mylar bags. He held the glossy cover open in his palm and laughed to himself without explaining what he found amusing and then he would carefully close the cover and slip it into the shiny bag.
He was one of the tallest boys in the school, but because he didn't like to sweat, he didn't play basketball. He regarded the limit of absent days per quarter, seventeen, as a constraint to be creatively circumvented.
Greg didn't fit in most chairs, and usually sat on the sofa. Greg often played wizards that threw strange objects. That News Year's Eve he had spent five minutes explaining the way his character's weapons looked--three-foot knives, with assorted nicks and repairs on the blades, and only one edge. "The back edge, remember, is flat." His ideal character was always ambidextrous.
Mark Imel was short and perfectly formed and a red head with freckles and had a soft way of speaking that sounded like he was attempting to calm everyone down. Everything he did, he did as if it was important to sound sincere. Greg ribbed Mark until Mark jumped out of his chair and wrestled Greg to the ground and muttered, "Say you're sorry Greg. Say it before I snap."
Mark had dropped out of Math Club shortly before you showed up Justin, and after this, you and Mark would go out to the pipeline and smoke a bowl during the morning break. Naturally, Mark often played the cleric because someone had to have the ability to heal the other players and he did not want to rock the boat.
John Segrist was a year younger than the rest of us. He had gigantic forearms like Popeye the Sailor Man. If the game slowed down, John would begin to twitch and we never knew what John would do. He and Jerry, because they hated cats, sometimes shared what-they-did-to-the-damn-cat stories, which often involved basketball hoops, bottle rockets, or Dobermans.
When John rolled the dice, he stood up on the couch where he sat next to Greg, blew on them, and thew them against the table, knocking over miniatures, and losing the twenty-sided dice under the coffee table. John almost always played thieves.
"Can I have a beer to celebrate? We can all have another beer, now? It's New Year's Eve," you finally asked. "And I just spent an hour filling out this four-page form." But it was my show and as Dungeon Master, I didn't want anyone getting drunk.
We played for six hours of uninterrupted play when Jerry, under the guise of correcting one of my mistakes, threw a dice at my face.
This was the convention: If someone else made a mistake and I didn't catch them, then they threw a dice at my nose. If there was any break in the continuity of the story, really, either in a flubbed improvisational line, an unrealistic character, some plot point or detail that changed, the players had the right to throw plastic objects--mostly the twelve sided dice because it was cast out of a slightly softer plastic resin--at my nose. I have a hollow notch about half way up my nose, and this was their target. Jerry's throw flatly hit the notch and a sound like a wooden clacker knocked in the basement.
"Let me try that again," Jerry said and then you and Jerry began hurling things at me and then, when you said, "It's Miller time," everyone, except me, got up and followed you to the refrigerator. After that, we were just all drinking and listening to the KZOK countdown. The songs went: "I have my back against the wrecking machine" and "Roxanne, Why do you sell your body to the night" and "Inna Godda DaVida, honey."
Sitting there, I could feel the pieces of the four-year-old fantasy slipping away, and the scattered miniatures were no longer wizards and gnomes and hobgoblins, but hunks of lead.
Jerry Hopen went into the Navy and became a nuclear tech and was decommissioned at twenty-one years old.
Greg Shupah and Mark Imel--after discovering LSD, which they called Uncle for some inexplicable reason--anointed themselves 'Cid Prophets and went to Texas to spread the word of lysergic acid and The Lord. They were arrested in a crowded church, so the story goes, somewhere down there.
John Segrist and I held onto that game, that game you were in the process of shattering, Justin. John and I played that game until John's addiction to over-the-counter cough syrup, Robitussin that he called 'tussin to be exact, became so severe that his parents sent him to Idaho.
I never did anything with you after that, and I don't know what happened to you. But that night, we got drunk, and I was made fun of because I was drunk after only three beers, and we howled and played air guitar to Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," that song that goes: mmh mmh mmah; mmh mmh mmah; mmh mmh mmah over and over again.
Do you remember, Justin, you hoped up on the coffee table and kicked the battle in progress, the polyhedron dice going everywhere, and ground the Chee-tos into Jerry's couch, and you howled and we all howled along with you?
NEXT: The first of a new occasional series revisiting every home I've ever lived in.
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