This is a continuation of an earlier story, "Mate."
I asked Brian why he liked me, not quite as confident with people as I am with chess. He told me that I was the smartest friend he had and that he liked me better than anyone else. His single mother was not well off. I remember her and Brian always being concerned about money and living in a neighborhood not quite as nice as mine. None of his neighborhood friends read books or had any interests besides sports. They posed as young toughs, cursing, boasting, insulting each other and everyone else, and spitting, or in other words, accentuating their vulgarity rather than showing any refinement. They bored and disgusted him. He could predict all their opinions and ideas. While they accepted him, because he was strong, he did not more than tolerate them.
Brian and I both did well in school. None of our classes challenged us until we began Eighth grade Algebra, at which time I had difficulty while Brian, who had much better study habits, succeeded. We read the excellent Lord of the Rings trilogy, the definitive fantasy classic, and often discussed each chapter. During recess, we played war games over imaginary continents drawn in the dirt on the playground. We played chess, though less often as time went by. My father and brother played me at home, sharpening my skills. Within a few months, I could beat Brian every game. Consequently, his interest in the game declined drastically until it was nonexistent.
The advent of my friendship with Brian threatened Mick, who learned of it through me, asking why I had not returned his calls. He demanded guarantees that I did not like Brian better than him. Being an honest soul, I could not provide such assurances. Brian told me that he already knew Mick and did not like him at all. Brian was contemptuous of him, but had consented to sleepovers at Mick’s house for the same reasons I had, namely Mick’s excellent library of video games. Brian wished only to have admirable friends and saw little to admire in Mick. He quit returning Mick’s phone calls and just dropped him.
I was flattered by the attentions of both boys, and their obvious jealousy and dislike of each other, and though on the surface I tried to make peace between them, secretly I delighted in their mutual hostility, for it was flattering to be the one that both liked and wished to keep. When Mick realized that he could not dislodge Brian from me, he attempted to make peace with Brian so that his friendship with me could proceed without any complications. Poor old Mick did the very best he could, even going so far as to invite Brian and me both for a sleepover one night which we both attended. He was as friendly and polite as he could possibly be to Brian.
Brian returned his civility, but an underlying coldness was palpable. Brian and I would exchange glances, and when Mick left the room, we would whisper to one another shared observations of his faults. We were horrible, just as young people often are. Mick deserved better. I wish he had made other friends and never even met us. I am not proud of the way that we treated him. However, his persistent pursuit of me and lack of judgment rather aggravated the difficult situation.
I remained friends with both Brian and Mick for about a month further, but Brian’s dislike of Mick only grew in intensity, exactly as I had foreseen. He never relented. Brian’s demands upon my time were enormous, leaving me little time or energy remaining for Mick or anyone else. He would call me up almost every day after school and we would talk until my ear was red. Then I would switch the phone over to my other ear and talk until that too was red. My throat would go hoarse from talking so much. He often complimented me and let me know in countless ways how much he enjoyed talking and being with me. It was not long before he told me I was his best friend. He was never in doubt where my feelings stood. My loyalty to him was unquestionable.
When before I used to spend much time with Mick, I was now spending my time with Brian, sleeping over at his house, where we would typically play board games together. Our favorites were Monopoly, chess, Stratego, and Parcheesi. We went out to the movies, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and arm to arm deep in our chairs watching popular action-oriented films like “Star Wars” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, our favorites. There was always plausible deniability in our friendship. Brian despised anything that was perceived as homosexual or effeminate. I never suspected he might feel the same feelings that I felt, and I never spoke of those things which I knew must not be talked about.
The summer of our eleventh year, Brian and I began playing Dungeons & Dragons with our circle of friends, initially including Mick, because we had to out of common decency, still being his friend nominally if not in fact. Mick had not known the existence of the game until he discovered that I was playing it with Brian, at which point, he ordered his mother to buy him all the books and dice. He learned the bare minimum required. He owned more official D&D merchandise than anyone else, amounting to a hundred dollars’ worth at least.
David and Alice were both founding members also, though David seldom attended, finding the game tedious, an observation I have come to share in later life. Prior to the advent of elaborate role-playing video games, D&D was a fun social occasion. We often invited new friends who sometimes attended for several months before they tired of it. Our bi-weekly meetings, punctuated by incessant talking, arguing and giggling, sounded like a gaggle of geese, a picture reinforced by our being thin, white, and silly. Alice was the sole female in our group. She attended about forty times, which in a bi-weekly group covers the better part of a year, and even hosted meetings at her house on occasion, because we rotated from house to house for variety’s sake and to spare any one mother from having to play host all the time.
Mick’s attempt at popularity was cloying and similar to his mother’s, in that he attempted to buy affection. When he played as Dungeon Master, his dungeons featured powder-puff monsters that fell at the flick of a finger, and our player characters received vast hoards of gold pieces and the most powerful magic items. No player character ever died in Mick’s dungeons. While this was pleasant initially, it disrupted the balance of the game, eliminating the element of risk and challenge, and we expressed our disapproval, eventually proposed banning Mick from being Dungeon Master, which won a popular vote with Brian and me voting against Mick and carrying the others. Alice abstained from voting, not wishing to make an enemy. I believe she tolerated Mick’s approach, because she did not take the game as seriously as Brian and me.
I am confounded at reconstructing the dialogue of a D & D meeting today, because my memories of them are sketchy at best. I fear the proceedings would prove tedious to any reader not already immersed in fantasy role-playing games. RPGs, as they are still termed, were judged abstruse by most people, particularly in the 1980s, when all the rules had to be memorized and interpreted by human players, which resulted in lawyerly debates. Our parents, when they occasionally walked through a room where our meeting was being held, seldom paused to listen, and never elected to participate. The meetings were technical and game-oriented in nature, hence imminently forgettable. Upon my memory, the onslaught of years have performed their appointed tasks.
My competitive nature led me to try to build the strongest and most powerful player character. I spent hours toiling over my player character pages, where attributes were recorded. By rolling the dice numerous times, in effect cheating, I formulated the best, yet still plausible, combination of the six attributes, Strength, Wisdom, Intelligence, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma.
Out of curiosity, wishing to learn how others perceived me, I asked Brian once to write down what he believed were the scores for me (not my player character). He prudently declined at first, but when I persisted, he told me he would write my scores down that evening and hand it to me the next day at school. I made him swear to be honest and not flatter me, and he took me at my word. The next day at recess, I reminded him of this promise. He had hoped I would forget. Reluctantly, he handed me a paper, on which he had written my attributes. I had a below average score in Strength and Wisdom, and only average scores in Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. My only standout score was Intelligence, which was above average. My low score in Strength had not surprised me, but I had hoped he would think me wise or charismatic. Instead, he was saying I lacked wisdom and was not especially skilled at handling people in social situations. As my instructions had been clear, he could not be reproached, and I had to accept this evaluation in silence.
I remember being quite an infamous rulebook lawyer, frequently arguing against the Dungeon Master’s interpretation of the rules. Whenever the rulebook would be checked, nine times out of ten, I was proven correct, and the Dungeon Master had to reverse himself, red-faced. Not all Dungeon Masters were vulnerable. Of our group, Brian knew the rules just about as well as I did, so I usually accepted his decisions without question. Alice knew the rules less well, and I embarrassed her a couple of times. It was a grave social miscalculation on my part. She quit being D.M. after one of those occasions and forever after was a player-character only. The other two, Mick and Chris, had a very poor knowledge of the rules, and I could frequently find mistakes in their conduct as Dungeon Master. The result was that Brian and I were usually elected D.M.
In my thirteenth year, Brian bought me the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook for my birthday. The generously illustrated hardback book cost $15, a fortune to a kid, especially a poor kid like Brian. His mother worked in a profession making not very much money and struggled to make ends meet. She did not give Brian an allowance or anything of the sort. I asked him how he could possibly afford it. He said that he had worked extra chores for his neighbors, over and above his already enormous amount of chores for his mother, to earn the money.
I had long coveted the book, but lacking the funds, had put off buying it. Adults may find it difficult to understand the importance of a fifteen-dollar book, but it was the rulebook for our games, and without it, one was handicapped in playing these games. Words failed me in expressing my gratitude. I felt honored to receive this gift. In the inside cover, he had written his dedication, "To the best friend I've ever had. May your hit points be eternal!” One of my guilty pleasures, when alone, was to pick up this book, open it and read this inscription, a proof of his affection. A year later, when our friendship ceased to exist, the words became a haunting reminder of my loss. A chill crept up my spine even to lay eyes upon the book, let alone his words rendered obsolete by events. I hid the book behind a shelf, never wishing to see it again. But I never threw it away.
My friendship with Brian assumed supreme importance. On Brian’s suggestion, I stopped hanging around Mick and even stopped talking to him. We decided to exclude him from our D&D meetings by neglecting to tell him the time and place of the next meeting. We informed the other players of our move, namely Alice, David, and a boy named Chris, and cajoled them into going along, and because we were more popular than Mick, it was an easy task. We were incredibly cruel, as young people often are. We completely cut Mick off from our company, ignoring his questions and comments, pretending like he did not exist. In the past, we had spent nights over at his house, playing games on his computer and smiling little fake smiles. Now, he was nothing. As might be expected, he was beside himself with grief, anger, and jealousy. He could not believe that I had betrayed him. He decided Brian was the villain, and that he had to work to open my eyes to Brian’s wicked ways. Perhaps his wisdom score was even lower than my own.
Every day after lunch at school Brian and I and one or two other kids would go off to play War, a schoolyard game akin to RISK played with imaginary continents scratched into the ground with a stick. Mick stood alone in the distance, watching us mournfully, every day, a ghastly apparition. Though we felt pity, we felt annoyed by the skulking presence of “Gollum,” our new nickname for Mick, taken from the sad and lonely creature from The Hobbit. He was always watching our faces, gauging how we were getting along, whether our friendship was still healthy. He was deeply jealous. I felt flattered but also annoyed.
Brian would say, "Just ignore him, maybe he'll go away." We cracked jokes about him, invariably cruel ones, while he watched, knowing that we were talking about him. He often approached just to yell something hateful, usually a reference to homosexuality, which is ironic. I can still recall his runs, when he would charge at us, screech a silly insult such as “you guys are a bunch of queers!” and then flap his arms around like a chicken, and run away before Brian could seize and throttle him. It was both humorous and sad, because we had come to despise him. His true motivation, which I saw clearly, though Brian assumed it mere malice, was actually hope, the hope that Brian and I would have a falling out, and that I would come back to him. On one of these runs, he came close to me and whispered in my ear, "Brian will turn on you just like he did me!" Those were prophetic words, though not in the way he believed.
For several weeks, or it may even have been months, Mick devised pitiful ploys with the objective of changing my mind or at least making me feel guilty, which I did, at times. However, what Brian and I shared seemed so strong and good that in the final analysis, I did not care what Mick thought, and did not care if we were cruel. He needed to learn how to adapt. He was not my responsibility.
After he realized his schemes were fruitless, he turned bitter and tried to make us as miserable as he was, or at least, since that was not possible, give us a small taste of it. He watched us carefully and would howl with glee like a madman if one of us looked angry or disturbed. He would run by to throw pinecones, rocks and sticks at us, darting away before we could return fire. Brian could aim well and throw a stick very hard, as Mick soon learned!
All three of us wrote and distributed cartoons about each other, Brian's and mine expressing mutual admiration, but only contempt for Mick's intelligence and character. Mick's cartoons insulted both of us, but sometimes favored me while insulting Brian, in a vain attempt to sow discord. Mick's cartoons were crude and poorly drawn. When it attacked me in some way, Brian replied with his own comic strip, contrasting what he saw as Mick's idiocy and sniveling with the good qualities he saw in me. Brian’s cartoons usually referred to the Spartans, a people whose ethos he admired. His favorite saying was “death before dishonor.”
I wish we had kept those cartoons, because they were funny, if cruel. I have read that most humor requires a lack of sympathy with another’s misfortune. I believe Brian’s Mother discovered and confiscated the bulk of our cartoons, which may even have been for the best. I am of the opinion we were evil. When a person’s affection is spurned, how good is it to rub salt in their wounds? Sure, if Mick had been wiser he would have taken leave of us. Eventually as I recall, he did just that. He took about six months to do so, however, and a month to a youth is like a year to a grown man. Time moves extremely slowly for the young. Be not nostalgic about your childhood. If you remember truly, it was hell. For my part, I am glad to be old. It is a calmer and more pleasant state of existence.
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