Revenge of the Gamer

I’ve learned my first lesson about blogging.  People don’t care how my novel is coming.  They don’t care about philosophy or my nihilistic meanderings.  What they want are more stories.  The feedback on A Mullet and a Bloodstained Jacket and  Blooshot Eyes and Unsteady Feet have been tremendous. 

As nearly all of my handful of readers have requested more of the same I feel obligated to deliver.  From now on I will post a story from my past at least once a week, and if I do an update on the projects I’m working on it will be secondary.

This week’s story is one that still makes me smile.  When I turned sixteen I lived in New York.  At that time I had not one, not two but three jobs.  I had a paper route, I was the caretaker of a park and I worked at McDonalds two days week.  In addition I ran schemes like selling stolen porn out of my locker at school, but that’s a story for another time.

The point is I had money.  Every week I pulled in around a hundred dollars, which was a small fortune for a teenager in 1992.  Most of the money went to paying for clothes and the other things I needed for school, because my family was pretty poor.  The rest paid for junk food, novels and roleplaying books.

When I moved from New York to California all that changed.  I was the kid with long hair and a blood stained jacket, which was great for meeting girls and becoming the popular ‘bad boy’ at school.  It wasn’t so great for finding a job.  I wallpapered the little town of Rohnert Park with applications, but I didn’t get a single call back.

In hindsight had I been willing to cut my hair I could have found a job easily.  But at that age cutting my hair was one step above castration.  That meant I was perpetually broke.  My parents didn’t believe in allowance, which meant the only money I had access to came from scams I ran.  Those were fun but intermittent at best.

This sets the backstory for a discovery I made during my senior year of high school.  At the time my gaming group hung out with an older guy named Robert.  Prior to meeting him the oldest person in our group was Shawn, who was seventeen.  Robert was thirty.

The biggest reason we hung out with him was the fact that he had his own place, which gave us a place to game.  That setup lasted for a long time, until Robert and Jeff got into a fight.  Robert actually called the cops on Jeff, so we kicked him from our little group.

A few days later I stopped by Robert’s to pick up my gaming books.  He’d just started playing a new card game called Magic the Gathering, and asked if I’d like to try a few games before I took off.  I really liked the art on the cards, and the idea of the game was intriguing.

Robert showed me how to play and gave me a fistful of common cards to start my own budding collection.  It was a mismatched stack of cards, but it was a start.  I fell in love with the game and wasn’t the only one.  All around me friends were picking up Magic, and it spread like wildfire through Sonoma county.

Within a few weeks I found a comic shop that sold the cards, and my friends and I took to hanging out at New Century every day.  We weren’t the only ones.  Dozens of high school and college kids found the place, and finding games was plentiful.  Every day seemed to bring a few new faces.

Many people played games for Ante.  Each player put up a card from their decks, and the winner took both.  I was too poor to afford cards, but  found that I was very, very good at the game.  I won nearly every game I played, and used those games to increase my collection.

By the night of the first tournament I’d compiled a ruthless little black deck.  I was nervous and expected to be knocked out quickly.  Imagine my surprise when I stomped the crap out of everyone. 

I’d have won that tournament, but my parents gave me a 10pm curfew.   After four straight wins I dropped out and went home dejectedly. 

The next week finals were over so my curfew vanished.  I dominated the tournament, crushing everyone I went against.  I still remember dethroning ‘Hurricane Chad’ and taking the title from him.  Winning that first tournament was the start of something great.

I won every tournament for the next two months.  Each win gave me more cards and my deck grew stronger, which made it easier to stay at the top.  I also found I had a knack for working favorable trades (read: ripping off gullible kids and giving them crap for their ultra rare cards).

As the game’s popularity increased so did the value of the cards.  Suddenly my collection was worth a couple thousand dollars, and by the time my first semester of college started I was making a living buying, selling and trading Magic cards.

There were two brackets for tournaments, doubles and singles.  By this point I was at the top of both.  I was untouchable and I loved it.  I regularly used a card called Bad Moon, and the employees at New Century gave me the theme song Bad Moon Rising.  Every time I played someone they’d belt it out over the store stereo, and people would start cheering.

Most of the players were guys, but not all.  There were a few girls, all of whom were cute.  The best was a stunning Japanese woman with a soft smile and smoky brown eyes.  Darelene was twenty-seven to my eighteen, and I figured I’d never have a prayer so I didn’t even consider asking her out.

 She showed up for a few weeks in a row before I got close enough to actually meet her.  We ended up playing in a doubles tournament when she was partnered with a friend of mine named Damon.  My partner John was the guy who sponsored me into TKE and ran the store. 

The game was one of the hardest fought I’ve ever played, but in the end Darlene and Damon knocked us out of the tournament.  It was the first time anyone had done that, but I didn’t mind.  I was too busy making eyes at the hot asian chick, who gave her name as Darlene.  John caught me looking at her, and decided it would be funny to play a prank.

See, I was the youngest member in Tau Kappa Epsilon, and they saw me as a sort of mascot which made me fair game for pranks of all sorts.  New Century was owned by three members of TKE, which is how they’d originally found me.  I’d have never considered joining a fraternity on my own.

John told Darlene that I desperately wanted to meet her, and that I was head over heels in love.  Then John came to me and told me how badly Darlene wanted me to ask her out.  I totally fell for it, and asked her on a date that very night.

Unbeknownst to John he was actually right.  Darlene had been waiting for me to ask her out, and had apparently found me because I was at the top of both the singles and doubles division.

Less than twelve months later we were married.  Some prank, huh? 

I went on to win a lot more tournaments, culminating with the 1995 Origins tournament.  I won box after box of cards and for three years I didn’t have a real job. 

I made my living playing a card game and met my wife doing it.  I even joined a fraternity in the bargain.  It was one of the best chapters of my life.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.