By Don Jolly
I can’t do anything on time these days. I get ghosts in November.
My Brooklyn street is lined with bare branches. Rent’s past due but nobody cares. I’ve seen my landlord twice — both times at a distance.
It’s getting cold at night. The corners are clearing. During the day, when there’s no sun, the stoops stand empty. No talk, no cars. Just the long streets whispering, near silence. Wind and trash and bicycles.
I sit in a bare spot on the hardwood floor, leaning against the wall. The place is trashed.
Jack’s here.
“What are you working on?” he asks, shuffling through the papers on my desk.
“The column,” I explain. “You’ll like it — it’s about Dungeons & Dragons again.” We played together.
“Really?” he asks. A purple-covered pamphlet among the notes and clippings catches his eye: A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons: The Catechism of the New Age, says the cover. Beneath the title, a snarling dragon reaches for unsuspecting kids. Jack picks it up, smiles incredulously, and then begins to read aloud. “It’s Christmas morning,” he says.
“Brimming with excitement Junior opens his first gift, a Basic Dungeons and Dragons set. Inside he finds a rule book, some graph paper and an odd set of dice. No game board. No little ‘men’ to move around. He checks the wrapping paper for missing pieces, then begins to open the other packages, hoping to find ‘the rest’ of his game.”
Jack turns to me, excited. “Is this real?” he asks.
“Good question,” I say. The way his eyebrow sags into its socket disgusts me. I wince, and try to stop myself from wincing. Don’t they sell patches where he’s from?
Jack returns to the pamphlet.
“But, Junior has all he needs to play Dungeons & Dragons,” he reads. “The game, you see, doesn’t take place on a board. Instead you play in your head. In D&D, the basic rule is, ‘Use your imagination. Stretch it to the limit.’ Game boards and little men can be so confusing.”
He laughs. “Who wrote that?”
“A couple of Presbyterian ministers,” I answer. “Peter Leithart and George Grant. They’re pretty active writers. Have been since the eighties. Leithart has done some commentaries — Kings and Samuel, I think. Grant does rightwing political stuff, mostly. Lot of attacks on Planned Parenthood. In 1992 he wrote a whole book about Ross Perot.”
Jack is still thumbing through A Christian Response. “Really?”
“Yeah.” I brace my hands in the air, outlining an invisible marquee. “Perot: The Populist Appeal of Strongman Politics,” I say, with grandeur.
“Great title.”
“It is.”
“So why’d they write about D&D?”
“Well, A Christian Response was released in 1987. Throughout the eighties there was a lot of concern about D&D in the media. Evangelical media especially. You remember how it was, back when —”
Jack interrupts, grinning. “When I was alive?”
“When we were kids,” I correct.
He laughs. “Whatever.”
James Dallas Egbert III
“These days, D&D gets treated like any other nerdy hobby,” I say. “But in the eighties and nineties, it had a patina of troubled youth. Isolation and suicide, they said. All because of James Dallas Egbert the Third.”
“Who was that?” Jack scoffs. “Sounds made-up.”
“No! He was real. A bright kid who played D&D in the seventies. In 1979, he was sixteen years old and already a sophomore at Michigan State University, taking courses in computer science There’s a picture of him in that pile, there,” I indicate some papers on my desk.
Jack shuffles through them, finding the photograph. “Good looking kid,” he shrugs.
“Nobody liked him, apparently. He was younger than his classmates — socially awkward. Gay. His best friend at school was a girl from the dorms named Karen Coleman. Dallas nicknamed her ‘Mother.’”
Jack shakes his head. “Yikes.”
“No, no… I mean, yeah, it’s embarrassing, but we have to own that kind of thing, right? I grew up playing D&D, and you played with me, at least a few times... I’ve been doing it for twenty years, now. And I’ve played with more guys like James Dallas Egbert the Third than I care to admit in mixed company.”
“Newsflash,” Jack says. “Nerds play D&D.”
“But being a nerd in 2014 is very different than being a nerd in 1994,” I say. “The Avengers made more than a billion dollars at the box office two years ago. Everybody’s on the Internet, now. Nerd culture is just culture. The old stigmas are being dismantled by apologetic writing. You’ve probably seen some of it. Headlines like ‘Videogames Make You Smarter and Healthier,’ or pieces like that one about writers playing D&D that ran in the New York Times this summer. Ethan Gilsdorf wrote that one. It’s pretty good, actually. In it, he lists off all these creative, successful people who played D&D when they were growing up. Fantasy writers like China Miéville and Cory Doctorow. Stephen Colbert, the T.V. comedian. Even Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic. They all used to play. The message of the piece is that the kind of imagination involved in D&D helped these people strengthen their creative muscles. It’s not just a game for losers, Gilsdorf implies. Winners play it, too.”
Jack shrugs. “You disagree?”
I think for a second. “I disagree with the terms of the conversation.” A breeze whips at my windows, clattering the naked trees. “In this particular place and time, I’d rather lose than win..”
Jack grows serious. “So, obliquely, I’m a loser?” The skin arches above his missing eye.
I can speak my mind to people in his situation. “Yeah,” I nod. ”You’re a loser, I’m a loser — who cares?”
Outside, a garbage truck rattles down the block, big and hollow. “The reactionary literature about D&D in the 1980s, misguided as it was, still had a certain empathy to it,” I continue. “In 1991, a minor Christian television personality named Joan Hake Robie wrote her own entry in the genre, a seventy-six-page booklet called The Truth About Dungeons & Dragons. She dedicated it to ‘all the gifted young men and women’ who play D&D. ‘May your eyes be opened to the truth,’ she wrote.’ I think that’s kind of sweet. At least she cared enough to write.”
Jack shakes his head, disagreeing. “That’s not empathy,” he says. “That’s a pitch.”
I shrug. “Take what you can get,” I say.
“Whatever.” Jack’s eyes return to the photograph. “So what happened to him, exactly?”
William Dear
“Oh, right. James Dallas Egbert disappeared on August 15th, 1979. He got stoned, had lunch with ‘Mother,’ and then just vanished. He was missing for almost a month, and the press had a field day. A young genius missing, maybe dead. The Egbert family hired a private investigator named William Dear to help find him.”
“This guy?” Jack asks, holding up a photo from my mess of notes. “The dude with the tommy gun?”
“That’s him.”
Jack shakes his head, still looking at the picture. “This all seems fake.”
“Oh, it’s real. Or real as anything in print. Dear was flamboyant. In the introduction to his book The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert the III, which came out in 1984, he bragged about some of his exploits being turned into episodes of Simon & Simon and Matt Houston.”
“Never seen ‘em,” Jack says.
“Detective shows,” I explain. “Dear started interviewing the kids who knew Dallas at Michigan State. He found out that the kid was playing a strange new game called Dungeons & Dragons. He also found out that Michigan State, like a lot of colleges, had a network of steam tunnels running under the campus. Sometimes, Dear learned, Dallas and his D&D friends would play the game in those tunnels. The detective thought maybe Dallas had gone down there by himself one day and gotten lost. The press ate it up. They thought D&D was to blame.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jack says. “That’s like blaming chess or something. Dungeons & Dragons is a game, you play it around a table and roll dice.”
“Yeah,” I acknowledge. “But it’s an imagination game. It’s not confined to a board, and each session links up with each other session. D&D games can go on for months — years. You know how hard it is to explain that to anyone who hasn’t played.”
“Not really,” Jack says. “I never explained it anybody.”
“I don’t know if I have either, really. I’ve tried.”
“Yeah, I read your column every month.”
“Really?” I say, not believing him.
“Oh sure,” Jack answers. “I keep up with the internet like crazy. They’ve got a fiber-optic line in Hell.”
He laughs uproariously. I don’t.
“ Seriously,” he says. “Nobody reads your column.”
“The point I was trying to make last month is that D&D is a game so large, and so complicated that it has more in common with a model of reality than Checkers or Risk… It’s a space where modern people play at things that their real lives make difficult or impossible.”
“Like believing in God,” Jack says.
“Or talking to ghosts,” I answer.
“Whatever.”
“Now, imagine you’re a writer for the New York Times, or the Dayton Journal Herald, in 1979. How do you explain something like D&D in a paragraph? The game was less than a decade old, at that point. The people who played it were part of a tiny subculture of hobby gamers. Information on the topic wasn’t exactly easy to get. As a result, most of the stories about Egbert focused on the superficial, talking about how D&D contained hideous monsters and magic spells. People thought it was witchcraft.”
“I remember that,” Jack says. “What was that old comic? Dark Dungeons? The one where the girl starts playing D&D, and gets sucked into a witches’ coven or something?”
“I’ll get there,” I say. “Dark Dungeons comes later. The immediate aftermath of the James Dallas Egbert disappearance is stuff like that Rona Jaffe novel from 1981, Mazes and Monsters. They made it into a T.V. movie the next year, starring Tom Hanks as a college student who gets caught up in a game like D&D and then goes insane. He ends up trying to jump off the World Trade Center, thinking he can fly.” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfxXug5ZMdk]
Jack giggles. “I have spells!” he quotes, pathetically. “That movie’s pretty good.”
“Yeah, it’s funny,” I say. “But people were scared. In 1983, a woman named Patricia A. Pulling started an anti-D&D advocacy group — Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or B.A.D.D.. Her son played the game at a school club, and when he killed himself in 1982, she blamed it and sued its publisher. “60 Minutes” did a whole segment with her and one of the game’s creators, Gary Gygax, in 1985. A real he-said-she-said thing.”
Jack shakes his head, disbelieving. “This whole thing is so strange,” he says. A pause. “Did Egbert commit suicide?”
“Eventually.”
Jack sucks air behind his back teeth. “Tcch!”
“Dear, the detective, tracked him to an oil town called Morgan City, in Louisiana,” I explain. “This was mid-September, 1979. Dallas had been working on a derrick. By September 13th, he was back with his family. Dear and the Egberts never really cleared up where the kid had been, or why he’d left in the first place. The D&D theory was all anyone had. About a year later, on August 11th, 1980, Dallas put a pistol to his right temple and fired. He never regained consciousness. Died five days later.”
“Poor guy,” Jack says.
“Poor guy,” I agree. “Now, look back at A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons. The first line of the first chapter.”
Jack finds the little booklet, retrieving it from a confusion of scraps. “Parents are concerned,” he reads, aloud. “And well they should be. Our children are growing up in a very hazardous world. Not only are they forced to pick their way through a complex maze of conflicting values at school, in the neighborhood, and out in the marketplace, but they are even being assaulted in the ‘safety’ of their own homes.”
He chuckles. “By Dungeons & Dragons?” he asks.
“By Dungeons & Dragons,” I affirm.
Jack puts the book back, smiling. “So, these Christian authors didn’t really understand it, right? The game?”
“Some of them tried to,” I said. “Leithart and Grant actually do a pretty good job. Better than Rona Jaffe, anyway. Their problem with D&D, as they put it in A Christian Response, isn’t really that the game contains magic or monsters. They were more concerned by the imagination involved. Here, give me the book.”
Jack hands it over. I flip to page five, and read from section titled “The Moral Dilemma.”
“Of course, not everyone who plays the game becomes suicidal or homicidal,” I read. “One of the chief defenses of [D&D] is that [it stimulates] the imagination. This is undeniably true. The question is whether we want our imagination (or that of our children) to be stimulated in this particular way.”
“Jesus,” Jack says.
“Exactly. D&D allows players to imagine a miniature world, where God is just part of a game system, a piece of the whole, like a rook on chessboard. For Leithart and Grant, that goes too far. It’s blasphemy.” I thumb to the book’s conclusion. “Scripture encourages leisure, play and even role-playing, though always within the limits of moral Law,” I read aloud. “In the context of these standards […] our imaginations find true freedom. Like the sheep to which the Scripture so often compares us, our freest play is within the fold. Outside, there is only the bondage of fear that allows for no real leisure.”
“It’s about control,” Jack says.
“It is,” I agree. “But, on this point at least, Leithart and Grant aren’t too far from the position taken by Rona Jaffe, or any other ‘secular’ person caught up in the D&D panic of the eighties. The premise of the whole fiasco was that the imagination is a dangerous place. James Egbert got lost there. He never came back. There were a whole slew of secular and religious books saying roughly the same thing, all the way into the early nineties.”
© Jack T. Chick and Chick Publications
© Jack T. Chick and Chick Publications
© Jack T. Chick and Chick Publications
“So, what about Dark Dungeons? That was a Christian thing, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, sure,” I say, getting up from my seat to browse through a shoebox of old papers. Dark Dungeons is a tiny, illustrated pamphlet, something like a flip-book. Its author, Jack T. Chick, is a reclusive evangelical cartoonist who’s been screaming from the margins of American religious life since the early sixties. His “Chick Tracts,” including Dark Dungeons, tell simple, frightening stories in pictures, with the ultimate objective of bringing lost souls to Christ. Chick’s Christian readers distribute his tracts far and wide, on missionary crusades and in any public space that accepts free literature. Their method is to win souls through horror — to literally scare the hell out of people.”
“Dark Dungeons was released in 1984,” I say, retrieving my copy from the scraps. I pass it to Jack. He scoffs.
“I remember this,” he says. “This girl, Debbie, starts playing D&D with a creepy looking woman named Ms. Frost. Eventually she joins some kind of cult, where she learns to ‘really cast spells.’”
“And her friend Marcie gets so wrapped up in the game that she kills herself,” I add. “Just like Egbert.”
Jack pauses. “Here’s what I never understood,” he says. “This idea that the magic and stuff in D&D is real, that it’s all some kind of training to join a Satanic order or something.”
“Chick was always into conspiracies,” I explain. “He really believes that his tract making has made him the target of Satan’s agents on Earth. Chick thinks they’re everywhere, hiding in plain sight, operating through an endlessly complex series of clandestine organizations. In the end, it all goes back to the Vatican.”
“The Vatican?” Jack asks.
“Well, Chick isn’t a formal member of any Christian organization, but he’s definitely protestant. His view of the Catholic Church would fit into a Thomas Pynchon novel. Or Robert Anton Wilson.”
“So D&D is a Catholic conspiracy.”
“Yeah, roughly. Or part of one. Debbie, the main character of Dark Dungeons, gets saved at the end of the tract by a lecturer who encourages her to burn her game manuals and rock and roll records in a bonfire, right? That lecturer was based on somebody Chick knew — an anti-occult crusader named John Wayne Todd. Todd used to travel around speaking at churches about ‘the occult‘ in the late seventies and early eighties. He organized bonfires like that. For him, the almost all of ‘secular‘ pop culture was a satanic power play.”
Jack points to a page in the booklet — a picture of the curly-haired man putting his hand on Debbie’s shoulder, saying “In the name of Jesus, I order you spirits of the occult to leave Debbie.” Sure enough, the girl’s body is being vacated by disconsolate ghosts. “Lord Jesus, I repent,” she says.
“That was a real guy?” Jack asks.
“Well,” I shrug. “John Wayne Todd is a little slippery. He claimed to have been raised in a coven, and maintained that his family was highly placed in the secret, Satanic cult that ran the world. He called it the Illuminati, of course. Todd was saved, he said, in San Antonio, Texas, back in 1972. Apparently he had just seen The Cross and the Switchblade, an evangelical movie starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada. On the way out of his screening, someone handed him a Chick Tract.”
“Crazy,” Jack says.
“Maybe,” I acknowledge. “Or made up. Todd and Chick worked together for a decade, and cartoonist put out a lot of comics and pamphlets based on Todd’s stories of the witch-cult. Dark Dungeons was part of that.”
“You can tell they sure never played the game,” he says, closing the tract. “Just the way people in this thing talk about it… ‘I’m fighting the Zombie. Tell her I’ll see her tonight,’ or ‘Debbie, your cleric has been raised to the 8th level.’ It’s all just — wrong.”
“‘I used the mind bondage spell on my father,’” I say, quoting from Dark Dungeons. “He was trying to stop me from playing D&D.”
Jack giggles, crinkling his wound. “Right,” he says. “There’s no divide between the game and the real world in here. And all Todd’s conspiracies are true.”
“He ran with some serious people, apparently,” I say. “In interviews Todd claimed to have seen George McGovern kill a girl during a ritual sacrifice. Todd was the ‘occult advisor‘ to the Kennedy’s, too, of course. All before he got saved.”
Outside, the wind picks up. The sun is almost set. “Does this thing go all the way to the J.F.K. assassination?” asks Jack. “I mean, of course it does.”
“Well,” I say. “J.F.K. wasn’t really assassinated. Todd says that was all a sham. He used to hang out on Jack Kennedy’s yacht in the seventies.”
Jack rolls his eyes. “Of course.”
We sit, reading separately. It gets dark.
“What are we going to do with all this?” Jack asks.
I pause. “Well, as I see it, this is all about secrets and games. Stories and imagination. Systems, ‘real’ or not, that have places set for humanity, and politics, and God. We think there’s a division between fantasy and reality, but there isn’t. It’s all a big mess.”
I look around, at my apartment, which I haven’t cleaned since I got my Master’s Degree, at the end of the summer. Papers everywhere. Paper and trash. “This is the world we live in,” I say. Jack looks out the window. It starts to rain.
“You know what really happened to James Dallas Egbert?” I ask.
Jack’s expression doesn’t change.
“He was young. He felt pressured. His mother, his real mother, had driven him to enter college early, and she wasn’t satisfied with anything but perfect grades. Dallas felt trapped, like he was in a game whose next twenty moves had been worked out ahead of time. So he left. He went into the steam tunnels, first, but not to play. He went to be alone.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The detective, William Dear, put it in his book. The Dungeon Master.”
Jack nods. “Sure.”
“Dallas tried to commit suicide in the tunnels,” I explain. “It didn’t work, so he crawled to a friend’s house. From there, he got pawned off on friends and friends of friends, until he ended up in Louisiana.”
The rain gets harder.
“But before that, when he was alone, Dallas felt, for a minute, like he’d gotten away. ‘I sat down against the wall, so I could lean against it,’ he told Dear. ‘It was chilly and I was wrapped in my blanket. I had food within reaching distance. It was heaven.’”
We sit for a while. The shadows lengthen.
Finally, Jack faces me. I stare. “What do you think really happened?” he asks. “To me, I mean.”
“Well,” I say. “I think you were bright kid, but a little weird. We met in the fifth grade, but we weren’t really friends. You played the game with me.”
“Sure,” he shrugged. “Right so far.”
“I think you started shooting up in high school. And then you dropped out. We saw each other a few times after that. Someone cut your face in that flophouse on the East side. That’s how you lost the eye. Eventually you just — got away. The cops found you in that drainage ditch.”
“Eh, pretty close.”
***
Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)
Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)
***
Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.