Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  If it weren’t for my friend Jono, I might have given up on games and spent the rest of my childhood looking into those “sports” I’d heard so much about. Instead, on his recommendation, I rented a game called Final Fantasy.

  Developed and published by Square in 1987, Final Fantasy wasn’t released in North America until 1990. It was an RPG, or role-playing game, a term mostly associated with Dungeons & Dragons at the time. What made Final Fantasy different from other video games was the structure. Instead of playing as a single, predefined character, I got to play as four characters of my own creation. Each character was defined by a class, or skill set. They could be warriors and thieves, black belts and mages. Choosing a character’s skill was exciting, but getting to name them was the real attraction. The game only gave you four letters, but that’s all I needed. Walt was the perfect fit.

  For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to play as Mario or Samus or Link. I could be me, only better. Final Fantasy’s Walt was a thief, stealthy and swift. The other three characters were idealized versions of my friends. Jono was a black mage, master of dark magic. My friend Phillip was a black belt, mainly because he was the strongest kid I knew, but also because Phil fit the game’s four-letter limit. The final party member was a white mage healer named Sara, Alli, Katy, or whoever else I had a crush on at the time. My history of unrequited love is written across old video-game save files. These girls didn’t know I existed in the real world, but on my TV screen, they fought by my side against the forces of evil.

  After Final Fantasy, the only games I played were those that let me change my character’s name. Next was The Legend of Zelda, which closed the loop on my Nintendo Cereal System fantasies. After that was Dragon Warrior, which I quickly wrote off as a cheap Final Fantasy clone, even though it had been released a year earlier. Then came the wonderfully silly StarTropics, which brought the experience into the real world by including a paper map I had to dampen to reveal a secret code necessary to complete the game. When I played these games, I didn’t have to be Walt with the big ears and Coke-bottle glasses. I could be strong, capable, and most of all, important. That was the real fantasy, I think—not power or heroism but relevancy. In those games, I mattered.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS A kid, my gaming was limited strictly to consoles, like the Nintendo Entertainment System. Our house wasn’t what you’d call technologically advanced. My parents weren’t the type to throw out something that still worked. When everyone else in our neighborhood was going crazy over cordless phones, we were still rocking rotary classic.

  I knew people played games on their computers, I just didn’t know how. My computer couldn’t run anything more complex than solitaire. I’d visit my local game store, Babbage’s, and stare longingly at PC games like The 7th Guest, Alone in the Dark, Phantasmagoria, and The Beast Within. Their box art was dark and disturbing, like something you’d find in the horror aisle of a video store. It screamed, “This is for adults.” I was intrigued. What kid wouldn’t be? But I’d never find out what those boxes contained, because PC games are evil.

  Here’s what happens when you buy a PC game:

  You convince your mom to drive you to the mall. Not your dad, because he already thinks you spend too much time playing Super Nintendo. If he finds out the computer can also play games, he’s likely to throw it out. At the mall, you run ahead of your mom, making sure you’re outside her shouting range when she passes through the young men’s section of JCPenney, otherwise you’ll be trying on slacks for the next hour. Also, no one wants their mom looming over them at the game store. The cool kids would laugh at you. Everyone knows cool kids don’t have moms. At the store, you agonize over which game to buy. Nothing you see is familiar. There are no mustachioed plumbers or blue-finned hedgehogs; those are kid’s games. At thirteen, you’re practically a grown-up. Using your adult intellect, you select the game most likely to show you some boobs, then make your purchase, being careful not to look the cashier in the eye. Afterward, you meet your mom in the food court, where you eat a corn dog because corn dogs are delicious. You lie to her about the game you bought, keeping it carefully wrapped in its bag so she can’t see it. If she sees it, she’ll know about the boobs. On your way out of the mall, you stick by your mother’s side. You’re almost in the clear; you just have to play it cool. Too late, you realize your mistake—JCPenney is having a sale on slacks, and you’re just growing so gosh-darn fast. An hour later, you finally head home. Alone in your room, you unbox your latest treasure and load its disc into the CD-ROM drive, at which point the computer looks you square in the face and says, “Eat a bowl of dicks.” Oh, did you want to play the game you just bought? Well, you can’t, because the application wasn’t able to start correctly, or the cabinet file had an invalid digital signature, or the VC++ runtime redistributable package wasn’t installed successfully. What do these things mean? The computer isn’t going to tell you. Ha ha. The end.

  After the third time, I decided PC gaming wasn’t for me.

  Once more, Jono stepped in to save me from my foolish ways. At his house, he introduced me to a PC game called Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero. Like Final Fantasy, it was a role-playing game that allowed me to create my own character. Again, I played as a thief. When I was a kid, I got picked on a lot. Thieves had an uncanny ability to avoid detection. That appealed to me.

  The best part of being a thief was the Thieves Guild. Hidden under the floorboards of the Aces and Eights Tavern, the guild was a place where thieves could be thieves. You could fence stolen goods, play a game of Dag-Nab-It with the Chief, or just hang out with Crusher, the Guild’s Orc bodyguard. It was like being in a club. It was so much fun, I began to wonder why it couldn’t carry over to the real world. Stealing wasn’t magic; it was a real thing people did all the time. If my friends and I could establish our own Thieves Guild, we’d be rich. I even knew exactly what we could steal—adult magazines. We’d all seen them sitting on the top magazine rack of the bookstore in our local mall: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, taunting us from behind their black wrappers. For a group of adolescent boys in a pre-Internet world, these magazines were more valuable than gold.

  We met in the mall’s food court after school. It was far enough away from the bookstore that none of the employees would see us together. It was also near the corn dog stand.

  The Fixer entered the store first. He found a book of which there was only one copy, hid it somewhere in the store, and then returned to the food court. Next came the Lookout. That was me. My job was to browse books and keep an eye out for trouble. If things went south, I’d leave the store, signaling everyone else to abort the operation.

  Once I was in position, the Decoy, Flipper, and Bagman entered in quick succession. The Decoy went straight to the counter and asked for help locating the book our Fixer had hidden. One of the two clerks followed the Decoy to the back of the store, at which point the Bagman approached the counter, ready to purchase some comics. While this took place, our Flipper subtly grabbed an adult magazine off the top rack and placed it on a lower shelf, inside a copy of Sports Illustrated.

  The Bagman, now holding a bag of newly acquired comics, headed for the exit. On his way out, he spotted something on a table and stopped to look. At the same time, the Flipper took a magazine to the counter and paid for it. While the clerk was distracted, the Bagman picked up the Sports Illustrated, casually dropped the adult magazine into his bag of comics, then exited the store. The plan went off without a hitch. I wish I could say the same for Phase Two.

  My idea was to rip out the pages of the magazine and sell them at school. That’s how it worked in Quest for Glory: you stole something so you could sell it. Before the dawn of dial-up, porn was in high demand and low supply, so we could charge whatever we wanted. The price was set at twenty dollars a page. We were going to be rich—at least, we would have been, if there were such a thing as honor among thieves.

  In the end, our Flipper was overcome with guilt.
He ratted us out to our parents. We were grounded and banned from the mall; all fair punishments. But it didn’t stop there. Faced with the knowledge that their children had become perverted criminals, they did what any parent in the South would do. They sent us to church.

  * * *

  IN THE BIBLE BELT, religion is a way of life—less of a doctrine, more of a social obligation. You can opt out, but you can’t escape it.

  South Louisiana is historically Catholic, due to its large French and Creole communities. North Louisiana, where I’m from, leans more to the Evangelical side of things. We like our preachers loud, our sex postmarital, and our choruses praiseworthy. It’s an intoxicating mixture of theatrical drama and real-world peril. Impressionable teenager that I was, I couldn’t resist.

  First off, the Evangelical narrative was fantastic. With its emphasis on the book of Revelation, it interpreted nearly anything as a sign of the End Times. The world around me was a battlefield where angels and demons fought for the greatest prize of all—my very soul. It was like living in an action movie only I was aware of, and it was all building to the show-stopping climax, when I’d be whisked away to Heaven to watch the apocalyptic extravaganza from the safety of my cloud-cushioned box seats, bought and paid for by the blood of Jesus Christ, hallelujah A-men.

  Another great thing was the sinning. As Evangelicals, we wanted to dance and drink and fornicate—we just weren’t allowed. I was taught to fight temptation, and I did. But that never stopped it from building up in my chest like a balloon until I couldn’t take it anymore and would finally just give in. Afterward, it took only a prayer for forgiveness to wash away my shame and start the cycle all over again. Honestly, there was nothing better. Candy is always sweeter when you know you shouldn’t eat it.

  The best part was that everything happened for a reason. This wasn’t a trite, half-assed sentiment. Everything literally happened for a reason, good or bad, and the reason was always me. If my mom died in a tragic car accident, it was because God wanted to make me stronger. If mom left me a million dollars in her will, God was rewarding my faith. If I blew Mom’s millions on cocaine and hookers, it was because God wanted me to fall so He could lift me back up. The Evangelical universe revolved around me, and I thought that was grand.

  High-stakes adventure with no real risk, a reward loop driven by delayed gratification, and the emotional security of socially acceptable narcissism: no wonder I was drawn to organized religion. It was structured just like a video game.

  * * *

  IT WAS MY LOVE of the Lord that led me to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, the largest Baptist university in the world. I come from a military family, so it was understood that I’d attend college on an air force scholarship. In exchange for tuition, I agreed to four years of active service, to be completed upon graduation.

  My plan was to study religion and become a military chaplain. But college has a way of shifting your priorities. There’s something about the unsupervised freedom found within an idealized coed environment that makes you question everything you once believed. That something is called casual sex. Let’s be honest: God is great, but He’s not much of a cuddler. He and I didn’t even make it to the end of freshman orientation before deciding to see other people.

  Our breakup was made official when I switched majors to telecommunications, the closet thing available to a film degree. The way I saw it, when I graduated college, the air force would slot me into whatever role they wished, regardless of my major. I might as well study something I enjoyed. It was in Baylor’s communications school, the Castellaw Communications Center, that I learned of the NoZe Brothers, a secret society of gadflies and thieves. The NoZe had plagued Baylor for almost eighty years. The administration desperately wanted to expel them from campus, but no one knew who they were. Aside from their very rare public appearances, the only proof the NoZe existed was a newspaper called The Rope. Every so often, a new issue would appear on campus, tackling topical issues through the use of satire, story, and fat jokes.

  Everything I had wanted as a kid was right there in front of me. I had to join.

  According to The Rope, the application process was simple. All I had to do was write a humorous article. I chose to analyze a nonexistent book, Itty Bitty Bang Bang: The Soft & Seedy World of Midget Pornography, including quotes and works cited. The instructions said to print it out, wait until nightfall on a given date, locate a certain church, go around back, find the bearded man carrying a flaming torch, and throw my article in a nearby garbage can. If my submission was deemed worthy, the NoZe would contact me. I did as I was told. Around 3:00 a.m., I received a call. What happened after that I can’t really say. I remember being rolled down an assembly line in an abandoned industrial building while watching a fat, shirtless man pretend to smoke cigarettes through his belly button. Aside from that, the memories are hazy.

  * * *

  BEING A MEMBER OF a secret society isn’t something you broadcast to the world, especially if it includes a regular schedule of vandalism, breaking and entering, and theft. But since the statutes of limitations have surely expired on any alleged crimes, I don’t mind saying that yes, I was a NoZe Brother.

  Unsurprisingly, the military didn’t look kindly on my membership in an antiauthoritarian group dedicated to the humiliation of Baylor’s leadership and principles. A semester before graduation, my scholarship was pulled and my commission was canceled. It was entirely my fault. If I’d kept my mouth shut, the air force never would have known about me and the NoZe. I just didn’t see a point in joining a secret society if I couldn’t brag about it.

  I’d been banking on that guaranteed four-year job. Now that it was gone, I had nothing but a degree in telecommunications, a 45 percent attendance rate, and a 2.4 GPA. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

  You see, working on The Rope had kindled something inside of me. I’d spent many late nights composing articles and stories, and through them discovered a true passion for writing. It was a compulsion. If I wasn’t writing The Rope, I was writing screenplays, short stories, anything that put words on paper.

  It hit me fast. One moment, I was looking at words, simple tools of communication and expression. The next, I blinked, so fast my brain didn’t register the action, but when my eyes opened, everything had changed. Those words, once simple letters, had allowed me to see them for what they truly were—ancient runes, almost alchemical in power and potential. I knew then exactly what I wanted to do with my life. There was no more confusion. I didn’t want to be a cartoon, a preacher, an officer, or even a thief. The rest of my life would be lived in service to those goddamned unassuming words.

  That’s exactly what I told my parents when I called to tell them I’d been kicked out of the air force. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything will be fine.

  “I’m going to be a writer.”

  3

  * * *

  BREAKING IN

  There is an upside to desperation.

  Creating art is hard, even painful. Writing in particular can require days, if not months, of solitude, doubt, and struggle against your better judgment. To be good, you have to put in the time and the effort. You have to consume the work of others, both good and bad. You have to write, then revise and revise and revise and revise until you can accept it is time to let go. Most importantly, you have to sit down every day and punch yourself in the face repeatedly, hoping in the end you will come out the winner in a fight against no one but yourself. You can teach yourself to live this way, but it does not come naturally.

  Contentment, comfort, financial security—these are the natural enemies of the aspiring writer. Humans instinctually flee from suffering; it is hardwired into our DNA. When that suffering is emotional, writing can serve as an act of retreat. This is why it’s important for writers to suffer, in one form or another. The good must be driven out until only the negative remains: jealousy, pettiness, desperation. And the greatest of these is desperation.

  A y
ear after graduation, I was living in New York, subleasing a ten-by-twelve room in Alphabet City. All I had was a laptop, a suitcase full of clothes, a broken futon I’d found on the curb, and a metal end table with wire baskets and a wooden top, which served as both my desk and dresser. It was June; my rent was paid to the end of August. I had around two thousand dollars I’d managed to save up by slinging CDs at a mall in Austin, Texas. It was just enough money to see me through the summer. That gave me three months to figure shit out, find a job, sign a lease, and start a life in New York City, a place where I knew next to no one.

  Just because I was unemployed doesn’t mean I was without work. While living in Austin, I had connected with a pair of aspiring producers working with a director who lived in Hell’s Kitchen. For the life of me, I can’t remember the guy’s name, so Guy is what we’ll call him. Guy directed rap videos but was looking to move into feature films. He had a script: a 1980s true-crime story about Jamaican drug dealers in Brooklyn. It was in rough shape. The man who penned it had lived through the events, so he knew them firsthand, but he wasn’t a screenwriter. The producers suggested I could take a few passes at the script. I suggested they pay me.