Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  This guy was the weirdest kid in the school.

  Just what we were looking for.

  On the next Saturday we knocked on the door and watched it open with a creak. He walked away without a greeting and we followed. The unfinished basement had a concrete floor and stone walls, and was lit by the sunlight of the small eye-level windows. Greg sat at the head of a square wooden table surrounded by four chairs. He had a binder, three pads of paper and pencils, and various sets of dice.

  “First things first, you’ve got to roll to create your characters,” he said.

  We sat at the table and began the painstaking process of creating characters by rolling die after die. After we were done Greg took us through a beginner dungeon. For those unfamiliar with D&D, it’s just talking. The dungeon master describes the action and asks questions, and the players answer. There is no game board or figurines. The entire game takes place in the imagination. We played all day, pausing only long enough for a run to Nick’s for veal Parmesan subs, which we took back to Greg’s house to eat while we continued playing. When we finally stumbled out of the basement it was dark, and we walked home in a daze. Like most D&D players, we were hooked after the first hit.

  I’m not sure how my friends and I spent all our free time before that day, but after that, all our weekends were booked. D&D was exactly what we needed. You see, we were beyond Roll-Land and Papa Gino’s, where boys and girls would congregate in groups and horse around on a Friday night. We were in high school now and people were dating. But not us, not yet.

  There is something about a boy’s mind at that age; I think that the body is aware that it is about to be overtaken by a complete obsession with women that far exceeds your early teen years. The body knows it’s powerful, and will soon become all consuming, so the mind tries to distract itself as long as it can with activities like D&D. The maps, the hit-points, the treasure, the details. It’s why teenaged boys of the 1970s loved The Lord of the Rings. It’s full of maps and family trees, all perfect for memorizing: “Aragorn, Son of Arathorn! Gimli, Son of Gloin!” The more details, the better. You’re trying to fill your mind with stuff to take up space and keep it busy before the total onslaught of women. The final battle. The end of boyhood. The point of no return.

  We’d play from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, with a short break at the Apolostic Church on Sunday at 11 a.m. My parents weren’t thrilled with my D&D addiction, but they put up with it and chalked it up to my being “creative.” They were also surprisingly tolerant of its occult themes. My mother took it in stride, occasionally correcting me if I was excitedly talking about one of our adventures.

  “How was your game?” she’d ask.

  “Amazing. We killed a Beholder and captured a gnome god. . . .”

  “That’s nice but there’s only one God,” she’d remind me.

  *

  When you look at my journal from high school you can divide it into two distinct sections: before girls and after. The first part of the diary references only two things: Dungeons, and Dragons. To wit:

  Yesterday Greg, Rob, Bob and myself established the Dungeons & Dragons Hall of Fame. So far the members are Corbon the Great, Crimp Kadiva, Nuklo Vadantus, and Gorian the Brave. This weekend is all Dungeons & Dragons. We’ll start Friday night. It will be one of the best adventures ever.

  Then the next entry:

  Yesterday’s Dungeons & Dragons adventure was the best ever!

  I was the unsung hero. I helped kill the Frost Giant Chief and did excellent throughout the entire adventure. The dance this weekend was cancelled because of snow but we’ll play some pretty good D&D.

  Are you seeing a pattern here?

  Our characters teleported from the glacial rift of the Frost Giant Garl to five miles north to the Five Fire Giant settlement. Now they’re nice and warm.

  Fire Giants are bigger and meaner than Frost Giants. We played Dungeons and Dragons again tonight. It was pretty good. We killed a few Fire Giants and then just walked through the place taking all the treasure. I have the entire adventure in the Dungeons and Dragons log.*

  If you are a healthy teenage young man and you are writing entries like that in your journal, then some self-reflection and redirection of priorities might be in order. We’d been playing every weekend during the school year, so when summer arrived, in an attempt to save ourselves from losing all of the pigment in our skin and turning into social outcasts forever, Bob and I tried out for a summer play—a rootin’ tootin’ wild-west musical. We claimed our newfound interest in theater was an intellectual pursuit, something to pass the time between dungeons, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the mind at work but the body, and we were drawn to the theater for the same reason most guys are: the female-to-male ratio is always in our favor.

  I immediately fell for one of the actresses, Anne Lynch. She was playing the lead role, the delicate ingénue Rose Blossom, and I was the wisecracking cowboy sidekick Wild Bill Hickock. I was sure she would go for Bob, ever the handsome leading man, but that was not the case. I heard through the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Calamity Jane that the beautiful Rose Blossom had an eye for ol’ Wild Bill. Which was fine with Bob because he had a thing for Anne’s sister Sharon.

  Bob and I would go out with the sisters after rehearsal, just to hang around and talk or to go get an ice cream. Then one night, the girls showed up in their parents’ car, a big Chevy Impala. We drove to the junior high school parking lot and parked next to the tennis courts. Bob and Sharon went for a walk, leaving Anne and me alone in the car.

  I put an Elvis Costello cassette in the player and Anne turned and reclined against her door. The Impala was as big as a living room. I tried to subtly inch across the front seat toward Anne. The lights were shining through the fence of the tennis courts, casting a diamond chain-link shadow across her, following the contours of her face and neck and continuing down over her tank top and shorts. I drank it in as I inched toward her. The yellow light on her tanned skin and the diamond shadow that draped over her is burned in my memory forever. It’s my own personal Edward Hopper painting, “Young Woman Lit Through Fence.”

  It took me 14 minutes and 39 seconds to get my arms around her. I know that because “Man Out of Time” is the fifth track on Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom, and the song started just as I touched her. By the time I kissed her, Elvis Costello was singing the chorus.

  I kissed Anne Lynch for the rest of the summer. I only stopped to eat and sleep and do the necessary things required for living during the daytime. Bob did the same with Sharon. It was the legendary summer of the Lynch Sisters. And it took a swinging broadsword to our D&D game. Greg and Rob weren’t too happy about this development. They continued playing without us, rolling for our characters, who coincidentally came to an untimely end in the Temple of Elemental Evil. They claimed it was all in the dice. I’d kiss Anne until my lips were sore, but if you look in my journal/diary, you see . . . nothing. I didn’t write one word about it. The feelings were so intense that I was not prepared to write about them. Here is the first entry after months of not writing, just as my whirlwind summer romance was coming to an end:

  I have not written in this book for many months. I look back at what I wrote before, I get sick to my stomach. This book is supposed to record my personal thoughts and feelings, and I’m writing a summary of Dungeons. It does not even seem like me who wrote all that Dungeons and Dragons crap.

  How moronic. Any thoughts which I tried to put into words were destroyed by my inability to express myself properly. I must make note of this so that when I’m an adult and I read this, I don’t get the impression I was completely illiterate as a child. I am going over to Anne Lynch’s house tomorrow. She’s got to talk to me about stuff that’s too difficult to write about. I’ll be right glad to see her, because I didn’t see her at all on the weekend. I haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons since the play began. I kind of lost interest because we got so powerful.

  As is typical in my diary, I dis
play a great lack of insight into my feelings. I write that I lost interest in Dungeons and Dragons because our “characters got so powerful.” The direct correlation between my relationship with Anne and the end of my interest in role-playing games goes completely unnoticed. (Also, note the part where I mention Anne having to talk about stuff that’s “too difficult to write about” while glossing over what was obviously our impending breakup.)

  But the seed had been planted. I couldn’t go back to Dungeons and Dragons. I cast the die aside, never to be rolled again. Body and mind were united in my devotion to the pursuit of women.

  IT’S NO WONDER THAT SO MANY YOUNG MEN ARE PRONE to fantasize about women instead of taking action. Our preteen obsessions were all based in fantasy. For my generation it was The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Wars, Marvel comics, Dungeons and Dragons. Today it is Minecraft, still Star Wars, still Marvel comics . . . why should we all of a sudden be particularly adept at dealing with girls the minute our voices change? It’s not as if we were ever actually flying the Millennium Falcon, or really sacking castles and making off with treasure; we were only pretending to do those things. Then, when it comes to women, we are expected to jump right in and behave realistically with them, these strange creatures, as puzzling to us as a gelatinous cube is to a level-one thief with a three-hit-point dagger.

  Besides, we didn’t know anything! And there was no way to learn except through experience. We didn’t have the Internet to turn to for any wonderful or terrible thing we might be curious about. Today, of course, the average American kid can be transported from the privacy of home to the equivalent of the red light district in seconds via his high-speed modem. But what did we have? An old hollowed-out tree in the woods, inside which could be found a handful of rolled-up Playboy magazines. Ask any suburban kid who grew up in the ’70s or ’80s, and they can tell you where the tree that contained the magazines was located. But all that offered was a few glimpses of something mysterious. It didn’t have the power to offer an alternative to the safe and ordered world we grew up in. And part of that safe, ordered world was: no sex.

  It wasn’t allowed. Good girls didn’t do it, and good guys didn’t try to make them. So I went through those high school years with no expectation of it—and I’m so glad that I did. I really think the key to happiness at that age is not having sex. It’s also important that there is hope or expectation that you’ll be having any. Adolescents have enough to struggle with; they don’t need to add that to the equation. And it’s not about being “safe” or any of that modern stuff. It really comes down to the good old-fashioned advice: that sex is best left until marriage, and if you’re not going to wait until you’re married, you had better at least wait until you’re an adult. And the longer you delay it, the better.

  Now, I would give this advice to any young person today, and mostly for entirely secular reasons, because I think it’s a better way to get through those teen years and remain happy. But of course it all comes from religious morality. That’s what holds it all together. You’re not going to get anywhere with a teenage boy by saying, “Believe me, you’ll be happier without it.” You may sincerely believe it and have the life experience to back it up, but he’ll just smile at you and say, “I’ll take my chances.” You’ve got to instill it early on, and that’s where the religious stuff comes in.

  I hear my contemporaries complain about how they “grew up with a lot of Catholic guilt.” What’s the matter with that? Guilt is fantastic. I thrived on it in high school, and it was responsible for keeping me in line. It wasn’t able to keep me from having impure thoughts, but it kept me from wallowing in them. It didn’t stop me from lusting after girls, but it kept me from pressuring them to do anything beyond making out—which I loved to do, because it was as far as I ever expected to get. And expectations, as I said, are extremely important—instead of spending my high school years feeling like I was stranded on first base, every time I kissed a girl I felt like I was hitting the home run derby.

  So even though I was not focused on having sex, I was very focused on the opposite sex.

  I was determined not to go back to rolling twenty-sided die, and I wasn’t going to be intimidated. I had landed Anne Lynch, after all, and even though she had unceremoniously dumped me at the end of the summer, for a time my charm and sense of humor had won her over. I needed to be proactive and put myself out there. I put my dad’s lesson to work all through high school. I’d smile at ’em in the hallways, smile at ’em in class or in the stands at the football games. I was always polite, as I had been taught. Some guys teased girls; I simply smiled at ’em. The jocks were busy trying to look cool, and the nerds were too intimidated to ever look cool; and there I was, with eye contact, a confident smile, and a “how-do-you-do?” It certainly wasn’t cool—the ladies weren’t really sure what to make of me, but they liked me. Maybe they didn’t have a crush on me and perhaps they didn’t understand me, but they always smiled back. I had their attention.

  So I was the nice guy, but I wasn’t going to be one of those nice guys who finish last. I was also starting to craft my persona as an outsider at this time. An iconoclast. I was “alternative.” At least I thought I was. But that’s what being alternative is—thinking you are different from everyone else.

  To create my alternative persona I borrowed cues from the music I was listening to. I decided I was new wave/post punk. The new wave friends I had recently made were listening to U2, Joe Jackson, the Police, Depeche Mode, the Specials, the Clash, and Elvis Costello. The average suburban New England kid back then referred to all this as “punk” even though it wasn’t. MTV was brand new and was sweeping the nation, but hadn’t really reached small-town America. Everyone still listened to hard rock like AC/DC and Zeppelin, or southern bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchett. Being on the cutting edge of new music, my friends and I became a small crew of weirdos, and it felt good to be outsiders.

  I put my outsider status out there in what I chose to wear, as most teenagers do. I had to live up to my alternative persona, but I didn’t have enough money to go to Chess King every weekend and buy one of those awesome shirts with all the buttons and flaps that had been knocked off from a Duran Duran album cover, so I would shop at thrift stores.

  I mixed and matched my vintage findings and cobbled together a classic/new wave, Bing-Crosby-meets-the-Eurythmics look. Picture Duckie from the movie Pretty in Pink if he were . . . Actually, just picture Duckie, because he totally stole my look. It was sufficiently offbeat to keep everyone guessing, including my parents, who nonetheless took it all in stride. This may seem surprising, given the very traditional upbringing I’ve described, but by high school, my parents gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted. Even though I had been literally tied to a tree as a kid, as a teen I was given a fairly long leash to be offbeat and a little weird. So although they may not have agreed with all the ways I was expressing myself, they let it go. Some of it may have been exhaustion, seeing as I was their fourth child to go through adolescence, and later kids always seem to get the benefit of more laid-back parenting. But I think a lot of it was their deliberate philosophy: they had given me the foundation in my childhood, and it was time to trust that it had sunk in, and let me learn things on my own.

  My favorite secondhand store was a little gem in South Norwood called the Norwood Women’s Community Committee Thrift Shop, which I still maintain might have been the best thrift store in America. After a man’s untimely death, a wife would donate his entire wardrobe to the shop. These were men from the greatest generation, too: they had Savile-tailored three-piece suits, Harris Tweed overcoats, Stetson fedora hats, leather wingtip shoes, and white bucks. Everything sold for five to ten dollars. I bought as much as I could afford. I guess it’s no surprise for someone who had such an old-school childhood, but as I was trying to push the envelope and be edgy and modern, I ended up going full retro. I guess I was still clinging to the 1950s, even then.

  *

  On Saturday
nights we’d go to dances at Xaverian Brothers, an all-boys Catholic high school that, improbably, was the hottest social scene in south suburban Massachusetts. Whoever booked the bands for the Xaverian dances had their finger on the pulse of the moment. And those dances had the lure of exclusivity—girls from all over the area were welcome, but only Xaverian boys. Boys who weren’t students at Xavierian could only gain entry by way of a special “voucher” signed by an Xaverian student. These vouchers were like gold and traded aggressively on the high school black market. Public school girls were used as both the bait and the prize. All the public high school guys put the word out to all the girls that if an Xaverian boy asked you to their dance, you had to ask for a voucher “for a friend’s boyfriend” so that the non–private school guys could get in on the action. The girls didn’t seem to mind being used that way—the more guys there, the more competition over them. All of the extra work required to simply get through the door just made the whole event more desirable, even though these dances were just a bunch of high school kids packed into a humid gymnasium.

  My friends and I didn’t go to the dances to hit on girls and try to get them to make out with us behind the bleachers; that’s what the Xaverian guys and the jocks from our school did. We showed up in our skinny ties ready to dance. We’d be out on the floor the whole night, working up such a sweat on that steamy dance floor that we would soak through our extremely carefully chosen outfits. Then, at the stroke of 11 p.m., the lights would go up, and we had to step out sopping wet into the freezing cold and walk home.