The John Wick

I look at him sideways when he says it. Like the way a Christian looks at you when you curse. He pulls out his cigarettes, then remembers what state he’s in. I don’t reply, so he says the word again.

“Magic,” he says.

I cut the steak and dip it in my puddle of sauce. Just behind me, a couple is crooning over each other. At Norm’s, just off Santa Monica Boulevard. And we’re talking about it. Talking about…

“Magic,” he says again. My buddy Tom, sitting on the other side of the booth with his omelet. “So, you do magic?”

“You make it sound like porn,” I tell him.

That stops him. “Huh?”

I eat another bite of my steak, smearing it in the eggs. “You said ‘You do magic.’ Like I’m fucking it or something.” I chew a bit. “Which isn’t far from the truth, I guess.”

He stops, puts his fork down. “Okay. You gonna explain yourself or just sit there smug, asshole?”

“Sorry,” I tell him. “It’s just part of the package. Man of mystery and all that.” I wave the fork and knife around a little, like magic wands.

“That’s funny,” he tells me. “But I mean, I haven’t seen you in years. You two were like the perfect couple. Everybody was all, ‘They’re what married people should act like.’ What the hell happened?”

I shake my head. The waitress stops by and re-fills my Coke. She’s cute. Black hair and dark eyes. Olive skin. Reminds me of someone else. Someone we were just talking about.

“Dude,” he says. “We were talking.”

“Sorry,” I tell him again. “I don’t know. A lot of things happened.”

“Like you doing magic.”

I sip my Coke. “Yeah. Like that.”

Outside, there’s a big, fat black woman walking with everything she owns in the world shoved into a shopping cart stolen from the Vons just down the block. She turns her back to us, throws up her skirt, showing us everything she’s got. Then, she squats down on the cold cement

“Oh God!” he shouts. Some others in the restaurant saw it too. They’re reacting the same way. My reaction is just about the same.

“Welcome to Santa Monica,” I tell him.

“God, the cops gonna do anything about that?” he asks.

I shake my head. “They can’t, really.”

“Fucking southern California.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

We both push our plates away and work on our drinks.

A few hours later, we’re walking down 3^rd Street Promenade. It’s Saturday night and the street performers and beggars are out in full force. We pass by a group of activists claiming the Theory of Evolution promotes Nazi-ism. Then, there are the street acrobats tempting fate, jumping high in the air, plummeting down toward the pavement head-first. Finally, we stop in front of a man, seated with a guitar across his lap, playing a mixture of Mozart and Spanish Florentine. The twist is he’s got a golden mask on his face and a gold cape over his shoulder. The kind of mask and cloak you get in those Halloween specialty stores.

His fingers move across the fret board with ease and speed. I drop a dollar in his guitar case and he smiles and nods at me. We know each other. I’ve done this before. If he’s here next Saturday, I’ll do it again.

As I walk away, a homeless man carrying a bag and an aura of unidentifiable stinks moves by me. He stands over the shoulder of the man in the golden mask. He listens for a little while, then slowly finds a smile. His oily, creased face cracks to show what little teeth he has left in his head. Black little raisins. But his smile is warm. He moves on. So do we.

“Magic?” Tom asks me.

“Magic,” I tell him.

“You mean, you cast spells and stuff?”

“No.” We walk into a Barnes and Noble. “I don’t cast spells and stuff.”

“Then, what do you do?”

We stop by the graphic novel/roleplaying game section. He picks up a d20 book. I pick up Hellblazer.

“You mean, magic like that?” he says, pointing at the book in my hands.

“No,” I tell him and point at the book in his. “That kind of magic.”

He looks to where I’m pointing. “You mean, you can cast fireball and magic missile?”

I shake my head. “Not quite.”

We follow the distant discordant chord of guitar and voice. The pretty girl sitting on the stool sang well enough, but her voice cracked in that completely unsexy way. She hadn’t figured out that part just yet. Give her props for trying, though.

We go out onto the porch where the night air is cool and the wind coming from the ocean smells like ocean air ought to smell. I drink hot milk and honey. He drinks coffee.

“You still haven’t explained…” he starts.

“Magic.”

“Yeah.”

I point at the book. “Roleplaying games,” I tell him. “It’s an unique kind of literature. It’s the only literature where the authors are the audience.”

He smiles and nods. “You’ve told me this before.”

I keep going anyway. “In movies, books, comic books… the author and the audience are separate. The author knows what’s coming before the audience does.” I tap the hardcover book. “In roleplaying games, you aren’t following the hero’s footprints; you’re making the hero’s footprints.”

I pause for dramatic effect. “You are the hero. That’s what makes RPGs special.”

“It’s a hobby, man,” he tells me.

I shake my head. “When novels first hit the scene, they were called ‘novels’ for a reason. They’re novel. A cute fad that’ll go away soon. Same thing with short stories. Same thing with radio and TV.”

A group of women – half naked – walks by us, completely shutting down our conversation. Over the banister, one of them hands Tom a little pamphlet about a woman’s right to be nude.

“Here you go,” she says.

Tom takes the pamphlet without question. As they pass, I say, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen all day.”

He puts the pamphlet down and looks at me. “Explain TV,” he says.

“When TV first hit, all the ‘real actors’ wouldn’t go near it. It was like, shameful, to be even associated with television. They couldn’t get theater or radio people near it. That’s why it was so easy to break into TV at the beginning; nobody with any credit would do it.”

“Okay. So…?”

“It’s the same thing with RPGs now. The reason so many of them are hack bullshit is because they’re the bottom feeders of the fantasy industry. I mean, ‘real writers’ look at fantasy writers as complete hacks. And the fantasy writers look at gamer fiction the same way. Why? Because most of it is crap. Adolescent power fantasy. That’s all it is. Big swords, big tits, money, sex. It’s written for fifteen year old boys.”

He coughs and winks at me. “You’re gonna get to the magic part in a minute, right?”

“In a minute.” But, I’m on a roll. I don’t stop when I’m on a roll.

“See,” I tell him. “Roleplaying games have the potential to be real literature. I mean, they already are, but they have the ability to be a medium we’ve never seen before. Cooperative storytelling. Telling the tales of heroes, but we’re Percival finding the Grail. We’re Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. We are the ones telling the stories and we are the ones living those stories.”

“We’ve talked about this before,” he tells me again.

I pause. Take a breath. “If Campbell’s right and we read myth to guide us, and interaction with the myth is the kind of ritual we’ve lost in our lives, then roleplaying games are the new ritual.”

“Whoah!” he says, putting down his coffee. “You’re jumping around here.”

I point at the book. “Roleplaying games are ritual,” I tell him. “We are telling mythic tales about heroes and their adventures. About hope, magic, betrayal, drama, intrigue, sex, violence, the whole thing.”

“It’s a game, John,” he tells me.

“Only if you see it that way.” I point out to the fundamentalists in the street, telling people they’re going to Hell. “You see them? They’ve lost the ritual. They think Jesus is some guy who lived two thousand years ago and died for our sins. They’ve lost it. They’ve lost the real truth behind Jesus’ life and death. They’ve lost the fact that Jesus’ death means something more than that.”

His eyes go skeptical. I’ve almost lost him. “What does Jesus have to do with magic, John?”

I stop. “Okay. Maybe I’m jumping around too much.”

He laughs. “Maybe?”

“All right. I am. I apologize.” I wave at the Bible worriers. “Let’s leave them out of it.”

“Get back to roleplaying games,” he tells me.

I take a deep breath. Take a sip of my hot milk and honey – now, almost warm. “Okay. Here’s what I’m talking about.

“A long time ago, back when we still believed the world and sky were flat, when we looked up at the stars and still wondered what they were, we believed the world was magic. Not science. Magic.”

He nods. “All right. I’m following you.”

“Okay. Now, in a sense, we were right. Magic is just exploration of mystery. It’s a way to explain things. Like science is. Except, it’s got a hidden layer that science doesn’t have.”

“Science is transparent,” he says. “It doesn’t have any hidden layers. Just transparency.”

I nod. “Right! Science is about facts. Magic, on the other hand, is about truths.”

“Isn’t that from an Indiana Jones movie or something?” he asks. I keep going.

“Science and magic aren’t opposed to each other. That’s… I don’t know where that comes from. Maybe from the whole “reason vs. intuition” thing. Magic is the product of intuition. More specifically, magic is a way to express things that science can’t express.”

“You mean like ESP and…”

I cut him off. “No. Magic isn’t what science can’t explain. It’s what science can’t express.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”

I take another sip. “Okay. Magic is about metaphor. Tarot cards, kabbalah, all that stuff. It isn’t literal truth. That’s science’s job. It’s metaphorical truth.”

“You’re still dodging me, man.”

I nod. “I know. And I’m trying to figure out how to tell you.” I look back down at the book. The roleplaying game book.

I nod again. “Okay,” I tell him. “I think I know how to do this…”

 

 

(to be continued)