The Frontiers of Friendship

“Who’s gonna pick you up
When you fall
Who’s gonna hang it up
When you call
Who’s gonna pay attention
To your dreams
Yeah, who’s gonna plug their ears
When you scream”
The Cars
Drive

I watch the browser screen that only moments before had been full of little boxes, each one containing a face that was at least twenty years my junior. The faces are all pleasant and in most, there was a tiny hand waving farewell for the night. I pull my gamer headset, complete with inlaid neon blue lighting, off my head and set in on the top of my now collapsed laptop and look around.

I’m sitting on a high stool that had once occupied a historic saloon the next town over and I’m surrounded by a blend of craft beer culture and deeply-invested fantasy role-playing game paraphernalia. Acrylic caricatures of my past and present canine companions fill the wall behind me, making for a whimsical backdrop for the Friday night gaming sessions I started sharing with people half my age shortly after COVID-19 lockdowns hit the US in late March.

It’s been nearly eight months now and the holiday season is upon us, promising to disrupt the prospect of having twenty sessions of D&D under our belts by the end of 2020. Throwing myself into the legendary world of D&D after a twenty-five-year hiatus has been an obvious and welcome attempt to escape the arduous reality that 2020 has brought. What I was not expecting when I reentered this world was the sheer volume of personal detritus and layers of memories it would peel back, and the intense sharpening of the dull, haunting memory of my friend Robbie Tindall.

In the fall of 1984, my father uprooted my family for the fifth, out of eight, time, moving us from a very comfortable existence in Boise, Idaho to the relatively alien landscape of Kimball, Nebraska. The situation was made worse by me entering into the eighth grade and leaving friendships I had fostered over the course of three years. More acutely, I was leaving a small metropolis where I was able to find people with similar interests to a place where finding a kindred spirit seemed unlikely at best.

Specifically, I was leaving a small clique of fellow role-playing gamers. Boise had hobby stores that carried all the exciting supplements, miniatures, dice, and art books that help fuel the gamer’s imagination. Boise had schools and libraries with closed meeting rooms that we could use for marathon gaming sessions and a population of young people who enjoyed reading good fiction and weren’t just interested in sports.

Deep in my heart, I knew that the small rural oil town in Nebraska with a population of three thousand people probably wouldn’t have any of those things.

Within the first day or two of living in Kimball, I did discover their small but robust public library. Of all the places I lived, the Kimball County Public Library served me the best — immediately becoming a sanctuary for me. In the library, I could pursue the daydream of many scholarly midwesterners and pretend to be living in a place more sophisticated than I really was.

Being the new kid in a small town is always a challenge at any age, but being a new kid in middle school seemed to bring a fresh hellish flavor I had not yet experienced. Within a few weeks of the school year starting, I found myself once again reluctantly playing football with a team that was equally reluctant to have me. My plan in Boise had been to begin running Cross Country. In small-town Nebraska, Cross Country is an athletic indulgence only allowed at the high school level — sometimes.

The football season was largely forgettable with the exception of the massive amounts of music I consumed while riding on the team bus between tiny towns on game days. That autumn, The Cars, a band that had recently popped up on my expanding teenage music radar, had a song titled “Drive” and the song would come to embody all of the frustration and alienation I was experiencing at precisely the same time it was popular. Unlike most of The Cars’ songs that are led by the crisp, choppy delivery of lead singer Ric Ocasek, “Drive” was sung by bassist Ben Orr, who had a softer, more haunting tone that proved to be a better fit for the lyrics. To this day, I cannot listen to that song without having memories and images of Kimball Middle School flash through my mind.

By the time “Drive” started to drop in its pop chart ratings and the football season came to a merciful end, I was beginning to become more comfortable with what appeared to be my foreseeable future. It was the week before Thanksgiving when I realized that I might not be so alone after all.

Robbie was a small kid. Born in July of 1971, he was one of the younger students in the eighth grade, but that didn’t account for his size. He just wasn’t a big or athletic kid and he definitely didn’t participate in sports. But what Robbie lacked in athletic prowess, he made up for in intellect and wit.

Being in a future graduating class of roughly twenty-four students means that you take virtually every class with the same people. Despite being in nearly every single class with him, and maybe because I was dealing with so much adjustment, I didn’t notice Robbie until November. Specifically, I first started paying attention to him in Mr. Hinkle’s Algebra class. Mr. Hinkle was an asshole who was more concerned about the Kimball Shorthorns winning football games than he was of our being proficient at mathematics and Robbie clearly liked to push his buttons. Once a week, Hinkle would hand out a quiz with a dozen equations to solve. Robbie would burn through them, furiously jotting down his answers. Then, usually within fifteen minutes, he would walk his sheet up to Hinkle’s desk and drop it down while the rest of the class would glance up and wonder how he could possibly be finished. Hinkle would get red-faced and usually say something like, “Your answers had better be right, Robbie.” To which Robbie would confidently say over his shoulder, “Yeah. They are.”

And they were. Every time.

I honestly don’t remember all the details from that window between mid-November and the beginning of Holiday Break, but I do recall that our friendship got its kickstart in the school library where Robbie and I started talking about science fiction. That conversation led to an invitation to my house after school and to us playing Star Frontiers, my role-playing go-to at the time. By the time the week of Christmas had arrived, I had managed to find, even if only in the form of one other person, some of what I had lost by moving away from Boise.

Friday the 21st of December was our last day of school and the beginning of the Holiday Break. My family was planning a last-minute shopping trip to the mall in Cheyenne, Wyoming and I was looking forward to perusing the small role-playing game section of the bookstore there with hopes of picking up a fresh Star Frontiers game module. Robbie and I already had at least one full day set aside during the break for some marathon gaming and it promised to be epic.

Friday evening, I was sitting on my bed in my tiny paper-thin wood-paneled room of the double-wide trailer we lived in, listening to a rock station out of Scottsbluff. I had just finished watching old episodes of Doctor Who on a tiny black and white TV set that could only receive PBS out of Lincoln. I heard my mother on the telephone in the kitchen and then heard her knock softly on my door after she had hung up.

She sat down on the bed and asked,” You know that boy, Robbie, that’s been coming over?”
I nodded and replied, “Yeah.”

“Well,” my mother paused for a moment and continued,” There’s been an accident. Robbie was shot this afternoon.”

I stared at my mother for probably thirty seconds before asking,” What do you mean?”

The consistent version of the story that I would hear for the next few weeks was that Robbie had been hanging out with a boy — my recollection of this kid is remarkably vague — that he had been friends with, possibly since he started school in Kindergarten or First Grade. They were in the basement of one of their houses, fooling around with a loaded handgun. According to some, they were playing a game by tossing it back and forth. I won’t try to explain or understand this behavior other than to say that all adolescent boys do incredibly stupid things, even when they’re really smart. The gun went off during this game, a bullet struck Robbie, and he was dead before the paramedics arrived (This version of the event proved to be inaccurate — according to a brief article in the local paper, Robbie was rushed to the hospital where he later died.).

To be honest, I don’t recall if there was a public funeral. It’s possible that it occurred on one of the days we were visiting distant relatives that lived around Sydney. Our relative newness in the community made participating in any public grieving seem to me that I would somehow be intruding, declaring a form of familiarity that would be deemed too forward. In retrospect, this was probably wrong, and I regret that I did not attend his memorial service.

Spring came around soon enough and to a certain degree, my family was getting into a rhythm that seemed to fit us fairly well. I once again retreated into the Kimball County Library. On one such visit, I suddenly recalled a series of books that Robbie would talk incessantly about Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Despite thinking that I had exhausted much of the small library’s science fiction collection, it turns out I actually hadn’t. There they were on a shelf that I had somehow skipped: all four of the fabled “trilogy”.

I checked out and opened the first self-titled volume as soon as I got home with it and read the opening sentence:

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

When you’re a fourteen-year-old who is being forced to live in a place like Kimball, Nebraska — especially one who is homesick for places they consider to be more exciting… To say that Adams’ work resonated immediately would be an understatement. I could hear Robbie’s chuckle and see his impish smile every time I read a punchline or funny line of dialogue. While I missed our budding friendship dearly, reading the books he was enthralled with helped soothe the pain of his sudden absence.

I filled the spring months by reading all four of the Hitchhiker books. On a day during the last week of May with the school year nearly finished, I received a note from the front office. In a simple script, the note said:

“Please come to the Tindall’s house after school. Robbie’s mother would like to see you.”

The brief request was followed by their street address.

I had no idea why Robbie’s mother would possibly want to see me. Even then, it seemed to me that seeing any of Robbie’s classmates would be a painful reminder for her. After school, I rode my bike to the handsome house where Robbie’s family lived. Robbie’s mother answered the door where I stood, somewhat nervously waiting. When she saw who it was, she held a hand up for me to wait and retreated briefly. When she came back, she stepped out onto the front porch with a box in her hand, which she then held out to me.

The box was the much-coveted expansion set for Star Frontiers. I numbly held out my hand and received it. I really did not know what to say.

Robbie’s mother said it had been purchased just days before his accident and it had been intended to be one of his Christmas presents. He had asked for the gift so he and I could get together to play Star Frontiers in the weeks leading up to the holiday. Beyond that, I don’t really recall what we said to each other. I’m certain it was awkward, whatever I said in the form of a thank you. The circumstances were simply beyond my depth of experience. For years after I would think about how I wish I could have expressed what Robbie’s friendship meant to me and how grateful I was.

Later that summer, my family would move again, this time uprooting the tiny hold we had in Nebraska only to plant us in California just a couple of weeks before the beginning of my Freshman year. By the time I reached California, I had not only devoured the Hitchhiker’s series but had already read them through twice. Those books would prove to be my source of comfort and guidance to navigating the culture shock I would experience yet again in California. Through high school and well into college, I would continue to form new friendships and play a variety of role-playing games. In fact, during college, my friends and I began creating our own gaming systems and tailoring adventures to our specific interests at the time. Eventually, this form of socialization gave way to many of the trappings of adulthood and became a collection of boxes and notepads tucked away in a closet.

But the thrill of exercising my imagination and the joy of sharing a creative adventure with friends never really let go. Even if it just lingers as dusty nostalgia, it’s impossible not to have memories of my experiences stirred up now and again.

And now, thanks to a global pandemic and the miracle of the internet, I suddenly find myself once again thrust back into the environment I so enjoyed when I was much younger. I idly ponder if Robbie and I would still be in contact with each other if he were still alive. I like to think that he would approve of how I now spend time igniting the imaginations of people half my age and exploring worlds far beyond the reach of our little yellow sun. Giving hope that a better world exists out there.