The story that follows is about 5 years old. I wanted to post this first and then use this as a jumping off point from which to tell/remember my story. Some of the facts have cleared up since then, but the story overall is pretty much the same. If you read last week’s article then you know that I fell in with a bad crowd in my early Magic career. As a result of my inaction I was banned for 5 years. It’s been almost 15 years since then. I’m only now going back to make sense of it all.  

Late July 2000. 

For most of the night I was dressed in black, crouched behind a tree while the enemy stalked all around me. Occasionally, I’d bring my gun to bare fire off a few well placed rounds and move to a new location.  It was a casual thing.  I didn’t really have my mind in the firefight that was going on around me.  Bigger problems were going down in the background.

I moved with a silence through the woods.  Shadows spun about me.  That was the closest to “the shit” I’d ever get.  I was 20 and things had been complicated for a long time.  This was easy, move-in, remove enemy agents and wait.  Waiting was easy.  Being passive was not so easy.  In the background, this was just a distraction, merely a charade to put my mind away from the real threat.

For just a second, I lost myself in the void completely.  The bushes moved and the enemy sprung out firing from hidden spots.

An Ambush!  Of course!

And with that the game was over.  Laser Tag guns blazed into the air.  We packed up and got into the cars.  Into the air conditioning.  For a minute I thought to myself, maybe everything’s gonna ok.  It’s been three days.  In a week I’ll be in Belgium.  I’ll work on my rating with side events, compete in the main team event at Worlds.  With a little bit of luck and some other less savory measures, I should walk with a few thousand dollars.  What can I say, things were simpler then.

Then my Qualcom 1920 rang.  It was Fred.  I toyed with the idea of putting this off until the morning.  After all, I’d avoided contact for three days.  It was 12:30am.  He’d never believe that I was asleep.  I’d been up from 5pm to 7am for the last 5 months.  Sleeping schedules don’t just change out of the blue.  It’s time to face the music.  “Hello, Fred.  Any news?”

“It’s over, Zac. They have everything.  Sprocket’s death-threat email didn’t help, but they had everything every match-up, everything.  We can’t even appeal.  You and I got five years, Sprocket and John got two.”

“That’s pretty much it then.”  It didn’t even feel real.  I was floating outside of the situation.  This had to be happening to someone else.  “It was Black wasn’t it?”

“Of course, it was Black!” Fred sounded like he was gonna rip the phone out of the wall. “What the fuck were you thinking trusting him?”

I hung up the phone, there would be time to deal with Fred later and the cell reception could cut off at any minute in the Pine Barrens.  I turned off my phone.  It was time to think about how to make sure I kept my job…

Guilt.

Most of us carry some of it like a monkey on our back.  We try to hide our shame or mask it with a smile or a joke.  A lot of it is really self imposed.  I always wondered what was worse: the crime or the punishment you put yourself through after you committed the crime.  Everyone has some sort of conscience, and we all create our own brand of hell in between the genesis of our sin and it’s illumination to the rest of the waking world.  I was certainly no exception to the rule.

But the devil drives us on.  We covet the information.  And we keep it from prying eyes.  In our care the guilt grows and we have no choice but to find another place for it to live.  We’re left with a couple of options.  We can go mad in our silence, and let the guilt eat us from the inside until we no longer are the persons that existed before.  We can find a bigger place for it to live.  This involves moving to a new town or state.   With enough room some guilt will just belly up and die after a while.

We can also take the third option:  Tell someone else, confess and hope that they keep the guilt to themselves.

Even when taking the third option though we know that our punishment is merely around the corner.  Perhaps on the surface we hope that our confessor will absolve us of the guilt and that we can go on living a normal guilt-free life, but there stirs another feeling deep inside the mind of the guilty.  The hope that we will be caught, chance that we will be brought to justice and the universe will be set right again.  Only when those fires of justice baptize us could we begin to feel that life could proceed at a normal pace.

It’s the measure of strength in a person when they choose the catharsis of Justice to the inferno of Silence.  Those silent folks are just made of sterner stuff.  They have the courage and the constitution of stomach to deal with the guilt longer than I did.  But I’m better for the speed at which I took my decent.

I was barely affected negatively for the crime I committed.

What was my crime you ask?  There was more than one.  The list if left to single accounts would span a great length indeed.  Let’s make it simple.  I was a liar first and foremost.  I was a false prophet, a conspirator.  In the end an anti-hero.  I was a card cheat.  Just a simple sleight of hand and a few clicks of the computer set me down a path that changed the way the game was played, and changed my life forever.

It started simply enough in 1995.  A fifteen year old freshman in highschool, I was starting to enter tht awkward stage that most folks grow out of around 20-21 years old.  To my credit I think I’ve done a pretty good job of stretching out the phase for the last 15 years.  There’s no real end in sight, either. I was into comics and video games and Dungeons & Dragons.  Not a whole lot has changed.  I still min/max D&D characters and I play video games.  These days I write comics as well as read them.

So, high school is obviously not the place to celebrate one’s diversity from the crowd.  I confess I wasn’t the most well received member of the graduating class of 1999.  Between a solid addiction to reading the funny books and playing Magic: The Gathering, it’s not like I was destined to become the all-star quarterback type.  In fact, I was much happier to just be left alone, or maybe gracelessly talk to girls at the mall.  I reveled in the anonymity that I had.  I picked up a part time job at the local comic shop in 10th grade and met a group of people that I could begin to fit in with in the upper left corner of the Deptford mall.

For what it’s worth high school seems a blur now.  Though, I know I felt every day like I was on the rack.  I think it was early 10th grade when I went to my first sanctioned tournament.  I had been “invited” by Grey Matter Conventions to compete in a Pro Tour Qualifier for Pro Tour Los Angeles.  Invited! Someone had sought me out to compete in a pro event!  Later, I found out they just sent out a blast of junk mail to every registered DCImember in the tri-State area.

The DCI?  Oh, so the the game Magic: The Gathering had a governing body of rules “Lawyers” that judged the game when a tournament was being played.  Duelist Convocation International.  I couldn’t even tell you what that means.  And I always thought it was sort of strange that the company that made the game didn’t just have the judges run under the same banner of the company itself.  I’m no businessman though so maybe it had to do with taxes or something like that.  I’ll probably never find out.

Anyhow, The DCI was how you played in Sanctioned Events.  The prizes were generally more cards and one lucky card flopper got a spot in the Pro Tour in LA.  Pro Tours were big money.  Thousands of dollars handed out!   And for those under sixteen there was the Super Series that put money toward college.

I say all that to say this:  It was by far the most social thing I’d done in my entire life.  My dad, who was constantly under the impression I was anti-social actually paid my entry fee and drove my friends and I to Race Street in Philadelphia.

My first time alone in the big city.  I showed up signed in and began what was the most nerve racking experience of my then very short life.  Five hours later I was 0-5 and I was sitting across from this stinky over weight indian guy that had fashioned some “lucky cards” that he had in large plastic sleeves next to his deck.  Each of the card had some cut out of a dirty magazine in the spaces were the illustration for the card ought to have been.  I wish I could say that was the weirdest thing I dealt with that day.

Even after going 1-6 in the swiss rounds, I fostered the hope that somehow I’d move on to the top 16 elimination round.  That hope was quickly dashed though.  I spent the rest of the day with my friends, trading and playing with the new cards that we bought that day.  It was a weird thing looking back. We all realized how strange a lot of these other people were and we realized that ( or I did at least) we weren’t as strange as we thought we were.  There were some real wacky cats out there.  Still that didn’t sour us on the game itself.  It made us love it!  Finally, we had a place to not be judged, we could talk about games and music and school, and not feel like we were being overheard by people who would make us feel bad about ourselves.

 

That’s were this ends. Next week I’ll pick it up with Fred and Sprocket and myself. I know this moves a bit slow but I really want to make sure you understand the mindset of a 19 year old Zac Clark in this situation. More over I think that exposition is half the story. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

 

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