The notable shops in the strip mall were a failing United Artists movie theater that looked more ghetto than most inner city grindhouses on the inside and a nickel arcade. You'd think we'd have hung out at the arcade, but for some reason none of us ever set foot in it. There was an Italian restaurant that Big Mike (being a large Italian with a healthy appetite) often sent me to on food runs for antipasto. It had a couple of arcade games like The Simpsons where three of the four joysticks didn't work, and nobody could ever remember which one the good one was, and a generic Sega racing game. It's also the first place I'd ever seen where they had weekly karaoke contests.
My favorite place on that block was the Sukiyaki Express, just past the nail salon: a Chinese take-out place with stereotypical accoutrements like red walls and big gold-colored dragons hung around the place. It was authentic food, too, a family business. Over the years we went though every damn thing on that menu. Some of us were woefully addicted to their crab puffs, but me, I ate their pork fried rice almost every night. It got to the point where they had an order ready for me at six with, densely packed into a white box, two packets of soy sauce perched on top. I'm no judge of fine cuisine, but I still crave that junk. It was probably loaded with MSG and the bad kind of fat I will one day suffer a massive coronary for, and many people often joked that the red cubes of pork were really dog, but I don't care. That was damn fine dog. I felt like Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks talking about that cherry pie.
The second major reason we went there constantly was their policy of 25-cent refills on soda, which the family was good enough to extend to us because we worked on the same strip. And man, did we shamefully abuse that policy like like the cheap scum we were. They eventually upped it to 35 cents, cursing us in Mandarin as overcaffeinated swine even as we ordered a store-full of General Tsao's chicken.
The third, probably real reason we went down there was that the family had their smoking hot teenage daughters working the registers, whose names we never learned and who none of us ever mustered up the balls to ask out on a date. They had a uniform of sorts: dark slacks and a tight white t-shirt over-- and this is the important part-- black bras. You could see just enough underwear through those shirts to make the whole day worth living. And yeah, you can call it shallow and sexist. I can't deny that. But give us a break; those are the only women we'd see all day, most times. It's not like we were stuffing dollar bills into their cleavage.
God I miss them.
For about a year the entire shop smelled like nail polish because of some strange venting issue between us and the salon next door. It drove Mike nuts. As for me, I discovered that if you sat in the bathroom (where the fumes were coming from) for about ten minutes, you got high. I stopped doing this when Mike started questioning why I spent long stretches of time on the toilet making giggling noises.
For all the time we spent together, I never really spoke to Mike all that much about his personal life, and I still don't know a lot about him personally. He's a big guy, a true New Yorker at heart. Big fan of the Yankees and the Mets, and you knew he was authentic the way he'd rip into Steinbrenner at the merest mention of the team. He was married when I met him, but (from my perspective) it was a persistently rocky marriage where they were always both in varying levels of not speaking to one another, still fuming over some argument had in private. I don't think she had much patience for Mike's obsession with collecting nerd books and playing with funny-shaped dice. She always had this pinched-face look of disdain on her face whenever she spoke to me, which was infrequently. It always seemed like she treated the interior of the store as if it were populated by highly-excitable monkeys infected with Ebola and irritable bowel syndrome.
The store traded primarily in RPGs and card games when it first opened. Mike started his business trading and selling rare coins on eBay, and he was apparently good enough to turn a profit at it. He had a lot of sources to old, used things, and I guess thats' where he got access to a treasure trove of out-of-print RPG sourcebooks and games-- a major reason for the store's popularity. That's important to gamers and card collectors.
I was still relatively new to gaming and had the precious resource of a credit card backed financially by my mom, so Mike liked me just fine. We sat around and argued about stuff all day, usually with new customers over the store's copy of Settlers of Catan (a German game about cursing a pair of wooden dice for being traitorous whores). We played so much Settlers that we actually wore a copy out. The cards were warped and split, filthy from skin oils, the spots on the dice work off from over-use. Now I can barely stand to play the game, but it kept us occupied for a long time.
I tried a little bit of everything there. That's the danger of hanging out in a game store with friends for too long: you can get roped into some truly stupid shit. I've lost count of the lame CCGs I bought into: Raw Deal, Rifts (yes there was a card game), Shadowrun, Young Jedi, Warlord, Mage Knight...jeez. When we had a lot of people around and long stretches of time to fill, we either busted out some obtuse board game printed by Avalon Hill like Civilization or its many, many war simulations or robber baron games, or we indulged in some marathon RPG sessions.
It's a sure bet that nobody will remember your name at a game store until you've been a presence there for about two months. In RPGs you'll notice people referring to each other in broad generalizations (as they can't be arsed to remember your character's name, either) like "Elf, shoot that!" or "Shouldn't the dwarf be here? The ranger isn't back yet. Thief, go check on him." When a gamer finally does commit to remembering your name, it's usually with the aid of a mnemonic device, especially if your name is sickeningly common.
At one time I knew about four Mikes, forcing the gamers to hold a conclave and decide once and for all, which Mike is to be known as what. There was Store Mike (the Mike I knew), whose name had to be changed to Big Mike when I was reminded that there was another Mike who ran Game Depot, and he was Store Mike already, so he had tenure. There was Crazy Mike, a man who looked like a frazzled roadie for Motorhead and one of my most loyal players. There was Crackhead Mike and Skinny Mike, too.
Then there were the Steves: Celtic Steve, Vegan Steve, Ponytail Steve, Star Trek Steve, and He Might Be Steve, whose name we thought was Steve but were too embarrassed to ask to make sure. I personally objected to Ponytail Steve's name, because Vegan Steve had a ponytail as well, but I couldn't fight the system.
I even knew about four Noahs in one very strange time in my life, each requiring his own mafioso style codename. As far as I know, I actually did not have a wacky name-- something that still scares me because people who didn't know their other name had names nobody dared repeat aloud in their presence. I was probably Shithead Noah.
We had quite the cast of characters, though.
- Crazy Mike - Not actually as insane as his name would lead you to believe, he was probably just called that because for a long time he desperately needed a haircut and looked like one of the family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He was notorious for having absolutely no luck at all rolling dice in an RPG, to the point where few people were willing to even sit next to him during a game for fear that his bad luck was contagious. I remember a span of years when he failed to roll a single successful to-hit. Currently, he DMs a somewhat turbulent Star Wars RPG.
- J.D. - A perpetually disheveled guy who favored the classic black rock concert t-shirt as his typical wardrobe, most memorable for a broad smile and a high-pitched "nya-ha-ha!!" laugh. He was big-time into CCGs, playing the Star Wars and Star Trek games as often as he could. Both of his decks were massive, favoring TIE Fighters and the Borg, each of which required a lot of cards. Worse, he tended to put plastic card protectors on each one, which would triple the size of the already ponderous 120+ card decks. As a result, his decks were about a foot tall, yet he had somehow developed the freakishly strong forearm muscles necessary to perform a classic dealer's shuffle with them.
- John - A Desert Storm veteran, rumored to have been discharged after a head wound (although I never pressed him on this). Famous around the store for never losing train-based board games, and I soon found out why over a game of Iron Dragon: he cheated like a son of a bitch. He also had a cute trick during RPGs of sitting at the far end of the table, away from the DM and rolling those awful mottled dice whose numbers you couldn't possibly identify even if you're looking directly over them, then announcing an average number that's usually sufficient to produce a success. One day he just up and vanished, and I never did find out why.
- Danny - Another veteran of our first war in Iraq, discharged after being shot through the face in the line of duty, resulting in most of his teeth and soft palette being blown out of his head. He had a surprisingly good nature despite this, however, and other than a gummy smile showed little other sign of his injury. He was up for pretty much anything.
- The Invisible Jason - I'll tell you the story behind his name later. He's about my age, but left not long before the store closed to go career in the Air Force. He could be talked into pretty much any game, which meant at any given time he was collecting four or five CCGs at once and trying to organize people for a Raw Deal tournament or the Rifts card game. He liked Rifts and the World of Darkness games. Some say...too much...
- That Guy Who Painted That One Miniature of Yours - A very amiable person who was in the store for a couple weeks and offered to paint our fantasy miniatures for us because he was bored. He did a phenomenal job, even adding custom bits of grass and rhinestones to their clothes. Then rumor has it that he hit someone with his car and went to jail for vehicular manslaughter. Never saw him again, but people kept asking if I'd seen him so I could ask him to paint their minis. It really was an awesome paint-job.
- Rugby Dan - Rugby players are harder than a coffin nail, and Dan played a lot of it. Most of his best stories are about gruesome injuries, including his favorite about severing his own Achilles tendon with a weed whacker. Somewhat notorious back in the day for being a good DM, but unable to hold a group together longer that two weeks. To this day he's big into Rifts and White Wolf, and would drop everything if he thought he could get a group going again. He's recently found religion and is one of the more devout Catholics you'll ever meet.
- Irish Bob - A huge, burly corrections officer who worked down in Florence and infrequently stopped by, mainly to see if we wanted to get out of the game store and go to the titty bar in an effort to remind us that women exist. He thought I was hilarious, mostly because I always declined to join him for drinks, which he thought was ballsy, considering I was a quarter his size and refusing to drink with an Irishman is a sure way to get your ass kicked. He finally forced me away from a game at a convention to go drinking with the other guys, where I had a choice of either drinking Irish carbombers or going to the hospital.
- Catpee Man - Most stores have a Catpee Man, a person who may or may not be homeless who loiters around the store smelling sharply of urine, and reading the books on the shelves. Oddly, he tends to favor reading whatever book another customer is looking at, and will invade their personal space to rubberneck. Mostly harmless.
- Vegan Steve - A long-haired ninny who nobody liked and whose idiotic behavior has spelled the doom of more than one D&D adventuring party. Never ate animal products, and when anything relating to the subject was brought up, would open the floodgates to a lengthy lecture about animal cruelty and the unhealthiness of our pagan diets.
- Celtic Steve - A lifelong member of the Society for Creative Anachronism who looked at all times like he'd just stepped out of the Renaissance Festival...usually because he really had. His main hobby was goatee maintenance and clubbing people with large metal objects. Probably our best hope in case the store ever faced a classic siege situation.
- Fucking Patrick - A loud, obnoxious, mouth-breathing little piece of anal discharge who had made it his life's mission to loudly antagonize people and be generally as pleasant as a tropical skin infection. So-called because whenever anyone saw him approaching through the store's front window, the moan "it's fucking Patrick..." rose throughout the assembled gamers. Was once arrested for brandishing a knife at someone who had beaten him at a game of Magic.
