Gloss
I was scared when the figure stepped from the shadows, pointing a gun at me. I was still scared when I realized it was Rob.
Rain blew softly through the broken kitchen window. Standing in the dark, dilapidated suburban house with three cans of tomato soup in my arms, my gut sank. I stared at the chrome barrel of his gun. What the hell was I thinking?
Rob became the youngest member of my teenage friend circle when we met at our church’s youth group. He was playful and funny, and I invited him to join my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Although he went to a different high school from most of us, we spent a lot of time together, mostly playing tabletop games like Gladiator and Civilization. And we played a lot of D&D.
One time, we were playing Diplomacy, a game that’s all negotiation, no dice. The board is basically a map of the European theater of World War I. Rob was playing as England, and he offered to partner with me — playing Russia — in a tight union.
“OK,” I said, “but you better not screw me.”
“No problem, boss,” he said, smiling. “We can do this.”
We started in the north and worked our way south. Our alliance held, despite temptations and challenging moments, and we won the game that night. Feasting on pretzels after the game, I bragged we won because I was the boss.
“No, I’m the boss,” Rob teased, and everyone laughed. After that, we jokingly called each other boss all the time. That mutated to “Gloss” for some long-lost reason.
Once summer came, most of us had predictable teen jobs, and we’d get together at my house most evenings for gaming. One time during a D&D session when Rob passed me a note. The group was exploring some underground crypt, and Rob had noticed something no one else had: a little secret panel that opened in the stone wall. The note said he wanted to wait till everyone else left the room, then search the panel. I nodded to him — both of us keeping poker faces — and wrote back that he’d found a jeweled dagger, something obviously very valuable. Would he take it? He read my note and just nodded. For months, he just held onto it, finally trading it in a private deal to an NPC. I’d sometimes say to him privately, when we weren’t playing, “Nice dagger,” and we’d smile.
Rob became famous in the D&D group for saying, after the group killed a foe, “What’s he got?” before the body had hit the ground. It became one of his signature lines.
When I was in college, I’d race home on holiday breaks and the gaming would begin immediately. Got home at 10 p.m.? No problem: “Hi Mom, Love you,” — the gaming started ten minutes later. One December, I got home on the night of the twenty-third. I called Rob right away. “Gloss, I’m home. Get over here!” Rob was the last to arrive, and he came in wearing a fuzzy red and white Santa hat, carrying a stack of wrapped presents.
“Santa Rob! I didn’t hear the reindeer,” Jay exclaimed.
“Ho, ho, ho, ladies,” Rob replied as he began handing out gifts. “Santa Gloss, you’re the best,” I said when he handed me a gift shaped like an Avalon Hill board game.
By the time Rob got to college, two years behind me, he had become the biggest guy in the group. He had wrestled competitively in high school and was now lean and muscular. When he was feeling feisty, he’d playfully manhandle someone, chuckling through it all. Once he wrestled Jay to the ground and put him in a scissors lock with his legs, laughing — we were all laughing. Before long, Jay lost his sense of humor about it: “Get the fuck off me!”
I tried to intervene carefully. “Hey, Gloss…let up,” I said, shrugging slightly.
Rob, realizing he’d pushed the joke too far, let him go. “OK, OK. I’m just playing around. Sorry! Geez.”
One of the odd experiences four or five of us shared was working as security guards for the Kuntz Detective Agency. The pay was awful, but the benefits — as I saw it — were pretty cool. We usually had graveyard shifts, either midnight to eight or eleven to seven. Being 18–21, we were fine with being up all night, and we made the most of it. When one guy was working, say, guarding a factory overnight, others would come by. We’d hang out and play games for hours. Sometimes we made up our own, like the time Rob and I found that the forklifts had the keys in them. Now these weren’t the kind where the forks go up three or four stories. With these, the driver went up with the forks. And you could drive them at any height. The forklifts felt a lot like speeder bikes from The Empire Strikes Back to us. So we had to race the forklifts around. But it would be too easy to do it at ground level — we set the rule that you had to keep the forks at maximum height at all times. We’d start at max height (which was at least 30 or 35 feet), charge off the start line, then duck down to go under doorways or pipes in the factory. The courses were maybe 200 or 300 yards long, and we’d have three-lap races. It’s hard to believe we never got hurt or destroyed anything.
After college, we still got together, and sometimes we’d play a game. But it was less often. I only got back to my hometown a couple times a year. People started having families. Life happened. But it was always good to see each other. Rob and I still called each other Gloss, and we all laughed at the old jokes. The relationships didn’t change a lot. –And then they did.
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One fall, I was planning to visit the old stomping grounds at Christmastime, so I texted the guys to find time to get together. Others wrote to say when they could get free, but Rob didn’t respond. After a couple weeks, Rob finally wrote to us. His brief message said that after a lot of thought, he’d decided not to get together with us because he didn’t want to hear a bunch of political talking points he disagreed with. “Good luck and good health to you,” he concluded. Jay quickly wrote me privately: “What the FUCK?” We tried to dissect it, but in the end Rob had made his choice. I was sad, but didn’t try to argue with him.
That was the way things went in those years. Mostly you didn’t notice the changes, then sometimes you really felt them. Some people had seen the revolution coming, but most people couldn’t believe it would get that bad. It did.
One hot summer day my neighbor was pounding a political sign into his lawn as I walked by. We exchanged looks, then he pointed to the holstered gun at his waist. The next week, the grocery store shelves were empty and fights broke out in the lines at the gas station.
And now here I was, scavenging for food in the wrong neighborhood, one controlled largely by a group of armed people who saw things differently than I did. And here was Rob, pointing a .44 at me.
“Hi Gloss,” I said, holding my hands up as much as I could without dropping the soup cans.
Rob just stood there, his arm extended, the gun still pointed at my face. He sighed. His face was only anger and dead seriousness. The wind started to blow the rain harder.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“Yeah.”
“I bet you know the rules here.”
“‘Trespassers shot on sight.’ I saw the signs.”
He nodded.
“I’m not armed.” I dropped the soup cans. “You can search me. I don’t have any weapons.”
“Take your shirt off.”
I complied. With the wind blowing through the house, I was even colder without the wet shirt. I held my hands up, shivering.
“Pants too. Slowly.”
I tried to swallow, but I had a big lump in my throat. I tried to breathe evenly. I slowly undid my belt and lowered my dirty jeans around the tops of my boots. I held my hands back up.
“No weapons.”
Rob just stared at me. He lowered his aim to my chest.
“I, I have some cash in my pants.” He shook his head.
“Gloss…” I trailed off.
He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “Gloss. How did we get here.”
