Zero Charisma
Well, poo.
I had planned on an twelfth day of Christmas post, perhaps writing a bit about Twelfth Night celebrations involving wassail, wassailing, and special cakes. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Say, “La vee.”
Over the weekend, my son Christopher and I watched Zero Charisma, starring Sam Eidson as Scott Weidemeyer. (N.B. That link is to the trailer.) I’ll avoid spoilers for those who’ve not seen this 2013 independent film, but I’ll offer my two coppers after the still of a scene from the movie.
Zero Charisma is not a bad movie. It’s not a particularly good movie either, in part because it can’t seem to make up its mind what kind of movie it wants to be. Is this a parody? Sort of. Is it a comedy? Sort of. Is it a melodrama? Yeah, it’s kind of that too. Who am I supposed to be rooting for? It’s hard to tell. Most of the characters are pretty unlikeable, especially Eidson’s Scott. At times, it seems I’m supposed to pity Scott, but other times he’s so horrible that he merits scorn. The same is true for several of the supporting characters.
Scott is not a nice guy. He rains on parades. He’s dictatorial. He’s verbally abusive. He’s dishonest. He’s got a hair-trigger temper. He is, in his own estimation, a loser, and he embodies all the worst stereotypes about gamers: overweight, socially awkward, stuck in a menial job, intimidated by pretty women, and resentful of those better at things he wishes he was good at.
While watching Zero Charisma, uncertain about what the movie’s conflicting tones expected of me, I was reminded of a guy I gamed with for a short time. Let’s call this guy C.A.
Shortly after I left the Army at the end of 1992 and moved back to Houston, I got together with a few of the folks I gamed with in high school. We also roped in some new players, including C.A., who answered an ad thumbtacked to the gamer board at Nan’s Games and Comics Too. At the time, we were playing Champions, and C.A. via phone conversation seemed an enthusiastic player.
We met a Fred’s house to play. C.A. showed up, dropped off by his mother, which didn’t really raise eyebrows despite C.A. being roughly our age (that being mid-20s). Fred’s mother lived with him, and another player, Ben, lived with both his mother and grandmother, whom he helped care for. The first thing I noticed about C.A. was how familiar he looked, but I figured he might have one of those faces, so I left it alone.
It didn’t take long to figure out C.A. was a bit off kilter. His insistence on the letter of the law regarding the rules extended mostly to other characters, but not his own character (which was a sort of martial artist rubber man in the vein of Bruce Lee meets Mr. Fantastic). During non-game talk, C.A. seemed a bit too eager to either one-up the experiences of others, or else he made claims that were simply bizarre and untrue (such as his claim that he knew for a fact that H.P. Lovecraft based the Necronomicon on the “real Necronomicon”, which C.A. had read). I chalked C.A.’s behaviors up to either nervousness in a new situation or to a rather dry sense of humor that we didn’t know him well enough to quite get.
And so we gamed about once a week, and we had fun. C.A. was quirky, to be sure. He showed signs of being a bit volatile when he didn’t get his way, but can’t anyone have a bad day? He wasn’t abusive. He wasn’t violent. He more intense and stubborn, and I’m hardly one to condemn someone for being stubborn. That is a level of hypocrisy to which I do not aspire.
Some time after meeting and gaming with C.A., I figured out why he looked familiar. He had been a student at Spring Branch Senior High School at the same time I was there doing as little as possible to earn my high school diploma. I still remember the first (and possibly only) time I noticed C.A. It was in the morning in the cafeteria. He was sitting facing my direction several tables away from where I was sitting. He was reading a comic book. Two of the high school’s many third-rate thugs sauntered up to him, took the comic away, and tore it in half before laughing and walking off to congratulate each other on being jack asses. I remember feeling bad for C.A.
C.A. was a student in special education. Back then, circa 1984-1985, most students identified as needing special education services were segregated from the main student population. There were several temporary buildings (called T-shacks) behind the main school building where students in special education received instruction. From what I remember, most of the students were obviously developmentally delayed. Children with Down Syndrome, for example, seemed more common three decades ago.
C.A. was not developmentally delayed, at least not intellectually. He was a bright guy. Looking back through the lens of years of experience as a teacher, I can say with a degree of confidence that C.A. was some shade of autistic. High-functioning, to be sure, but socially quirky enough to have been identified as “disruptive to the general education learning environment” (as was the public school thinking back then).
But back to our Champions game, which was interrupted by my wedding and honeymoon. I don’t remember if we invited C.A. to the wedding. If we didn’t, that might explain what happened while my bride and I traveled to El Paso, Texas, to visit my aged grandmother who could not travel. If we didn’t, we should have. It might have made a difference (but maybe not).
We’d been out of town for a couple of days and our regular game day rolled around. A very irate C.A. called Fred. He yelled at Fred, demanding to know why I wasn’t answering the phone. Fred explained I was out of town. C.A. demanded to know when Fred was coming to pick him up for the regular game. C.A.’s mother wasn’t available for transportation, and C.A. assumed this meant Fred was responsible for picking him for the game. Fred explained there was no game because I, the GM, was out of town. Fred wasn’t much of a gossip, but he let me know enough about C.A.’s phone call that day to understand that C.A. went from very irate to verbally abusive at the top of his lungs.
We never gamed with C.A. again after that incident, and watching Sam Eidson as Scott Weidemeyer in Zero Charisma reminds me of why. But it also makes me a little sad.
