I left Tulane in the fall of 1995, and spent the next year traveling between Massachusetts – where I spent one semester attending Hampshire college – and at Neutral Ground in New York City. I lived with my mom in Great Neck while in New York and kept an eye on her. As the spring of 1996 came to an end, I decided I’d return to New Orleans for summer school at Tulane. Summer school tuition wouldn’t be covered by my scholarship, but it was only a couple of thousand dollars per summer session, so I’d be able to make up some of the ground I’d lost by leaving the university in the first place.
When I first returned to New Orleans for the summer, the dorms hadn’t quite yet opened for the interim students. Anthony and Chris DiNatale invited me to stay at their apartment until housing opened up, and this led to many games of Magic: The Gathering. Anthony and Chris lived in the house with Angela, who had a bit of a nebulous relationship with the twins. She also played Magic, and we’d frequently have Bob Brubaker come over to sling some spells.
If you don’t remember from my earlier blogs, Bob was a recovering alcoholic who picked up Magic as his newer, safer addiction. We loved playing with him, but he was frequently addled in his game play. Even after I hadn’t seen him for a year, he was still trying to tap people’s lands with Icy Manipulator in response to them casting spells, in an attempt to use Icy Manipulator as a hybrid Mana Short/Counterspell.
I remember the first night Bob came over to the twins’ house after I came into town. Anthony had called Bob and told him that they had a surprise. Bob showed up, and barely noticed me.
Me:”Bob, what’s going on?”
Bob:”Oh, so now you talk to me?”
Me:”(Puzzled) Bob, what are you talking about?”
Bob:”Why have you been avoiding me for a year now?”
Me:”Bob, my parents got divorced and I moved back up North. I told you that last year!”
Bob:”(Gruffer) What, and you never wrote?”
That’s Bob for you.
We’d have a lot of group games, with Chris, Anthony, Angela, me, Bob, and Bob’s daughter Dana. Dana was around twelve or thirteen at the time, and Bob’s idea of father/daughter bonding was to teach Dana Magic, and bring her around to play with our group. Predictably, she quickly became better than him at the game. Bob became obsessed with some infinite recursion deck he read about in The Duelist, which revolved around Fastbond, Timetwister, and Regrowth. He began playing the most complex combo deck imaginable, and foisted a Red/Green Giant Growth/Bloodlust/small creature deck on his daughter.
Group games quickly degenerated into Chris and Anthony teaming up against everyone else, with Angela stabbing each of them in the back. Dana would kill one person and then completely run out of gas, and Bob would play his deck suitably horridly, taking unnecessary points of damage, fizzling his combos, and mana burning frequently. We’d still take him out of the game quickly, as we feared that at some point he might accidentally cast the right spells in the right order and kill everyone at once.
In one game, Dana killed Chris on the second turn of the game. She cast a first turn Scryb Sprite, and followed it with a Black Lotus, Mox Ruby, Double Giant Growth, Bloodlust, Berserk kill on the second turn.
Bob:”What the **** Dana? You can’t kill people on the second turn!”
Chris:”Bob! Don’t curse in front of your daughter!”
Bob:”(Penitently) Oh, sorry Dana. I didn’t mean to say **** in front of you.”
After a couple of weeks, I moved back onto campus. We all still met up at the twins’ house to play Magic – on the weekends Bob would bring Dana, but otherwise it was just the five of us. We’d play every night, until two or three in the morning – free for alls, group games, color wars (in which each player builds a deck of one of the five colors, and the winner is the person who knocks out the opponents of their enemy color), chaos games – you name it, we played it.
On one not-so-special night, Bob took off as usual, and I stayed behind to play a couple of more games. I headed back to the dorm about an hour later, and came back the next night to play again. I arrived early, chatted with Angela for a while, and waited for everyone else to show up. Chris and Anthony came back home, but Bob was nowhere to be found. That was odd – he looked forward to playing with us every day. We tried calling his house, but we only got his answering machine. We played a few four-way games, and called it an early night.
The next day, Anthony called me at the dorm.”I just got a call from Dana. Bob’s been in a car accident. They’re not sure he’s going to make it.” The bottom fell out of my stomach. I knew Anthony wasn’t joking, but I didn’t want it to be true.”I’ll be right over,” I said, hanging up the phone and quickly getting dressed.
On his way home from playing Magic with us two nights earlier, Bob’s painting van (Bob made his living as a house painter) had been broadsided by a jeep full of drunk college students. They had rammed the driver’s side door at full speed, and pinned Bob between his steering wheel and the wreckage of the side panel. The irony of Bob being killed by other people’s drinking was not lost on me.
We’d gotten the call at night, so we couldn’t visit Bob at the hospital until the next day. Instead, we learned that the accident had taken place only a few blocks away from Anthony’s house, at the corner of Claiborne and Broadway. The police had moved Bob’s van to the side of the road. We approached the vehicle, which had been nearly totaled on one side. The driver’s side had been caved in straight to the middle of the vehicle on some parts. Blood covered the dashboard and seats. I don’t mean there was blood – I mean that the entire seat was coated in dried blood. We’d later learn that Bob’s leg was pinned and they nearly had to amputate it to get him out alive.
We made our way to Charity Hospital downtown the next morning – me, Anthony, and Chris. At Charity, each patient was only allowed to have two guest passes to their name, and Bob’s wife and daughter had gotten there ahead of us. We wandered around looking for Dana, and found her in the hallway. She got her mom (it was the first time we had met Bob’s wife – though they were divorced or estranged at the time, so this was not surprising), and we borrowed their passes for a few minutes.
Bob was barely conscious in his hospital bed. He was considerably doped up, and he looked near death.”Hey.” It was all he could muster – Bob, who was always going on and on and being the loud one and the boisterous one, and his strength only left him with one word to speak.”Bob, are you all right?””Not really. They want to amputate my leg.””Are you going to make it?””They think so. I’m hurt real bad though.” I couldn’t stand seeing Bob like this – bandaged and banged up, lying helpless in his bed, talking about death and dying. I left the room to go into the hallway. Bob had been a father figure – albeit a screwed up one – when I needed a father figure. Seeing him prone was more than I could stomach in the wake of my parent’s divorce.
I went back in to give Bob good wishes and hopes for his recovery, and we left to return to Tulane, leaving Bob with his ex-wife and daughter. We’d keep in touch with Dana over the coming days, during which time Bob began to make a slow yet steady recovery. He ended up keeping his leg, though it was permanently hurt from the accident. Bob left the hospital after a few weeks, and came to play with us at Anthony and Chris’s house. We were all so happy to see him, and we let him know that.
Things were different though. Bob was distracted, and not in his traditional scatter-minded manner. No, Bob’s near-death experience had gotten him thinking, and that thinking lead to a resolve – he was going to reprioritize his life around his family. No more drinking, no more drugs, and no more playing games – no matter the addiction, it had all served to keep him focused away from the people that mattered most to him. Bob told us that he was going to start spending more time with his family, and he stopped showing up to our games.
After the summer ended, I returned up North, and began working at Neutral Ground. I learned that Bob sold his entire collection to Serendib Jim for a pittance. He had multiple power nine cards, tons of dual lands, and most key Arabian Nights, Beta and Alpha cards, yet he just wanted to get rid of it all and dumped it all on Jim for $500. Part of me was disappointed that Bob hadn’t offered me his cards – not because I wanted to profit off of him, but because we had shared a close bond through Magic, and it seemed”right” to me that he would want to pass down his cards to me. Part of me was disappointed that Bob had settled for such little money. But part of me, the part that really mattered, was happy that Bob had thrown off the crutches of addiction and had moved his life past recovery and into rebuilding with the people he most loved in this world.
Ben can be reached at [email protected]