Episode 3: Dynamite Dice

Lean in, I have something spectacular to tell you.

About dice.

Now your average die, the one everyone is familiar with when you break out Monopoly for family game night or bust out the serious poker chips at Vegas, is a six-sided little cube, pips arranged in symmetrical designs on each plane. Usually one through six, although I've seen variant schemes. There are thousands of different colors and materials to choose from, but the most common today would be plastic, smoothed on the corners for increased rolling and to lessen manipulation. And the most dominant color: black and white. Simple.

They were playing with dice in Rome, in Greece, in civilizations lost to time and unnamed. Millennia later, two men named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson would show up and figure out a new game to play with them, and the six-sided die would become merely one weapon in an arsenal of polyhedral dice used in role-playing games. Four-sided. Eight-sided. Ten-sided. Twelve-sided. Twenty-sided. With simple, basic statistics, people around the world began building worlds, destroying them, and rebuilding.

Now this isn't all that spectacular. The spectacular bit is this: it was an old, old trick. The Greeks knew all about building a universe out of polyhedrons. Plato devised an elemental system of five separate elements, and to each he assigned a shape: pyramid/fire, cube/earth, octahedron/air, icosahedron/water, and dodecahedron (every other shape can be broken down into right-angle triangles; the dodecahedron cannot, and thus was a “cosmic” element – the aether). The world in Plato's view was built of mixtures of these elements. Contrary to Einstein, Plato's God did indeed play dice with the universe.

My favorite is the decahedron, the humble ten-sider the philosopher found no use for. Most of my favorite role-playing games use it exclusively. Simple to construct percentages, easy to scale from 1 to 10. And it spins like a dream. Each side is a lop-sided diamond, squat near the equator and pointed at the pole. A twenty-sider is easy to spin; it's almost a sphere and it wants to roll. You have to coax a good spin out of the ten-sider, give it space, and somehow that makes success sweeter. My favorite ones are a fiery orange, not quite burnt. The numbers are black and bold. And the orange is an illusion from a distance; peer closer and you see flecks of every warm range: smudged yellow, salsa red, and a sea of soft orange swimming around the splashes. Spinning, they all merge together like the tip of a flame with faint black stripes. Then it wobbles, clatters, and comes to rest.

And they explode. In many games that use them, a ten “explodes,” adding one die to another until they fizzle and cease exploding; there is no limit to what that ten can become, its potential astronomical. Every lump of plastic, or stone if you lay out enough cash, can go nova. Only a ten can do this. Other dice may “crit” or “stack” or even achieve a “nat.” But no other die explodes.

Handle your ten-siders with care. Plato was wrong about the pyramid. Dice with a decahedron, and play with fire.

Episode 2: Talk About Rules

PowerPoint presentations by anarchists are a thing of beauty. There's a guy named Margaret at the podium giving a brief history of intellectual anarchy; the Pearl Room of Powell's bookstore, a huge edifice of bricks and books, is packed. Mostly people plop down to see the icon of Portland fantasists, Ursula Le Guin, like me.

Then the sketchpad filled with stick figures illustrating key moments in anarchy literature is hoisted high. Modern technology at its finest: Sharpie and paper in perfect harmony. Red marker helped highlight the antics of more notorious anarchists with flame. An occasional bit of arson, and the knifing of a secret police captain, later and the speaker is quick to put it, “I'm not with the bomb-throwers!”

Mr. Killjoy was anything but.

This is not about that night.

I'm rushing. I've just been from the graduation information booths at the university's. It was an unpleasant experience dealing with the Registrar.

“I know, but you aren't actually planning on graduating as a Japanese major. We can't let you write it down,” she said. I've been waiting to hear an answer and hoping it would be different. “You'll have to talk to Financial Aid.”

“I've already talked to them. We had a meeting Friday. If y'all can just clear me on this, they're okay with my...,” damn you Maruki-sense, and your twisted naming conventions, what was it again, technically? “Modernity Japanese Narrative class. It meets the requirement, you just need to let me put it down on paper. The major.”

I know I can get a Japanese professor to sign off on it; they owe me a solid by now.

“I've talked to the higher-ups, and you can't do it. You'll just have to talk to Financial Aid.” She keeps repeating the mantra, like a sacred charm.

“I've talked to them. I don't have any options and I'm maxed out on all the other aid. This is it. We should be able to do this.”

“There's nothing I can do.”

A white cake with white frosting and a lemon middle sits on the table when you enter. I sliced a piece before grabbing my robe order form and getting down to business with the registrar.

Two bites. Forget it; I toss the cake in the trash.

“I was walking around this anarchist book faire looking for anarchist fiction. Have you tried that? Not a whole lot. I was determined to buy every novel written by anarchists there,” Margaret says, grinning. “I bought both of them.”

He held up a book, but I miss seeing the cover.

“Could you move? We have to keep the aisle clear,” says a woman with a Powell's nametag. I was squatting down near a pillar, trying not sit on another listener's bag of stuff, my legs sore and jacket thick. There was no room for me to shed my jacket in the congested room.

“Sure, sure. Sorry.” I stand, move closer to the pillar. I lean on the pillar to scoot in from the shifting aisle between people, supporting my weight with my arm. The rest of the session is spent shifting my arm occasionally to reduce fatigue.

The guy next to me, his stuff is piled on the floor. He doesn't move it, and despite anarchy in the air I don't either. I just stand for it.

I seek a meeting with the associate dean. 1:30, no problem. I'll just keep climbing the totem pole. I'm only trying to play the game I've been offered, because I want to play it, but the only weapon I have are the rules themselves.

And just before the meeting, literally the minute before I slide out of my chair and shake off enough of a slump not to smell desperate, I get an email. The numbers don't crunch. Modernity Japanese Narrative can't be an independent study with a 455 tag; will 395 do?

No. No it won't. Not by the rules. If the class is not a 455, I don't graduate. Money be damned.

“Numbers. Paper. I'm getting buried in them,” I write back.

Calm.

Calm.

Goddammit. Calm.

This is the conversation I didn't have with Margaret.

“What about Daniel Quinn? Ishmael? I mean, you stressed horizontal power structures versus vertical ones throughout the talk. Why isn't he listed as an anarchist here, in the appendix? Isn't tribalism just about the ultimate form of anarchy.”

“Well,” he thinks about it, “with a tribe, you'll still have a structure you're born into, right? A set of norms that don't allow for variance, and an even stricter cultural taboos. So there's still a hierarchy. You might even have a chief.”

“Chiefs are temporary; once they're permanent you've moved into a power structure, sure, and you've got what we've got here. But I mean, can't we take the basic ideas of a tribe, and rework it into something new and voluntary? Something not ethnographic or geographic,” I'm struggling to put the words in the right order, “something more voluntary. Like a circus operates. Or gypsies.”

“Sure, and there's even people doing it. But not enough. Fiction might inspire more. We're buried in theory right now.”

“Well,” I shrug, “what about Quinn?”

“For one thing, I don't really remember him ever self-identifying as an anarchist. So I didn't think to interview him.”

Self. Identify.

This is the actual conversation.

“Oh, hi. Could you sign this?”

“Sure.”

Thrilling.

Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. A book full of interviews with a wide variety of anarchist philosophies represented. I spend far too late in the night devouring it once I'm home, delighted to see Le Guin, Alan Moore, even a line developer for a defunct Dungeons & Dragons setting. I make a note to investigate some authors I never read before.

I walk in reeking of desperate.

“Oh there's the subject of our conversation.” Professor Beard is just walking out of the associate dean's office, Steve Smith right behind her. I nod hello. Keep it together. Keep it together.

“So, right, you see there is no 455 it turns out, and we can't assign an independent study to anything more than a 395. Or you'd end up taking it to the Registrar and they would just be confused and reject you.” Well, it's a familiar feeling this week. “So, we're going to write 395, here,” she shows me the green form, the holy grail I've been chasing the last few months, “and then I'll talk to the Creative Writing faculty and we'll see if they'll make an exception. I think it will be alright.”

People have been telling me they think it will be alright a hell of a lot lately. Or, worse, they “hope” it will be alright.

“Sure. Well, I'll just pretend it's fine for now, all done.”

Mr. Smith doesn't look too sure. He goes over the whole deal again himself. I repeat myself.

“Well, is this what you're here about?” asks the professor.

“No, no, I just got your email five minutes ago, right before I came. This is about something else.”

“Oh, well, good luck. I should be able to get back to you tomorrow, yes?”

“Okay.”

Mr. Smith leads me into his office, sits down at his desk. We exchange a few strained pleasantries, and I shrug my coat off on the back of the chair. If this were second story or higher, the window would look inviting.

“I'm losing two thousand dollars, because I did the right thing, I filled the paperwork out on time. I know it would take me another two years to graduate with Japanese, but it's been a long time. I mean, thirteen years, I need to be done. I can do it this year. It's not like I might not still come back and do Japanese, but I need to survive for now.” I hedged before, with the Registrar, with Financial Aid. I tried to tapdance with hypotheticals, falling short of begging. “I don't want to graduate and starve the next day. It's paper; I don't understand. Shuffle a paper here, for me. Sign something. That's all it takes.”

There's more, of course, but you have to sandwich it between mental commands to Hold It Together and stuttering and looking away and looking back and what with all that, translation from garbled memory and fierce emotion to dispassionate recitation suffers a tad. Or flushes straight down the toilet; dissecting verbal diarrhea is a messy business.

Turn the spigot off.

“Look,” Smith leans forward, hands steepled on the desk, “I don't know if there's anything I can do. But, this is like any other bureaucracy, it has its own wheels. I can't promise anything. I'll look into, see what can be done. Okay? Will that do?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

We shake hands.

I hope it's alright.

Dawn is soon. A book you can't put down is a thing of beauty. Mythmakers & Lawbreakers leads me to Lewis Shiner's Slam. A recent parolee is having the worst week out of jail, and it's not his fault. Drug deals are going down he can't control, he has a ridiculous job, a UFOlogist and the blind and the deaf are breaking into his new home almost every night.

On the edge of the Gulf, in Galveston. I've seen that sea. The water is never blue in the book; nor is it ever. Brown and warm and, if you close your eyes and don't think about it too much, clean. He's just trying to get a beer and play poker with his old friends, things any man unparoled could do, no problem.

But it doesn't work, any of it, until he dies. According to the rules. A simple paper trick.

I keep thinking of the last words he shares with his parole officer.

“This isn't your fault or mine. It's a problem with the rules. They won't stretch to fit me.”

Episode 1: My First Big Boy Trip

"San Luis Potosi," mused Coyote. "Sure, I been there. Me and some amigos started a little brushfire down there. Twice"

Yes, I'm sure you did. San Luis Potosi is an important city in Mexican history, but few Norteamericanos could place it. It isn't huge and bloated like Mexico City, doesn't have the tourism of Monterrey, or the notoriety of Tijuana. San Luis Potosi is still a good-size metropolis, however, and halfway between the Rio Grande and Mexico's capital in the heart of the desert hills.

I don't doubt Coyote was there. In 1810, Father Hidalgo, a priest a bit crazy to put the needs of his Indian friends over the aristocracy he was born into, let loose the bells of Dolores to summon Mexicans to independence and war; San Luis was an early victory. A hundred years later, a crazy vegetarian and teetotaler proclaimed the opening of the Mexican Revolution (different name, same game) after escaping prison in San Luis. Something about San Luis Potosi just inspires the Coyotes of the world thirsting for some radical change, I suppose.

So, in the summer of 1997, my friend Danny and I plunked down thirty-two bucks to ride Greyhound to Laredo. From there, another thirty-two bucks (translated to pesos) took us twice the distance in a bus twice as nice and half as crowded down to San Luis.

Now, I had no idea at thee time I was traveling Coyote style. We hit a dusty trail with no idea what we were doing. At least I didn't.

Here's a little tip if you want to travel south of the border, from Texas into Mexico. And I don't mean a quick trip for some cheap shopping or to linger around the pool in a fancy resort. I mean deep. Grab your passport, get a visa. It's an easy thing to know now, in a post-9/11 world it's absolutely required, but when an ignorant I passed Nuevo Laredo and the bus headed into the desert, trouble started. So here's the second tip: do the research yourself. Our purpose was to visit his extensive family living in San Luis; Danny was Mexican, born in the Yucatan, so this came regular to him.

"Danny, am I going to need a passport or something?"

"No, no, you don't need anything. It's Mexico."

Coyote is laughing across the fire, hooting and yowling something terrible. I can only grumble I was 18, and had never been outside the USA before, what did I know? I didn't come from a traveling family. When I told my mom what Danny and I were doing two weeks after graduation, she laughed and said, "No you're not!" Sure I was, I was an adult, and as I packed my bags it dawned on her that maybe it was true. I was going, I was a man, and that was that. She even drove me and Danny down to the bus station.

Coyote growled and tipped his battered hat. He respected that.

All that machismo vanished when the nice young men in fatigues with machine guns escorted me and Danny off the bus about dozen miles past the border.

Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus I'm going to die in the desert and no one will ever know. All I could picture were the Federales mowing down Pancho and Lefty splitting with the loot, just like a Willie Nelson song. And, unkind as it was, I prayed I was Lefty.

We were paraded into a small government building. Tiny. There was a pudgy, middle-aged Federale with a mustache, so cliche it hurt. He shot a stream of Spanish at us and Danny handled it all, with me growing more and more nervous. "What's he saying?" "Don't worry." "What's he saying now?" "It's okay, it's okay."

I would discover later it wwasn't me in the most hot water; they were convinced Danny was Guatemalan. One thing about racism and discrimination, there's always someone below you to kick down the ladder. His eyes, they said, weren't right; well, he had Yucatan blood, he said. The Federale let that go. Then he asked if we were priests.

So here's you're third tip: Bring a bible. No, seriously. We grabbed a taxi to get us over the bridge into Nuevo Laredo. The Mexican customs agents searched our luggage as we watched (we had a suitcase apiece), but stopped immediately when they saw a bible packed on top of the clothes in each one. We were both a bit more religious back then. May it was intense Catholic respect, maybe it was a smuggling code and they were on the take; I will never know. But a strategically placed bible can save you some hassle in Mexico.

No, we told him, we're not, just like to keep some churchin' in our lives (I imagine Danny explained it much more eloquently in Spanish). So he pulls out a paper, and gives me instructions on how to sign it for a temporary visa. In perfect English. I'm shaking in my sneakers the whole time as a world of machine guns and the Law breathes down my neck, not understanding a word spoken, and it was all unnecessary. Well, fair enough; it was his country, not mine.

And that's how I got into Mexico, completely backwards. I didn't do a thing you should do. I was smart enough to have had a birth certificate copy with me, just in case (a copy useless now, since the laws changed), but I didn't have nearly the documentation I should have had. I didnt ask the right questions. The things I did right I had no idea I was doing.

We didn't land in a posh resort; I awoke after my first good sleep in San Luis in the concrete ghetto. Danny's aunts and grandmother were downstairs watching telenovellas, and Danny nowhere to be seen. Still, between his abuela and me we figured out she was our host and lived a block over, across from a collapsed home nestled between more concrete homes holding up its lost walls. She was a former history teacher, and I have fond memories of her guiding me and Danny around the city and giving us its Revolution and Independence history. On those steps, she said when we visited its cetral cathedral, Hidalgo called for the Revolution. And there are lost tunnels connecting that cathedral with others throughout Mexico.

Some of her history is a bit suspect, actually. But they were good stories. "I liked her," said Coyote. I assured him so. "And think about those guys, starting there, or near enough," he continued. "Scared as hell, I bet. Didn't know how to do a thing, just went and did it. The last guys you expected to buck the system and have an adventure. And for Mexico, if not for themselves, it worked out pretty well. It's not a chance if you don't take it, and not a journey if you never leave something behind."

San Luis Potosi, where I became addicted to tortas sold by a guy on the corner. Where I dared Mexican carnival rides (and I thought the Federales were scary). Where peasants were still begging in the alleys or kneeling and praying their way to the cathedral steps as vendors sold kneepads and ice cream. Where we shot pool everyday. Where we never saw the lake because the rains made it impossible for ten people to get up a mountain road in a Volkswagen.

I won't say I became a man, or anything so trite. But it was the first decision I made as a man, that couldn't be contradicted or overruled. And it got guns pointed at me and paperwork tossed at me. But it worked out all right, in the end.