The Heartbreak of a Would-Be Warhammer Dad
My best childhood friend, Jesse, had a WWII Navarone playset in which two combatants could stage an American assault on a cross-section of fortified seaside cliff, complete with German troops and two big artillery pieces in balconies of heavy-gauge molded gray plastic.
For scene-setting, it was a step above: the person setting up the Germans could position men in two or three tiers of mountain bunkers, with the rest of the combatants arranged on a plastic playmat that had some printed beach and water features.
There was a good assortment of troops: flamethrower dudes, infantry in various poses, even a few (I loved this) casualties in agony’s repose on their plastic bases. I think the Allied forces may have had a half-track.
The setup was thrilling, the quasi-godhood of miniaturization and negated time.
“Playing” was depressing; the minute the battle would start — each of us in a race to make sound effects and turn active enemy threats on their side — the magic of the setup was degraded.
There was some residual excitement in examining the carnage, but I would have been happy setting it all up again and just admiring it together. But the shooting always had to start because I couldn’t take Jesse to that place in my pre-pubescent head where possibility was nourishment enough.
Let’s Put Some Structure In Here
Large-scale tabletop wargames like Warhammer: 40,000 serve as the ideal bridge between the 12-year-old who loves the detail of exotic warriors in dioramas and the kid who, 20 years later, needs a defined structure to Pew-Pew-Pew! Yeah, Unit X is a fearless whirlwind of destruction who inspires terror across the sector with the dread whine of their whatever-cannon, but how badass is it when firing into cover against my also measurably badass dude? (Large swathes of the hobby love the lore and the painting and never bother getting an army on the table at all. I think I’m starting to understand these people. Even civilians understand: they’ll ogle at a model waaay longer than they’ll sit to learn how hits v. wounds work.)
It doesn’t hurt to have coplayers in that age-spanning psychographic: In 2010 I joined the household of my then-girlfriend and her two kids. EZ, the eldest, was 14 at the time and I knew by some of the Warhammer jokes he would crack that I had a shortcut there to quick rapport.
I was at Barnes and Noble one day and saw a copy of Space Hulk: Death Angel. About the size of a paperback. $20. It became our whole summer. He kind of screwed the pooch in his spring semester math class, so he had to dedicate a portion of each morning to online catchup courses. I had LOS to him from the kitchen table, working on client shit, and my peripheral vision was sharply attuned to the moment, usually late morning, when he would close his laptop.
“You ready?” I’d say. I would already be sorting cards before I asked. We charged our Blood Angel Terminators through the masses of Genestealers waiting in the twisted guts of the Sin of Damnation again and again. By summer’s end, the cards had a friction patina of white.
Sifting back through those sessions, I see the same piece of char bob up again and again: the pangs of not ever having had a son; the antechambers of my personality that needed not just to have companionship, but to be revered. Now, it seemed, I had an acolyte and a pal and a hobby. I upped the ante by getting him the Black Reach W40K starter kit for one of his birthdays.
The first time he broke it out in earnest, his longtime homie, R, was visiting for the weekend. Those last sweet weekends before driving age, full of monstrous fast-food orders and constant laughter. I assumed I would be in the Warhammer clubhouse. They were pitting the Orks against the Ultramarines on the living room floor, chucking dice, cussing at each other; I pointed out something about the rules that didn’t match up with what they were doing. He snarled at me. I spent the rest of the evening in the bedroom, staying out of their way and sulking like someone a fifth my age.
The Clubhouse Schism
As he aged and eventually moved out and then the marriage failed, my foothold in this charismatic, hot-tempered and capable young man’s life shrank again. But we seemed on the verge of a Renaissance when he started coming to the first few recordings of this podcast, partying with us and playing games. It was at the tail end of one of those nights when he drunkenly said, “I’ll put together a Kill Team army if you do.”
He chose to play the elite Space Marines Deathwatch. I chose the Death Guard’s Plague Marines: putrid demon soldiers. We painted together at first under the tutelage of game shop veterans. He was setting up the game at his house and walking through solo games to learn the rules.
But those nights in the Colorado Springs clubhouse were sometimes more like a night in the trap than a boardgame get-together, and I was recklessly self-medicating through the first winter of being separated from his mom. Costly medicine.
The night he showed up with all his gear and books, I had not brought my Plague Marines (I brought them the week prior, but he didn’t show. EZ either shows or he doesn’t, and courtesy updates are not on offer.) I was drunk and high, and also distracted by all the manic cross-talk, seven people in the room, loud beats and multiple games being played on the table at once.
I didn’t understand the execution of a rule. I could tell he was hot, because he just started stripping pieces off the table and into his carry box. Let’s proceed with your interpretation and figure it out later, I tell him. It was no good: He later dragged me and my game group to his Mom and never came again.
I tried to coax him back by making contact with a young officer from one of our two local Air Force bases. We started doing booze-free Sunday tutorial sessions to eliminate distractions. He was a competitive tabletop player who got bored with routinely vaporizing my Death Guard by overcharging his Tempestus Scions’ plasma rifles. Once we increased the point ceiling and he added an Ogryn to give him some melee capability, I was tits-up. EZ never showed at any of these. Barring cartwheels in his front yard, I was out of ideas.
I moved to Southern Colorado; the remaining connective tissue dissolved. The last time we were supposed to hang out, I thought I had talked him into coming down to the Southern Command Post for the weekend. I had bought food and our favorite liquors and had been going at the kitchen linoleum with a scrub brush all morning. Noon and 1 p.m. passed. I called him. “Oh, I’m at work,” he said. That was my last effort, aside from one call of concern when his mother reported he was dating a woman who thought it was acceptable to ask for attention by holding a handgun to her head or telling her friends that he’d beaten her up.
Other material amassed for no purpose other than its own suspension: I went to OfficeMax and had all the relevant pages to my faction copied and bound so I would waste less time thumbing through the Codexes as a reference. I bought and cleaned out an old ammo box from a surplus store, custom cutting foam slabs from The Gamer’s Haven so I could carry all my Plague Marines and Blightlord Terminators and Poxwalkers and terrain in one neat martial case.
On the occasions a guest happens through, I’ll still pop it open and show them the figurines. My first few Death Guard are mostly carried on the strength of Death Guard primer and a few competently highlighted pieces of equipment, but by the time I got to my Poxwalkers, I had a magnifying visor given to me by my jeweler and I was hitting crazy detail.
I have mentally conditioned myself to the fact that my stepson has no room for me in his life, but still stew about it from time to time, the chest ever three sloppy steps behind what you know. I try to be conscious of it and chat myself through it, hoping the next high tide of sadness and bile brings more acceptance and recedes a bit earlier than before.
Still I thrill at that vile little army in the ammo box, posed in mid-step, bolters Plague Spewers and brutal blades forward, unconcerned with the intensity of Imperial fire and impervious to loss.
These seem the only things sturdy enough to bear the weight of the magics I invest in them.
