Interstate with the Vampire

An Atlanta childhood in the shadow of death, an echt 1990s role-playing game, and more

Feb 18, 2021

Welcome once more to The Rogation Dragon, the fearsome maw into which I stuff all my least coherent thinking, to be regurgitated upon a grateful readership. As usual you’ll get a short book note, plus a rambling thing about Rust Belt vampires for which I typed out and then deleted MANY pointless and omnidirectionally insulting generational comparisons, and a couple of links. No quote this time but I’m reading Stephen Fry’s The Liar for the fortieth time and you should too. It’s the funniest book I’ve ever read and also a painful meditation on the fear of being caught.

So Much to Answer For

I recently finished Tayari Jones’s 2002 Leaving Atlanta, a novel about the lives of black children on Atlanta’s Southside in 1979 – 1980—that is, the era when one or more serial killers were preying on Atlanta’s black children. Jones really captures the cadence of the children’s speech and thoughts, and the ways of the adults around them. A child complains as a mother is doing her hair, and: “‘You know this is not hurting you,’ Mama said, but she used a lighter touch.”

There’s a lot of this kind of dialogue, at once kitchen-table realistic and resonant with the novel’s themes—all that adults say to children without words, all that children mean to adults and how those adult meanings can clash with what children mean to themselves. This idea of the clash between the private symbolism by which people make sense of their lives (if they do), and the public meanings their bodies bear for others, is something I think about a fair amount; it comes up in the novel I’m working on. Jones talks about it here: “I also realize [now] why child murders were even more harrowing for parents because parents have a long view, kids don’t. Parents were looking at the child murders in the context of history. Also, for adults, children are symbolic people more than individuals. They see children as our future. But children don’t see themselves as the future . . . they just see themselves as themselves. For our parents, we were both our individual self and a symbolic self.”

Those ideas emerge naturally within the novel; they don’t feel imposed on it. When Jones reaches for meaningful images or lyricism the novel does strain, and sometimes ends up in cliché, as when a child deliberately breaks a Christmas ornament under her bare foot. Jones writes that she “limped to the bathroom to tend to the wound I could see.” We don’t need this last bit, with its obvious shadow, the wound she could not see! These moments seemed to appear most often in the novel’s final section, but honestly, they’re rare, you can move past them.

The most memorable passage of this novel doesn’t take place in Atlanta, but in a teacher’s memory of her childhood in Sugarloaf, Ala., her journey to Atlanta, and the people she lost in sudden crushing blows. Atlanta, like Chicago (and DC), was an obvious stopping place for black families fleeing the rural South. Knowing the terrible losses of that journey makes the terror gripping Atlanta’s black community in those days all the more vivid.

I don’t know of many portrayals of what it’s like to be a child in a time when you know that there is a child predator in the neighborhood. There is Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s 1967 children’s classic The Egypt Game; there’s the Smiths song I name-check above, about the victims of the Moors murders, which Morrissey has said draws on his own experience of being a child at that time: “A swarm of misery grips mid-60s Manchester as [confessed killers] Hindley and Brady raise their faces to the camera and become known to us all.” I don’t know that this is a genre (theme? topic?) I’m specifically looking for, but if you have examples which capture something about childhood or the relationship between children and adults, I’d be interested to hear them.

All the fantasy tales about child-catchers, of which the one I remember liking best is Joan Aiken’s Is Underground, likely touch on related fears. But they feel really different from both nonfiction and fictional descriptions of how children fear real child-killers. In fact, the communal fear in Leaving Atlanta, the feeling that a malevolent unseen force is moving among the people you love and destroying them as those in power look on with indifference, hatred, or pity—all of that reminded me of nothing so much as gay writing on the AIDS epidemic.

Rust Red

The most interesting fact I learned from the 2017 “World of Darkness” documentary is also the fact that most perfectly combines the tragic and the prurient: “Vampire: The Masquerade” was inspired by Gary, Indiana. The White Wolf guys were driving to GenCon through Indiana—what, you thought I was going to say they lived there?—and staring at all the boarded-up Rust Belt storefronts and burnt-out houses, as you do when you’re a human in a place, just gawkin’ and rollin’.

“Who lives here?” one of them asked.

“Vampires,” another one said. And a legend was born….

The White Wolf guys were not from Gary, but their objectification or fetishizing of Gary was a way of identifying with it. The documentary argues that part of “Vampire’s” appeal was that previous games had you killing vampires, but only in this game could you be one. Put on your lipstick, you and I are playing abandoned buildings tonight.

To see oneself in another person is not the same as seeing the other person. So I’m not defending it when I say I liked it, the Gary origin story explains some of what I loved about “Vampire.” I was never good at playing it. I disliked the constraints of collaborative storytelling and I bet I disliked the element of luck, which is now my favorite part of RPGs: You can have an idea for how well or poorly your character will handle something, but the dice decide. Just like in real life!

But in “V:TM” something terrible has happened to you, which makes you violent and also very sexy, and you can do anything you want except make things right. I love wild generalizations about marketing categories so I will call this a Gen X attitude: damaged, solutionless, all ecstasy and indifference. There’s an economic element to that mindset (I remember answering a phone survey, back in like middle school, where they asked if I expected to have the same amount of financial security as my parents, or greater, or less. I was like, “...Less? Duh??”) and also a social element, a postcard from the days when we said things like “mugging money” and “heroin chic” and “broken family.” There’s also a fun spiritual element: The terrible thing that was done to you may have been something you participated in, something you shared, and even if it was completely against your will you’re now doing things because of it, and you bear the responsibility for those later acts yourself. The theologians argue about the relationship between the Fall and personal guilt but in “Vampire” it’s easy, you count your Corruption points.

You’d think this game would not be civic-minded. And yet, as the documentary also points out, the innovative “Vampire” clan system is about the dream of community: Instead of economic lifeblood draining out of your hometown, all the families breaking up around you as the city bleeds out leaving only violence and addiction and despair, that very experience of destruction can be what binds you to other people and gives you a new family. ...Now that I’ve typed this I think I’m saying vampires are basically hot Juggalos. $#$@ mirrors, how do they work?!

The “Vampire” clans are my favorite kind of friendship, the kind St. Aelred warns you against, where you’re bound to someone for the rest of your life because of the worst things you share. Art about addiction is often art about friendship and this is why. Not so much found family as forced family, even feral family—but it’s better than drinking alone.

To close… Tim Bradstreet’s illustrations are still smoking, I’ll say that. They’re as slick as some of Jaime Hernandez’s work at that time (Flies on the Ceiling came out October 1991), even if they’re obviously not aiming at the same depth Love and Rockets regularly hit.

I Sought that Wascally Wabbit… I Sought Him But I Did Not Find Him

In conversation with a friend after the last newsletter we thought there was another obvious way of representing prayer in the movies: by a radical shift in genre. A sudden inbreaking of expressionism in a realist picture; even an intermingling of animation, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Outbreaks of musical fantasy like in Brazil or The Hole. Bruno Dumont really went for this idea in Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc. I loved it there, I think I’d love it always, but you don’t have to be quite as aggressively edgy/European to make this idea work: the idea that God speaks in a different genre.

Of course then I realized that, while I certainly cannot endorse its theology, “Duck Amuck” may be the greatest adaptation of the Book of Job ever filmed.

icymi

I have an essay in the Tablet on medieval Italian penitential peace movements, and the insights they offer for contemporary peacemakers like violence interrupters and restorative-justice practitioners. I haven’t written a lot lately but I think this piece is good. An excerpt:

The peace movements mediated between the armed camps loyal to imperial or papal forces; they prompted repentance in murderers and robbers; they settled personal feuds.
And they whipped themselves. Flagellant processions featured in many of these peace movements, including the Battuti, Bianchi, and Colombini (“little doves”). Barefoot marchers from all classes would parade in self-imposed public humiliation, the knotted cords lashing their shoulders like an especially literal interpretation of Matthew 11:12. This penitential violence was not just a sordid, gothic curlicue on the edge of the peace movements’ real work. It holds lessons for our own time, especially for those who seek to make peace outside the judicial violence of the criminal justice system.
(more; nonsubscribers can read the whole thing if they’re willing to jump through some registration hoops)

Now Playing

Harrison Lemke, “The Old Band.” It’s never, ever, ever getting back together. From his upcoming album “Forever Only Idaho,” for which I am ridiculously excited.