So I found the image above on one of Julie’s former student’s Facebook wall and completed the task. The title of this post is my Emo band name.
It sent me down a rabbit hole of a memory.
So… this is a story about a guy I used to know (used to be?)
I have written before in various places about my role-playing and how I tend to commit to the bit so much that I sometimes get myself into a little bit of a weird spot. This is a similar story, but not out of anything deceptive or untrue. This is about a time I think I role-played deep to the heart of something inside myself.
Picture it, Sicily… I mean Richmond, 1995. I’ve just graduated from high school and it’s the middle of the last good decade. As I am sure I’ve mentioned before if you’ve been following things here, I chose not to go to college at the last minute because my grandfather (my mom’s adopted father) died and there was no one to help my grandmother take care of herself. She didn’t want to go in a home (she died in a home just about four months ago, sigh), so I opted to leave Bloomington (for the first of two times) to go home and essentially take care of her. She couldn’t drive, she was forgetful, she needed a lot of support. I don’t regret it, even if things did get really uncomfortable between she and I at one point and we ended up on not-as-solid terms.
Not going to college put me in the work-a-day world. And working menial jobs (I worked in a factory where I was on a line producing CDs for a while, then I started working at Wal-Mart) didn’t occupy my mind. I had to have a hobby (or three).
My first hobby was hustling people at Mortal Kombat (I think it was III at the time) and Tekken (2 at the time) at the arcade and the local truck stops. I managed to supplement my income enough to cover my various nerd needs doing this.
My second hobby was going to shows/trading bootlegs/meeting musicians. I was never very good at music myself (I was the vocalist in a super-shitty grunge cover band for a while, but who wasn’t in the 90s?).
My last hobby was role-playing, just as it had been in high school. My D&D group was gone, though, and while I suppose I could have met some new people to play with, I was also dealing with the worst period of my social anxiety, so meeting new people out in the world seemed like a bad idea. About this time I got slowly back into wrestling, through the little brother of a friend. I’m sure I’ve told this story, but he was in something called an E-wrestling federation. Basically people role-played as wrestlers, and the person who ran the game (the DM, essentially) chose the winners and losers and wrote the actual matches based on strategies sent by the players. I started playing along because no one would play with this younger sibling of my friends, and when the game ended up being sort of lame, I started running one myself so he could have fun. I made a number of friends through that.
Fast forward to around 1998. I’m back in college, living in an apartment that belonged to my uncle before we had a weird change-of-place encounter and he moved back in with his mother (the grandmother I was taking care of– I was asked to leave because the uncle and I didn’t agree on his use of various substances, so I moved into the apartment he was too depressed to go back to). One of the friends I made doing the wrestling RP stuff has started a game of his own. At the time, my other big-important-wrestling friend wanted to be a part of that game, but my friend wanted to do something that had a different flavor than the WWF(e) clone I was running. He wanted to do a little local thing (like an ECW) based in New Mexico. So I created a luchadore for my famous friend, a mask wearing guy named The Offspring who spouted Warrior-isms and wore a mask with warrior’s paint stitched into it.
At first, I wasn’t going to play in the other game. I was busy running my own and trying to go to school and work. But my famous friend couldn’t fit it into his schedule at all, and the other players (who were all really good– the friend running the game had hand picked a group of great RPers) were suffering from his not being there. And I did create Offspring. So… I fleshed him out more and I played him.
He started as this weird experience. I always wanted to be Spider-Man as a kid, so I changed the mask up a bit. I always wanted to grow long-ass braids like a hippie So-Cal dude, and the character’s name was “Offspring,” so I re-wrote his description to have Dexter Holland style braids. I was also very much in a period where I was thinking about being othered, so I made the character a mixed-blood (Cherokee and Mexican, with a father from Mexico City who hated wrestling with a passion). He needed a name, so on a lark I gave him the name Nathan Herrerra, which if anyone knows their super-duper-deep-cuts was the name of a kid who wrote a question that was sent into one of the Beavis and Butthead shows where they did viewer mail. Butthead couldn’t say his name right, and so with one of my high school friends the “Herrr-idd-eeer—a. Uh…Nathan” thing was recurrent joke (the kids call it meme-ing hard now).
As I played the character, he quickly grew cynical. Then a little rebellious. Then militant. He went from normal ring gear to wearing steel toe Doc Marten boots and baggy black jeans. He got tattoos (I guess he might have always had them, but I started describing them), and he wrapped his arms from the hands almost all the way to the shoulder on each side with black cloth tape. He wore death metal shirts and cut his “promos” in dark, desolate places. He became a “hardcore” wrestler (his tagline was “the extreme luchadore”) and he started using all manner of weapons (well, wrestling weapons– baseball bats, chairs, sledge hammers).
I realized about a month into it that Nate was a part of me. I was cynical over how life was going, and as I’ve always been a storyteller, he was the vehicle for the story I needed to tell, the avenue for my frustrations. I wrote his role-play material with zeal. I learned to frame stage directions and such from working on making sure people could visualize what I was setting up. His voice was consistent and urgent, always on-point. I could slip into him in chat rooms and talk for hours in character. It was creative writing and storytelling in action, and it was great fun.
But nothing lasts forever. Eventually I got too busy with my many jobs and school, and school got harder, and jobs got harder. I stopped playing. But I still try to make Nathan as best I can in my wrestling video games. Every now and then something reminds me of the Offspring and I stop and think.
For example, there’s a wrestler called Pentagon Jr. AKA Pentagon Dark AKA Penta Zero M. I have found him fascinating since the first time I saw him a couple of years ago on Lucha Underground. It just connected for me this morning that the reason why is that he’s, conceptually, my old RP character without the English speaking and the dreadlocks. I can even remember a whole storyline that was based around Nathan becoming obsessed with Daredevil comics and claiming to be the man without fear (he leaped off a balcony and through a stack of 3 flaming tables at the end of that game).
And today, before I realized that, I thought of Nathan when I did the little Emo meme thing(see how I talk about him as his “real” name? We got so deep into role-playing that we went full meta and didn’t just RP the wrestlers but also the backstage politics and production work. I think of him as Nathan, not just as the character). Because I can see him naming a wrestling move that and trying to get people to chant it.
I miss that dude sometimes.