A Place Beyond Shame, Part 7: Coop Devils and Live Evil

"Explain to me again why you’re acting like such a dick?"

"Dick? Who’s being a dick? I guess I’m just not a party guy, that’s all."

Hala Winter and I were standing on the corner of Bleeker and Sixth, preparing to make the long trek from the Village to the Lower East Side. She knows The Last Exodus better then I do (by some accounts) and has been a vital part of concept design. She pulls double duty at Synister simultaneously serving as Creative Director and my stress management.

I looked ridiculous. I’ve got my long hair in braids these days and I usually tie them back with a black bandanna. I was wearing one of my favorite shirts, a little Coop Devil piece featuring a pair of lesbian demons. But that’s normal ridiculous. On top of that, largely thanks to a flash storm which caused my to pull my coat out of my car in Hoboken, I had been anticipating rain for the rest of the night. The rain lasted as long as it took for me to make it to the subway. So here I was in 90 degree weather in a black leather coat. I folded it and hung it over my arm, already warm.

"Yeah, not a party guy. I seem to remember&-"

"Okay, okay! Well, It’s just& I dunno. There’s one in every city. There was a guy like this in Boston, too. What was his name? Ken? Ken. In New Orleans I think his name was Rob."

"What do you mean, "Like this?"

"I mean, In every city I go to, there’s some guy that I keep getting compared to by the local chicks. Some guy that looks like me and sounds like me and walks like me and talks like me and just might be but is not quite me."

"Will the real Sean Jaffe please stand up?"

"Yes I’m Sean Jaffe yes I’m the real Jaffe All you other Sean Jaffes are just imatatin’."

"Uh-huh. "And you don’t want to go to this thing because it’s a birthday party for this guy ‘like you’?"

"Yeah."

"Ummm...You’re being a jerk."

"Am I?"

She nodded. She was very astute in her observations of such things. "Let me tell you about this Live Game instead." She smiled pleasantly. She has this way of being a tad too ingratiating that indicates that I’m getting on her nerves.

"Okay."

At least this was a topic I’m good at. While the topic is not exactly burning with romance, Hala and I can both talk shop for hours. And the project was one that I was particularly interested in. In a strange way, Hala and I met because of her reputation as being behind the best Live-Action game in the tri-state area. The task I had assigned to her seemed fairly simple. Get a full-fledged live-action Last Exodus game up and running in New York City. This would normally require a great deal more of my supervision, and probably at least three support staff, but this was her specialty. I wasn’t worried.

"Tell me about it."

"Well, We can do the bi-weekly thing, but you’d better drop it down to monthly if you want to do it in a club."

"Snoogans. Definitely, definitely the club thing."

"Well, I’ve been talking to promoters. It’s certainly do-able."

"Great, great! I want bands and DJ’s and dancing girls and drugs and people having sex in every available crawlspace. Nootch. I want this LARP to be like a Thrill Kill Kult concert."

"Trust me sweetheart, with the crowd you get at these things sometimes, you’ll get that whether you want it or not."

"Nootch."

"We have encountered a problem though."

"Yeah? What?"

"Well, you know how you proposed that we cordon off a room and do the whole "Real World" Thing live and the "Eden" Stuff sit down? "

"Yeah."

"First, people are gonna wanna play their Deiforms live. They’re gonna wanna show up in costume. Second, a lot of people say that it sounds pretty lame to have to stop playing their characters live when the really cool walking on water /loaves and fishes stuff begins."

"Good Point."

"Last, if you figure that it takes one director for every four people to run sit down, that’s ten Directors who all have to constantly be aware what the other nine are doing."

"Ouch. So how do we do Eden?"

"I was figuring that there was some way we could change the music at the club&"

"No, I mean generally."

"But& Why don’t we solve the problem at hand?"

"That’s exactly what I mean."

"Let’s deal with this. OUR live game."

"But there has to be a general way to& DICKCHEESE!"I barked at the cabbie who had decided it was worth running a red light to raise my blood pressure. I swear they have it in for me personally.

"A general way to Dickcheese?"

"Shut up." I glowered. "I swear these psychos have it in for me personally."

"Where are we?"

"We’re not on Houston?"

"No, I followed you."

"But&But&You live here. I’m from Jersey!"

I usually knew better than to invoke the great divide but my feet were wet. That clouds my judgement.

"Okay, relax. Jesus, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Here. I’ll call and get the address."

She walked up to one of Manhattan’s ubiquitous phones, popped open her computer and searched for the number as I played with an old door that was lying in the sidewalk. I pretended that it opened up to another, parallel dimension that happened to be absolutely filled with concrete. I’m still not sure it didn’t.

"Okay, got it. We gotta go back the way we came."

I grumbled.

"Where were we?" She shot.

"Um. Dealing with the problem in our LARP of how to run the Promised Lands."

"Well, I said we could use the club&"

"No, I mean something general and all-purpose. Something never done before."

"Uh, a LARP in which you can play the Son of God?"

"No, I mean&er&something new. Catchy. A gimmick."

"Like?"

"Well, Live gaming is a kind of a gimmick in and of itself."

"Kind of. I don’t know, this sounds like a bad idea. Why don’t we figure out how we can do our game before we solve the problem for everyone?" she was getting irritated.

"But, as the designers, it’s our responsibility to come up with something that is equally cool and fun in a field in Idaho as in an LA nightclub."

"Amphetamines?"

"A system. A game mechanic."

The argument continued all the way to Houston. Try as I might, I could not get my lady to understand the idea I wanted. Finally, we turned the corner. "Dammit, Sean, just listen. I was planning on having the music be different in two rooms."

It hit me.

MUSIC!

"That’s it!"

"What’s "it?"

"Music! You’re a genius! We’ll have the new mechanic be music-based! You’ll know you’re in the areas designated as Edenic because there will be music. Anyone who can run a LARP has access to a system of SOME kind."

"That’s what you meant?"

"Yeah. We need to get to work on this!"

We turned a corner and proceeded up to a doorway where two underage girls in tight black pants had just rung the buzzer. We pressed up to the apartment, the door throbbing to the beat of the music inside. It opened with a rush of the smells of sweat and marijuana smoke and the host invited us in.

"Aw, Sean, see that? He’s got his bandanna on and a coop devil shirt, too! You two could be like&twins!"

We looked at each other and sighed deeply.