The Ballad of Allen Hamilton
January 21st, 2015 | 
Author: It was 35 years ago and I was sixteen. After a stint at KFC, I was finally old enough to not have to lie about my age to get a real fast food job.
I applied at Der Wienerschnitzel and was hired by a color blind man named Jerry. He had a face like a melted bag of caramels and a vague east coast accent. Everything about him was the color blue. His suits. His ties. His car was a sky blue El Dorado with a navy blue vinyl top. I don’t know if that was the only color he could see or what.
He looked and sounded like a gangster to me.
I had a hard time taking him seriously. He was a stereotype. A caricature.
Jerry took me back into the kitchen where the magic happened and introduced me to a beefy guy named Dave. I would learn later that Dave was an aspiring bodybuilder. Dave’s corpulence challenged his managerial uniform in every imaginable way. Shirt buttons barely winning, a too short tie that looked to be asphyxiating. His brown polyester slacks glistened like fresh sausage casing. He wore braces on alarmingly aberrant teeth. Dated 70’s disco afro.
Dave told me to report the next afternoon, after school, to the tallest and ugliest motherfucker I would ever see.
He told me his name was Allen.
That’s what he actually said.
He was perhaps the tallest and ugliest motherfucker I’d ever seen, but he was cordial. He showed me to the stock room and casually suggested that I practice punting old corn dogs against the ceiling for awhile. He pointed to a 5 gallon plastic bucket and said he would be back to check my progress.
Allen stood about six foot six and was 4 or 5 years older than me. He was slope shouldered, pigeon chested and very long of limb. His face was pocked and pitted. Lantern jawed with a smile that was nothing if not threatening. His voice was cavern deep and despite his awkward stature, he was sinewy and there was unmistakable power in his presence. He was pretty fucking scary the first time I laid eyes on him.
After an hour so, he came back. I’d done the best I could. The floor was random with ruptured corn dogs, wrappers, the wooden sticks and somehow, there were mustard stains on the ceiling.
He raised an eyebrow above milky glasses and muttered something about my lack of enthusiasm but seemed satisfied enough and introduced me to the deep fryer. His instructions were terse. Pay attention to the drive thru grease board, listen to the orders broadcast on a PA from the front register and anticipate. There were two timers. One for french fries and one for corn dogs. Don’t cook too much and don’t run out.
Men had failed before me.
There was a guy we called French Fry Bob. He worked the day shift. He had some obscure degree in something he assured us. He never made it past the fry station. He must have been good. I can’t remember much about him except that he was pear shaped and seemed to last longer than he should have.
I’d never met anyone remotely like Allen Hamilton and my guess is I never will.
I don’t know how other less legitimate fast food outfits were back then but when you pulled up to the window to pay and collect your delicious meal at Der Wienerschnitzel, you were afforded a full view of the kitchen and it’s workers. Nowadays you’re lucky to get a glimpse of a cash register and the drink station. There is no choice in remembering the shock on customers faces when they caught an eyeful of this gaunt giant, in nothing but an apron and boxer shorts, spatula in hand, flipping patties and grinning while assembling the delicious meal they had just ordered twenty feet back.
He was difficult to know. He didn’t suffer fools. He had a dark, sometimes vicious sense of humor but he was still very funny. It was obvious that he was troubled but even those who knew him well barely saw it.
There were marathon Dungeons and Dragons sessions at Allen’s place fueled by meth and liquor. Allen was of course, the dungeon master. For a time, his circle of older friends and my circle of younger ones converged. There were always some pretty shady characters in and out. Characters that inspired instinctual caution. Jack, who dressed like a 50’s greaser, pegged jeans and all with a constant rapid, involuntary wink. RJ, with an overbite that left him on the verge of whistling when he talked. He was nearly as tall as Allen but beefier and not nearly as smart.
I liked Allen and admired him. He was painfully bright. He had composure. He always seemed to be a step or two ahead of me and everyone else. He was calculating and manipulative. Just a little more dangerous than anyone I’d ever met. People who didn’t know or understand him were at least a little afraid of him. He could be intimidating and he knew it.
You could reasonably expect to find his trunk full of medieval weapons.
He was a good friend to me and my friends. He challenged me in conversations. I flirted with trouble far more serious than I would have on my own.
A good friend to me and my friends, save maybe one. His name was Pete and we were friends. He was a year older but I was his boss. We took his ’67 Cougar over Donner Summit to see the Who and The Clash at the Oakland Coliseum in 1982. I made mix tapes for the trip. We ran out of money on the way back and resorted to a dine and dash at a Denny’s in Vallejo. We left our last money as a tip.
Pete Thought the rest of us were keeping a secret from him. He was convinced that Allen was controlling his mind. We would would catch site of him by the side of the highway scribbling in a notebook. Eventually he refused to have anything to do with any of us. We all experimented liberally with a variety of pharmaceuticals back then and I’m sure that was at least a component of Pete’s demise but there must have been more at work. I heard he’d married Allen’s sister. Allen had nothing to say about it but liked being asked.
He liked cocking an eyebrow and saying nothing. He did that a lot.
Eventually the restaurant changed hands, Allen was fired and I became manager.
It’s not like I was ambitious.
I kinda fell into it.
I beat out a kid with dirty teeth and a desperate home life.
Spanked him on the written test.
The last time I saw Allen was early November of 1992. I was in town for Nevada day. We spent a late night drinking tequila and ended up at my parents housein the Carson valley. I remember him in the back yard putting out a cigarette and looking for a trash can. The sound of his primer gray ’69 GTO lumbering off.
Ten or so years later I heard he was dead. From a mutual friend, who was a notorious drunk, and drunk and sullen with the news.
Part II
Fast forward to the present. Two days after Christmas and I’m in Lake Tahoe for my niece’s wedding. I’m sitting at a table with my wife and kids and mostly people I recognize except one tall and lanky girl. I know her boyfriend Mike pretty well but I can’t remember the last time we had a conversation. I like Mike. We start talking and his girlfriend joins in. Valerie. She’s bright and funny and self deprecating. I like her. She’s pretty behind big glasses. At one point someone asks how tall she is and I don’t remember her answer but think it’s an odd thing to ask.
Not long after, she stood up.
I discover I know her mother. We dated. She was beautiful and crazy. We rolled a car off the side of a mountain road end over end in a blizzard. Her mother was driving. If it wasn’t for seat belts, we both would have been killed.
I ask her a question about her father and literally get the one answer I never would have thought before this exact second when I’m thinking it. She is saying the same thing my brain is saying at the same time. Allen Hamilton. My long dead friend and her father are the same man.
It makes sense. Marfan’s syndrome. She looks like him. She’s built like him. She tells me she’s already had open heart surgery and a doctor told her once that most people with Marfan’s don’t live past thirty. She tells me this haunts her.
She says she just has a few vague memories. She doesn’t know anything about him. She’s never met anyone who even knew her father other than her mother. We talk about him a lot. Neither one of us are prepared for this. I’ve rarely been in a situation where I know less how to act or have less of an idea what to say. We orbit. We exchange contact information because we understand the conversation is far from over. We hug and she cries. She is lovely.
On the way out, her boyfriend Mike tells me he is glad it was me.
I think about this for awhile and decide I’m glad too.
A few weeks later I get an email from her.
“………………There are so many things that I want to know that I don’t know how to ask. If I could ask just one question it would be, was he ever happy? Happy with himself, or happy with his life? Did he know heart-swelling joy, or just fleeting moments of non-sorrow?”
I answered that she had thrown me a pretty wicked pitch.
She seems all of the good and none of the sorrow.
I wrote her back but this is my complete answer.
Drinks for my friends.
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🙂 WIERD, MY NIECE MARRIED IN AUBURN, CA DEC 24TH, FOR LOVE AND TAX PURPOSES.
EXCEPT FOR THE TIME I MET YOU AT ” WEARHOUSE RECORDS”‘ AND THAT TIME AT MEMOREX, I DON’T HAVE MUCH IN COMMON WITH YOU. YOUR A HELLA EXCELLENT WRITER. BEST OF THE BEST!
Loved this! What a gift you’ve given his daughter by writing this. Wonderful ;).
I love this. I love it a lot. It makes me sad. I am glad his daughter has this opportunity to know her dad. It’s a good thing.
Wow. Good stuff, Mike.
That’s amazing that you met Valerie, too. I had no idea Al had a daughter, but glad to read it and happy that there’s still some part of Al still here with us, along with the stories.
Your enemy,
Carpool Funnel Sindrome
Great story!
Mike, this is beautiful. That poignant time of your life is so richly captured in a few words. I never knew Allen except for all of the stories. I met him twice. The first time I was sitting on the floor, he was standing directly over me staring down, lingering his gaze a little longer than average. Can you imagine that exchange?
Like Farris, I am glad to know his embodiment continues…through a girl I just wept for.
I never knew Allen in the weenie-bag (der Wienerschnitzel) days, I came on scene in the Dungeons and Dragons paragraph. I remember some of those ‘schnitzel stories. The image of him working the line in an apron and boxer shorts is so damn funny. I may paint that one day. Didn’t you get to graduate to punting corn-dogs out the back door as soon as Allen deemed your store room practice punting had reached a high enough standard? One story you left out of your post is the time(s) Allen was working the drive up window. A car of hungry fast fooders pulls up to the window, pays for their meal. Allen takes the money, grabs the weenie-bag sacks of grilled and deep fried glop, leans out and places them on top of the car, on the roof, above the confused drivers head, and then turns his back on them. Dismissed from his attention. Always thought that was hilarious.
I only really knew Allen through those D&D excursions. (If someone besides Mike is reading this- I was the young friend that mingled into the group of old friends in the paragraph about the game.) You and I waded into that strange bunch of delinquent devote gamers and just sort of melded right in. We were the rock and roll contingent. I was Blackmore, you were Roth. That still makes me laugh inside. I think Allen did really like to test people. Also to just push buttons and test convention. He was sly. I never really felt he did that with me, but thinking back on it, maybe he did test me, but only through the game. Seems I passed whatever private criteria of judgment he had for people with the proper roll of the twenty sided die. And conversely, my opinion of Allen was also formed at the game table.
So pardon me if I dork out about Dungeons and Dragons for a sec. I have such vivid and rich memories from those sessions. Memories of the people, the other gamers, sure, but I mean memories of the game itself, the story. It’s ridiculous how vivid and real some of that adventuring was to me. (is and was, more was than is these days) The game itself is brilliantly conceived, hats off to Gary Gygax. And Dave Arneson too of course, but Gygax has the cooler name. Those are the guys who designed the game and all the factors and rules of play. The most remarkable thing about it is how it engages the players imaginations, and more, stimulates those imaginations. It puts you in an interactive story, and you start to live it. Eventually you lose your soul and start worshiping Satan. (That, of course is a joke relating to the times we were playing. It’s so funny how worked up stiff neck conservative churchy types get over things like this. D&D was under attack like Rock and Roll before it. There was even a TV movie staring the young Tom Hanks, who loses his marbles and starts seeing trolly cars as dragons and cops as Orcs, goes bugshit crazy due to playing the evil game.) Me, I’ve got the monster imagination already, so I slipped in there pretty easy. But the reason my time at the game table was so rich and thrilling is because of our Dungeon Master. It was all due to Allen’s credit, how epic the story became. The DM has charts and manuals and private dice, he sets the stage, designs the layout with it’s traps and challenges, it’s secrets to find. He also conjures up opposition and plays the parts of whatever characters, human or otherwise, that take the game forward. So the DM does all that, but the other thing, and this is where my respect for Al comes in, the DM narrates the story as it unfolds. And it unfolds in real time as we roll the dice and see what happens. He was awesome at this. The dice determines the effectiveness of the action you are attempting, but Allen would describe it for everyone, he would breathe life and depth into things. He’d tell you how your ax swing missed, why you failed to stop the thing from taking a bite out of your ass, or how gloriously the goblins head spun on a gout of black blood as it left its shoulders. Allen made that game for me. And he enjoyed his roll, he had fun, he was as surprised as the rest of us when the dice changed the direction of the tale.
Another aspect of the game, it reveals traits about the gamers. I noticed this especially with one of Allen’s group (see that? It was his group) These people had been playing for years, some with the same character, they were invested. This one guy, I can’t remember his name, he was a paladin I think, fancy charismatic knight, high level, lots of hit points. His character talked cocky and tough, but when there was a fight, I noticed he (the gamer) got really nervous and always let the other players take action before he did. He’d end up fighting, but only if he had to. His character was tough and powerful, but he was a coward because the gamer was a coward. He wasn’t aware of this. He had a flawed character. Makes for better storytelling sometimes.
I think Allen liked me because I was a recklessly bold player. I wasn’t invested like the others, so I just, quietly, went for it when trouble showed up. I didn’t care if I lived or died. Well not me, my character. Plus I was pretty lucky with the dice. The first time we played, it was a little adventure, treasure in the dungeon type deal. The other players were all more experienced than us newbies, so we were allowed to roll up characters a little higher than level one. In the course of the game, towards the end of the long night of play, my character took a fall, took a lot of damage on top of the damage I had accumulated. I died. I remember sitting back and just shaking my head, like whoa, that was intense. The other gamers were uncomfortable, they fidgeted, it was weird. As we were leaving, (Mike, I think you and I were the last to leave,) Allen was sincere when he apologized to me, said he was really sorry I died like that, how that usually wasn’t the way it went. I assured him I was OK, I didn’t care, I had nothing but a good time, I was leaving happy. He invited us back for more. Was that some sort of test? Who knows?
We went again, and then again, and again, and I lived a lot longer. After a few more games, things shifted and got bigger, when Allen revealed an arch villain, an evil little half-elf he’d created years before, was back in the game. One of those strong memories: when Sten Lurik appears, everyone at the table, all the veteran players, just about shit themselves. They couldn’t believe it! He’s Back! You (Mike) and me, we marvel at all the hoopla and say what the fuck is this? It was my turn to do something, I remember saying, “Well, I’m going after the little guy (Al’s Character)” I roll the twenty sided attack die and come up double-zero- that’s twenty. The crowd goes wild- I mean the people at the table just go crazy. Blackmore and Lurik exchange several more blows, his aren’t landing, mine are pummeling him. The gamers are going nuts, they’re shouting and turning red. Lurik eventually vanishes… I had no idea what I was doing. I wondered later if it was one of those Allen tests, if I’d passed one. But I know it wasn’t, it was the dice man, if I was being tested, then so was Allen, it was all in the game, and just my good luck that I didn’t get crushed. That’s when the story went epic. It’s like first we play short stories, then we graduate to novels. Allen later told me that he couldn’t believe how that encounter played out, how he was casting healings and protections and still just getting clobbered to the point where he had to retreat. He also told me that from that point on, Sten Lurik had it in for Blackmore. And I think he did have it in for me, but Allen didn’t..
So Allen, for me, was a blast. He was intelligent as hell, and creepy too, with a rich imagination and a wry wit. I didn’t interact with him much beyond the game, so I never had to face any challenge from him that didn’t involve my plus 3 battle ax. Remember I was the super straight kid. Didn’t drink or smoke or snort, didn’t hang out all night with him at American Flats on acid. I didn’t party. I wasn’t in on the live D&D experiment at the Flats either- where you (Mike) there for that? Some of the stories about Allen are troubling. My brother was one of the ones left under the mountain in the dark. Allen came back for them, sure,(or turned his light back on, stopped being part of the silent pitch black), but that is one fucked up thing to do. I want to believe he was just pushing boundaries, not trying to break anyone, but who really knows? Being left in a dark mine shaft to wonder if you’ve made a fatal mistake, to feel in your heart, all that earth above and around you, well, I don’t know how I’d have done in that situation. I once went down in a mine with another one of our mutual friends (my name is Bob N-), and even with a flashlight, the claustrophobia is palpable, it sits on your head. And then there’s all that strangeness with Pete, that was dark, but how much of that was Al, and how much was Pete? And how much was the acid? I just don’t know.
Anyway, part two, you met his daughter. That part is incalculable, such a surprise. Such a great surprise in the end, thank you brainspanker. I kinda knew there was a baby… but man, I didn’t really know. I remember mom too… I knew that you guys had rolled a car back in the day… but all that as background, as you lead me into this crazy gamer dope den. Was her name Michelle? Cannot remember. I do remember her beauty (real world) and her awesomeness to do battle with (fake world). She had grace and power, as a character with the dice. Pretty and crazy. She was the only girl at the table- and, by fucking fudge, that says a lot. Anyway, the offspring. I give her a hug. It’s so great to hear, that in your observation, she is full of joy and not sorrow. If she ever reads this, I can tell her, Al was happy at that game table. I don’t think it was exactly joy he was feeling, but there sure was elation, he was confronting mystery, and there were lots of laughs. And there was escape. It was my absolute privilege to be allowed to participate. The reason I love and respect that game is all Allen. He’s also the reason I’ve never wanted to play it again, wouldn’t be the same without him.
Here’s the last bit. One night as we departed after hours of crazy game play, I tried to tell him how impressed I was with him, and to thank him. I told him (paraphrasing and polishing) that playing the game feels like living a story, similar to reading a novel, but from inside out. Better than reading a novel because it’s all unfolding before you. I told him he should write (it was all that rich), turn the games into books. In response to this, after a beat of consideration, he said, “Yeah, well, I’m the laziest person I know. So-” God damn that made me laugh. Turns out, that was an accidental piece of backwards advise. I’ve thought of that many times over the years as I try not to be the laziest person I know…
Drink for Mikes friends.