I was a freshman at Palo Alto High School in 1981. My parents were divorced, which was compulsory for kids of my generation. After a few years of living alone with my father in San Francisco, I had moved to Palo Alto to live with my mom and younger brothers.

With the exception of one lost junior-high year in Los Angeles, I had spent grades 1-8 at a small private school in Marin County. I was not popular (headgear, right field, the works) and didn’t have a big social circle. Bussing across the Golden Gate every day meant that I also didn’t have classmates living nearby. I spent a lot of time at home alone in the afternoons reading science fiction and comics and watching just the dumbest possible stuff on television. No regrets.

At Paly, my freshman class was the same size as the entire student body of my old school in Marin. This was great. I had known all thirty kids in my old class in Marin and pretty much hated 27 of them. In a big public high school, you can find your tribe. After about two months skulking at the fringes of the Paly cafeteria, I found mine. And I could bike to everyone’s houses!

My high school clique was a sprawling Venn diagram of overlapping communities. A motley agglomeration of science fiction fans, science and proto-computer geeks, goth-lite theater kids, and other assorted weirdos. It was glorious. I wore a literal anorak and a ten-foot Tom Baker-era “Dr. Who” scarf and fit right in. Photos of that era are amazing. Just an explosion of feathered hair and regrettable fashion choices. In other words, the 80s.

One of the circles in the Venn diagram was the fantasy gamers. They spoke of arcane rules and systems, and things I’d never heard of. Champions? Call of Cthulhu? Dungeons and Dragons? OK, that one I’d heard of. By sophomore year, I was deep into the games. This would end up influencing my life in surprisingly profound ways. And it was how I met Scott.

For someone who figured so hugely in my high school experience, Scott and I didn’t really overlap. He was four years older, a senior when I was a frosh; normally an unbridgeable chasm. But the fantasy game clique transcended age and even graduation. 

The age difference was part of why Scott made such an impression on me. Also, in a world of high school poseurs, he was a bone-deep eccentric. Physically large. Bombastic. A military fetishist and low-wattage firearms enthusiast. Scott once introduced me to another friend of his, who popped open his car trunk to reveal a Vietnam-era M-60 machine gun. Reminder: this was Palo Alto. The M-60 wasn’t his, but Scott rocked aviator shades and a U.S. Cavalry hat in the style of Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now. It was a vibe.

But there was a core of soulfulness under Scott’s bluster. And, most important, he was a talented artist. 

In a 1980s fantasy gaming clique, being a good artist was the Platinum Card of social currency. With a few flicks of his trademark brush-tip pen, Scott could make real and tangible the images we had in our heads of characters, scenes, jokes and even each other. 

I oozed with jealousy. I wanted to be able to draw, and sweated over it, often trying to imitate the Anime style we were infatuated with. (We were those kids.) But I sucked comprehensively. Every time I see an AI image where Dall-E has screwed up the hands or ears, or created a nightmare facsimile of a human being, I sympathize with the machine. You and me, buddy. Once, during a gaming session, I was laboring mightily on a sketch of a spaceship. Scott peered over my shoulder and damned my efforts with a curt, “Nope.” It’s a testament to him that I remember this moment with affection.

It helped that Scott was generous with his talent. Most of us couldn’t draw, so Scott drew for us. Scott drew my gaming characters, but he also drew characters and concept art for the stories I wrote. Forty years later I still have much of this art, tucked into binders alongside my character sheets and my own lame works. 

During all-night D&D sessions fueled by two-liter bottles of Coca Cola and packages of Mothers Iced Oatmeal cookies (honestly, it’s a miracle any of us lived into middle age at all), Scott drew rapid-fire cartoons. Fred Flinstone pointing at a bird with an enormous dick perched on Barney Rubble’s head: “Hey, Barney, isn’t that the bird that fucked your wife?”* Uproarious. Many of Scott’s cartoons were mock comic book covers that he billed as “Falbo Comics.” Almost always tasteless, generally hilarious. We were teenage boys, what do you want?

Scott also had a car. This was a Big Deal.

For a long time, the principal car owners in our gaming clique were Scott and another kid his age, Pete. Scott and Pete were very different drivers. Pete drove the Green Machine, a rattling avocado-green Ford Granada, with a death-wish. I once was a passenger in the Green Machine as Pete rammed it down Alma Street at 90 in the wee hours, ripping through desolate suburban intersections in a cloud of gaskets and bearings while I watched my crushingly virginal life flash before my eyes. The Green Machine eventually died in a cloud of smoke outside my mom’s house.

Scott rolled in more stately fashion, in a bronze Oldsmobile 98, the pinnacle of mid-century Detroit naval engineering prowess. Window open, elbow out, Cavalry hat and aviator shades, gently goosing his boat down El Camino to the sounds of the Nails, the Stranglers or maybe Ebn-Ozn. Did I mention Scott had cool taste in music?

Measured against today’s Yukons and Hummers and the absurdly jacked pickup trucks that serve as prosthetic testicles for a certain kind of contemporary man, the 98 was probably modestly sized. But, in the time of the Honda Civic hatchback, it seemed immense and it embraced Newton’s laws of motion like a lover. I remember driving it once, furiously cranking the wheel to make the turn from Page Mill into Peter Coutts Road, the car leaning way out of the curve like the body might simply separate from the undercarriage and float into the stratosphere in a straight line like a vinyl-top B-52.

Scott and Pete’s cars gave us freedom (if poor actuarial math), which we embraced with 1980s innocence, rolling to the multiplex on Shoreline in Mountain View to watch The Terminator for the nth time, or our favorite burger joint near San Antonio Shopping Center where we would feast and play coin-op video games. Or perhaps to downtown Palo Alto to catch the always popular double-bill revival of Mad Max and The Road Warrior at the Varsity Theater.

In those days we had a long-running D&D campaign with a dozen or more core players who rotated in and out. The dungeonmaster, Jade, was also slightly older and often convened us in a conference room at the company he worked at. You could just take Coke out of the fridge! A perfect Saturday night for us was rolling with Scott or Pete to a “Jade Game” session and smiting skulls until three or four AM on Sunday, followed by a devastating breakfast at Denny’s (always finish with a shake!) and then crawling into bed at 6AM or so and sleeping until Sunday afternoon. I am sure my mother thought I was torching my brain. She may have been right.

In 1985, after graduation and The Summer that Was**, my cohort atomized off to college. I went to UC Santa Cruz, along with a few other members of the gang. The Jade Game kept rolling and we convened when we could. The climactic session unfolded in my apartment in Santa Cruz in 1987. One of the players had written a computer program (gasp!) to resolve the statistics of the massed army battle that ended the campaign.

The summer after that year, I worked at a guest ranch on Mount Lassen. Many evenings, after the guests had gone to bed, the younger staff would take mushrooms and skinny dip in the volcanically heated swimming pool. Naturally, Scott memorialized this experience in Falbo Comics, sketched on the back of stationery from the Apple Computer Fall 1986 Developer Conference.

One day in Santa Cruz, my buddy Dave and I walked into a game and comic shop in the basement of a grand Victorian building on Pacific Garden Mall. There we met Mike Pondsmith. Mike had written Mekton, a fantasy game based on Anime giant robots like Gundam. We bonded over anime fandom and gaming and Mike pulled Dave and me into his orbit as he built his company, R. Talsorian Games.

Mike’s next big project was called Cyberpunk and Dave and I became part of his core team of writers. Scott joined the stable as an artist, helping me bring to life the mega-corporations of the Cyberpunk universe. Scott, Dave and I worked GenCon, the big fantasy gaming convention, for Mike for a few years in the early 90s. Flying off for a few days in Milwaukee felt amazingly grown up. I remember Scott and me wearing neckties for some ridiculous reason and using pen caps as tie clips. Why? Who knows. Nobody else at GenCon in Milwaukee in August was wearing a collared shirt and a tie. 

Here’s a bit of trivia. If you’ve played any version of Cyberpunk (original box set, 2020, Cybergeneration, Red…), or played the CD Projekt Red computer game Cyberpunk 2077, or watched the Netflix series Edgerunners, you’ve encountered the Arasaka Corporation, one of the ur-villains of the Cyberpunk universe. Scott is indirectly responsible for the name Arasaka. Among his militariana, Scott had an Arisaka type 99, a Japanese rifle of Second World War vintage. When I was casting around for a name for a villainous Japanese super-corporation I borrowed the name of Scott’s rifle, though I misspelled it.

Through a wildly improbable sequence of events, my work for Mike Pondsmith led to me moving to Singapore in 1995 as part of the first (and catastrophically doomed) attempt to make a Cyberpunk computer game. This was shortly after Singaporean authorities had famously caned a young American for vandalism. Naturally, Scott commemorated my impending move to Singapore in a Falbo Comics panel. Dave and Scott also both went into the video game industry, with rather more success. I eventually drifted into other parts of the technology world.

I’d like to tell you that Scott and I stayed close in the nearly two decades I was abroad. But, as far as I can remember, 1995 was the last time I saw him in person. I have a photo of that day, and one of my friends, José, is holding a baby. To be honest, I am not sure whose baby it is, but I don’t think it’s José’s.*** What’s remarkable to me is that the baby in the photo is now older than I was when the picture was taken. That’s how time works, of course, but it just floors me.

After the rise of social media, Scott and I intersected from time to time on Facebook. So I guess it’s appropriate that Facebook was how I found out last week that he’d died. This is how it happens these days. The Algorithm reveals the stages of life (and death) of my friends. It’s mostly posts celebrating the high school graduations and college matriculations of friends’ children. But in the last year it’s also been three deaths of old friends about my age, in the gap between 50 and 60 when you don’t consider yourself “old,” but you can see old coming.

It’s not necessarily bad to find out about the deaths of your friends through social media. It was completely appropriate to the status of our attenuated relationship. While I lived abroad, social media was the thread that kept me connected to people far away, including my old high school and college friends. Where else would I find out?

But social media made me lazy. It laid a simulation of intimacy over throwaway, one-to-many blurbs. It let me feel connected and stole the urgency from my intentions to get together with old friends. I’ll get to it, I said to myself. There’s time.

And then there wasn’t. 

And I still don’t know if I am going to do anything different. I’d like to think so, but the track record is pretty dismal and people are scattered and busy. And. And. And. Well, you know.

My son is 16, the same age as I was when I was playing in the Jade Game and hanging out with Scott, Pete, Dave and all the other members of my sprawling clique of weirdos. A few days ago, three of his friends came over and they spent a raucous few hours in the garage playing video games, winding each other up and having a great time. Just, you know, hanging out. I watched with some jealousy. Enjoy those teenage friendships. 80s, 90s, 2020s, there is nothing like them.

So, to all my old friends, I miss hanging out with you. I don’t know if we’ll do it again, and even if we do it won’t be like it was forty years ago. But I remember those times fondly and, while there’s still time, I just wanted to say that you’re all weirdos, and I love you all.

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*I may remember this backward. It might have been Barney pointing at Fred. But you get the point.

**IYKYK.

***Now confirmed to be Dave’s (upper right, in the Sharks jersey) then infant son, now in law school.

Note: Yes, the last two posts on this blog have been obits. I guess that’s just where we are now.