Teenage boys are (1) many in number; (2) bored out of their minds. And they get tired of pornography. So, when I was twelve, a California mathematician named Richard Garfield began selling a game called Magic: The Gathering.
You remember Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game, where you spend hours pretending you’re an elf or a dwarf on an adventure? Or Pokémon, which is a descendant of the game? Magic’s like that, but it uses cards. Each player has a sixty-card deck, and each card depicts a troll, gnome, or some other Dungeons and Dragons–ish creature.* The players draw seven of these cards to make a hand; then they use this hand to attack each other, taking away life points with successful hits. Each player starts out with twenty life points; when someone hits zero, he dies. Game over.
The rules get a lot more complicated. Just know that when you win a game of Magic, you get a sharp, semisexual thrill that makes you forget, briefly, that you’re a card-obsessed loser.
I love the game, as do a lot of people—Magic is a global industry with tens of thousands of cards.*
It takes money to play Magic. The cards are sold in packs, like cigarettes, about three dollars and fifty cents for fifteen.** Those fifteen cards, however, aren’t random. Just as baseball cards have “rookies” and “all-stars,” Magic packs contain eleven “commons” (virtually worthless cards), three “uncommons” (might be worth a buck or two), and one “rare” (the real goodies; some have double-digit price tags). Every few months an “expansion set” is released, containing a new group of cards with dozens of fresh rares for players to collect. Each expansion set has its own name and packaging so that a Magic player making a purchase sounds like a smoker, “Yeah, I’ll have a pack of ‘Legacy.’ ” I’m down to a pack a day.
Magic also offers a chance to make money. Certain ultrarare cards are worth more than three hundred bucks, and if you get your hands on them, there’s a world of collectors who will buy. Also, Magic tournaments sponsored by the Duelists’ Convocation offer cash prizes. Real cash. I know a kid who won twenty-five thousand dollars in the Magic Grand Prix in Japan.
For years, the New York Magic “scene” has been dominated by a single gaming hall: an oversized room full of tables called Neutral Ground. Occupying the entire fourth floor of 122 West Twenty-sixth Street, Neutral Ground is nerd heaven. At all hours of the day and night, you can pay seven dollars to enter the place and play Magic with people as addicted as you are.
I used to attend Neutral Ground’s Friday tournaments about once a month. Fridays at the Ground were a trip. Hardcore gamers sat in stained T-shirts methodically opening packs of cards, while businessmen perused glass display cases, picking out seventy-five-dollar rares. The businessmen wore stylish coats and carried attaché cases, but as soon as they entered Neutral Ground, they were like little kids, gibbering about this and that card. The patrons ranged in age from twelve to fifty, but most were in their twenties, and everyone acted like teenagers. Occasionally, a girl would join the tournament, but the women who play Magic are a wild and woolly lot: they either look and smell like train-hopping hoboes, or they’re with male Magic players, who value them more than anything on earth.
Once, I spent all night at Neutral Ground. It wasn’t hard. I told my parents I was sleeping at James’s house* and went into Manhattan at 6:30 P.M. I entered the Friday tourney at 7:30 and played until 12:30 A.M. (I lost), steadily consuming a supply of Nacho Doritos and Mountain Dew. I played with Tony, a twelve-year-old whose mom let him practically live at Neutral Ground. I tried to play with Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz—the highest ranked Magic player on the East Coast—but he spurned me. Out of my league.
Around 1:15 A.M., I started a “melee game”—a Magic game with more than two players. My opponents were a marine who kept telling the same joke about a woman in a tollbooth, a turtle-esque man half my height, and a pudgy guy who kept picking at his ear. Our game began at 1:30, and Time, in a wacky, late-night trick I hadn’t seen before, jumped forward three hours. I looked down at my cards at 2:00 and glanced up to find it was 4:30.
“Gotta go, guys,” I told my opponents. They were doped up on Mountain Dew by then; they smiled and patted me on the back. I gathered up my things and staggered (my thighs had fallen asleep) onto Seventh Avenue. The birds were singing. Sunrise.
The subways didn’t run so well at that hour. I had to wait twenty minutes for a train, but I got home okay. I ate breakfast at a diner at 5:45, watched the sky turn blue, and told the waitress I’d been out all night “looking for trouble.” I went home around 6:45, slept for ten minutes, and got back on the train. It was Saturday morning, and I had to volunteer at my high school.*
Magic shaped up to be my adolescent pastime, the way video games were my childhood sport. I eased into conversations about it that sounded like gibberish to everyone else. (“Ball Lightning is crap! It always gets Bolted or Incinerated or Black Knight-ed!”) My mind slipped into thinking about Magic like hands under a pillow.
See, at the cusp of puberty, I had to make a choice: Magic or girls. And, well, Magic was right there. You know?
*Many of these “creatures” are scantily clad, buxom females. In fact, some early Magic cards were banned from later editions because they were too sexually suggestive. The one I remember was Earthbind, which featured this teenage-looking elf tied down with leather straps.
*If you want to learn the rules to Magic, the Web is a good place to go. It makes sense that the greasy folk who play the game have time to put up countless Web sites about it; for starters, check out www.pojo.com/magic/.
**You can buy Magic cards at comic book shops, newsstands, and specialty gaming stores—anywhere you can get decent Star Trek memorabilia.
*James was my “friend of convenience.” I think a lot of teenagers have one—the friend you tell your parents you’re staying with when you’re really doing something illicit. James was perfect because my mom knew his mom (so there was a degree of trust) but didn’t talk to her that often (so there was little chance of getting caught).
*It was Stuyvesant Tour Day or something, when all the kids who passed “The Stuy Test” (this page–this page) for that year got to look at the school to decide if they wanted to attend. I stood around directing parents and answering kids’ questions. I had fun.