A few years ago I was playing Warhammer 40K, the miniatures war game that involves buying armies of tiny plastic soldiers at budget-killing prices, at a gaming convention at the Hilton in Iselin, New Jersey. As I was starting my first turn, a man walked in the war gaming room (aka Hitlon Ballroom C) wearing khaki riding pants, a crisp WWII American officer’s jacket and a shiny M1 helmet sporting four golden stars. It looked as if he had just walked in from 1945. He strolled around the room looking at the various games being played with his head held high. When he finally came by my table, I noticed that the man was a dead-ringer for General George S. Patton.He reviewed my Imperial Guard army of plastic men. “Those are some sharp boys you have there,” he said, pointing to some of my more poorly painted guardsman with a riding crop.
“They’re just regular guardsman. They suck,” I said. Patton stared me down for a minute.
“Let’s talk over here for a minute, son, ” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder and guiding me away from the table. As soon as we were a good ten feet away, he stopped, took off one of his riding gloves and slapped me in the face with it.
“Ow! What the fuck man?!”
He grabbed my head with both of his hands. “Don’t you ever say that in front of the men again! Do you hear me? Those boys have to go through enough. They’re tired, scared… hell, just look at those bastards they’re up against, some sort of bug-lizard monsters. They don’t need to hear their CO talking some bullshit like that!”
“Okay…”
“Good,” he said, straightening up. We headed back to the table. He looked the battlefield over again. “Now what’s this ugly sucker right here?” he asked.
“That’s a Tyranid… something-fax… I don’t know. It’s like a giant-bug tank-thing,” I told him.
“Sounds like an intelligence failure to me. The bugs probably set a trap for you. Your old plan, throw it away!” he commanded, taking the paper that I had my army list written on and ripping it to pieces.
“Okay… I needed that, but okay…”
“Where’s your cavalry, son?”
“It’s an Imperial Guard army, there’s no cavalry," I told him.
“No cavalry?! What a load of bullshit!” he shouted, alerting everyone in the room that he was still there and still loud. “You’ve got to have something you can exploit a goddamn breakthrough with!”
“I’ve got three of these Sentinels,” I told him, pointing to my futuristic squadron of lightly armored walkers. “But they’re pretty flimsy. You could kill them with… harsh language.”
“Doesn’t matter, they’re there to die for their country. Send them forward and give them some marching fire! We’re going to punch a hole in their line right there,” he said, pointing at a swarm of four-armed aliens with his riding crop.
“Charge into their Genestealers? Have you ever even played Warhammer 40K before?”
“War never changes,” he said, stoically.
I rolled my eyes.
“What’s going on?” asked my opponent, a fat kid with a severe eczema outbreak covering his neck. “Are we still playing?”
“Shut your mouth, you traitorous, fat little son-of-a-bitch! I’ll teach you to work for those bugs!” Patton said, lunging for the eczema kid. It took all my strength, but I held him back. The kid ran away, leaving his army of alien bugs behind. “Coward!” he yelled after the kid.
After I calmed him down, Patton sat down at the table. He shook his head. “Goddamn kids want to fight for the damn aliens!” he uttered, smacking his knees. “I drove those fucking Krauts out of Western Europe, and is anyone playing games about that? No... well, just those two fat losers in the corner.”
In the back corner of the room, a 400+ pound gamer stopped moving tiny metal tanks and raised his head. He began to hobble towards us with an angry expression on his face.
“Holy fuck! Enemy counter-attack!” Patton cried out, pointing at the obese gamer now barreling towards us. “Fighting retreat!” he commanded as pushed me at the gamer and then ran for the exit.
“And how do we perform a fighting retreat here?” I asked him, when I caught up.
Patton stopped, turned to the gamer chasing us and yelled, “You’ll never catch us alive, you fat fuck!” And then ran like a madman until he had caught back up with me. He grinned.
We ran through most of the hotel’s parking garage before we were sure that we had lost him. For several minutes, we stood around trying to catch our respective breaths. Patton sat on the curb and pulled out a cigar.
“You’re a smoker?” I asked him.
“Only cigars, and only the best,” he said, clenching it between his teeth.
“If you’re about quality, try this,” I told him, pulling a finely rolled blunt out of my pocket.
“It looks a little lumpy.”
“Craftsmanship,” I told him.
“What if we could start a war and like… hear me out here... we got everybody to show up: fascists, commies, chinks, beatniks… and we just blow them all up. BOOM!” He said, chuckling.
“That’d be pretty fucking crazy,” I told him.
“I've got another one,” he said, nudging me with his elbow. “What if we took all the Negroes, put them on a rocket, and shipped them off to the moon?”
“Alright, that one’s a little bit over the line, dude.”
“Nawwwww,” he said, waiving his hands dismissively. “I don’t think so. We’ll give them some deep-sea diving equipment, some excess food grain, they’ll be better than fine—”
“You can just stop right there, this isn’t going in a healthy direction. We should just stop and move on to something else,” I told him.
“But—” he tried to spit out, but I just shook my head and took another puff of the blunt, then handed it to him. “This is some cigar. Where’d you get it?”
“Jamaica.”
Patton nodded. “I knew those Negroes were good for something.”
“Alright dude, you’ve got to stop that,” I said.
“What?”
“We don’t call them Negroes anymore.”
“Well ain’t that a whore. What do we call them nowadays?" he asked.
“Blacks.”
He scowled. “That sounds worse to me. Negro has a sort of bourgeois to it.”
“…And even then, you don’t want to be saying shit like ‘them’ or anything like that; especially around them. It’s kind of a touchy issue these days.”
“What a world,” he said, exhaling some smoke.
“You’ve got that right.”
“So sixty years after the Great Crusade and all we have to show for it are obese man-children playing games and uppity ne—” I frowned. “uhhh… ethnics.” I shrugged.
“There’s an upside,” I spat out, choking on a hit.
“What’s that?”
“We can get porn at like light speed, man.” I told him, when I’d regained by breathe. Patton became lost in though.
“My god, what a world,” he said, then took another hit of the blunt. His eyes were becoming droopy. “You think you’ve seen things… fantastic things; Great empires rise and… uhhh… fall, that’s the word, and… wait what was I saying?”
“Something about getting back to that game in there,” I said, pointing at the table where the Eczema kid had now returned.
“Right. Okay, so when we get back in there, we’ve got to stick it to those alien… bug… motherfuckers. It may seem like suicide, but our… guys… need to stay on the attack. You can’t make any progress if you… ummmm… stay in one… what’s the word I’m looking for here?”
“Place? Spot? Locale?”
“No no… spot,” he said. “We’ll take the infantry company on the… left…” he thought for a minute. “…left flank, yeah… and hit those four-armed… things… head-on. Then, our heavy guns and those tanks’ll blast that big bastard right up there in the… ummm… center. As soon as the big guy is knocked out, those chicken-walker… ma-jiggers will cut across the…umm… center and hit that squid-looking fucker in their rear-area. After that—” he became distracted by a man dressed in a full suit samurai armor walking by. “…what was I talking about?” he asked.
“You know, I don’t think either of us really knows,” I said, checking my watch.
“…porn at the speed of light,” he mumbled, trailing off.
“Great, so let’s get back,” I told him, snuffing out the remains of the blunt. Patton blocked me with his arm.
“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll take care of all that, you get us some snacks.”
“What?”
“Snacks. You know… maybe some hamburgers… hotdogs… pies… good old American food. You just go ahead and get some food—drinks too. I’ve got the plan all up here,” he said, tapping his helmet with the riding crop. “…you know what, maybe some… uhhh… Mexican food too. Those beaners can really stir up some good chow.”
“Alright, I’ll do it if you’ll lay of the racial slurs. Okay?”
“I can’t say ‘beaner?’ Oh for Christ’s sake…” He shook his head. “So you go ahead and get the food… some Chinaman-food too… and I’ll take care of those bug fuckers until you get back.”
Being hungry, and not really wanting to play Warhammer 40K, I agreed.
When I returned with a United Nations of snacks, Patton was gone. My Imperial Guard army was also gone. Eczema kid was packing away his army. I was going to ask him what had happened but I already knew. Also, I really didn’t want to talk to this kid. It was seriously the worst eczema outbreak I’ve ever seen. I don’t really know how he could function. I’m not kidding, it was that bad.
I went to Joe, the convention security guy. He had a radio and shoulder-mounted mic/speaker. He stood with his arms folding as I told him how Patton stole my Imperial Guard army. When I finished he looked me straight in the eyes asked: “Are you high?”
I decided to drop the issue.
And that was the time that I smoked a blunt with General George S. Patton just minutes before he stole hundreds of dollars in plastic army men from me.
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