Blood Games (30 page)

Drinking was a part of Chris’s failure to study. He had begun drinking in high school, but once at college and away from the strictures of home, he began drinking more and more. In the first semester, he drank mostly on weekends, usually Canadian Mist, or vodka, sometimes spending Sundays and some Mondays nearly too sick to get out of bed. He never had liked beer, but by the second semester he had acquired a taste for it and began drinking it every day. When a friend pointed out that he was drinking too much, Chris became worried that he was an alcoholic. He quit drinking completely for a month, during which he brought up his grades to a low C, but at the end of the period he started drinking again, this time more than ever.

Chris was enjoying his liberty too much to return home to Washington at the end of his freshman year. Although his mother and stepfather thought that he needed a break from classes, Chris decided to go to summer school, which allowed him to keep his room on the sixth floor of Lee dorm. During the ten-day interim between spring semester and the beginning of the first session of summer school, Chris returned home and brought back to school his beloved Mustang, which had remained in Washington since the previous summer, because freshmen at State were not allowed cars. Now he had mobility with his liberty, and to supplement the $50 allowance his parents put into his account each week, he got a $4.50-an-hour job in the men’s department at Miller & Rhoads, a clothing store in Crabtree Valley Mall, only a few miles from the campus. He had just gotten off work after one of his early days on the job when he saw a misleading notice on a dorm lobby bulletin board that said: “FREE BEER.” When he saw that the notice actually was about Dungeons and Dragons, which appealed to him as strongly as beer, he went straight to the eighth floor and introduced himself to the dungeon master, James Bartlett Upchurch III, who by the summer of 1988 wanted friends to call him Moog.

Bart moved back onto campus that May with more money than he’d ever had. An insurance company had just paid him nearly $5,500 to replace the Camaro he had demolished on the day after he bought it in February. The money should have gone to the credit union, which held the lien on the car, but through a fluke Bart received the title to the car, and the check came to him. Rather than pay off the loan on the car, Bart decided to keep the money and continue making payments on the car, which now, unbeknownst to the credit union, rested in a junkyard. When the check came, Bart paid a bank to cash it and took the money in $100 bills. He called Opie, who was about to leave for basic training, and arranged to meet him to pay off a debt he owed for back rent. Bart climbed into Opie’s Jeep, gleefully pulled out the big roll of bills, and began counting them off.

“If a damn cop comes by, he’s going to know we’re doing a drug deal,” Opie said. “You better watch yourself. Somebody will kill you for that.”

After flashing the money around to his friends, Bart put $2,000 in the bank, made several advance payments on the car loan, so he wouldn’t have to worry about that for a while, and went on a spending spree with the rest. Among other purchases, he bought tickets to a Pink Floyd concert for himself and all of his friends, and on the night before the concert, he threw a big party and provided all the alcohol and drugs with his windfall money.

Bart wanted to use the $2,000 he put into the bank to buy a Jeep, but the one he and Opie found that was to his liking cost considerably more than he had. With his usual audaciousness, Bart asked the bank to make a loan on it. When the bank said no, he began to look for a lesser-priced vehicle. A want ad for a ’67 Ford Galaxy convertible with a new paint job, new chrome, and a new top caught his eye. He went to look at the car. It was a big, hulking machine, dramatic, a sure attention getter, and Bart could picture himself and his friends charging wildly around in it, making all the girls take notice.

Bart bought the car, only to discover that it needed new brakes and other expensive repairs. He put it into a shop to have the work done, but the bill came to more than $1,000, and Bart realized that he wouldn’t have the money to pay it and still get through summer school, even though his mother had given him the money for the first session’s tuition. The shop owner agreed to hold the car until Bart finished summer school and could pay the bill.

Later, Chris would say that he met Neal Henderson on his first visit to Bart’s dorm room, but Bart would say it actually was on his second visit, when they got together to plan around their class and work schedules to play D&D. Bart was taking two courses the first summer session, prehistoric archeology and anthropology. Chris was enrolled in a single course, calculus. Neal was working third shift at the Sav-A-Center, giving him time to play in the afternoon and early evening. They decided that they could play at least twice, possibly three times a week, and Bart began mapping a campaign.

During the first week of classes, both Bart and Chris attended faithfully and did their classwork. But soon after the session began, Chris met another student in his calculus class, Tim Parker. Soon after their meeting Parker asked Chris if he smoked pot. “Sure,” Chris told him. Later, he would claim that he actually had smoked only a couple of joints during his entire freshman year. Parker was a heavy marijuana user, Chris later claimed, and he offered it to Chris without charge. Within a week after Parker first offered him pot, Chris said, he was smoking it every day.

During the second week of classes, Chris came to Bart’s room to talk about D&D, but the conversation took another turn.

“Do you get high?” Chris asked.

“Yeah, man. Sure.”

“Well, come on down later, if you want to. We got plenty of dope.”

When Bart went downstairs to Chris’s room, he heard loud rock music coming from within. He knocked and heard people shuffling around before the door cracked open and somebody peeked out.

“Ah, it’s Moog,” Bart heard Chris say. “Hey, man, he’s cool.”

And the door swung open to a smiling group of students and a haze of marijuana smoke.

Neal Henderson spent little time on campus with Bart, Chris, and Quincy. He came over for the D&D sessions, which, when not scheduled at his apartment, were played in Bart’s room or the dorm’s downstairs study room. But he rarely stayed for the partying, usually walking back to the apartment he shared with Butch Mitchell on Ligon Street. Part of the reason was that he was back with Kenyatta, who had finished her first year at the School of Science and Math and did not want to return home for the summer. Neal invited her to move in with him. Kenyatta saw this as an opportunity to revive and rebuild their relationship, and she resented the long hours that Neal spent playing D&D. Soon, she and Neal were bickering and yelling just as they had in their tumultuous past.

“I liked having her around. I liked her as a person,” Neal later said of Kenyatta. “But when we stayed around each other too long, she got on my nerves. She’s a very hyper person. She gets upset extremely easily. I go and play D&D twice a week and she magnifies that into never spending any time with her.” Because Neal worked late at night and Kenyatta had taken a daytime job at McDonald’s, they had opposite schedules and little time to be together. Kenyatta wanted to have that time alone with Neal. “I’d want to cook him dinner or go out somewhere,” she said. “He wanted to spend all of his time doing D&D.”

A couple of times she went with him to his games on campus, only to draw the ire of her cousin, Bart, whom she still called James, despite his preference for Moog. “He treated me really bad,” she said of Bart. “It was like, why are you here? He picked on me. He knew my weaknesses and he would use my weaknesses against me. I would go over there and he would make me cry and I would start walking back to the apartment. After James abused me, Neal would ask me, ‘Why did you leave?’ I’d say, ‘You saw how he treated me.’ But he wouldn’t say anything about it. I hated James. I hated him for letting my bike get stolen, but I really hated him for making me cry. He didn’t care about himself. He didn’t care about anybody.”

Although Kenyatta’s relationship with Neal’s roommate, Butch, started off okay, it, too, began to deteriorate and soon led to yelling. Neal also had begun to realize that moving in with Butch was a mistake. He hardly knew him, had only played D&D with him. Butch had a powerful temper, Neal discovered, and he never knew when his roommate might explode in anger. He was unaware that in the past Butch had been hospitalized for emotional problems and that Butch’s mother worried that when he drank he might become violent and hurt somebody. Like Bart, Butch resented Neal’s sloppiness and disorder. And although Butch was a regular member of D&D groups with Neal he also resented Neal’s form of play. “Neal was always trying to rule the world,” he said later. “The boy was hungry for power, put it that way. I hated playing with him. Neal’s philosophy is, if you’ve got it, I want it and I’ll kill you for it. What he wants, he is gonna get it. He’s calm. He’s sneaky. He’s not physical, but he’s always thinking.”

By the third week of the first summer school session, Chris had a smoking device called a bong in his room and was using marijuana daily—and paying Tim Parker for it. He also was drinking prodigious amounts of beer each day.

As Chris and Bart were smoking pot one day, Bart asked if he ever had used acid. Chris said no.

Later, Chris remembered Bart telling him, “You ought to try it. It’s cheap. Only three dollars a hit. It gives a great high and it lasts a long time.”

Soon after that, Chris, Bart, Neal, Butch, Quincy, and Brew were playing D&D in the dorm study room. Chris was sure that Bart was on acid. He thought that he could tell because Bart was “jumpy,” as he described it, more hyperactive than usual, and his eyes “rolled and darted.”

When the game ended, Bart told Chris and Neal that he had some acid and suggested that they try it. Both were willing. They went to Bart’s room, and Bart sold two hits to Chris and one to Neal, suggesting that they take only half a hit to begin. Chris took half, but Neal decided to take the whole hit. Bart took a whole hit, too. Afterward, they went to Chris’s room and smoked pot. When Chris reported feeling nothing from the acid, he took another hit, this time a whole one. Within thirty minutes, he later reported, he began seeing bursting colors and hearing the music to which he was listening much differently than he ever had heard it before. He felt euphoric, “on top of the world,” bolder than he ever had felt. And he could not contain his energy. He had to go outside. It was after midnight, and the three went out and walked for hours around the campus. It was nearly five when Neal went home and Bart returned to his room. Chris was still too energetic to sleep, and he went to his room and listened to music for another hour before dozing off.

Hank had now returned from his travels, and Bart introduced him to Chris three days after Chris’s first acid experience. Hank began coming frequently to Chris’s room to join in the activities.

By the fourth week of the first summer session, both Bart and Chris were attending class less frequently. Chris decided to change his calculus course from credit to audit, thinking that would release him from having to turn in homework and take tests, but he was soon to learn different.

At the end of that week, Chris got his paycheck from Miller & Rhoads. He bought half a gram of cocaine and half an ounce of marijuana from Tim Parker and went up to Bart’s room, where Bart, Hank, and two of their friends had gathered. Already high on marijuana, Chris bought ten hits of acid from Bart. He still had $150 in cash, and he held it aloft, along with the cocaine, the acid, the marijuana. “Fellows,” he grandly announced, “now this is
power.”

He offered up his marijuana and cocaine to the others, and before the night was out, the drugs all had been used, and the campus police had been summoned after the group began throwing firecrackers from the balcony. Later, Chris reported that he was “really messed up,” but again he was so energy-filled that he couldn’t contain himself. Once more, he and Bart and the others walked off their high, this time off campus, covering five or six miles, Chris later estimated. It was on this walk that Bart told Chris about the tunnels.

Bart had learned about the tunnels as a freshman, and he already had made several forays there, exploring. The tunnels were concrete underground passages that crisscrossed the entire campus, carrying steam pipes and other utilities from building to building. Their entrances were barred and locked, but Bart and other students had discovered that many manholes about the campus offered access. Chris was excited about the tunnels and wanted to go immediately. Nobody else was interested, but Bart agreed to take Chris to see them. It was about 4 A.M. when they lifted aside a heavy grate near the D. H. Hill Library and dropped into the darkness of N.C. State’s underworld. Bart knew the locations of switches to turn on the fluorescent lights, and they wandered through the intricate network of pipes, pausing to smoke another joint and to read the graffiti that other student explorers had painted on the tunnel walls, giving them the look of a New York subway car. When they climbed back out of the manhole cover through which they had entered, Chris knew he had discovered a place he would want to revisit again and again.

A week after Chris’s first venture into the tunnels, he, Tim Parker, Bart, and Brew were in Chris’s room one afternoon, smoking pot. All of them were stoned, and they began discussing what they wanted to do after they got out of college. Chris and Brew had similar dreams: they wanted to be writers. Bart said he might like to run a restaurant and a club. They would be wealthy and popular.

Chris mentioned that it was just a matter of time before he would be wealthy anyway. His family, he said, had millions. Not to mention three houses and seven cars. This was the first time the others had heard anything about Chris’s family being rich, although they knew they were well-to-do.