Difficult Simple

After scaring up a free copy of the boxing-themed roleplaying game, Contenders, I was pretty anxious to try it out. Since I haven’t had a regular, or even semi-regular, gaming group in a number of years, the GM-less mechanics were a definitely appealing, as it took the onus off me in terms of making the game happen from beginning to end. It always seemed to fall to me to entertain everyone else, and I never got to enjoy just playing. So I corralled my wife at the kitchen table and set about hashing out Contenders in action.

It should be noted at the outset that my wife doesn’t care for boxing. I’ll admit that I’ve fallen in and out of love with the sweet science over the years; the sad state of heavyweight boxing, in particular, is enough to drive anyone away. But this is about Contenders, so let’s not get distracted.

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The other night I was killing time ahead of dinner when I saw The Godfather was on. Normally I don’t watch movies, particularly R-rated movies, when they air on commercial television because I can’t stand to see them butchered by S&P, but there’s something about The Godfather… I watched the last third of the movie, and when The Godfather, Part II came on, I watched that, too.

I don’t give all the credit for these films’ success to Francis Ford Coppola, nor do I heap laurels solely upon Mario Puzo. The two men working in harmony created magic. Sure, the magic might not have been as potent by the time Part III rolled around, but they got me then, too.

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I remember learning somewhere that Christopher Lee reads The Lord of the Rings every year. That’s a worthy pursuit, because the book is awfully good (though awfully long), and there are many layers to its narrative that reward careful and repeated reading. But I’m not so enterprising. I make it a point to dip into a particular classic year after year, but it only takes me a couple of hours to finish. That classic: Dawn of the Dead.

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In Burundi, Africa there is a 60-year-old crocodile that’s grown to nearly 27 feet in length and over 2,000 pounds on a diet consisting largely of human flesh. The natives call this crocodile Gustave, and his cyclic appearance in human-occupied river basins and lakes is invariably accompanied by sudden, gruesome and numerous feeding incidents. Gustave is riddled with bullet scars, including a large one on his head. When members of the Burundi army fired their automatic rifles into him, Gustave was said to “swallow the bullets.”

Gustave is for real.

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Certain fiction has a mournful, even desolate quality about it that films can only aspire to, but never reach. When film discards flash, action and reckless forward momentum to focus instead on characters whose drives come from within, the end result is often something utterly inert; with everything happening beneath the surface, there’s nothing to see. The best works of David Lynch manage to find that dividing line, and while something like Lost Highway throws itself over and becomes gobbledygook, there are others, like Mulholland Drive, that get it almost exactly right.

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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve read two of Mario Puzo’s books, The Last Don and The Godfather Papers. Both were problematic in their own way, but they were good enough to keep me reading steadily. No small feat in the case of The Last Don, because it’s much, much longer than it ought to be.

When I was in junior high school, I developed a kind of obsessive relationship with The Godfather. I was forbidden to see the film whenever it showed at the local revival house, but my parents apparently though it was fine for me to create a version of the film in my mind’s eye by reading, rereading and re-rereading Puzo’s novel. I used to keep the family hardcover in my locker and dip into it between classes like a prayer book. To this day I have favorite scenes, both literary and — yes, I’ve seen the movies by now — filmic that I can spool out in my memory at will.

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