Our time in California amounted to somewhere between a year and a year and a half. I remain grateful for every second I spent there, every friend I made, and what lessons I learned from the experience. I got engaged, and then the engagement broken off during that time. I got to travel all across the country and visit exciting locations such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, Malvern, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio. I flew through Chicago so much that I have a lasting opinion about O’Hare International Airport, and it’s roughly analogous to Dante’s version of Purgatory.

When we weren’t on the company dime, Weldon and I explored the Bay Area. We ate at probably 20 or more different Chinese restaurants, no two alike. We were on the hook to entertain visitors, which meant we got to see Alcatraz multiple times, and the sea lions at the pier. I went to every bookstore in the East Bay and SF, and this was back when Other Change of Hobbit, Dark Carnival, and Rory Root’s Comic Relief were all a going concern.

We had a place we could retreat to, a brew pub called The Triple Rock, conveniently located about three blocks from our apartment in downtown Berkeley. We were regulars there, sometimes as often as three or four times in a week. This was the first bar I’d encountered that made their own beer, and it was wonderful, and the reason why I’m a beer snob to this very day. We got lessons on what to drink and what it should taste like from the folks that worked there, but our favorite bartender was a guy named Tom, who lived in Texas for a while. He and I could talk about the Dallas Cowboys, back when that was the thing to do. Once every so often, we’d both walk into the bar, sit down, and Tom would walk over, take one look at us, and draw us a pint. “This one’s on me,” he’d say. Good guy, Tom.

On weekends, we hung out on Telegraph Avenue like old hippies and went to Moe’s and Rasputin’s. Weldon liked to feed the squirrels on the UC campus, and it’s a freaking miracle that he’s still got his eyes and his lips. I took public transportation to see KISS avec make-up in San Jose (thank God I knew the way!) And we were devotes of the UC theater on University Drive and their different double features every night. Some of my singularly best movie going experiences happened in that theater. Just to keep us on an even keel, we watched a lot of Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies while eating cheap Chinese food from this place around the corner. It was magnificent.

Our world in Berkeley was this four-block square area from Shattuck and Addison over to University and the edge of campus. In that small section of downtown, we had: Comic Relief, Sushi a Float, Other Change of Hobbit, the UC theater, the Triple Rock, two very different and beloved Chinese restaurants, a Ben & Jerry’s, a Starbucks, a separate bodega with coffee and breakfast sandwiches, a Taco Bell, and the downtown Berkeley BART stop, allowing us to go anywhere in the Bay Area that the subway went. For us, during that time in our lives, it was magical.

Work, on the other hand, was a decidedly mixed bag. There were other small successes during this time period. Chessex expanded into Euro games, which are everywhere now, but back then, they were these gorgeous, complex things that no one had seen before. We also started carrying Italian Tarot decks from Dal Negro, one of the largest producers of tarot, and they were all gorgeous, ranging from rustic to outright fantastical (the Fairy Tarot is still a favorite of mine, just because of how clever and cool the card art is).

It wasn’t all bad. But when it was bad, it was terrible.

Astute readers may have gathered that there was a cashflow problem with Chessex Manufacturing that started long before we were working there and continued well after we left. Our paychecks were adequate but there was a constant danger of there not being enough dough in the bank account to cover everything, like payroll. I distinctly remember us getting our checks on one Friday and being dismissed early, as we were told to “run and deposit them while you can.”

Money motivated nearly every creative decision we made, and it even drove a lot of my ad copy. Everything was urgent. Everything was also great. No, really, true believers! I felt like Stan Lee sometimes, spinning plates and rah-rah-ing it up for the company.

Most of the decisions for what happened to Chessex Manufacturing and later the whole company can be laid at the feet of Don Reents. As these things happened nearly 30 years ago, I’m sure I’m not speaking ill of the current version of Chessex Manufacturing, or even the current version of Don. It’s ancient history, so I’m going to talk about it historically, and with my butt firmly in the Monday Morning Quarterback chair.

Don came up through retail, and as such, he was always on the lookout for a good deal. Quantity at a discount was his kryptonite. That’s how Chx Mfg ended up with games like Skyrealms of Jorune, Albedo, and Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective under the same umbrella that sold lead figure cases and blank wargame counters. It was a mishmash born of opportunity.

Don was also a chess master, and what he did well—what he was best at, really—was his ability to see four or five moves down the line. That is how Chessex Distribution expanded so rapidly that it scared the shit out of the other regional distributors and even Diamond Comics. All of those warehouses were all doing very well, when they didn’t have to prop up Chx Mfg so we could, for instance, buy vinyl to make Battlemats or pay a customs bill to get pallets of Indian hardwood chess sets off of the docks. Sure, those chess sets were expensive and we had to order a three-year supply at a time to make it worth shipping, but on the other hand, they took forever to hand sort, didn’t sell that quickly, and ate up a lot of resources. Clearly a win-win for everyone

Probably the most galling thing about all of it was that both me and Weldon were hired for our expertise, and then that expertise was rarely utilized. In fact, it was just the opposite. We both came from retail sales, and both of us were veteran gamers with years of experience working in and around creative people, artists and writers. This should have been our first grown-up dream job. Instead, we ended up fighting a company that hired us, but didn’t want to use us.

We weren’t the only people frustrated with the company and its practices; folks in distribution were just as peeved about having to take junk product they didn’t need. Within a few months of me showing up, people started to drop off like flies. Stanley, the one man sales department, was the first one gone, but I don’t think that was a great loss. Stan had a thing he’d do on business trips where he’d disappear for a few hours and not tell anyone where he was going. After the trip was over, he’d break out his pictures he’d taken, and they were all photos of him standing next to pretty girls in front of gardens, fountains, etc.

One of the other people we worked with was the accountant for Chx Mfg, an older man named Bill. I don’t remember his last name, but I will never forget him—he had a low, nasal voice that was reminiscent of Burgess Meredith’s Penguin, if the Penguin had never laughed at his own maniacal plots. He spoke in almost a deadpan monotone, which wouldn’t have been so bad, if he didn’t also have a tic—his eye would occasionally twitch so violently that it would slightly jerk his head to the right, and his hands would occasionally shake. It was impossible to to not notice. Me and Weldon just assumed it was Parkinson’s. He was usually in his corner of the office, head down, working whatever magic he possessed to try and shore up the company’s scattershot finances.

This was all well and good, unless he lost his cool. Then he’d stand up, unleash a torrent of profanity, in that same nasal monotone (only much, much louder), and he’d slam things around on his desk: “God-DAMN sonofaBITCH What the HELL bunch of SHIT!” and then he’d stalk off to Fitz’s office or to the break room for a cup of coffee.

The first time he did it, I thought it was a bit or something, and I started to laugh, but Monica, one of the employees who worked for Castle Books, the book side of Chessex Manufacturing, caught my eye and shook her head. Evidently, Bill exploded once every couple or three months, and the company policy was to just let that grenade go off and pretend like it didn’t happen. I saw that sideshow act twice before Bill finally put in his notice. He wasn’t the first one to go, but he was close.

Tellingly, Weldon and I bumped into him in public a few months later, and we both almost didn’t recognize him because he was smiling, a thing we’d never seen before. He greeted us warmly, another thing we’d never seen. We talked to him for several minutes and this is the clincher: Bill didn’t twitch at all during our visit. No tics, no shakes, nothing. We bid him adieu and I said to Weldon, “I wonder when our tics are going to start?”

As people dropped off of the payroll, we had to take on additional jobs, some of which were so all-encompassing that they took us away from the things we were supposed to be doing. We stopped being polite about it.

And lest anyone think otherwise, we weren’t always nice. Sometimes, we could be real assholes, cocky, maybe a little too confident, and brash. In other words, Texans. I know we rubbed folks the wrong way occasionally, and I’m truly sorry that y’all didn’t get us at our best all of the time. I know we weren’t always the easiest people to get along with. We liked nearly everyone we worked with, even the goofy people. By that point, it had stopped being fun, and that frustration had to go somewhere.

“Don is a POOPIE?!”
One of the last things we worked on was a Arrows of Chaos pendant, made of pewter, that was the latest in a line of jewelry for gamers. We were in charge of its design. Weldon wanted to use the square logo he’d created as a basis, but it was a bit too plain. We decided it would look cool with runes on the four sides of the square frame that the pendant sat on.

Sure, I could have looked up some Norse runes or some sort of font or cipher, but I had another idea, and I was bored enough to give it a try: I made my own runes. They weren’t great, but they looked runic enough that we could write with them on the border and fill it up. It looked good, hand-made, which was what we were going for. Everyone signed off on the design and we sent it to the jewelry maker.

Only after we did that did we take the illustration in to Patti, the head of Castle Books, and showed her the design.

“I wrote these runes myself,” I said.
“Cool,” she said, looking at the drawing.
“Can you decipher what it says?”
She squinted. “Um…something…it looks like ‘Monkeyhead’ and ‘Well-Done’…”
“Good! What about that part?”
Now that she’d seen the runes, it was easier to decipher. “Does that say… ‘Don…is…a…Poopie!?’”
“I told you she’d figure it out!” Weldon said.
Patti was aghast. “You can’t do that!”
“It’s done,” I said.
Patti looked ready to throttle us both. “Oh my God! We’re going to get fired! What is wrong with you two?”
“Relax,” I said. “Fitz loves you. If anyone’s going to get fired, it’s us.”

The pendants came back from the silversmith, and they were fantastic. The runes looked even better than the artwork, because of the sculpty-crafty mold making process. We shipped them out to the warehouses and no one was any wiser. Patti, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for the minor heart attack. I told you folks, we were assholes. I do think some of it was justified assholery, though.

After Banemaster sales stalled out (about thirty minutes after they hit the warehouses), the pressure increased exponentially to produce something that we could sell that would pay for tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of unusable orange and green cards. The speckled dice were paying for themselves, and the other products were slow but steady sellers. Nothing to provide a splash of cash in a flash.

Attitudes soured. We were practically camped out at the Triple Rock. The new person in charge of production was an outside hire because no one who was left wanted the gig, for it was the Hot Seat. This new head of production didn’t know us and also didn’t know the business at all. We clashed, frequently. We were tired of fighting. Weldon tendered his resignation and about four or five weeks later, I followed suit.  We made a brief, pyrrhic attempt at looking for another job to stay in California, but we knew what we really wanted to do. We rented a U-Haul (a 21-footer this time), threw everything in the truck, and drove back to Texas, a little older, a little wiser.

What Happened Next
I returned to Austin, and Weldon fell back to Dallas. We both got other jobs and got on with things, thus ending our personal and professional partnership of several years, but I am pleased to say we are still best of friends.

Other people followed our exodus, but a few folks held on until the bitter end. Gilbert finally got a chance to do some product development, based entirely on Weldon’s speckled dice color charts and theories. Their Area 51 Speckled Dice set was made out of all of our leftovers. The one thing Gilbert did right was a Call of Cthulhu dice pouch and dice set. The pouch had the old Call of Cthulhu RPG logo on it and the dice were the Ninja speckled dice with bilious green ink. They were really good looking and the bag was sweet. A solid product all around.

The last person to leave was Robert, the warehouse manager, who had been filling and shipping orders all by himself for several months. Everyone else was gone. I didn’t mention many of the other employees from back in the day, but they were all weird and wonderful and odd and sometimes, so very Californian (in the same way that we could be very Texan), and I loved them all. Most of them. Okay, many of them. I certainly bear no one any ill will and for the folks I still occasionally speak to, I’m grateful to still have them in my life.

Chessex Distribution merged with The Armory, a former competitor, to form Alliance Game Distributors, in 1998. I don’t have any details, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to figure out what happened and why. Two years later, Alliance was bought up by Diamond. Don kept Chessex Manufacturing for himself, and it’s still around to this day, making all kinds of dice, speckled and otherwise, as well as a modest line of tried-and-true accessories, like Battlemats and Megamats, figure storage cases, etc.

I hate that for Don. I really do. He did something that was a thumb in the eye to the industry. He created a national game distribution network during a time of rapid expansion and growth in the market. If you started gaming in the 90s and you bought your gear at a comic shop, or a place called The Dragon’s Den, or The Ogre’s Closet, or some other name like that, there’s a near 100% chance they were buying their products from a Chessex distribution warehouse.

Some of the policies at the distribution level were implemented so that fly-by-night bottom feeders who wanted Magic: The Gathering cards because they were “hot” were denied from opening an account with Chessex so that more cards could go to legitimate game and comic shops when they finally came back in stock.

Existing hobby shops expanded their lines and added locations. More new game stores opened up. More comic stores started carrying role-playing games because it was suddenly very easy to get them. That happened because of Chessex Distribution. That should have been Don’s legacy.

Now, most of this stuff is lost to the annals of time: the stories, the products, the history, all of it. No one cares about what happened to a game distributor nearly 30 years ago. In today’s culture, that might as well have been the Triassic Period. If anyone is going to talk about the 90s, it’s usually a World of Darkness conversation, or a brief mention in a larger discussion about the history of Magic: the Gathering.

Most of what we sold to game stores would come under the heading of consumables. Accessories. We didn’t publish a major role-playing game or a beloved customizable card game. We made cool dice, fun little kits, and not much else. A few of those products still exist; dice colors mostly. That’s cool. I’ll always be proud of the fact that we were able to contribute in some way, however small, to anyone’s fun time at the gaming table.

My profuse thanks to Weldon Adams for helping jog my memory, for fact-checking me, and for providing some great candid photos from around the office. We really shook the Pillars of Heaven. No bullshit.