Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Wednesdays!

Each Wednesday night we meet according to the rules we agreed upon. I think it was Dan who first put them to paper, but at this point it’s hard to say. We all show up around seven or eight with a bottle of something and log on to Skype. One of us will call the others. It can be any of us, but it is almost always Alex.

One by one we sign in and take up our respective places, waiting in an unmarked Heroes of Newerth channel. We wait as a group, quietly musing over current events, movies, sports. whatever. We begin this way each night because it is slow, because it lets us ease in to one another’s company and because it forces us, briefly, to work as a team, which is what Guys’ Night is all about. Of course, because it relies heavily on teamwork this innocent game also puts our entire evening in jeopardy. A bad HoN game means a bad night, where everyone’s angry at everyone else, trying to prove that either the loss wasn’t their fault or that they can make up for their poor performance in some other way. If the first game goes well we’ll play another, and sometimes a third, bracing ourselves for our inevitable defeat.

Tonight we’ll win our first game.

“Alright,” I’ll say, sipping water and hoping that my sobriety doesn’t cloud my playing. “Sure we want to do another one?” I went six and two with Forsaken, a feat I’m unlikely to best. I really just want to play Modern Warfare so that we have some time to ride on our victory high before the night starts to turn.

“Yeah,” Alex says. He did pretty well too, breaking even with Magmus. He knows he can do better in another game and he wants to take a chance.

“I think we should play another one,” Dan quips in in his douchiest voice. Dan went one and six with Voodoo Jester and he really wants to get a good game in. He wants it bad.

“Okay,” I say, and click the refresh button.

Games populate inexplicably, re-ordering themselves on my list as if on a whim. There’s no real logic to how they appear or vanish, they just flash and then decide whether or not they want to stay, jockeying for position within my attention constantly. I pick one, open it up and Alex and Dan follow.

“Fuck, no. Leave,” Alex sighs into his microphone. He’s already left the game and we’re left to follow obediently. Dan asks what we’re both thinking.

“Why?”

“Did you see their scores, Dan? God.”

We search in silence, still sifting through games, looking for our gem. After all, we only need to really find one good one. We can throw away all the shitty games we like, even if we don’t all always agree that they’re shitty in the first place.

“Maybe Grove shouldn’t pick,” Dan intones. This intonation will come after my third unacceptable pick.

“Whatever,” I say, eying the bottle of whiskey, half left over from before I decided to give alcohol a rest. I sigh and step away from my keyboard to fill up my water bottle. When I return Alex and Dan are screaming over chat.

“Get the fuck in the game?”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Keep your fucking pants on, Jesus.”

I log in and slip, just barely, into the last slot on their team. I am seconds behind XXXPRIDEXXX, and if I’d lost the race I’m sure I’d have heard about it for the rest of the night. And rightly so. I broke one of the rules. I left without mentioning it.

But there’s no harm done, none yet, so we sit and watch the teams autobalance, the percentages even out and the clock count down from five. We don’t even hear these sounds anymore. They are like white noise underneath our own voices, like a rising wind in a storm. Part of knowing everything is going well in the game. But when the countdown settles and the heroes are randomly assigned, that’s when the cursing begins.

“Shit,” Alex mumbles. “We’re fucked.”

“We’re always fucked,” I grumble.

“Seriously,” Dan sighs. Surveying the selection, however, Alex is right. We’re very, very fucked.

“Shit.”

Of the five heroes we’ve been assigned, I can play two of them well. Alex can play one of them alright and one of them, in the hands of our lowest ranked player, amazingly well. Dan can’t really play any of them. We jockey for position accordingly. I stick with my mediocre hero, with whom I can guarantee results, if not great ones. Dan distributes his heroes as they come to him, hoping for the best and trying to make sure the rest of the team is more or less comfortable with their heroes, and Alex settles for a hero he hates but might be amazing at. That happens sometimes with Alex.

But when the game starts we don’t have a chance to see just how great Alex may or may not be with his hero.

The two of us head bot, already in irksome silence, already fully aware of our inevitable defeat. If we were in better spirits we’d be offering up quips, criticizing our teammates and calling each other queer. We’d have already had a lengthy conversation about whose semen tastes like what, but instead we’ll be verbally paralyzed, waiting for one of us to start the rage, In the end it will start with the source least likely to an external observer: it will start with Dan. Or perhaps with scotch. A team effort maybe? Whatever the source, Dan’s voice will sound, rage barely detectable in it.

“Thanks for the call.”

He’ll be referring to mid’s hero, which will have jumped lanes and killed him. His lane mate will have largely ignored his plight, apparently, and as a result Alex and I will be at fault. In the ensuing chaos, caused entirely by this discussion mind you, I will have died and Alex will be sighing at a deafening volume.

“Fuck,” I’ll mumble to the silence, returning with the promise of another explosion.

The game will continue in this fashion for an eternity, quiet rage erupting, then fading, erupting again. Numbers will increase rapidly, then slow, then rush up again, time slowing down all the while. The perfidious game clock will read twenty two minutes when Brown finally drops, having successfully sabotaged our entire team’s K-D ratios, as well as all of the middle lane’s defenses. His efforts will have been nothing short of prodigal.

Pink will still fight on, against our wishes, refusing to vote each time we try to concede so we can move on to other games. In the end this will stretch out for another fifteen minues, each second containing a similarly sized epoch within itself. Dan will be completely silent, Alex eager to move on. He won’t even say anything as he loads up Modern Warfare 2 and starts up a game. Dan and I will follow, knowing better than to chance his rage.

But Modern Warfare 2 will do little to soothe our bloodied egos. Every player we face will prove to be a hacker or dipshit or fucker or something, right up until they join our faction for the round, in which case they’re immediately transformed to a bundle of no-talent shit for brains faggotry intent only on ruining our entire fucking night. By the time the second round is over Alex will be shouting fuck every time he dies, and I’ll be eying the whiskey with renewed consideration. After all, if this game is a reflection of my life, shouldn’t I just go with it and enjoy being at the bottom a little?

“One more try at HoN,” I’ll ask, dreading the answer. We’ll be fighting a particularly vicious band of hacking Russian throat rapists when I beg the question. I’ll have just been shot from across the map by a young man with two machine pistols and aim that could only be bested by John Rambo. Our departure from this game will be a foregone conclusion, the only honorable path to take if we want to preserve even a shred of our dignity.

“Fuck yes,” Alex will respond, his courage returning. Or the rum emerging, again, difficult to say. If I wasn’t sober I’d have a better angle on what was going on, but I will, regrettably, still not have taken a drink. It will be a bad evening, one of our worst.

Dan will say nothing through the search for a new game. This, in turn, will prompt me to say nothing, which means Alex will talk, non-stop, about how shitty our team is throughout the matchmaking, hero selection and prep process. After these give way to play he’ll keep on about how much bullshit the other team’s heroes are and how incredibly fucking weak ours are. Each time he dies he’ll slam his desk and shout.

“FUCK!”

By the time the game ends our team will have a severe kill deficit. I’ll have managed to keep an even K-D ratio, a rare thing, but Alex and Dan won’t have been so lucky. Clucking my tongue at the good my sobriety has done me I’ll frown, listening to Alex swear.

“Well,” Dan will sigh. “I’m done.”

I’ll nod in agreement before I remember that my microphone doesn’t pick up gestures.

“Yeah, same.”

“Alright,” Alex will sigh one last time as we one by one back out of the Skype channel.

Once Skype is closed I’ll be left to my own devices, finally, the first bit of time I’ll have had alone for the whole of Wednesday. It will be twelve thirty in the morning and I’ll have three posts to finish before Thursday night. I’ll be sober, bleary eyed and surly. But, smiling, I’ll already be looking forward to next Wednesday, wondering if I’ll have enough in my savings to drink by then.