Blood Games (29 page)

Christy had to hand it to Bart, though. He handled himself well.

“He suckered the judge royally,” she said later. “He presented himself as a college student trying to get his life together. He said with a probation officer like Mrs. Newsom, he thought he could do better if the judge would just give him another chance. George Greene ate that up.”

The judge gave Bart another chance, continuing his probation without additional penalties, instructing him to catch up on his payments and heed his probation officer.

Christy was in a cold fury, struggling to control herself, especially when she saw Bart looking at her, as she later described it, with his “I got you again” look.

Christy was then handling 180 cases, and she thought that half of them probably should be in jail. Bart was her most difficult case, the one giving her bleeding ulcers. She knew that he should be in jail. He defied all the rules, yet he got the same treatment as probationers who obeyed them all. “My biggest problem with the courts,” she said later, “is that if the law says this ought to happen, it ought to happen. Judges give these conditions of probation. Why do they give them if they’re not going to enforce them?”

Christy did not control her fury when she met Bart outside the courtroom.

“I promised him he was going to jail,” she said. “I said, ‘One day you’re going to jail, and I’m going to see to it.’”

Later, she even went to see Judge Greene to express her displeasure privately. “I didn’t do it in a disrespectful way,” she said. “I asked him, ‘What am I supposed to do with these people?’ He told me I was doing a good job, but he just couldn’t put everybody in jail. He was nice about it.”

When Christy next saw Bart, only two weeks later, she barely could believe her eyes. He had come on schedule for his appointment, but gone was the clean-cut college student who had so impressed Judge Greene. Bart had bleached his hair and shaved the sides of his head in patterns. He was wearing torn jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and rawhide moccasin boots laced to the knee. And he arrived at her office by skateboard.

“It’s the new me,” Bart said with a grin.

“I liked you better the other way,” she said.

Bart was indeed a student again when he appeared before Judge Greene. In April, he had left his job at the convenience mart after a dispute with the manager. He hadn’t been able to save any money and he was tired of working. Things were about to change. As soon as the semester ended, Opie was going off to basic training with the Air Force. Hank was planning a long trip to visit his mother and friends. Both would be giving up the apartment, and Bart couldn’t afford to keep it alone. He decided to enroll in summer school and try to reestablish his standing as a student at State. His parents were pleased and relieved about his decision, especially his father, who was in frequent contact with Christy Newsom and was worried about his son’s activities and the company he had fallen into.

Bart returned again to Lee dorm, this time to the eighth floor, room 807B, in which he was alone for the first ten days. Almost everybody Bart knew had gone away for the summer, and without close friends or a job, he was at loose ends while he waited for classes to begin.

Soon after moving into the dorm, Bart bumped into Quincy Blackwell, a casual friend from Caswell County, who, he discovered, was living just three suites down from him, also waiting for summer school to begin. Quincy, a dedicated aficionado of Japanese cartoons, had played Dungeons and Dragons in Bart’s group during high school. He also was a good friend of Neal and had been rooming with him in Burgaw Hall until the semester ended.

Bart suggested that they get a D&D group organized to help kill the time, and he asked Quincy where Neal was living. Quincy said that he had moved into an apartment on Ligon Street on the western edge of the campus, only a short walk from Lee dorm. Neal’s apartment would be an apt spot to hold the game, Bart thought, and he and Quincy walked over to Ligon Street to propose that to Neal.

The past nine and a half months had been a downward spiral for Neal, and he was just beginning to try to pull out of it.

Neal had returned to classes the previous fall with a renewed determination to study hard, but personal problems soon intervened. With Kenyatta now at the School of Science and Math in Durham, less than thirty minutes away, he began seeing another old girlfriend, Jane Freeman*. They had remained close friends, and they went out for dinner on his birthday, September 21. They talked about their earlier breakup, decided that the reasons for it were stupid, and began to go out again. There was only one little catch. Jane also was seeing another guy. And she couldn’t decide which one she liked better.

One of her criticisms of Neal was that he wouldn’t express his feelings, that he kept his emotions bottled up. He knew that she was right about that, and one night he opened up, telling her his deepest feelings, his innermost longings.

“I cried and made a mess of myself,” he said later.

After that episode, Jane decided that she couldn’t decide—and until she could, she wouldn’t date Neal or the other guy.

Kenyatta also contributed to Neal’s emotional turmoil that fall. Convinced that he was in love with Jane, Neal tried to break up with Kenyatta. Kenyatta later said that he came to see her one Sunday and told her that a girl he had been seeing had a sexual disease. On another occasion, she claimed, he invited her to Raleigh, had some of his friends take her off on a pretense, then staged a scene in which she returned to his room to find him on the bed with another girl. “I was supposed to see it, get mad, and go back to school.”

Finally, Kenyatta came over for a long, volatile, heart-cleansing session with Neal. It went on for hours at the student union. When it ended well after midnight, they returned to Neal’s dorm room to find his friends sprawled over the beds, leaving them no place to sleep. Kenyatta was crying and had a terrible headache.

“I said, ‘Neal, why not wake them up and make them get off the bed?’ He wouldn’t make them leave. Instead, we went down to the lounge and pushed couches together at three or four o’clock in the morning and slept there. He had no respect for me or our relationship at all.”

She left the next morning thinking that Neal probably was out of her life for good.

The emotional turmoil and his continuing dedication to Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games often kept Neal out of class and away from his books that fall, and his grades continued dropping.

At the beginning of the second semester, Neal learned that Jane had moved into a condo with the other guy she had been dating.

“I was already extremely upset that she didn’t want to see me,” he recalled. “She moved in with him and I went into a tailspin. I was crushed. Up to that point, I had never really applied myself fully to anything. That way, if I failed, I could say I didn’t try. With her, I tried one hundred and ten per cent and fell on my face. There was no excuse other than that I wasn’t good enough.”

He quit going to classes and rarely even left his room. “I said, ‘I don’t care anymore,’” he said later. “‘I refuse to work at this crap anymore.’” Soon he was spending most of his days in bed with his D&D books. The only time he ever left his room was when a close friend forced him to go. “He would drag me physically out of my room and make me go and do stuff,” Neal said. But Neal still managed to show up every Sunday for his regular session of D&D.

Others worried about Neal. His mother. Weldon Slayton. Kenyatta.

Neal didn’t want to face Slayton, didn’t want to talk with him, or anybody else.

“I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong,” Kenyatta said later. “He said, ‘I can’t explain it. I’m just depressed. I just don’t feel like going to class.’”

His mother came on several occasions, but Neal couldn’t bring himself to tell her what was bothering him and assured her that he would be all right. Finally, at her instigation, he went to talk with a campus counselor.

“The guy I got struck me as an idiot,” he said later, “and I didn’t talk to anybody after that.”

The end of the semester brought the inevitable: the revocation of Neal’s scholarship. “I already knew I’d lost it,” he said. “I’d decided the whole college thing needs to take a break.”

He had to move out of the dorm and he couldn’t face going home. He knew that he had to find a place to live and get a job. A fellow D&D player, Butch Mitchell*, was looking for an apartment and suggested that they move in together “I thought, what the heck, let’s try it,” Neal said later. “Boy, was that a mistake. Beats living on the street, but not much.”

The apartment they found was in a rundown building on Ligon Street, close to the campus. Nearby on Western Boulevard was a big Sav-A-Center supermarket where Neal applied for a job and was hired as a third-shift stock clerk.

Soon after Neal and Butch moved in, Neal’s two former roommates, Bart and Quincy, came calling.

Neal was amenable to the idea of starting a new D&D group. Quincy and Butch said they would play, too. Bart said he would put up some posters around the dorm to try to bring in more players.

“FREE BEER!” Bart scrawled in big letters on a page of notebook paper. “Aha. Now that I’ve got your attention, if you’re interested in playing D&D, come to room 807B.”

He would remember signing his name to it. Not Bart, or James, but his new name, a nickname: Moog. “He and I were sitting around the room early that summer,” Neal recalled. “He said, ‘You know, I need a nickname.’ One of us said, ‘Moog, as in synthesizer.’ He thought it was interesting. He picked up on it. After that, every time anybody asked him, ‘Where’d you get that name, Moog?’ he’d say, ‘It’s a long story. Ask Neal sometime. He knows it.’”

Soon after Bart put up several of his handmade posters in the dorm, he heard a knock on his dorm room door one evening.

“I open the door,” he remembered later, “and there’s this little guy, real flashy dude, real well dressed, blazer, dress slacks, silk tie, shades. It was like he was making an entrance. He comes into the room, throws his foot up on the bed, reaches down and pulls up the cuff of his pants, and says, ‘Excuse me while I scratch the head of my dick.’ I laughed. I thought he was high. I thought this is a peculiar fellow. He seemed to be pretty cool. He stuck out his hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Chris Pritchard.’”

26

Later, when his friends tried to describe Chris Pritchard, they called him “off-the-wall,” “strange,” “weird,” “a character.” He was smarter than average, and funny, if often in a loud and crude way. He was a show-off, frequently doing things to draw attention to himself. “He was the kind who was always trying to prove something,” one friend said. He was a dreamer, too, filled with big plans for the future that regularly bubbled out of him. But some friends wondered how he would ever accomplish such grand schemes, for he was easily bored, impulsive, anxious. “He was always in a rush,” said his mother, Bonnie Von Stein.

Two passions occupied most of Chris’s time outside of school: cars and role-playing fantasy games, especially Dungeons and Dragons. He first had become interested in D&D while he was still in grammar school in Indiana. After his family moved to Washington, he began playing regularly with a small group of friends he met in school, a group that his other friends considered to be brainy but odd.

Chris’s passion for cars led him to a different group of friends, less brainy, more outgoing and raucous. Among the teenage cruisers in Washington, Chris was well known both for his car and the way he drove it. His car was a classic ’65 Mustang fastback. It was black with a gold stripe down each side when he got it, a sixteenth-birthday present from his mother and his stepfather, Lieth Von Stein. Later he had it repainted in its original color, Wimbledon white, with black stripes. Steve Outlaw, one of his closest friends, also had a Mustang, and they spent many hours together working on their cars. Chris loved the sense of power that the car gave him, and behind the wheel, he became a different person, forceful and reckless.

A good student in high school, Chris maintained a B average until his senior year, when personal problems got him off to a bad start. The summer before his senior year, he spent several weeks with his father, Stephen Pritchard, his first long stay with him since his father had left when Chris was three, barely old enough to remember. Chris rode with him on one of his long-distance trucking runs to the West, and his mother worried about the emotional effects of the visit. Soon after his return, Chris started dating one girl regularly, his first real love affair. When she broke off the relationship after only three weeks, he nearly went to pieces. His concentration faltered, his grades plummeted, and some friends thought that he began to develop an uncaring attitude.

His best scores in high school were in science and math, and at the end of October during his senior year, he applied to the engineering program at N.C. State University, the program Lieth Von Stein had flunked out of twenty years earlier.

Although his SAT scores were not exceptional, 1020, they were high enough to get Chris accepted as a nuclear engineering student at State only a month after he sent in his application, a matter of great pride to his stepfather. Although Chris had a troubled senior year in high school, nearly flunking English and college-preparatory math, he still was graduated sixty-eighth in his class of 266, with a 2.86 grade point average.

But once Chris got to State in August 1987, his study habits grew far worse. At the end of the first semester he had a grade point average of only 1.3, barely passing. And his grades became a matter of contention with his stepfather, who could see Chris going down the same path to failure that he had taken at State. Although Chris improved his grades slightly at the end of the second semester, he still was far from living up to his potential.