This eulogy (if that’s what it truly is) is long overdue, not because I didn’t know about the death of my former friend Dan DeNike, or didn’t care, but because I didn’t feel like I had the right to say anything.
Dan and Me and D&D
Dan and I met while we were both in high school in Greenbelt, Maryland in the early 1980’s. IIRC, we got to know each other in gym class: he was a junior, I was a sophomore. We were both into Dungeons & Dragons, so Dan invited me to join his gaming group, which consisted of brothers Jason and Doug, and a middle school kid, Mike. After Jason and Doug quit unexpectedly, I became the Dungeon Master, and we added a friend of Mike’s named Brian, and a high school friend of mine I’ll call “Jack.”
Though I ran the games, Dan was the unquestioned leader of the group, and their exploits centered around his fighter, Lucan. In this “Monty Haul” campaign where all the characters were given lots of mighty magical items, Lucan swiftly ascended to high level, gaining the highly-coveted combination of Hammer of Thunderbolts + Girdle of Storm Giant Strength + Gauntlets of Ogre Power, which was every D&D power gamer’s wet dream. All of this excess cumulated in Lucan establishing his own kingdom in the World of Greyhawk.
Sure, this was all geek-boy munchkin-level stuff, but in my defense, I was all of about 14 or maybe 15 when it started, it was my first time running adventures, and it was actually a lot of fun. We played every week, and whenever my folks went away for a weekend in Ocean City (which happened several times), we had multi-day marathon gaming sessions.
On those occasions, Dan and the crew assembled at my house on Friday evenings, sometimes before my parents left, and we gamed until well past midnight. We crashed for a few hours; got up, showered, had something to eat; and picked up where we left off, going all day and night through Saturday. On Sunday morning, we got up and gamed some more, until my folks returned that evening.
We’d take breaks of an hour or so for food runs. Other than that, though, it was extended dance-mix D&D. My folks were fine with it: there were no drugs, no booze, no girls, no parties, no cops being called. As the oldest kid, Dan was a very good influence on all of us.
Dan the Man
Dan wasn’t very tall (I’d say 5′ 10″?), but he was physically imposing. He was broad and muscular, and had wrestled in high school. He was also extremely hairy all over, with a full beard and moustache at sixteen. He liked to joke that he was a werewolf (his D&D character was named after a TV show about a boy raised by wolves).
Dan was smart—he was really good with electronics and computers—and funny, often cracking jokes and dishing out puns. He always talked very loudly and animatedly. He loved sci-fi, fantasy, and rock: his favorite band was Rush. He and I were avid fans of the Washington Redskins, and often watched games together.
Dan had a very assertive personality; he was not shy or awkward (unlike me, at the time). He could be downright muleheaded about certain topics. I soon learned that you shouldn’t try to argue with Dan unless you had a lot of time on your hands.
He told me that he had attention deficit disorder, like ADHD without the “hyperactive” component. I had never noticed: certainly, he paid plenty of attention during all our gaming sessions. He was usually cheerful and fun. It took a lot to get him pissed off, but once he did, it was best to de-escalate the situation quickly.
I never saw him get into a fight, but I thought that he and Jack were going to throw down during a tense D&D game, which would have been lights-out for Jack. In Dan’s defense, Jack had been acting like a dick for quite a while, and after this confrontation, I stopped inviting Jack to play.
If there was anything that bothered Dan, it was, he asserted, that “little guys” sometimes tried to pick fights with him to show how tough they were. I never saw it happen, but if it was true, it was absolutely insane on their part: Dan’s biceps were as big as my thighs. I was a scrawny kid in high school, but I never worried about bullies, because Dan was protective and brave. There’s no way that anyone would have tried to mess with me when he was around.
Dan and Me and High School
The year after we first met, Dan and I were in Geometry together, him as a senior, me as a junior. We both wound up pulling a “C” average in class. I wasn’t good at math (I’ve gotten better), but Dan was great at it. He got “A’s” on all his tests. So, why was his overall grade the same as mine? Because he never did homework. He argued (reasonably, methinks), that there was no need for him to do it when he understood the material perfectly well.
This drove our teacher, Ms. Agreen, nuts, to the point where she called him out about it in front of the whole class, but Dan gave zero [fornications]. He turned in not one homework assignment that year.
Speaking of that year and…couplings, shall we say…Dan fell head over heels in love with a young lady, also a junior. For privacy’s sake, I’ll call her “Cat.” Cat was in a few of my classes, and she was pretty and smart, enrolled in the prestigious science and technology program (which neither Dan nor I were in) at our school.
My junior year of high school was a shitshow. My home life was bad, my grades were mediocre to poor, I pined after a young lady who eventually shot me down in a nasty, uncalled-for way that broke me. Dan helped get me through all that. We were so tight, that I made him the hero of a post-apocalypse novel I was writing. As in, the character was just like him, and was named “Dan.” I even dedicated the book to him.
(For the curious, I will never publish that book—pretentiously titled Age of Iron—because, in retrospect, it was awful, like all novels written by 16-year olds are).
Dan was great at managing Emotionally Unstable Teenaged Me. One time, I flew off the handle (as I was prone to, back then) and started yelling at a mutual friend who had forgotten to bring some D&D material that we needed to run a game, and could not do without. Dan literally picked me up, carried me away from the situation, and talked me down. I sheepishly apologized to our friend later.
We had a lot of fun together. One morning before classes, Dan and I were roughhousing in the halls, with some friends in attendance, and Dan accidentally hit me in the mouth. I pretended to stagger back, grimacing and moaning, and then I spat out the Chiclets that Dan didn’t know I had been chomping on. You should of seen the horrified look on poor Dan’s face when he thought that they were my teeth! We all had a huge laugh about it, no one louder than Dan.
After High School
Dan graduated in 1983 and went to work as an electrician for his father (whom I think he lived with, too). He kept playing D&D with us, and he kept dating Cat, all through my senior year.
In May 1984, Cat and I graduated. My folks moved out to Kent Island, Maryland, but kept the townhouse where we had lived. I was expected to pay rent, so Dan moved in with me. For a short while, it was great: when we weren’t running gaming marathons every weekend, we were riding around in Dan’s car (an old green Plymouth Valiant, if I remember rightly), hanging out at Beltway Plaza, or bumming around Greenbelt Lake.
In the fall, Cat went off to college in another state, and I started at the University of Maryland. That first semester is when things started going off the rails. I was working part-time instead of full-time, and paying rent and tuition, so there wasn’t much left over for groceries. I was living on salad and 25-cent boxes of store-brand macaroni and cheese. Dan (who still had that sweet gig with his dad) was eating steak almost every night.
But I wasn’t envious of Dan, because while his girlfriend was hundreds of miles away, mine was over all the time—and Dan was miserable without Cat. He deeply missed her, often sitting in his room alone for hours. Pro tip: if you’re feeling down, playing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on repeat is not good for your mental health.
Dan mentioned to me a few times that he wanted to marry Cat. I urged him take a weekend and drive up and see her, but for whatever reason, he never did.
If you’re of a certain age, you know what came next: Breaks-giving. My mom had predicted it, but I had thought it impossible. Dan never saw it coming, and he was devastated. To the best of my knowledge, he never saw Cat again.
Meet The New Dan, Not Like the Old Dan
My friend suddenly became someone I didn’t recognize. In addition to being sad, he was now angry. Whenever he talked, he sounded bitter, sarcastic, even mean. He didn’t go out and do fun things, or find someone new; instead, he stayed at home and brooded. He openly resented me because I had a girlfriend, even though it wasn’t much of a relationship (we only lasted a few more months after Dan and Cat broke up).
At first, our mutual friends and I were very understanding, because Dan and Cat had been together for about two years. We offered our support and tried to talk to him, but he wasn’t having any of that. It didn’t help matters that at the start of the new semester, both of us had to move from my folk’s townhouse (they had decided to sell it). I went to go live with our pal Mike and his dad; Dan got his own place.
And then I saw Dan maybe once a week, for gaming, but even that was not as fun as it used to be. We had moved away from the “Monty Haul” days of Lord Lucan, and were running other, more grounded, less over-the-top adventures with new people (Mike had dropped out to join the Navy) and new rules (the AD&D Unearthed Arcana).
Dan didn’t really cotton to the direction the rest of us were going in, his new character was not the star of the show, and friction started between him and the two other main players, Brian and Pat, who had taken over leadership of the group.
We didn’t have a big blow-up, per se, but at our last session with him, he griped again—loudly—about the campaign, and said that maybe he needed to find another bunch of people to game with. Things were very tense, and we wrapped up shortly thereafter. Immediately after Dan left that day, Brian and Pat told me that if Dan continued with our group, they were out.
I chose Brian and Pat. Though I felt shitty about it, I cut Dan loose, and didn’t ever invite him back.
Dan The Former Friend
Over the next few years, I only saw Dan maybe a dozen times, usually at parties of mutual friends. He had more-or-less recovered from Cat (for a while, he dated an absolute knockout), and his mood had improved.
In some ways, he was the old Dan from right after high school: he still worked for his dad, and he was still interested in the same things. But in other ways, he wasn’t: what he had gone through with Cat had permanently wounded him, like a soldier who comes back from war missing a limb.
For my part, I had changed a lot, too, going through college, and getting engaged and married, and having a kid. Whenever Dan and I met, we were cordial, but it was clear that we had moved from best-buds to acquaintances, and neither of us were inclined to mend fences and turn back time. There was no, “Hey, we should hang out sometime,” or, “I’m starting up a new D&D campaign–do you want in?”
Dan stayed close with Mike, though, being the best man at his wedding in 1991. To the best of my knowledge, Dan never married or had children. I lost touch with him sometime in the mid 1990’s, and didn’t hear about him again until many years later.
On December 17, 2011, Dan died in a boating accident on the Chesapeake Bay. He had taken up sailing some time before, and had gone out with a friend from work, the friend’s girlfriend, and the friend’s dog. From what I gleaned from the news reports, Dan was injured when the boat capsized. Only the girlfriend survived.
Though I hadn’t seen Dan for many years, his death troubled me, and has done so to this day.
Letting Down Dan
Troubled me, because I feel like I let down Dan when he needed me most, when Cat left him and the legs came out from what was holding him up. Because I couldn’t pull him through that bad time the way he had pulled me through mine. Because my life went off in a different direction from his, and I left him behind.
Looking back on what happened forty years ago, with the experience and insight I’ve gained since, I understand that you can’t help people who don’t want your help, and you can’t make them stay when they’re unhappy and pushing you away, the way he was with our D&D group. I recognize that Dan and I were already growing apart—even if neither of us realized it at the time—just by circumstance. I realize that adolescent friendships, while often intense, are usually temporary.
But still, I treasure the three years when we were very close, I mourn that it passed, and I deeply regret my part in it coming to an end. When I pray for my deceased loved ones, I always include him. We were tremendously good friends for a little while, and then we were not friends for an even longer while, and I miss him very much.
Kenton Kilgore writes books for kids, young adults, and adults who are still young. Follow Kenton on Facebook for frequent posts on sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative fiction. You can also catch him on Instagram.
