A Ballad for
John Roger Wolfe
—
Jameson Draper
FRESHMAN YEAR, HIGH SCHOOL. MY FRIENDS
and I, bored out of our minds and trapped in the dull monotony of another nameless suburban night, thought hard about something to do that could elevate ourselves above that excruciating ennui. Someone floated the idea of Zap Zone. It had been years, but for once, all parties involved were on board. It sounded better than smoking weed out of a Gatorade bottle in Mark’s bedroom, or taking shots of Jake’s parents liquor in his basement.
For a certain generation of Michiganders, Zap Zone was a holy place. An amusement center chain that dominated the local industry, it housed arcade games and—more importantly—laser tag. You’d go for a classmate’s birthday whom, maybe, you didn’t particularly like or even know that well, but you’d get excited anyway, because inside those cavernous walls laid a cornucopia of greasy pizza, skee-ball, hunting games, Dance Dance Revolution and, of course, the massive laser tag room. You’d sign up at the front desk where younger, swindled, less adventurous kids would cash in their unfairly-priced tickets for toys that gave them stars in their eyes and fleeting joy in their hearts, only to be forgotten the following week. The guy at the front desk would assign you a team and a time. At your allotted slot, you’d walk into the black light Mecca, strap on your germ-laden targets and power up your gun. You’d get briefed on the rules but you’ve been here enough times to know them. You’d spend thirty euphoric minutes running, jumping, sliding and sweating in that dark place, only to come out and get handed your score on a printed sheet—always with a lower score than you expected—and claim your gun was faulty. You’d go out more disappointed than you came in, ready to go home and forget about your follies in the magic foggy light of a mid-aughts night. You’d be back within the next few months having forgotten all about your pain, ready to be hurt again. By the time you hit middle school, you begin to age out of Zap Zone. You don’t miss it, until you do.
So to Zap Zone we went. It was a sorry sight. The neon painted walls were now not only out of style but in disrepair, too. They lost their luster, less neon, more faded. Even the big warehouse-style room seemed to droop. It was the only active business left in the strip mall in which it resided, all other businesses moving on to greener pastures or fading softly into the shadows of history. Inside it felt more cavernous than ever—was it always like this, or were we just taller, able to see things we previously couldn’t?
We were the only ones in the place, the five of us. We were not going to let our predilections for a past that perhaps never even existed distract us from our mission. But how would we break up five people into two teams? It would be unfair. As we mulled over our options, the sole employee in the place spoke up: “You wanna play against me?”
He was about six-foot-two, cherubic, fat, maybe thirty years old, with knotted auburn hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in quite some time. He had a soul patch and a very thin rat tail that sat comfortably on his left shoulder. He wore wire-frame glasses whose nose bridge needed readjusting. He scanned each of us individually with his small pale gray eyes, knowing eyes, almost disinterested.
“What do you mean?” Mark asked.
“You guys all versus me.”
“Why would we do that?” I added.
“Because I’ll beat you,” the man said.
“What?” asked Mark.
“Five-versus-one. Do you want to bet that I’ll beat you?” he said. “I’m pretty fucking good at laser tag.”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m sure you are,” said Mark, looking disconcertedly about the mostly empty room. I wondered who would take front desk duties if he played a game of laser tag. Was this allowed? Not that it mattered—nobody had come in since we entered, and the general vibe portended an empty arcade for the rest of the night. Mark continued. “I’m just saying that seems pretty unfair. Just, like, in terms of numbers.”
“I am the 2011 Laser Tag World Champion,” he said, massaging his rat tail. “Look me up: John Roger Wolfe.”
“No fucking way, dude,” another one of us, Chris, said. “No fucking way.”
“I’m telling you. Let’s bet on it,” said John Roger Wolfe. His name felt like a name you’d hear on the news. A serial killer name.
“If you’re such a beast, then why are you working at Zap Zone in Waterford?” asked Chris.
“I don’t know if you kids have noticed, but there isn’t a big market for talented laser tag players,” said John Roger Wolfe. “Let’s bet. I’ll give each of you five dollars if you win. That’s twenty-five dollars. If I win, you each give me a dollar. That’s five dollars. Good odds.”
“Fuck it, I guess,” said Mark, shrugging, nodding, looking our way for approval. We shrugged and nodded accordingly. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
We bore witness to absolute greatness. Inside the blacklight palace, John Roger Wolfe went God Mode. He hit a flow state like game six Jordan. His rotund body somehow became smaller, melting into the neon lights and bending around the tight walls. He slid like Cobb, jumped like Jordan. His accuracy was like Maddux. He was light on his feet, creeping up behind us, shooting us down methodically and disappearing into the artificial darkness before we even noticed. He started to transform in my mind into something of a legend. At first we were all frustrated at our relative incompetence, believing our guns were faulty like the old days, or maybe that we were worse than any one of our fellow teammates. Quickly, though, it became clear that John Roger Wolfe was the truth, operating on a different level than any of us could fathom. It’s like he was playing an entirely different game. The Waterford Zap Zone was his canvas and the plastic gun was his brush. He made laser tag art.
When the thirty minutes from Hell concluded, he quietly walked off the map, hung up his equipment, walked out of the room and back behind the front desk. He printed out the score sheet. John Roger Wolfe: 500,000 points. The rest of us: zero. Combined. If we expected gloating, a smile or even an “I-told-you-so” moment, we were sadly mistaken. His expression didn’t change. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. He looked at us with unbelievable stoicism and said, “Keep your money.”
We were floored. We walked out of the Zap Zone in stunned silence. We piled into Chris’ car and drove without the radio on, dropping one by one out of the car and back into our respective houses in quiet residential corners. None of us would ever return to Zap Zone again.
To this day, I have not been able to find a lick of information about John Roger Wolfe. Every few years, I Google his name in all spelling variations. I look up Zone Laser Tag championship records, old local news archives and scour Facebook. There is not— and to my knowledge has never been— a John Roger Wolfe in the material sense that we knew him. He was but a mirage, perhaps one final reflection of our departing childhood, a last send-off of the magic of Zap Zone embodied in one transitory ghost. We still talk about John Roger Wolfe, the master of a quiet craft. He represents something to all of us, though I’m not quite sure what.
Certain moments in your life will stick to the walls of your brain whether you like it or not. I’m not talking about the big moments— your wedding, a gruesome car accident, your graduation, the death of your parents— but rather the ones that shouldn’t take up as much real estate as they do. For do we not all have certain moments that we hold dear without being able to properly articulate why? The first hot sun bathing your pale and reclusive skin on a late spring day, perhaps on a bar patio or on the bench of a small neighborhood park with your favorite book of poems? The way the smell of rotting leather mixed with adolescent body odor on purple dusks in the back seat of your friend’s car on the way home from football practice, your cleats caked in mud, and the way you had to pull an exposed rod to shut the car door because the inside panel of the old Bonneville was completely gone? We don’t know why we hold these memories dear. Perhaps they remind us of a place, or a feeling, maybe, of a time when we were of a certain ilk, a certain person now lost to history, never to be recovered. Nostalgia is a prison bathed in tones of ochre that reminds us of memories and days lost. John Roger Wolfe is just another one of those many apparitions. •
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Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has appeared in Burial Magazine, BRUISER, Hobart, and Michigan City Review of Books, among others. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma.
Website | Twitter | Bluesky | Instagram
For a certain generation of Michiganders, Zap Zone was a holy place. An amusement center chain that dominated the local industry, it housed arcade games and—more importantly—laser tag. You’d go for a classmate’s birthday whom, maybe, you didn’t particularly like or even know that well, but you’d get excited anyway, because inside those cavernous walls laid a cornucopia of greasy pizza, skee-ball, hunting games, Dance Dance Revolution and, of course, the massive laser tag room. You’d sign up at the front desk where younger, swindled, less adventurous kids would cash in their unfairly-priced tickets for toys that gave them stars in their eyes and fleeting joy in their hearts, only to be forgotten the following week. The guy at the front desk would assign you a team and a time. At your allotted slot, you’d walk into the black light Mecca, strap on your germ-laden targets and power up your gun. You’d get briefed on the rules but you’ve been here enough times to know them. You’d spend thirty euphoric minutes running, jumping, sliding and sweating in that dark place, only to come out and get handed your score on a printed sheet—always with a lower score than you expected—and claim your gun was faulty. You’d go out more disappointed than you came in, ready to go home and forget about your follies in the magic foggy light of a mid-aughts night. You’d be back within the next few months having forgotten all about your pain, ready to be hurt again. By the time you hit middle school, you begin to age out of Zap Zone. You don’t miss it, until you do.
So to Zap Zone we went. It was a sorry sight. The neon painted walls were now not only out of style but in disrepair, too. They lost their luster, less neon, more faded. Even the big warehouse-style room seemed to droop. It was the only active business left in the strip mall in which it resided, all other businesses moving on to greener pastures or fading softly into the shadows of history. Inside it felt more cavernous than ever—was it always like this, or were we just taller, able to see things we previously couldn’t?
We were the only ones in the place, the five of us. We were not going to let our predilections for a past that perhaps never even existed distract us from our mission. But how would we break up five people into two teams? It would be unfair. As we mulled over our options, the sole employee in the place spoke up: “You wanna play against me?”
He was about six-foot-two, cherubic, fat, maybe thirty years old, with knotted auburn hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in quite some time. He had a soul patch and a very thin rat tail that sat comfortably on his left shoulder. He wore wire-frame glasses whose nose bridge needed readjusting. He scanned each of us individually with his small pale gray eyes, knowing eyes, almost disinterested.
“What do you mean?” Mark asked.
“You guys all versus me.”
“Why would we do that?” I added.
“Because I’ll beat you,” the man said.
“What?” asked Mark.
“Five-versus-one. Do you want to bet that I’ll beat you?” he said. “I’m pretty fucking good at laser tag.”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m sure you are,” said Mark, looking disconcertedly about the mostly empty room. I wondered who would take front desk duties if he played a game of laser tag. Was this allowed? Not that it mattered—nobody had come in since we entered, and the general vibe portended an empty arcade for the rest of the night. Mark continued. “I’m just saying that seems pretty unfair. Just, like, in terms of numbers.”
“I am the 2011 Laser Tag World Champion,” he said, massaging his rat tail. “Look me up: John Roger Wolfe.”
“No fucking way, dude,” another one of us, Chris, said. “No fucking way.”
“I’m telling you. Let’s bet on it,” said John Roger Wolfe. His name felt like a name you’d hear on the news. A serial killer name.
“If you’re such a beast, then why are you working at Zap Zone in Waterford?” asked Chris.
“I don’t know if you kids have noticed, but there isn’t a big market for talented laser tag players,” said John Roger Wolfe. “Let’s bet. I’ll give each of you five dollars if you win. That’s twenty-five dollars. If I win, you each give me a dollar. That’s five dollars. Good odds.”
“Fuck it, I guess,” said Mark, shrugging, nodding, looking our way for approval. We shrugged and nodded accordingly. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
❊
We bore witness to absolute greatness. Inside the blacklight palace, John Roger Wolfe went God Mode. He hit a flow state like game six Jordan. His rotund body somehow became smaller, melting into the neon lights and bending around the tight walls. He slid like Cobb, jumped like Jordan. His accuracy was like Maddux. He was light on his feet, creeping up behind us, shooting us down methodically and disappearing into the artificial darkness before we even noticed. He started to transform in my mind into something of a legend. At first we were all frustrated at our relative incompetence, believing our guns were faulty like the old days, or maybe that we were worse than any one of our fellow teammates. Quickly, though, it became clear that John Roger Wolfe was the truth, operating on a different level than any of us could fathom. It’s like he was playing an entirely different game. The Waterford Zap Zone was his canvas and the plastic gun was his brush. He made laser tag art.
When the thirty minutes from Hell concluded, he quietly walked off the map, hung up his equipment, walked out of the room and back behind the front desk. He printed out the score sheet. John Roger Wolfe: 500,000 points. The rest of us: zero. Combined. If we expected gloating, a smile or even an “I-told-you-so” moment, we were sadly mistaken. His expression didn’t change. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. He looked at us with unbelievable stoicism and said, “Keep your money.”
We were floored. We walked out of the Zap Zone in stunned silence. We piled into Chris’ car and drove without the radio on, dropping one by one out of the car and back into our respective houses in quiet residential corners. None of us would ever return to Zap Zone again.
To this day, I have not been able to find a lick of information about John Roger Wolfe. Every few years, I Google his name in all spelling variations. I look up Zone Laser Tag championship records, old local news archives and scour Facebook. There is not— and to my knowledge has never been— a John Roger Wolfe in the material sense that we knew him. He was but a mirage, perhaps one final reflection of our departing childhood, a last send-off of the magic of Zap Zone embodied in one transitory ghost. We still talk about John Roger Wolfe, the master of a quiet craft. He represents something to all of us, though I’m not quite sure what.
Certain moments in your life will stick to the walls of your brain whether you like it or not. I’m not talking about the big moments— your wedding, a gruesome car accident, your graduation, the death of your parents— but rather the ones that shouldn’t take up as much real estate as they do. For do we not all have certain moments that we hold dear without being able to properly articulate why? The first hot sun bathing your pale and reclusive skin on a late spring day, perhaps on a bar patio or on the bench of a small neighborhood park with your favorite book of poems? The way the smell of rotting leather mixed with adolescent body odor on purple dusks in the back seat of your friend’s car on the way home from football practice, your cleats caked in mud, and the way you had to pull an exposed rod to shut the car door because the inside panel of the old Bonneville was completely gone? We don’t know why we hold these memories dear. Perhaps they remind us of a place, or a feeling, maybe, of a time when we were of a certain ilk, a certain person now lost to history, never to be recovered. Nostalgia is a prison bathed in tones of ochre that reminds us of memories and days lost. John Roger Wolfe is just another one of those many apparitions. •
Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has appeared in Burial Magazine, BRUISER, Hobart, and Michigan City Review of Books, among others. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma.
Website | Twitter | Bluesky | Instagram