My story begins with a small round metal canister. It has an antique gold finish and is decorated with a map of the world. Like a globe, only flattened a bit. This type of decorative canister is sold in knick-knack stores around the world. What would one use it for? Paper clips? Jewelry? One feature of this golden flattened globe canister was that its top fit very snuggly on. So snug, in fact, that it was quite difficult to open. Only with a turning, twisting, prying motion and applying a fair share of strength, would this container deliver it's contents.

And what was inside this one, this special golden, metallic, globe en-crested wonder? Only the jewels that a true role-playing game player could appreciate. Jewels of many colors, many facets. This one red, and having 8 sides, another, the palest blue, and having 12. And of course there were the ordinary, more commonly known, six-sided stones, white with black dots, each side bearing its number, from one to six.

Jewel-like dice of every shape and size, and having only one purpose, the playing of the RPG. Roll playing games first designed for the 10 year old crowd. Made very popular by the board game Dungeon's and Dragon's in the 1970's. D&D is so popular it is hard to imagine a fad this size.

And 10 years after D&D's release, there was Steven Jackson, of Steven Jackson Games. Jackson, designer of GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System, has over 1,000,000 copies of his basic-set rules of GURP's in print today. 256 pages of rules provide the underpinning for any role-playing game story line. More amusing to me is that there is now GURP's lite, free of charge (and sounding like it must be free of calories), available to download free on the world-wide-web. GURP's lite is a mere 32 pages and for those who don't like to read or don't want to pay, it is a fine alternative.

But one must think, if all of those 10 year-old's started playing Dungeon's and Dragon's fantasy role-playing game in the '70's, that those same 10 year-olds's would have been 20 year olds by the time Jackson first published the GURPS rules and subsequent story-lines, games and books, in 1980.

And maybe, just maybe they might be 30 year-olds now, or back around the time I met Adam Rostoker, or as the card he placed in my hand read, Adam Walks-Between-Worlds. That day, in 1992, Adam was carrying his role-playing dice in his antique-gold canister.

Now it sits on my bookcase, next to a candle, and an especially beloved picture of my grand parents. I leave it there, in memoriam. Sometimes I go over and lay my hand on it, think of Adam for a moment, before I go back to the daily dealings of life.

Adam, who ironically gave himself the name walks-between-worlds, no longer walks in this one. Unless you count in our memories, and our imaginations. When Adam died, in February of 1997, of two gunshot wounds, he left behind a lot for the memory and imagination to grab hold of.

Adam is dead. I think about that now and again. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up. When did Adam first appear upon the Sonoma County scene? One day in 1995 Adam drove into town with his girlfriend. They drove in a van that had served as home for the past two years. The vanity plate read "IOPAN". They had come from the east coast, Boston they told us.

They rented a wild tile-floored house that no one I know could afford, they partied with Monk's and Rock Stars.

I met them when my best friend brought me to their house. There my friend Jim and I ate and drank and smoked with the eccentric crowd of characters ever present at Adam's house in Cazadero. Jim wanted to write about the Taxi Driver (him), the Accountant (me), the Rock Star (Genesis), and the Monk (Bhante), but he never did so I guess the idea is still up for grabs.

OK, when we met Adam and his girlfriend Marie he was working on this novel, only none of us ever actually saw the novel. And he had this room at the house with a cardboard sign saying "Altar, Do not Enter" where he was rumored to practice magic, which we all understood he took very seriously.

His girlfriend, Marie was (and still is) a genius, database programmer, and the main bread winner. OK, the only bread winner. She made killer bread too (the real stuff). Marie is German among other things.

We never entered the room. Once I was in the house alone and I sat there for a long time debating about checking out that room, but I felt it would be wrong, so I didn’t. I mostly suspected it would have been a mess. So when Adam is "writing" we never disturbed him. It seemed normal enough, he and Marie, two lap-top computers, two offices, a programmer and a writer. None of it bothered me.

The thing was, Adam was a wanna-be lady's man, he believed morally in polygamy. Now I've heard that line one too many times, but he was a musician and he played guitar and sang real nice. So I suspect he had his fans. Marie, on the other hand, wanted monogamy, marriage, babies, the whole 9 yards. So gradually, the relationship didn't work, and didn't work and then still didn't work.

But while it wasn't working we were all hanging out at the groovy house in Cazadero, taking hot tubs, eating Marie's food, renting video's, playing computer games and listening to Jim and Barry and Adam "rehearsing". Jim and his other friend Barry Barnett (also a colorful character) and Adam quickly formed a band they called "Pagan Men". They weren't too bad either, but Barry was way too annoying and Jim was impatient that they weren't making any money or likely to find success in this manner. Adam insisted that his brother was just about to get them a record deal or some such nonsense, but it didn't happen. So eventually the band broke up.

But while it was breaking up, Jim and Adam and I began to play our own versions of Dungeon's and Dragon's. OK, not our own version really, straight out of a book called "The Masquerade". Basically, we drank way too much Kenya AA coffee, rolled 12 sided dice, and read rules and scenarios, while playing a strictly imaginary role-playing game. It was often boring, but Adam and Jim loved it. Adam was the dungeon master, so he wrote the script and then we played out the options. For a while we were vampires, trying to retrieve our humanity points, yet drink enough blood to survive, but somehow not kill anyone (at least no "innocents"). So we made up inane plans for making spells that would give our victims amnesia, and twisted the vampire myth to beyond recognition (although most of that was stolen from the authority on Vampire mythos Anne Rice).

Later we were Space Elves from Dimension X, which was more fun to me. Anyway, one way or the other our stories usually had to do with covert operations. Jimmy had a special briefcase with high-tech stuff, modem's and cell phones and much surveillance equipment. The briefcase usually got us out of trouble. Again, none of this happened, we just drank coffee and made up stuff. Once I was a super strong vampire who pulled a heart out of a bad guys chest with my bare hands, once I was changed into a spider by a spell and had to "hang around" over a hospital bed for along time. Yes it was dumb stuff.

These stories became our private language and even legend. We would talk about the time I surprised the bad guy and just laugh and beam with pride. I was some mean vampire. Oh, I was devastatingly beautiful too. We were all in our early thirties then. This all would have made a bit more sense if we were thirteen.

But back to "reality". We really didn't know about Marie or Adam's past. But Adam told us different things, once he said he had fallen out of a plane and broken every bone in his body. He mentioned it when he had aches and pains. It seemed incredible, but Marie said it was true. He also spoke fluent German, so did Marie. They used to "liepchein" each other and be all lovey-dovey in German to annoy us. They were both very smart and that annoyed me sometimes as well.

Adam had been in the military, and he said he had killed before. We had a vague picture that he had actually been some kind of mercenary. The way the story went, he eventually had a breakdown, that was kind of mystical to him and he had walked away from all the cloak and dagger stuff and now wrote novels and practiced pagan magick (which he spelled with a K of course).

We accepted that he had a "past" and it all felt kind-of "Great Gatsby"-ish. We didn't dwell on that. It is sometimes just that way with life's color-characters. They tell their tales, the rest of us just listen.

Now, as the relationship between Marie and Adam began to sour, the issue of money came up now and again. Then one day we heard about the book deal. Adam had been offered $100,000 advance from a New York Science Fiction publisher. We were ecstatic and envious. I think it was Bantam. But months later no contract had arrived and the pressure began to build. Finally, Adam took off for New York to find out what had happened. When he arrived in New York they said his publisher hadn't been seen in days and was rumored to be checked in at a hotel. Adam went over to the hotel to find his publisher had O.D'd on drugs and alcohol and if Adam hadn't arrived he probably would have died.

The long and short was "no book deal".

Well when I heard this story I could not shake one thought from my mind "Bonfire of the Vanities". It sounded just like a scene from the Tom Wolff book and I couldn't shake the feeling. It was just my mind's way of saying "this story doesn't add up".

The whole story became the tip of the iceberg as Marie and Adam did in fact break-up, part ways, and as with all break-ups it was a bad scene. Marie tried the generous route letting Adam remain in the house for a month, letting him continue to travel and eat using her credit cards and then one day she asked for the card back and it was reluctantly returned with over $5,000 of charges on it. The event really discredited Adam in my mind. It was more than a let-down. I wanted to remember the good things, but he became an ordinary scammer, just a gigolo, some trash to be avoided.

Then there was radio silence. I didn't hear much about Adam, who as a Pagan on the music scene now went by the pseudonym, Adam-Walks-Between-Worlds. Until one day in the summer of '97, when Jimmy called me and told me that Adam was dead. Dead at 36, the victim of a mystery murder. As the story unfolded he had been found dead of two gunshot wounds in a house in Orange County. Before that Adam had been excommunicated from the Pagan Church for some charges that were sexual in nature. I gathered that he had been accused of inappropriate behavior by three separate women. I also heard the charge was actually rape, but it was all hearsay. The rumors went that maybe someone had taken it upon themselves to avenge these crimes. I believe the murder is still officially listed as unsolved. We never saw the body, Adam's brother did not hold a public funeral. We attended a kind of Pagan wake.

And me? I am left paranoid and confused, not wanted to believe he is really dead. Wondering if all the cloak and dagger were real or imaginary. If someday someone were to tell me Adam was a CIA agent and was killed for opening his mouth, or that Adam was alive and living in Chile, or that Adam was an escapee from a psych-ward that never did anything important, or had killed a nurse, or, or, or. I will never know, and I have to deal with my paranoia, and my doubts and the betrayal, and my grief for someone who was always wonderful to me, and with my denial, and in the end, with death.

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