Ah, good old Roy "Mr. Awesome" Shildt. I lived with him in a student co-op during the pre-Missile Command days, and wrote this piece for a arcade-gaming board that wanted dirt on him:
Your assessment of Roy's character is spot on. I first met him in 1980 at UCLA's infamous UCHA housing cooperative, which was my home as an undergrad. Even back then he struck me as one of the strangest people I'd ever met.
In those pre-MISSILE COMMAND days, Roy spoke with a much thicker Brooklynese accent than he does on the video. I remember that virtually every encounter he had with other human beings turned into perceived slights and one-upping challenges, with him loudly spewing invectives at the slightest provocations, often to nobody in particular. Few people seriously confronted him, largely because he was a heavily-muscled wightlifter who had the classic "crazy eyes" of the mentally ill or -- more likely in his case -- the steroid-poisoned.
(So infectious was Roy's Noo Yawk-accented style of public abuse and obscene banter, that many of us started imitating him in our daily social rounds at the Co-op. His favorite all-purpose saying -- "Hey dude - I f(edit)d ya MUTHA!" -- became a common greeting between Co-opers.)
Although his accent betrayed his Gotham origins, nobody seemed to know much else about the guy. He had no real friends, never dated, and let slip few details of his past. Rumors maintained that he'd dropped out of the Air Force Academy, that he worked as a low-level underworld enforcer, and that he was a closet gay. None were confirmed or denied, although someone eventually determined that he'd been born in 1956 and was a Psychology major. (Which turned out to be rather ironic, as I made him the pseudonymous, unwitting subject of a Psych-class study on "antisocial and eccentric behaviors.")
None of his assigned roommates lasted more than a few days with him before they fled. All agreed that he was the most obnoxious, inconsiderate, surly, and rude person with whom they'd ever shared a roof. One of his ex-roomies swore that one night, when Roy thought he was asleep, he stared into the room's mirror and chanted "Doctah Jekyll -- MISTAH HYDE!" over and over again, all the while whipping his head to the left and right as if he was undergoing the same violent and total personality transformations as Stevenson's fictional character. I'm sure a lot of this was an act designed to create a *de facto* private room for himself in the crowded cooperative, but the guy's *public* behavior, absent of obvious incentives to intimidate, was just as weird.
In the pre-video-game era, Roy's favorite recreation was playing games of Hearts in the illegal-beer-bar/-lounge we'd set up in one building's spare room. True to the form he'd much later demonstrate to the world, Roy's prime competetive strategy was to loudly and repeatedly bait, badger and badmouth other players.
One of his favorite card-game victims was another East Coast transplant, Joe, who he'd mercilessly insult during games, continuously urging other players to "give the ***** to Joe!" (i.e., pass the Queen of Spades to Joe on a trick to make him lose the game.) Joe later said that Roy somehow got his home phone number, called him one late night, and played Styx' song "Queen of Spades" at top volume in the background, while an unidentified female voice purred into the phone, "Joe, I'm COMING FOR YOU. You CAN'T STOP ME!"
Roy was at his demented best when he was brought up in front of the Co-op's membership meetings after some offense he'd committed, and got to demonstrate his unique brew of billingsgate and bullying in front of a sizable audience. The charges he'd face varied from theft of Co-op property of all kinds, to blowing off his work duties as the building's security guard, to "uncooperative behavior" -- a catch-all category that could mean anything from driving off yet another would-be roommate with bizarre and boorish behavior, to calling a nonpaying losing bettor a "Jew" (yes, he did the latter -- loudly and publically).
When asked to account for his actions, Roy did his jailhouse-lawyer best to portray himself as a latter-day Captain Dreyfus, and his accusors as blackhearted, vindictive fiends, no matter how legitimate their complaints or how valid the charges seemed. He would rant tirelessly against the plaintiffs, the Co-op authorities, his neighbors, the UCLA community, and any other entities that crossed his persecution-complexioned consciousness, peppering his tirades with a plethora of Brooklynese idioms and obscenities. If he was in an especially theatrical mood, he'd compose
and recite doggerel and ditties that lambasted and lampooned his opponents, and cast the Co-op management as incompetent fools. Although it sometimes seemed as if Roy had the makings of a great insult comedian, it was sadly obvious during these performances that he was a little *too* angry and crazy to properly sublimate his inner demons for the stage, and was fated for some other kind of fame.
That fame arrived, in a sense, when the Co-op installed two coin-operated video games in its public lobby. One of them was Missile Command, and Roy started spending all his free time on the machine, pumping a stream of quarters into its coin box, and mastering the rapid-fire demolition of electronically-animated missiles and smart bombs. He quickly became the undisputed master of the game -- not only did he practice on it like an Olympic hopeful, but he transferred his card-game tactics to the video-game field, and would roundly heckle and browbeat anyone else who tried to play Missile Command, whether they were directly competing with him, or just playing alone.
Often it seemed as if Roy literally never left the game. Nobody could figure out how and when he attended classes, slept or studied. The source of the small fortune's worth of quarters he poured into Missile Command was also a mystery, although a lot of it seemed to come from his constant and persisting panhandling of passersby -- the phrase, "Dude, ya gotta QUATAH?" was a regular feature of the lobby's sonic landscape in those days. Eventually Roy figured out how to beat the coin-operated mechanism using the time-honored drilled-quarter-on-a-fishline trick.
With the money problem solved, he also made sure that no interlopers could ever play on the machine, and that he could perfect his game without the distractions of human society. How did he do this? Simple -- very late one night, he unplugged the machine, rolled its several-hundred-pound bulk over to an elevator, squeezed it into the car, and transported it up four floors, depositing the game inside his 6x8" single room. Without knowing it, Roy had pioneered the concept of the home-video-game through a single act of obsessive madness and grand theft.
The management never bothered to reclaim it, as they had much bigger concerns with Roy at that point. Besides racking up a big stack of unpaid fines, he had blown off paying "membership dues" (read: rent and board) for many months, and owed the Co-op several grand. Eviction proceedings were in the works, and the Co-op authorities had long since learned to ignore Roy's constant and baseless threats of litigation and less-legal forms of retribution. He had no supporters, having long since alienated virtually the entire 450-member community, who to a wo/man considered him a blowhard, a buffoon, and a useless drain on the Co-op's resources and attentions.
Cut off from the meal plan, he'd hang around the kitchen's dirty-dish station and beg table scraps from self-bussing diners. When he was feeling bold he'd openly lift foodstuffs from the service line; once, the cook caught him doing this, and ruined his plateful of stolen beef by pouring liquid detergent all over it. Roy became a furtive, seldom-scene presence in the building, skulking through the halls like a hunted beast on the rare occasions when he left his room and the purloined arcade-video-game that took up half its floor space.
Around this time, Roy somehow blundered into a big video-game competition in West L.A., and achieved the allegedly-highest-ever score on Missile Command -- a pathetically petty feat that he's milked for the past quarter-century, absent of any other form of adult achievement or success. This tiny smidgen of fame blew his already-overinflated ego up to Zeppelin-like proportions; he now maintained that he was "Mr. Awesome," and that he was being forced out of the Co-op solely because his enemies were jealous of his video-gaming skills.
Eventually the Co-op successfully evicted him, and the Missile Command game once again took its proper place in the lobby. Roy completed his university studies (don't ask me how), and thereafter was often spotted on the streets of West L.A., Westwood and Santa Monica.
He resurfaced in my life when I read APOCALYPSE CULTURE #2. None of the post-Co-op antics detailed in that book -- the video-game controversies, the Playgirl spread, the absurd claims about Hollywood celebrities -- suprised me in the least. I'd always pegged him as having just enough smarts and balls to obtain some sort of C-list public notoriety, and enough egotism and persistence to spend his life desperately maintaining it, rather than accomplishing anything constructive or lasting.
As nutty as he obviously is, I'm sure Roy is privately aware of how utterly inconsequential it is to be the world's Missile Command champ. But he's already sacrificed most of his adult life to the Mr. Awesome persona, and is probably stuck being a fourth-magnitude public eccentric for the forseeable future. At once, I both pity him, and feel he got exactly what he deserved.
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P.S. Here's a Roy nugget for you that I was only reminded of recently. Former Congressman James Rogan, who led the impeachment efforts against Bill Clinton in the 1998 House, published a memoir called ROUGH EDGES back in 2004. Rogan lived in the UCHA Co-op while he was attending UCLA Law School in the early 80s, and included a couple of pages of reminiscences about his encounters with the characters there. He mentions Roy, and claims that for some obscure reason, Mr. Awesome once pushed a washing machine off the Co-op's fifth-floor balcony, nearly killing some people on the sidewalk below. Rogan also says that Roy once mailed his own father a blender filled with human feces (you're probably familiar with Mr. Shildt's *Daddy Issues* from the APOCALYPSE CULTURE book interview.)
tl;dr: Roy was insane years before he first set his fat fingers on a Missile Command joystick.
EDIT: Apparently Roy has had a bad case of arthritis for the last fifteen-odd years, due to deadlifting way beyond his non-roid abilities back in the early Eighties. I've seen him in public a couple of times in L.A.; he's invariably limping around on a cane.