Craig, also known as TartarSauce

This is about one of the best friends I have ever had. His World of Warcraft character name, the one I still half-think of him by, was TartarSauce. To me he is just Craig.

We met in World of Warcraft, in a guild called TRU, run by a guild master who went by Sinister. It was the early days of Wrath of the Lich King, we were trying to push our way into Naxxramas, the entry raid, and we could not find a tank. The way it shook out, somebody pulled in a guy named Eric, a Draenei warrior, to fill in for a night. Eric was good, and we wanted him back, except Eric did not come alone. He played with his wife, Greta, and his brother, Craig, and the deal was basically take all three of us or go find another tank. So all three came in, first as casuals and then as full members, and that is how Craig walked into my life: as part of a package.

I was a holy priest by then, with a lot of raiding miles on me from years as a warlock and then a healer. Greta was already a great holy priest in her own right, but I spent a while showing her the interface add-ons and little tricks I leaned on, and she went from very good to genuinely top tier. I was not trying to correct her. I just wanted the whole group to do well, and I think Eric and Craig clocked that I was being good to her, and to all of them, and that mattered.

Two solo guys

Here is the thing about Craig and me: we were both solo. Eric and Greta had each other and were starting to build a family. Craig was on his own, working at a Domino’s or a Pizza Hut when I met him, later an OfficeMax or an Office Depot, and I was a single guy still living with my parents. So the two solo ones found each other and became best friends, fast.

We talked every single day. We would hop on Skype and play, and for a long stretch that meant World of Warcraft, the two of us tackling things designed for five people and beating them with just a death knight and a priest. Craig could tank and hold himself up, I could keep us both alive, and between us we could grind out group content with nobody else in the party, purely by being patient and clever. We loved that. We loved sitting there scheming, working out how to do the thing you are not supposed to be able to do with only two people.

We became a unit, really. Our little core of four, plus a couple of others, moved through the game as a set: take all of us or none of us. WoW being WoW, there was always drama brewing somewhere that had nothing to do with us, and when it got bad we would quietly pack up, switch servers, join a new guild, and start over. We did that at least once or twice. Through all of it Craig and I kept talking, on Skype, on messenger, over text, and eventually on the phone. I had that long forty-five-minute commute for years, and a lot of those drives were just me and Craig on the phone, talking about the day, the drama, the world, whatever. No topic was off the table.

And I mean that. Craig was one of the first people I ever trusted with something genuinely personal about myself, back when I was barely ready to say it out loud. He just listened. He did not flinch and he did not judge, and I have never once forgotten it. He was always, always in my corner.

The first time we met

At some point Craig did something very Craig. On what seemed like a whim, he decided to change his whole life, drove down to somewhere around Tennessee or Mississippi, got his CDL, and became an over-the-road truck driver. But that came a little later. The first time we actually met in person was before all that, on January 30, 2010.

I bought a ticket on Southwest, one of the first trips I ever booked and took entirely on my own, and flew up to Wisconsin to spend a weekend at Eric’s house playing World of Warcraft. I was nervous. I had talked to these people for ages, but I had never been in a room with them, and some small paranoid part of my brain ran the “what if they are secretly serial killers” routine the entire way there.

Two things from that trip I will never forget. The first happened before I even left. I was wearing my holy priest shirt from World of Warcraft, standing in an enormous security line at the airport. One of the TSA agents looked at the shirt, squinted, pointed at his own chest, and gave me a thumbs up. A minute later he came up behind me, tapped my shoulder, unhooked the little belt barrier, and said, follow me. So I followed this TSA agent, slightly worried about what I had done, while he asked me what class I played. Holy priest, I said. He thought that was cool, told me he played a paladin, and we compared servers as we walked. Then he asked the real question: Alliance or Horde? Alliance, I said. Good on you, brother. And he walked me straight to the front of the line, told his buddy this guy goes next, and I skipped the entire screening line while what felt like a hundred people stared holes into the back of my head. It was nerdy and ridiculous and one of my favorite small moments ever. This was before Battle.net tags, so there was no real way to stay in touch with a stranger like that, and I have always been a little sad I never got his name.

I landed in Wisconsin, and there was Craig, who is roughly two feet taller than me and just enormous, grinning at me. There was snow everywhere. He loaded me into his little pickup, and we immediately fell into our usual stupid banter, half-joking about which one of us was there to take advantage of the other. He drove us to Eric and Greta’s, where I stayed for the weekend. Greta made gnocchi, those little potato dumplings, with chicken and vegetables in a white sauce, and it was the first time I had ever had gnocchi and I fell completely in love with it. There were Doritos and summer sausage and a spicy cheese dip. We crammed into their upstairs office to play WoW, me perched on what I am pretty sure was a folding tailgating chair. At one point Greta’s computer would not turn on and I fixed it by jumping the power-button pins on the motherboard with a paperclip. We went downstairs and played Mario Party on the GameCube. It was casual and warm and easy.

The only photo I have from that entire trip is this one, and it captures us perfectly. For some reason, that whole weekend, nobody ever managed to take a picture of anyone’s head. So this is it, the only proof I have: the two of us, two headless torsos standing next to each other.

The second time, and the trucking years

The second time was easier, because Craig came to me. By around 2011 he was driving trucks, and one night he parked his semi at a freight hub a few miles east of Lake St. Louis, where my parents lived, and came and crashed at their house. I was still living there. We played video games, went to Qdoba, and mostly just gave him a night in an actual bed in an actual house instead of the cab of a truck. It was a good reprieve for him and a good night for both of us.

Trucking changed the shape of things a little. The gaming dipped, because he was on the road, but the talking did not. Any free time he had where I was not working, we would be on the phone for hours about anything. Our friendship was always like that, honestly, hot and cold depending on what each of us had going on. It was the kind of friendship where you could go three or four months without talking and then pick right back up without missing a beat. Neither of us ever took the gaps personally.

The games

And the games. We played so many over the years that I had to sit down and actually list them, because the list kind of is the friendship. World of Warcraft was the long constant; we raided together right up until I stopped playing, and then we kept finding new things. Here they are, roughly in the order they came out and came into our rotation:

Game	Released
World of Warcraft	2004
Civilization V	2010
Portal 2	2011
Minecraft	2011
Orcs Must Die!	2011
Castle Crashers	2012
Orcs Must Die! 2	2012
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes	2015
Rocket League	2015
Stardew Valley	2016
Human: Fall Flat	2016
Golf With Your Friends	2016
Osiris: New Dawn	2016
We Were Here	2017
Divinity: Original Sin 2	2017
We Were Here Too	2018
For The King	2018
We Were Here Together	2019
Fall Guys	2020

We loved Osiris: New Dawn, which actually got pulled off Steam for a while, and that made me sad. There were almost certainly a few more too, random little online games that never lived on Steam, that I have just lost to time.

Chicago

The next time we met up was November 11, 2016, in Chicago. We walked Navy Pier and wandered the city with our friend Laura. It was a strange week to be downtown, a few days after the 2016 election, with big protests going on all around us. We got deep-dish from Giordano’s, which I love, and mostly I was just happy to see Craig healthy and doing well. He had finally met someone and was happy, which was something he had wanted for a long time.

We also stood under Cloud Gate, the Bean, and took the obligatory selfie up into its mirrored belly, which turns everyone into a slightly melted version of themselves. This is the result, the three of us looking gloriously frumpy, and I love it.

Not long after, things got serious with the person he had met, and Craig did the rest of growing up: got married, moved from apartment life into a house, built a real life. I made a quiet rule with myself around then: I never wanted to be the third wheel calling a married man to come play video games, so I would not be the one pulling him away from his marriage. If he had time and wanted to play, he knew where to find me. But we stayed close, and the proof is what happened next.

The Japanese festival

The last time we were all in the same room was the best one. On September 1, 2019, Craig and the crew came down to St. Louis and stayed at my place. We played pinball late into the night, they crashed at my house, and the next day we went to the Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Garden, a Labor Day weekend tradition here and one of my favorite things the city does.

That festival is also where I discovered Samanco, these little fish-shaped ice cream sandwiches, and made the genuinely important discovery that they pair incredibly well with spicy food. A bite of something spicy, then a cold sweet fish full of red-bean ice cream. Trust me on this.

I love that the last time I saw my friend in person, we were eating fish-shaped ice cream in a Japanese garden after a night of pinball. You could not script a better last hang, if it turns out to be the last one.

Hot and cold

Our friendship has always run in chapters, hot and cold, and right now we are in a cold one. Around 2020 we drifted apart, and this time it was a little more than just life being busy. Some of our values had moved in different directions, we were not gaming together anymore, and the conversations had gotten heavier than our easy old rhythm. So we let it rest. I want to be clear that this is not a story with a villain. There was no blowup, no yelling, nobody crying. We just hit one of our quiet stretches, a longer one this time. We caught up briefly over text at the end of 2025, two old friends checking in, and it was genuinely good to hear from him.

Here is the part I most want on the record. I am a deeply empathetic person, and I had such a good thing with Craig that almost no week goes by without me thinking about him. The good times, and right alongside them, the wondering: how is he doing, is he okay, is he carrying something heavy. I have tried to rebuild the bridge more than once. Sometimes it feels like the bridge is just hard to rebuild, or like it is not something he has room for right now, and I do not want to add weight to a plate that may already be full. I think about texting him almost every day. I hold back only because I never want to be one more thing he has to carry.

So, Craig, if you ever read this: the door is open, it is always open, and it does not have an expiration date. You can tell me anything, talk to me about anything, and if you ever just want to play something dumb to escape the noise of life for a while, I am in. Say the word and I will be there.

What he is

Because here is the truth about my friend. Craig is one of the funniest, kindest people I have ever known, the kind who is always carrying someone, whether it was me or an entire guild. He led that guild for a stretch even though he begged not to, told everyone over and over that he did not want the role, and then did it anyway and did it well, because that is who he is. He is a natural leader who would never call himself one. He is sharp as anything, generous with his time, and he has this rare gift for making room for other people, for making sure that no matter how good or how new or how anything you are, there is a place for you. He puts other people in front of himself, every time.

This is a tribute to a friendship that lasted a very long time, that I loved and respected and never once took for granted. Our story has always run in hot and cold chapters, and for all I know there is another one waiting a few months or a few years down the line. I hope there is. And if Craig is reading this, I hope he is smiling ear to ear, because it really was that good.