[[This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books, a
diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and
exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner
from my hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon Fraser
University, and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to
drop in and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I
got there, I discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in
a dizzying array of languages, from graphic novels to thick academic
treatises, presided over by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so
palpably enjoyed their jobs that it spread to every customer who
stepped through the door.]]
[[Sophia Books http://www.sophiabooks.com/ 450 West Hastings St.,
Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684 0484]]
There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a
cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire
whom everyone stared at.
It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action
Role Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club
with going to sci-fi cons.
I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as
it was to me when I was 14.
The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred
teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping
stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking
to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass,
home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the
old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier's
uniform after a month in the bush.
These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't get
the job unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. They'd
have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'd
filled in beforehand, and we'd get our team assignments then, like
being called up for baseball sides.
Then you'd get your briefing packages. These were like the briefings
the spies get in the movies: here's your identity, here's your mission,
here's the secrets you know about the group.
From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on
spits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it's northern California, a
vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking
that can only be described as quaffing.
Already, the keen kids would be getting into character. My first game,
I was a wizard. I had a bag of beanbags that represented spells -- when
I threw one, I would shout the name of the spell I was casting --
fireball, magic missile, cone of light -- and the player or "monster" I
threw it at would keel over if I connected. Or not -- sometimes we had
to call in a ref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty
good about playing fair. No one liked a dice lawyer.
By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn't super-sure what a
wizard was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from the
movies and novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face
composed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mystical
thoughts.
The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been
stolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to
his will. It didn't really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I
had a private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my
familiar, and that I had a secret nemesis, another player on the team
who had taken part in a raid that killed my family when I was a boy, a
player who didn't know that I'd come back, bent on revenge. Somewhere,
of course, there was another player with a similar grudge against me,
so that even as I was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, I'd always
have to keep an eye open for a knife in the back, poison in the food.
For the next two days, we played it out. There were parts of the
weekend that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness
survival exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The
game-masters had done a great job. And you really got to be friends
with the other people on the mission. Darryl was the target of my first
murder, and I put my back into it, even though he was my pal. Nice guy.
Shame I'd have to kill him.
I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a
band of orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determine
who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it
sounds.
It was like summer camp for drama geeks. We talked until late at night
in tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot,
slapped away mosquitos. Became best friends, or lifelong enemies.
I don't know why Charles's parents sent him LARPing. He wasn't the kind
of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more the
pulling-wings-off-flies type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into
being in costume in the woods. He spent the whole time mooching around,
sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that we
weren't having the good time we all felt like we were having. You've no
doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is
compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time.
The other thing about Charles was that he couldn't get the hang of
simulated combat. Once you start running around the woods and playing
these elaborate, semi-military games, it's easy to get totally
adrenalized to the point where you're ready to tear out someone's
throat. This is not a good state to be in when you're carrying a prop
sword, club, pike or other utensil. This is why no one is ever allowed
to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games. Instead, when
you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple
rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience,
armaments, and condition. The referees mediate disputes. It's quite
civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the
woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a
little roshambo. But it works -- and it keeps everything safe and fun.
Charles couldn't really get the hang of this. I think he was perfectly
capable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was
simultaneously capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and
that he wasn't going to abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch
of times over the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and
kept on going back. He was one of the bigger kids there already, and he
was fond of "accidentally" tackling you at the end of a chase. Not fun
when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor.
I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he'd been
treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme
sneakiness. He was going to go monstering -- killed players could
switch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore
on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that
everyone got to keep on playing and the game's battles just got more
and more epic.
That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me,
throwing me to the ground so hard that I couldn't breathe for a moment.
"Gotcha!" he yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I'd
never thought much of him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbed
slowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning.
"You're so dead," he said. "I totally got you."
I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched my
upper lip. It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split,
cut on a root I'd face-planted into when he tackled me.
I wiped the blood on my pants-leg and smiled. I made like I thought
that it was all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved towards him.
Charles wasn't fooled. He was already backing away, trying to fade into
the woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank. Abruptly,
he turned and ran. Darryl's foot hooked his ankle and sent him
sprawling. We rushed him, just in time to hear a ref's whistle.
The ref hadn't seen Charles foul me, but he'd seen Charles's play that
weekend. He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him he was
out of the game. Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfaction,
the ref wasn't having any of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave *us*
both a lecture, too, telling us that our retaliation was no more
justified than Charles's attack.
It was OK. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hot showers
in the scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles's clothes and towel. We
tied them in knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of the boys
were happy to contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles had
been very enthusiastic about his tackles.
I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower and
discovered his clothes. It's a hard decision: do you run naked across
the camp, or pick apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes
and then put them on?
He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined up
along the route from the showers to the shed where the packs were
stored and applauded him. I was at the front of the line, leading the
applause.
The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year, which
left Darryl and me -- and lots of other LARPers -- with a serious LARP
deficiency in our lives.
Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels.
Wretched Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampire
hunters, and it's got its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help
them resolve combat skirmishes, so each skirmish involves playing a
little hand of a strategic card game. Vampires can become invisible by
cloaking themselves, crossing their arms over their chests, and all the
other players have to pretend they don't see them, continuing on with
their conversations about their plans and so on. The true test of a
good player is whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your
secrets in front of an "invisible" rival without acting as though he
was in the room.
There were a couple of big Wretched Daylight games every month. The
organizers of the games had a good relationship with the city's hotels
and they let it be known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on Friday
night and fill them with players who'd run around the hotel, playing
low-key Wretched Daylight in the corridors, around the pool, and so on,
eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for the hotel WiFi. They'd
close the booking on Friday afternoon, email us, and we'd go straight
from school to whichever hotel it was, bringing our knapsacks, sleeping
six or eight to a room for the weekend, living on junk-food, playing
until three AM. It was good, safe fun that our parents could get
behind.
The organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids'
writing workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running the
games for ten years without incident. Everything was strictly booze-
and drug-free, to keep the organizers from getting busted on some kind
of corruption of minors rap. We'd draw between ten and a hundred
players, depending on the weekend, and for the cost of a couple movies,
you could have two and a half days' worth of solid fun.
One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, a
hotel in the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind
of place where every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby
was full of beautiful old people in fine clothes, showing off their
plastic surgery results.
Normally, the mundanes -- our word for non-players -- just ignored us,
figuring that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend there happened
to be an editor for an Italian travel magazine staying, and he took an
interest in things. He cornered me as I skulked in the lobby, hoping to
spot the clan-master of my rivals and swoop in on him and draw his
blood. I was standing against the wall with my arms folded over my
chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and asked me, in accented
English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel that weekend?
I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. So I figured I'd
just make something up and he'd go away.
I didn't imagine that he'd print it. I really didn't imagine that it
would get picked up by the American press.
"We're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come in
search of a new ruler."
"A prince?"
"Yes," I said, getting into it. "We're the Old People. We came to
America in the 16th Century and have had our own royal family in the
wilds of Pennsylvania ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don't
use modern technology. But the prince was the last of the line and he
died last week. Some terrible wasting disease took him. The young men
of my clan have left to find the descendants of his great-uncle, who
went away to join the modern people in the time of my grandfather. He
is said to have multiplied, and we will find the last of his bloodline
and bring them back to their rightful home."
I read a lot of fantasy novels. This kind of thing came easily to me.
"We found a woman who knew of these descendants. She told us one was
staying in this hotel, and we've come to find him. But we've been
tracked here by a rival clan who would keep us from bringing home our
prince, to keep us weak and easy to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep
to ourselves. We do not talk to the New People when we can help it.
Talking to you now causes me great discomfort."
He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, which meant that
I was now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had been slowly
sneaking up on us. At the last moment, I turned and saw her, arms
spread, hissing at us, vamping it up in high style.
I threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through the
lobby, hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant,
making her chase me. I'd scouted an escape route down through the
stairwell to the basement health-club and I took it, shaking her off.
I didn't see him again that weekend, but I *did* relate the story to
some of my fellow LARPers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of
opportunities to tell it over the weekend.
The Italian magazine had a staffer who'd done her master's degree on
Amish anti-technology communities in rural Pennsylvania, and she
thought we sounded awfully interesting. Based on the notes and taped
interviews of her boss from his trip to San Francisco, she wrote a
fascinating, heart-wrenching article about these weird, juvenile
cultists who were crisscrossing America in search of their "prince."
Hell, people will print anything these days.
But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished.
First it was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People
across the country reported "sightings" of the Old People, though
whether they were making it up, or whether others were playing the same
game, I didn't know.
It worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the *New York
Times*, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for
fact-checking. The reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it
down to the Monaco Hotel, who put them in touch with the LARP
organizers, who laughingly spilled the whole story.
Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known as
the nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press
who we'd inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old
People were now interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how
unbelievably weird we LARPers were, and that was when Charles let
everyone in school know that Darryl and I were the biggest LARPing
weenies in the city.
That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn't mind, but we did.
The teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I'd find plastic fangs in my
bag, and kids I passed in the hall would go "bleh, bleh" like a cartoon
vampire, or they'd talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was
around.
We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun in some
ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I
missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel.
The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments
come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember
every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with
picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally
start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit-parade of
humiliations coming one after another to my mind.
As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old
People incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd been a similar,
sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets
picked up the story, as the likelihood increased of someone figuring
out that it had been me who'd sprung the story on the stupid Italian
editor in the designer jeans with crooked seams, the starched
collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses.
There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from
them.
It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges
up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before
they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept
visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let
them rest in peace.
All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I
would do about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I needed some
insurance.
And by the time I reached my house -- to be swept up into melancholy
hugs from Mom and Dad -- I had it.
The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS
couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet
would have time to turn out in force.
The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to
arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and
the grownups, so the DHS wouldn't just gas us again.
The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of
the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to stage something that
we could rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one
of their number be taken away in a police van.
The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did,
the way they had in 1968 in Chicago.
It was going to be some trick.
I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary
techniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of
new DHS checker that would result in my parents getting a note.
One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow would be
whether I was in trouble at school.
I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even earlier,
but she'd just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was
going to keel over and they sent her home.
We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trusted
friends, and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the decks and towns
of Clockwork Plunder and told our team-mates. Giving everyone enough
information to get them to show up but not so much as to tip our hand
to the DHS was tricky, but I thought I had just the right balance:
> VAMPMOB TOMORROW
> If you're a goth, dress to impress. If you're not a goth, find a goth
> and borrow some clothes. Think vampire.
> The game starts at 8:00AM sharp. SHARP. Be there and ready to be
> divided into teams. The game lasts 30 minutes, so you'll have plenty
> of time to get to school afterward.
> Location will be revealed tomorrow. Email your public key to
> m1k3y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at 7AM
> for the update. If that's too early for you, stay up all night.
> That's what we're going to do.
> This is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed.
> Believe.
> M1k3y
Then I sent a short message to Masha.
> Tomorrow
> M1k3y
A minute later, she emailed back:
> I thought so. VampMob, huh? You work fast. Wear a red hat. Travel
> light.
What do you bring along when you go fugitive? I'd carried enough heavy
packs around enough scout camps to know that every ounce you add cuts
into your shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity with every
step you take -- it's not just one ounce, it's one ounce that you carry
for a million steps. It's a ton.
"Right," Ange said. "Smart. And you never take more than three days'
worth of clothes, either. You can rinse stuff out in the sink. Better
to have a spot on your t-shirt than a suitcase that's too big and heavy
to stash under a plane-seat."
She'd pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across her
chest, between her breasts -- something that made me get a little
sweaty -- and slung diagonally across her back. It was roomy inside,
and she'd set it down on the bed. Now she was piling clothes next to
it.
"I figure that three t-shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of shorts, three
changes of underwear, three pairs of socks and a sweater will do it."
She dumped out her gym bag and picked out her toiletries. "I'll have to
remember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before I head down
to Civic Center."
Watching her pack was impressive. She was ruthless about it all. It was
also freaky -- it made me realize that the next day, I was going to go
away. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever.
"Do I bring my Xbox?" she asked. "I've got a ton of stuff on the
hard-drive, notes and sketches and email. I wouldn't want it to fall
into the wrong hands."
"It's all encrypted," I said. "That's standard with ParanoidXbox. But
leave the Xbox behind, there'll be plenty of them in LA. Just create a
Pirate Party account and email an image of your hard-drive to yourself.
I'm going to do the same when I get home."
She did so, and queued up the email. It was going to take a couple
hours for all the data to squeeze through her neighbor's WiFi network
and wing its way to Sweden.
Then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compression
straps. She had something the size of a soccer-ball slung over her back
now, and I stared admiringly at it. She could walk down the street with
that under her shoulder and no one would look twice -- she looked like
she was on her way to school.
"One more thing," she said, and went to her bedside table and took out
the condoms. She took the strips of rubbers out of the box and opened
the bag and stuck them inside, then gave me a slap on the ass.
"Now what?" I said.
"Now we go to your place and do your stuff. It's time I met your
parents, no?"
She left the bag amid the piles of clothes and junk all over the floor.
She was ready to turn her back on all of it, walk away, just to be with
me. Just to support the cause. It made me feel brave, too.
Mom was already home when I got there. She had her laptop open on the
kitchen table and was answering email while talking into a headset
connected to it, helping some poor Yorkshireman and his family
acclimate to living in Louisiana.
I came through the door and Ange followed, grinning like mad, but
holding my hand so tight I could feel the bones grinding together. I
didn't know what she was so worried about. It wasn't like she was going
to end up spending a lot of time hanging around with my parents after
this, even if it went badly.
Mom hung up on the Yorkshireman when we got in.
"Hello, Marcus," she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "And who is
this?"
"Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my Mom, Lillian." Mom stood up and gave
Ange a hug.
"It's very good to meet you, darling," she said, looking her over from
top to bottom. Ange looked pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed
well, and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking
at her.
"A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow," she said. She sounded very
confident and self-assured. Much better than I had when I'd met her
mom.
"It's Lillian, love," she said. She was taking in every detail. "Are
you staying for dinner?"
"I'd love that," she said.
"Do you eat meat?" Mom's pretty acclimated to living in California.
"I eat anything that doesn't eat me first," she said.
"She's a hot-sauce junkie," I said. "You could serve her old tires and
she'd eat 'em if she could smother them in salsa."
Ange socked me gently in the shoulder.
"I was going to order Thai," Mom said. "I'll add a couple of their
five-chili dishes to the order."
Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, getting
us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if
we wanted any tea. I squirmed a little.
"Thanks, Mom," I said. "We're going to go upstairs for a while."
Mom's eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. "Of course,"
she said. "Your father will be home in an hour, we'll eat then."
I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Ange
sort through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as
far as LA. They had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just
needed to get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair
of jeans, a tube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss.
"Money!" I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I was going to clean out my bank account on the way
home at an ATM. I've got maybe five hundred saved up."
"Really?"
"What am I going to spend it on?" she said. "Ever since the Xnet, I
haven't had to even pay any service charges."
"I think I've got three hundred or so."
"Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in the
morning."
I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around
town. It was less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through
my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites.
Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down.
"We're going to have to get up really early tomorrow," she said.
"Yeah, big day."
The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob locations
tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes'
walk of Civic Center. We'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said
VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> that we would spray-paint at those spots
around 5AM. That would keep the DHS from locking down the Civic Center
before we got there. I had the mailbot ready to send out the messages
at 7AM -- I'd just leave my Xbox running when I went out.
"How long. . ." She trailed off.
"That's what I've been wondering, too," I said. "It could be a long
time, I suppose. But who knows? With Barbara's article coming out --"
I'd queued an email to her for the next morning, too -- "and all, maybe
we'll be heroes in two weeks."
"Maybe," she said and sighed.
I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking.
"I'm terrified," I said. "I think that it would be crazy not to be
terrified."
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah."
Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange's hand. He looked unshaved and
worried, the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, but on meeting
Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek
and he insisted that she call him Drew.
Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her
hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville
units. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the
kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried
it after that and gave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned
out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural.
Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have a
spare at home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "You
seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these."
&&&