Chapter 75: Pirates and Princesses

Friday, March 22, 1985

We raced home after our last class and changed. I was picking Claire up, of course, while the others were heading there separately. We quickly changed into our Masquerade Banquet outfits before leaving. I was as ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ as possible, with loose-fitting black pants and a slightly poofy white shirt. Thanks, thrift stores!

The others picked the looks they wanted. Jas was, pretty much, Christine Daaé in her diamond mask. Since she’d played Christine before (and since it wasn’t us dating this time) — that seemed great to me. If Jas and I had been dating tonight, I would definitely have wanted to be the Phantom.

Paige and Cammie both made cute Catwomen, while Angie had another diamond mask and Mel had a Phantomesque half-mask.

I kissed Jas goodbye and headed off to pick up Claire. No mask — most of the campus would have no idea what was going on. AggieCon was a big deal for those of us who were interested, but most people weren’t.

As before, I parked outside Mosher and headed up. As usual, Kay answered the door. She gave me a smile, though, and it seemed natural.

This time, Claire was ready with no waiting. She gave me a kiss right away (Kay rolled her eyes at that, I noticed, but I also noticed the smile) and took my arm.

“Lead on, my prince!” she said.

“He’s just a borrowed prince,” Kay said, but she was still smiling. “Not yours!”

“Good enough!” Claire said.

“I’m not a prince,” I said, donning my mask. “I am the Dread Pirate Roberts. Be wary!”

“And he is...?” Kay said.

“Look for a book called ‘The Princess Bride’,” I said. “It’s better than the title. I promise! Beyond that I cannot explain, because there be spoilers!”

Kay chuckled.

“I’ll make a note of it!”

“I haven’t read it either,” Claire said.

“You? Read?” Kay said.

“Fuck you!” Claire said, giggling.

“Sorry, but you’re not my type,” Kay said. “Maybe your pirate...?”

“Mayyyyybe,” Claire said.

“The Dread Pirate Roberts knows when he has been bested!” I said. “Let us away!”

Kay chuckled as Claire and I headed for the stairs.

“She’s just having fun,” Claire said, once we were safely in the stairwell.

“Oh, I know,” I said. “She wouldn’t hesitate to voice her mind if she had serious concerns.”

“We talked a bunch. She’s not a fan, but she gets it, and that’s enough. Overhearing your conversation helped me understand her, and I think listening was fair enough.”

“Not that I know her well, even after that conversation, but she seems like a good roommate.”

“She is, really,” Claire said, then gave me a look. “Have you had roommates? Jasmine doesn’t count, just in case.”

“I did two summer programs in high school, so ... about a semester total worth of roommates?”

“Good enough! Where’d you go?”

I helped Claire into the car, then got in myself.

“The first was at Indiana, the second was at Northwestern.”

“Never been to either! The farthest I’ve been out of state is a couple trips to Oklahoma and one to Arkansas.”

“I’ve ... been around,” I said. “My parents are from Chicago and a small town in Wisconsin, so that, plus Michigan and Indiana, plus most of the states west of the Mississippi last summer, plus Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida on vacation, plus debate trips to Massachusetts, Georgia, and Kentucky.”

“That’s a lot of traveling! I’d love to do that.”

“One day,” I said. “There’s plenty of time. We’re pretty unusual.”

“You can say that again!” she said, giggling.

“We’re pretty...”

She gave my shoulder a light shove.

“Why did I agree to this?” she said, giggling.

“Because you wanted to.”

“Oh. Right,” she said. “And, fortunately, I still do.”

“Good!”

We were able to park fairly close to the MSC and walk in. It wasn’t nearly long enough of a walk to stress my knee. It had been over a week since the accident, after all, and I was pretty sure it was healing just fine.

Once we got inside the MSC, it was easy to pick out at least some of the AggieCon attendees. There were plenty of people wearing shirts with various sci-fi or fantasy movie logos or references, and others in low-level cosplay. Two people dressed vaguely like Luke Skywalker, complete with plastic lightsabers, passed us as we headed towards the registration desk.

Claire looked at everything with a bit of surprise.

“This is common?” she said.

“I haven’t been to many ‘cons,’” I said, “But I think so, yes. A lot of people are very into their favorite movies, or books, or TV shows, or whatever. You’ve heard of ‘Trekkies’...”

She nodded.

“This is something like that, but not as ... intense. Mostly.”

A guy walking towards us had a ‘Macross’ T-shirt. Claire nodded to him and said, “What’s that? Any idea?”

“It’s a Japanese animated series. For most things in that style of animation, the word you want is ‘anime.’”

“So, it’s a kids’ show?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “There is children’s animation in Japan, but there’s nearly as much animation for adults. We have much less here.”

“I was going to say I couldn’t think of any. Then I thought of ‘Yellow Submarine’,” she said, giggling. “That would’ve sounded dumb!”

“There’s more. The movie ‘Heavy Metal’, which came out a few years ago, is animated and was very much aimed at adults. Sex, violence, drugs ... rock and roll...”

She giggled.

“I might have to see that.”

“It’s good! They showed it on campus a while back and we all liked it.”

She sighed and squeezed my hand.

“I wish I’d met you — I mean, all of you, but also you you — earlier. I feel like I spent the first half of this year being all skittish and sheltered and not taking enough advantage of being here.”

“It’s a semester. At most, it’s one-eighth of your time at college, which itself is less than a tenth of the time you’ve got before retirement. Don’t spend time on regrets, just live your life the way you want to, going forward.”

Admittedly easy for me to say, after getting forty years of my life ‘back’, but it was still true. I wouldn’t wish a life like any of our first lives on Claire.

She nodded.

“That makes sense! I mean, it’s pretty much what I was doing, so of course it makes sense, but still.”

We reached the registration table. Claire and I filled out the paperwork and I paid for both of us. We got two name badges, a program, and a plastic bag filled with a few goodies. Nothing big, but we each had an AggieCon pen and a notepad at least, plus some random brochures from the Chamber of Commerce we would likely just throw away. I wished we could give them back for reuse, but that wasn’t an option.

They took a quick look at my sword, pronounced it to be ‘fine,’ and left it alone. I suppose I was applying the standards of future decades to today. One day, it would be a ‘weapon,’ and ‘weapons’ could not be drawn. Now, it was a child-appropriate plastic toy, one no one would worry about if brandished. How times do change!

We didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but Claire and I briefly visited the dealers’ room and looked around. This was clearly new ground for her. She wasn’t familiar with the many sorts of dice available and more than half of the fandom-related tchotchkes were also new and foreign. We would have to browse them more later.

One that she didn’t recognize was obvious in retrospect. One vendor had an H. R. Giger poster with one of the aliens from ‘Alien’ on it. Claire pronounced it ‘creepy’ and wondered who might want that. I explained that it was a movie reference, which helped a lot.

Of course, she would have been thirteen when ‘Alien’ came out, and it was an ‘R’-rated movie. It made sense that she might never have seen it. I’d just spent decades thinking of ‘Alien’ as ‘basic cultural literacy,’ at least for anyone even vaguely ‘nerdy,’ and Claire counted.

Before long, it was time for the banquet, held in the largest meeting room at the MSC. When we got there, hundreds of people, most masked, were already in place. I put on my mask, Claire put on hers, and we headed in.

I made a desultory attempt to spot Jas and Katy, but gave up quickly. My attempts to locate Angie, Paige, Cammie, Mel, Lindsay, or Paula also weren’t the most thorough.

In the end, we wound up seated with a group of five guys and one woman at a round table for eight. Claire sat next to the other woman and immediately attempted to start up a conversation, but the other woman might have been the ‘nerdiest’ one at the table. I could only catch some of the conversation, but it was a flurry of comments along the lines of ‘Have you watched this? What about that? It’s the greatest! You have to watch it! It’s based on this manga that’s only available in Japanese... ‘

Claire looked hopelessly lost, but she didn’t seem to want me to rescue her, so I mostly talked to the other guys while making sure I wasn’t ignoring my date. They were all older, but seemed fairly well-balanced, at least in my opinion. Clearly, adding a qualifier such as ‘for people at a con’ would be self-defeating, because I was a ‘person at a con.’ Entirely of my own volition, too!

I got to explain the story of Dread Pirate Roberts (while attempting to avoid spoilers, which are many) twice. The guys asked, and then the girl (Rebecca) along with her date (Andrew) wanted it repeated, since she’d been on a long ramble about Miyazaki’s ‘The Castle of Cagliostro’. I’m certain Claire had no idea who Hiyao Miyazaki was, nor the ‘Lupin III’ story on which the film was based. Nor anything else to do with it, really.

Still, I couldn’t fault Rebecca for good taste. Anyone who knew Miyazaki in 1985 was at least on the ball in some ways! I’d have to talk to Claire about it, though I might disclaim having seen any of them. If I mentioned ‘Nausicaä’, for instance, I might be expected to know it better than I did. I’d last seen it roughly two decades ago, which is a problem for a film that came out last year!

Our dinner speaker was John Varley. Sadly for me, I had not read any of Varley’s novels in either life. If I’d read any of his short stories I couldn’t place them, either. The talk itself was fun, rambling, and (in places) amusing. Varley came off as quite Heinleinesque in parts, but not in others, echoing some of Heinlein’s more libertarian philosophies but not Heinlein’s support for the military (or, at least, much less clearly than the rest). Someone had prepped him, because he tied his ‘in the future, hopefully we can all love who we love, whoever that may be and however many people choose to love one another’ comments to the ongoing GSS saga, wishing GSS the best of luck.

Brave speech for a con at a putative military school (at least, that was many outsiders’ view of A&M, and it certainly had many elements of truth), but science fiction should be brave and bold.

Of the authors attending this year’s AggieCon, he was the one whose name was the most familiar, but it was also not familiar enough. That said, I’d sat through much worse banquet speeches than this one, and I likely would again.

Once the banquet was over, Claire and I lingered in our seats while much of the room cleared.

“That was ... interesting,” she said, chuckling.

“I’m sorry you got hit with a nerd explosion,” I said.

“Is that what you call it?! Seriously, I think she had some interesting things to say. They were just buried in a torrent of less interesting things!”

“That was my take on it.”

“Goes to show you, I guess!” she said, chuckling. “The funny thing is, sometimes I get that on the other side. There are the girls who expect you to know fifty-seven different types of makeup, when each one should be used, which shade — between two I can’t tell apart! — is right for me and which is ‘totally heinous,’ and so on. They’ll spend half an hour telling me the benefits of this foundation compared to that foundation when I don’t wear foundation! I mean, I’ve worn it a couple of times, but...”

“I’ve heard that from nearly every girl I know.”

“Which says something, because most girls never discuss makeup with guys. Halfway through what I just said, I realized I was making a major blunder. Yet, here you still are, having not run screaming out the door.”

“Oh, I can do better than that,” I said, grinning.

“Do tell!”

“I am capable of having an informed discussion on feminine hygiene products, and of purchasing them if and when necessary, without undue embarrassment or a need to cover my ears and hide.”

“Ooh!” she said, giggling. “If I hadn’t seen you naked, I might be questioning whether you were really a guy!”

“It’s not a bad thing to know. I certainly hope to have a woman in my life for the rest of my life, and she’ll need them for decades. If we have daughters, that just continues things.”

“A twofer! Mentioning children without freaking out!”

“I definitely wouldn’t expect most guys to know any of that stuff, but if they can’t — or won’t — learn it enough to pass basic tests, that seems weird to me,” I said.

“Whereas them actually learning it seems weird to girls,” she said, giggling.

“Shall we?” I said, nodding toward the door. Most of the crowd had cleared.

She pulled out her program.

“Let me give this thing a look,” she said, flipping through the program.

After a second, she said, “I can skip the panels and everything. Let’s go watch movies!”

“I’m in favor!” I said.

Tonight’s movies were, in order, ‘The Terminator’, ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension’, and ‘Phantasm’. We wound up seeing the first two and skipping out of Phantasm somewhere after the second death. It wasn’t so much the killing, or even the movie in general, as just that we were both tired.

Claire enjoyed ‘The Terminator’ (and also considered it a good excuse to snuggle up close) and loved ‘Buckaroo Banzai’ more than she’d expected to. She loved some of the callback lines, including Paige’s favorite, ‘Boo-tay! Tay! Tay! Tay!’

Speaking of Paige, she and Angie were two rows back. They stayed for ‘Phantasm’ when we left. Cammie and Mel watched the first two but left before ‘Phantasm’. I spotted Jas and Katy once, but they seemed to have left by the end of ‘Buckaroo Banzai’. Lindsay and Paula were there only for ‘The Terminator’, I think. I got another glimpse of Paula, which confirmed she was who I thought she was.

I wondered what the girls would think of ‘Terminator II’ when it came out. Linda Hamilton was hardly a shrinking violet in the first movie, but her character in the second movie was a true badass and (along with Sigourney Weaver’s ‘Ripley’ and a few others) one of the precursors to a much longer list of strong women in action movies. I would have listed Taarna from ‘Heavy Metal’ as well. There had always been room for women to do things, but too many directors preferred them to cower, scream, and possibly get killed, often while wearing as little clothing as possible.