Chapter 130: Urban Camping

Tuesday, May 24, 1983 (continued)

Yes, we had another double date, only even more, since Jess was coming along. This one was a bit insane, or ... maybe not. Probably not. Maybe?

Our destination was a movie theater that’d been torn down in the 1990s in my first go-round. It was near the Galleria, and it had the advantage of being a stand-alone theater with particularly good projectors and sound.

We were just a bit early for our movie. Seventeen hours is a bit early, right?

In my entire first life, I’d camped out for tickets twice. Both times I was part of a group and the goal was football bowl tickets. I just held a spot for an hour, and then buddies traded off. My shift was at three in the morning, but that wasn’t an issue.

I’d never camped out for a movie. The most I’d ever done was five hours in line for what turned out to be a moderate disappointment: ‘The Phantom Menace’. I knew this movie was going to be great. So did Angie, of course.

Jas, Paige, and Jess? Not so much, but they were optimistic, and we were hardly going to spoil the film.

The movie in question was, of course, ‘The Return of the Jedi’. On the face of it, camping out for seventeen hours to see a movie I’d seen at least a dozen times over the years was ... absurd. On another level? Here was a genuine cultural phenomenon that I’d missed the first go-round. I wasn’t expecting a third chance to do this. So ... why not?

When we got there, at least a hundred people were already in line. They ranged from people just sitting on the concrete to people with folding chairs, air mattresses, army cots, and two full-sized camping tents, plus a larger number of pup tents. Several radios were playing. It was, pretty much, a party atmosphere, just as Jess had predicted.

The theater was staying open all night to offer restrooms, so that wasn’t a concern, and they had water stations set up. Why not? They were going to make a ridiculous amount of money tomorrow, after all.

We proudly joined the line, depositing our sleeping bags, pillows, camping pads, flashlights, and backpacks. We had snacks, drinks, books (just in case), and bear spray (also just in case).

Once we were settled, we immediately split up. We’d all gotten ‘Star Wars’ shirts for the occasion, and first the girls, then I, took advantage of the restrooms to change. Well, and ... restrooms.

Prom excepted (and it was, in so many ways, very much an exception), this was the first time Angie and I had taken advantage of the freedom to just stay out all night. It wouldn’t be the last, though perhaps the last in this sort of setting (at least until football ticket camp-outs became a part of my life again).

We talked with strangers, some of whom became at least friendly acquaintances. We talked amongst ourselves. I’d talked to Jess for hours, of course. Angie had talked to her a fair bit, and I knew Jas had as well. Paige? This was likely her first time really hanging out with Jess.

I’m not sure ‘old Paige’ would’ve done well, especially if ‘old Paige’ had known Jess might be ... interested. I wasn’t sure if ‘new Paige’ knew that or not, but my guess was yes. In any case, she and Jess sounded like old friends in minutes, and while some of that was Jess, some of it was also Paige. She’d come a long way over the last year.

There was dancing. Why not, with all the music? I danced with the four girls in our group and dozens of strangers during the evening. Most of it was group dancing, but some was slow. Often we’d have three incompatible songs on at the same time, and half the time we’d change what we were dancing to midway through. It was crazy, and it was a blast, too.

One thing that got to me at times like this (and plenty of others) was that I’d had a fairly full first life of fifty-five years, and (depending on how you count it) either three years or seventeen years of a second life. Yet here I was, doing what amounted to a brand-new thing, something I’d never done anything similar to before. It was by no means the first, and certainly not the last (barring a disaster, anyway — the universe is unpredictable), but it was most definitely new.

It was new to Angie, too. She hadn’t even camped out for football tickets. The only times she’d slept in sleeping bags were on the floors of some of Sharon’s ‘boyfriends.’ When I’d heard that, I’d worried, but Angie was thrilled at the idea of replacing a bad memory with something good. When it came down to it, that was as much the point of our new lives as anything else. Replace the bad, the iffy, even the mediocre, with the good, the great, and the spectacular.

Angie and Paige neither pretended that they weren’t a couple nor acted like one. No kissing, no making out, but they held hands sometimes and slept in a single oversized sleeping bag (as did Jas and I). Jess had her own. We went to bed, more or less, around midnight. By mutual agreement, radios went off at midnight and people kept conversations down.

In this crowd, I was pretty sure nothing would happen. There’d always be someone awake, and the whole thing just felt ... good-hearted. On the other hand, a tiny part of me couldn’t help but think of the story ‘Mr. Mercedes’ and a bunch of people sleeping in sleeping bags in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately, I was almost certainly the only one here who’d ever heard of it, and I could set it aside.

Jas and I snuggled up, said ‘I love you’ to each other, kissed, and then went to sleep. How many times does one go to sleep on the ground in a parking lot in a major city and feel (nearly completely) safe? It was certainly another first for me.

Wednesday, May 25, 1983

Okay ... a parking lot in a big city isn’t necessarily the place to go for some quality sleep. Really. It’s not.

That said, it wasn’t actually bad. We woke several times, finally giving up and getting fully awake at about eight.

Jas woke with me, and Jess woke with her. The two of them headed off to the bathrooms, armed with a change of clothes (yes, we had spare clean shirts, this time ‘The Empire Strikes Back’). Would they talk about me behind my back? Who knows? It wasn’t very worrying, anyway.

I waited, slightly impatiently, until they got back, then headed off myself. As I went, Angie and Paige were waking up.

Once I was done, I gave Mom a quick call, just letting her know we were fine. I met Angie and Paige heading in as I was heading out. Once back, I kissed Jas, then checked with some of our nearby new friends, or acquaintances, or whatever they were. I took breakfast orders from those who were interested. I was just going to McDonald’s, so the choices were what they were, but plenty of people were very happy to be asked.

When Angie and Paige got back, I added their orders to the list, then headed to the car. Angie came along and camped out in the parking space to hold it for me. I was pretty sure that she could chase off anyone who tried to take it (unless they were willing to threaten vehicular manslaughter, anyway). Everyone had carefully left a back exit from the parking lot that snaked behind the complex with the theater and led out to the street.

Half an hour later I was back with a lot of food. Yes, I bought some extra. I was certain there’d be takers for anything that no one wanted. Most likely I, or we, could’ve made quite a bit charging for delivery but that’d fly in the face of the spirit of the thing. We were a community. Temporary, but a community. Someone from outside could’ve driven in and sold things and I’d have been fine with it, but one of us? It would’ve felt wrong.

We munched our sandwiches, and I sold the extras at cost to a bunch of hungry people, and we sat, and talked, and listened to the music (the radios got going at nine), and waited for showtime. The odds were good that we’d be in the first batch, I was pretty sure. The line now snaked around a few times, then back along the theater to the front parking lot, and thence out to the street and down the block. I’d driven by on the way back and it was truly mammoth, making it to the corner, turning, and going off down another street. I had no idea where the end was. Some people might not get in today at all, from the looks of things.

We packed up around nine-thirty, getting everything we couldn’t carry into the theater back to the car. When the line moved, it was going to move fast, and we wanted to move with it.

Ten minutes before ten, the line abruptly moved. A cheer started right behind that and rippled back through us, then past us, moving around and around and heading off towards the street. I hoped it would make it all the way to the end.

We headed on in, feeling stiff and a little tired, but triumphant. We wound up sitting in the middle-back of the first showing. This one called for a big tub of popcorn (shared five ways) and five sodas. I had no problem ordering a large soda now that diet was readily available. The girls all chose mediums, pleading smaller bladders.

Oddly, I was nearly as worried about leaving the movie in the middle as I would’ve been if it was new to me. For one thing, I’d have to disrupt a bunch of people who’d just waited overnight to see the movie. For another, I’d have to remember whatever it was that I’d missed and pretend to not know what it was. I was sure they’d fill me in, but that’s not quite the same, and there’s no point in tempting fate.

I found myself, perhaps surprisingly, holding hands with both Jas and Jess. The thought would have been absurd two years ago, and in many ways almost as absurd one year ago, much less in that bleak August of 1982.

The odds that the three of us would ever have a threesome seemed low. Not this Jess, anyway. An older Jess for whom ‘casual sex’ was an option (not that it would be all that ‘casual’)? Perhaps.