We stopped at Malu for ice cream. I got a flavor called (I think) "Baseball," which was a mix of all the treats you can buy at a ball game (peanuts, popcorn, etc.). Nina got a few scoops of a red wine-based flavor. As we chomped, we listened to a owner of Malu's chat with the guy who ran the newsstand next door. It turned out he'd only just replaced the store windows after someone put his ass right through the middle of one during an after-hours lovers' spat. We walked over the Pulaski Bridge, peeking into the secret hollows where the workers who work on Newtown Creek might go to enjoy a beer. We walked all the way down through Greenpoint to Metropolitan, and from there to Shea Stadium. I wanted to see Space Wolves, though Et al. was still playing when we got there. The lead singer of Et al. is a real angry young artist type dude, a lanky dork with frizzy hair like if Daniel Stern's character in C.H.U.D. had gotten a semiotics degree or something. In lieu of actual merch, he'd piled on the display case a bunch of copies of his "manifesto," in which he argued, essentially, that there are too many bands right now because it's too easy to start a band. Ugh. I don't even remember what they sounded like, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't impressed. Not a fan. Space Wolves were great, though. It's two dudes who dress all in white, a fucking great drummer and a guitar player who sings into an old-fashioned telephone handset. They're fast and tight, a bit like Punks On Mars, though their songs are much shorter; and their commitment to their manic stage personas put me in mind of The Hamburglars. Great band! Fan.
Ted and I had been discussing options for a bachelor party for several months before Tom and Colleen's Wedding. There'd been an email thread on which we collaborated with Dan, Greg, and two of Tom's friends from high school -- Matt and Eric -- to develop a plan. Naturally, the discussion started with strip clubs, but there were some objections on moral grounds, and, to be honest, we are a pretty "women's lib" gang of dudes (to use Tom's expression). Tubin' was considered but not really seconded, and an adventure on a terrifying (for acrophobes like Tom and yours truly) "ropes course" almost came together but fizzled. Ted laid the foundation for a concrete party plan by finding and renting on AirBnB a cabin in Goshen that we could treat as our base of operations. He proposed an afternoon and evening of The rest of the structure of the party was decided at a very humid and boozy evening at the rooftop bar at The Rock Shop. I had two ideas that I feel very proud of. The first was this: We would locate and hire a Northampton "sex educator" to some kind of live session similar to a Passion Parties demo. The person I had in mind would be a cross between Mr. Van Driessen and John Cleese's sex educator in The Meaning of Life -- ideally, a middle-aged dude with a graying ponytail and a dissipated physique who'd show Tom how to perform cunnilingus on a blow-up doll. We searched for this person drunkenly on our smartphones to no avail. The other idea I had was that we would design and provision a LARP that we would go on as a group. And that is what we did.
The weekend before the wedding, he and I went shopping for supplies. We went Ricky's, Babeland, Bergen St. Comics, and finally Target. We were looking for bachelor party gear in general; objects to humiliate the groom sexually and both condemn and glorify his nerdy obsessions in specific. We managed to find some Eyes Wide Shut-style cat masks at Ricky's but Babeland proved to be a desert -- dildos, especially the ones with lovingly-modeled dick veins, are really fucking expensive. (Ted turned down my offer to train down to a seedy adult video store in Sunset Park to get a cheap plastic model.) Our goal for the comic book store was to gather a few dozen terrible comics and somehow impel Tom to protect them. Ted was inspired by his older brother's bachelor party, in which the stripper they hired shredded some beloved comics in the groom's face while giving him a dance. We were worried that, like Babeland, Bergen St. Comics doesn't sell no shit, until they directed us to their 25-cent bin, which was full of oh man just the worst garbage. At Target we were hoping that the "seasonal goods" aisle would already be stocking Halloween type things, but no such luck. Back to fucking school. So instead we dug into the toy section and made a great discovery: Styrofoam "pool noodles" on sale for a couple of dollars a pop! We bought two, knowing that they were long enough to cut in half to form four "short swords" for our adventure. Still, though, we were short a number of essential props. Ted was going to be upstate on "business" through the rest of the week, but I resolved to hit all the costume shops in town for reasonably-priced LARP gear. That Tuesday I used my lunch break to walk over to Abracadabra on 21st St. and ask them about "wizard robes." I didn't have to explain myself any more than that to the cashier -- she walked me right over to a nook in their costume section that was, like, all wizard gear. But it was expensive as hell, each robe averaging something like $70, so I asked if they had robes with a lower "price point." "Um," she said, "this is probably our cheapest selection of new costumes, but you can check downstairs in the remaindered section to see if we've got something cheaper." That's what I did. The basement of Abracadabra not only has the cheap, used stuff, but also a costume / prop repair workshop and a huge selection of really awesome stage-worthy rental costumes: Period dress, rubber monster suits, mascot heads of all shapes and sizes. It would make a great room in a text adventure, I thought. The remaindered stuff seemed to be a subset of their collection that was too worn or broken to be rented any more, and, true enough, it was much cheaper than anything they had upstairs. I agonized for a while over buying an enormous feathered headdress for twenty-five dollars or a full-body zip-up brown fursuit for thirty but decided against it: Holy shit bed bugs, for one, but also because looking over the used stuff, there still wasn't enough gear for seven dudes. So I went back upstairs and called Ted, and we revised the plan. We realized our budget could support a complete set of gear for one person, so if we split it across seven dudes, each person could have, like, one thing. And we could assign a different characteristic to each accessory. So I bought:
- A pilaeus cap, plus the two cat masks and a Mardi Gras mask from Ricky's: Protection from noodle-hits to the head
- Brown felt gauntlets: Protection on the arms
- Brown felt boot covers: Protection on the legs
- Black plastic shield: Protection anywhere you can swing it
Ted and Nina teamed up on a car rental early Thursday morning, and we drove up to Northampton with Stephanie. No driving for this guy but I tried to do my part by running the iPod. Steph pointed out correctly that I have almost no lady bands in my library. We dropped her off at her hotel and then bought enough groceries to cook dinner for seven dudes. We dropped the food off at the cabin, which tuned out to be a beautiful five-bedroom wood frame house full of Zen Buddhist bullshit and sporting a rock garden, a hot tub, and a fuckin' jacuzzi. There was a resident cat named Mina, a tortoise shell with short little legs like Ted's old cat Lola. The place reminded me of the house my aunt built with her first husband in Shutesbury. We returned to the main hotel where there was a tailgate of sorts in progress: Vodka shots in Dixie cups outside the jazz lounge of the Northampton Clarion. In person, Matt had the beard and overall demeanor of a hobbit; Eric was a lovable goon. We caravaned to Walmart and bought a few more things, notably: A multi-stroke pneumatic air rifle, a paint ball "blowgun," three heavily-discounted Halloween masks of The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man, and a set of zip ties -- this last because, as Matt kept saying, "There are six of us."
The guns came out as soon as we got to the cabin. We took aim at rocks and small targets in the woods circling the house, trying to figure out safely whether or not BBs were coming out of the air rifle, and how to get the paintballs from the blowgun to actually, you know, pop -- this in particular was frustrating and difficult, since the blowgun was really just a thick straw with a small stage for the brightly-colored paintball (careful, don't inhale it!) and even when we blew with all our might, the paintballs would often just fall impotently out of the end of the barrel. We started to worry about accidentally hitting Mina, who was out in the yard hunting sparrows, so we took the party to the road, and from there into the woods across from the house, where we used the shattered remains of a tree to hold our targets: Cans of PBR, an empty whiskey bottle. Some conventions of play emerged. When a rifleman (wearing a Lizard mask) successfully punctured a PBR can, his "second" would sprint over and drink as much of the spraying beer as possible. While this was happening, anyone who could lay hands on the blowgun was free to shoot stinging paintballs at the drinker. There are cell phone videos of me and Ted loping and ducking through the ferns sasquatch-like, hooting and covered in beer, to the shrill laughter of the group. It was a little bit scary how much fun this was. But we knew we still had the LARP ahead of us, so we cleaned up the cans and shards of glass, and returned briefly to the cabin. Ted and I arrayed the props on one of the beds, and we made our selections. The people who chose pool noodles were the warriors. The people who chose the bitchen skull scepters were the ages.
By the time we returned to the forest, the sun was about to set, and we were all quite drunk. The woods were lit only by a kind of ambient glow, and our eyes were saturated with green. Everything was ferns and moss. That's my strongest memory of the proceedings: Wading and tripping through a fern sea with a pool noodle in my hand and a can of PBR stretching the back pocket of my jeans. Yes, I thought. This. We'd refined the rules such that our game was a modified Capture The Flag: Each time arrayed their gold coins around their base, and set their intent on liberating the other team's gold from their base about 200 feet away. The mages could paralyze a foe with a spell (birdseed thrown from a plastic baggie), setting him up to be dispatched by a whack from a warrior's pool noodle. I was on the team with superior numbers, having two mages (Tom and Dan) and two warriors (myself and Eric). We enacted two skirmishes, and I think we won both of them, although drunken confusion over the rules muddied the tally a bit. I ran over a log concealed by ferns and fell hard into forest rot. Dogs barked somewhere far away. Matt caught a salamander and two small frogs. The game lasted an hour, maybe two. I wished it could have gone on forever; it was ecstasy. But it was getting dark in the woods, and people were afeared that someone'd sprain his ankle. So we went back to the cabin and made dinner. We'd bought steaks that Ted set about grilling on a comically small grill; using his recipe I made a pesto that I was proud of (no small feat without a food processor) which we applied to some grilled zucchini. After dinner we stood around the glowing embers of the grill in the dark telling jokes. I stole all of mine from Andy Breckman.
The next morning we rose groggy but largely intact, and Ted and I cooked breakfast for the group. We tidied the house, to the extent, we hoped, that it wouldn't be quite so obvious that we'd thrown a drinkin' party. We said goodbye to Mina, who was already hunkered down over a freshly-killed sparrow. The boys dropped me off at the Clarion, where I waited for Nina and ran into Maggie and Cliff. Together, we embarked upon a whistlestop tour of the Pioneer Valley's charms. The first stop was the dinosaur footprints on the banks of the Connecticut River, which Cliff and I were sure would be awesome but turned out to just be a some dents in some granite slabs next to a little kiosk with a can of Budweiser stuffed into one of its brochure slots. No luck trying to visit the Dead Frog Circus at the Wistariahurst Museum -- some people were getting married (!) there that weekend. Instead we stopped at Herrell's Ice Cream in downtown Northampton, where a placard below the list of flavors proclaims Steve Herrell as the inventor of the, uh, topping, which Herrell's refers to as a "Smoosh-in." The ice cream was very good. We had to drive quickly back to our hotel to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. We passed a storefront with a sign in the window advertising something called the Beer Can Museum. Cliff sighed as if he knew he was missing his one opportunity to visit. The rehearsal dinner was at something called WWII club. The boys and I showed off the videos of our antics. Tom's iPod playlist for the evening included a Bel Argosy song! I left my suit jacket at the ballroom. After dinner we returned to the Clarion. It's a strange hotel. Walking the narrow halls it seemed more like a minimum-security prison or a summer camp than a hotel, the dormitory areas made of cinderblock covered with a generous helping of latex paint. There were three enclosed atria that were always a surprise to find yourself in coming around a corner at night: A miniature jungle of towering office plants; a haphazard "rock garden" of craggy boulders and small stones; and a clearing filled with dorm-room chairs and nothing else. Weaving through those corridors at night was like being inside a persistent dream. We tried to rally Maggie to test her legendary skill against the claw machine in the hotel's neglected arcade, but the night porter had come by to turn it off before we could do so. We sat in deck chairs in the indoor pool room, which looked like a haunted greenhouse or an abandoned gymnasium being reclaimed by nature, while Ted and Jill frolicked in the pool with some old ladies and a woman with Downs Syndrome. At our urging, they (Ted and Jill) acted out an underwater tea party, an underwater yoga class. Night swimming.
The next day I worked with Ted and Dan and Greg on a four-man toast, and then hurried back to Hadley to iron my shirt and slip into my suit. Tom'd arranged for a shuttle from our hotel, but the driver didn't know where he was going nor how to get there, so we had to feed him the directions to the Unitarian Society. Our hotel-mate (and role-playing companion!) Bo described his treatment for a new Bill & Ted movie on the way. The ceremony itself was maybe the shortest I think I've ever been party to. Colleen looked great; she never doesn't. Tom wore his Radagast Brown suit. His sister officiated. Their vows were sweet and funny. "Before I met you," Tom said to Colleen, "all I ate were pizza bagels." (True, more or less.) Their parents had brought scoops of earth from their respective home states, and they dumped these into a small pot and pressed some seeds into the dirt and watered them. I got to be friends with Tom when Emma and Katharine made me his Secret Santa the Christmas of our sophomore year in college. I bought him a small jar of jam and a shower glove, with some hand-drawn instructions diagramming their suggested use. It was a gamble; he could've been offended. It boggles my mind that twelve years later I would be sitting in a pew behind his mom and dad and watching him get married to a very nice lady.
Ted and Cat and Nina and I walked to the reception at the Smith College Conference Center, which looks out over the Mill River and the Smith College track and field grounds. We drank and ate and when it was time to give our toast, I think the gentlemen and I did a pretty good job. "Tom used to waste time he could have spent socializing playing video games," Greg said, as part of the bit where we explained to Colleen how Tom had changed since meeting her. "Now he ruins social situations with fancy European board games." (This is true.) Improbably, we were able to dance after all of the eating and drinking, and we did so, on a removable wooden dance floor in the basement of the Conference Center. Tom and Colleen danced alone to the wonderful song "Bless The Telephone" by Labi Siffre, and then everybody joined them. "Empire State of Mind" made its inevitable appearance in the playlist, as did that ol' "Streetlights, People" song. The dancing ended when we Conference Center closed. Tom and Colleen had arranged for a shuttle to take people to the hotels, but it made an unannounced stop at Ye Ol' Watering Hole, home of the Northampton Beer Can Museum! The place sure had a lot of beer cans. They were arrayed in the hundreds on mahogany shelves up by the ceiling where a more pretentious establishment might've stored, I don't know, books. The Watering Hole sold us beer until we were drunk again, then served us water 'til we sobered up. We left the bar at 1:00 AM but didn't manage to get a cab until 2:00.
Ted drove us home the next day after brunch. We had to surreptitiously ferry the air rifle, which is extremely threatening and real looking, into our apartment building from the curb. I'll find some way to dispose of it later. But there's a shopping bag full of LARP scepters on the landing that I can't bring myself to throw away.
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