A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (18 page)

Awkward? Awkward wasn’t in his vocabulary. Sthenolagnia was. Awkward wasn’t. He was above all that, floating over the conversation in his luminous cloud, leaving everyone else to scramble below. He just
was
. And maybe, someday, if I learned enough stories, I could make my way up there too.

And one of the first stories that I was able to tell was about him.

One day a girl on my volleyball team announced that she had seen a strange man on the bus.

“Did he have a carnation in his buttonhole?” I asked.

She nodded. “You know him?”

“I know him,” I said. “He comes to Thanksgiving every year.” I smiled, warming to my theme. “He’s a real character.”

As a general rule, I advise against trying to pick up men at
Star Wars
conventions.

I know it sounds like a great idea.

Conventional wisdom states that a single woman going to a
Star Wars
convention is like an egg cell saying, “Screw it!” and hopping on a plane to go hang out wherever all the sperm cells happen to be. The odds in your favor would seem to be something like 3720 to 1.

But conventional wisdom doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Trust me.

•   •   •

Most people have one thing they’re deeply, deeply weird about. The moment you find your thing, your world shifts. Something in it just strikes a chord in you. You walk through your whole life like a sleeper agent waiting for someone to whisper the code phrase that activates you, and then you awaken and everything changes: your habits, your priorities, whether or not you have Obi-Wan Kenobi on your toothbrush.

Star Wars
was mine. My dad took me to see
A New Hope
in theaters in 1997 when the reissue came out, and from that point, the course of my life was set. I put away former pastimes (good-bye,
Wizard of Oz
. It was a nice run) and set out to dedicate my life to the service of this new god. It got so bad that when we bought a new VCR my parents made me sign a contract promising not to watch the trilogy more than thirteen times a year.

Even as it was, I watched the whole trilogy well over two hundred times, until the VHS tape creaked and groaned. Special Edition, 1997, gold box set. I knew certain things about it were lies (Han shot first) but it was the version whose rhythm crept into my bones. I always dutifully and unblinkingly watched all three movies in sequence with all the lights turned out everywhere else in the house, frantically shushing my parents if they tried to interrupt the trance. The outside world did not exist. I was on Tatooine. I was on Dagobah. I was in an X-Wing navigating straight down this trench toward a target shaft just two meters wide. And not once in all this time did I ever skip through the Director’s Intro to the Special Edition, so not only do I have the whole trilogy memorized, but I also know every comment Ben Burtt makes about the difficulties of optically compositing snowspeeder cockpits on a white surface so the black line isn’t visible. (“It’s a constant trade-off. How transparent can we make the cockpit? At what point is the black line more objectionable than the transparency?”)

As I said, everyone has something he or she is deeply weird about. This is mine. Maybe you’re lucky and yours is football, in which case the whole world is set up to cater to your preferences, or Marvel superheroes, in which case you had a few rough years early in life but now every movie that comes out for the next hundred years is already planned to suit your dearest wishes.

You can tell how mainstream the thing you love is by whether the Big Event You Attend in order to celebrate it is called a “convention” or not. You can tell, too, by how relieved you are when you finally get to turn yourself inside out and wear your deepest passion on your sleeve.

•   •   •

I used to think I could pass. Even if, on the inside, I was a large, sluglike Hutt, I could slip into the guise of a passable-looking young lady before anyone spotted me. No one could tell, just by looking at me, that for a while I had contemplated getting a C-3PO tramp stamp. (A friend was going to get an R2-D2. Fortunately we decided against it. Also the tattoo shop shut down. It’s amazing what good decisions you can make when you have no alternatives!)

I floated this hypothesis to someone and she started to laugh. “No,” she said. “I think people know. You have
Empire Strikes Back
bedsheets. You sleep on those bedsheets under a Darth Maul comforter, underneath a painting of C-3PO in a tweed jacket that you bought off the Internet.”

I shrugged. “Mere circumstantial evidence.”

“Whenever anyone says
Star Wars
in a restaurant, no matter how far away or how softly they whispered it, you go running over there shouting, “WHAT WHAT TELL ME WHAT THE
STAR WARS
THING WAS.”

I pshawed. “Please. Everyone does that. My point is, I could pass. Take away the sheets and what remains?”

“What about your watch?”

“Take off the watch.”

“Everything you say and do.”

“Well, other than that.”

•   •   •

I love
Star Wars
for so many reasons.

One, because there was never a moment when
Star Wars
hadn’t sold out. There are some things you can get a little indignant about when they go commercial—like if there were a big neon madeleine floating in the air just outside the Proust House and an amusement park ride called Trip Down Memory Lane—TASTE! the tea and the
madeleine! FEEL! the passion for Albertine! EXPERIENCE! the magic all over again—I guess people might get just the slightest bit upset about it. But part of the charm of
Star Wars
is that Princess Leia has always been on your shampoo bottle. Luke has always been on your bedsheets. Darth has always graced your toaster. You have always been able to get Galactic Bubble Mint toothpaste with Obi-Wan Kenobi on it, brandishing a lightsaber. As I speak I am staring at one of my most prized possessions, a ceramic serving plate for, I guess, chips or dip, on which C-3PO reclines sensually, one arm up, other arm akimbo. They made these things because we bought them!

•   •   •

You can, I guess, map my evolution as a human being as my favorite
Star Wars
character evolved.

First my favorite character was Darth Vader. How could it not be? He was all that I asked for in a man: tall, dark, and breathing.

Then it was Luke. Luke was never cool, but, in a way, that was his charm.

“I’m in it for the money. I expect to be well paid,” Han tells the Princess as they escape the first Death Star.

“You needn’t worry about your reward. If money is all that you love, then that’s what you’ll receive,” Leia retorts. Luke comes in, and she tells him, somewhat pointedly, “Your friend here’s quite a mercenary. I wonder if he really cares about anything—or anybody.”

“
I
care!” Luke says.

Yeah, Luke’s not cool.

And then I moved on to C-3PO.

I love C-3PO. I love him in part because he’s completely useless and very talkative and in a committed relationship with another robot, but also because the one consistent theme of the entire trilogy is that no one ever tells him anything and that no one cares about his problems.

“Secret mission? What plans? What are you talking about? I’m not getting into there,” he asks in the opening scenes of the original, as R2-D2 tries to get him to escape the
Tantive IV
, Princess Leia’s starship. “I’m going to regret this.”

His first lines in
The Empire Strikes Back
consist of telling R2, “Well, don’t try to blame me. I didn’t ask you to turn on the thermal heater. I merely commented that it was freezing in the Princess’ chamber. But it’s supposed to be freezing! How we’re going to dry out all her clothes, I really don’t know! Oh, switch off!”

This problem never comes up again, ever. Although it does explain why the Princess wears only one outfit for pretty much the duration of the movie.

He supplies people with facts and statistics that they do not want. He talks and talks and nobody cares, and none of his skills are relevant to his day-to-day life. He is the galactic equivalent of an English major. He speaks Bocce. He is fluent in well over six million forms of communication.

Here’s a list of things that people have said to C-3PO at one point or another:

“Would you just shut up and listen to me?”

“Shut up!”

“Shut him up or shut him down!”

“Shut up, sir.”

“Ichota.” (the RUDEST)

Return of the Jedi
is basically C-3PO’s great shining moment because all he’s ever wanted to do is have attention paid to him and get to tell stories (“I’m not much more than an interpreter, and not very good at telling stories” in the first film was clearly just Threepio being coy) and now he finally gets his wish. He tells stories—with hand gestures!—he’s worshipped as a god, and he gets to do some of that language interpreting that he’s claimed to be able to do for the
past three movies. “The illustrious Jabba bids you welcome and will gladly pay you the reward of twenty-five thousand!”

•   •   •

My point is: Threepio is great, and I appreciate him more with each passing day. And even more with each passing Jar Jar.

A moment for Jar Jar.

How fondly I remember the spring of 1999, before 9/11 and Jar Jar. In many ways 9/11 is the Jar Jar Binks of history.

This field has been plowed and plowed over again and wept into and plowed a third time.

But put yourself in my shoes.

You are young. You have found something you love. And then you have to somehow reconcile the fact that the thing you expected would bring you only joy has turned up on your doorstep with Jar Jar Binks bawling out, “MEESA CALLED JAR JAR BINKS! MEESA YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT!”

My only weapon was denial. I convinced myself that
The Phantom Menace
was good the same way I convinced myself, for years, that Santa Claus was real: by very carefully ignoring all the facts anyone presented to me. (This also works for things like evolution.) But that could only get you so far. Inevitably you remembered the existence of someone named Nute Gunray and all your defenses collapsed again.

•   •   •

I attended my first
Star Wars
convention right after freshman year of college, when the wounds of the prequels were fresh.

It was a big milestone for me. “Finally,” I told my roommate, Svetlana, “I’ll get to be myself and go among my people.”

“I don’t understand,” Svetlana said. “Who were you before? Literally the first thing you did on arriving at college was unpack your lightsabers. Do you think you’ve been hiding? If this is you
concealing your love of
Star Wars
, what would it look like if you let it hang out? Would you just dress up as Jabba the Hutt all the time?”

That wasn’t a bad idea, I thought. Maybe I should.

•   •   •

I had been saving up all semester to buy autographs.

I’d tried to make money by signing up to do negotiation studies at the business school. This had not been paying off the way I hoped, because I have the business acumen of lettuce.

Once, I tried to buy a cheap knockoff purse on a street corner. “You should haggle down the price,” my friends said.

“Sure!” I said. I strode to the corner and picked out a purse. “Pardon me,” I said to the man behind the table. “May I haggle with you?”

This, I have since learned, is not how haggling works.

“What?” he said. “No. The price is final.”

“Okay,” I said, handing him my money. “Forty dollars, wow.”

So the negotiation studies were a no-go. Money kept slipping through my fingers like Princess Leia said star systems would if Grand Moff Tarkin tightened his grip. Finally I got a job at the library to push me over the edge.

Nonetheless, I had enough for autographs from all the people I most cherished—the guy who had played Wedge Antilles’ gunner in a few shots of
The Empire Strikes Back
. The Imperial officer who yelled, “You rebel scum!” in one shot of
Return of the Jedi
. Several of the rebel pilots exploded during the Battle of Yavin. And Mark Hamill, of course.

I landed in Los Angeles and took a cab over. Walking into the convention center, I felt the way I imagine dogs feel when they visit a dog park for the first time. You’ve spent months surrounded by hairless beasts who sympathize with but do not understand you. Then suddenly, a hairy stranger has taken your ball and is trying to
mate with your leg. No, I’m sorry. What I meant to say was, “Then suddenly, you see that you are not alone of your kind! There are others! All kinds of others! And they wish to frolic with you in an open field.” Part of it was just being able to walk into a room and be surrounded with
Star Wars
things—action figures, artwork, tattoo artists doing tattoos while you waited. Part of it was seeing all the people who shared my feelings. I understood the jokes on everyone’s T-shirts. Everyone’s. That was rare.

With that recognition came relief: I was not alone. This was my tribe.

•   •   •

This was my first time, and it was instant magic. I sat riveted in the hotel bar, chatting with a family of fans. “You built a
Millennium Falcon
in your basement? I DREAM of someday building a
Millennium Falcon
in my basement, sir! Tell me all you know!”

There was a dance party and all the people accustomed to lurking on the edge of the dance floor and shouting over the music about Boba Fett actually got to get up and showcase our moves, waving lightsabers in the air to the dulcet strains of the “Cha Cha Slide.” I had no idea life could be like this. There was even a cute guy in a homemade C-3PO suit who vaguely resembled Edward Norton and wanted to dance.

•   •   •

My second convention, I signed up for speed-dating. Midway to the airport, I realized I’d left my Jabba the Hutt suit at home.

Leaving your Jabba the Hutt suit at home on the morning of the
Star Wars
convention is like realizing, the day of prom, that you forgot to buy a dress. “Now I have to fall back on my personality!” you think, as you frantically search through your carry-on one more time. “It can’t sustain this!”

My own dating life had not been
Star Wars
dependent. My first
kiss was with someone who turned out to be a Trekkie. Not just a Trekkie; an ardent Trekkie who had carefully filmed an entire “new episode” in which he painstakingly reconstructed the setting and vibe of the original series, making all his own effects in Microsoft Paint. Since then, my taste had run more to fans of Woody Allen than George Lucas. Of course,
Star Wars
reared its head now and then, like a space slug emerging from a crater in an asteroid. When a boyfriend suggested we watch
Annie Hall
—“I think it would shed light on our relationship,” he argued—I adamantly refused. “That movie stole Best Picture from
Star Wars
,” I shot back. “I try not to watch it on principle.”