Believe it or not, I was not always the paragon of coolness that I am now. In fact, you could say I was a bit of a late bloomer, having grown up in the ass-end of Brooklyn, where "interacting with my peers" meant "hiding in my house so I wouldn't get the crap beaten out of me" and "letting my parents decide every facet of my existence." Like many other hopeless geeks, I desperately wanted to be someone else. Somebody who didn't always say the wrong thing. Somebody who girls liked. Somebody whose shoes weren't set on fire by his classmates, at least until after he had taken them off.

Not surprisingly, I was obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, the great non-pharmaceutical relic of '70s that gives pimple-faced 14-year-old the ability to step outside themselves. Yep, sure is grand to be Conan the Barbarian in your own mind, ain't it? You'd think that finally graduating from high school and going to college would have been a Way Out of my personal hell, a chance to finally grow into a productive member of society, or at least a chance to meet someone else to play D&D with. Alas, rather than taking the opportunity to, say, write witty articles on alternative music for the campus newspaper or learn Web design at a time when Mosaic was the state-of-the-art Web browser, I just stuck my head even further up my own ass. After all my searching, I had finally found something even better than sharpening my sword +1 while looking at the pictures of succubi in the Monster Manual.

Billing itself as "The Middle Ages as they Should Have Been," the Society for Creative Anachronism is, much like BDS&M, Wicca, and sci-fi fandom, a product of Berkeley in the '60s. The best way to explain SCA is that it's what is often referred to as a "historical recreation." However, there's an awful lot of BDS&M, Wicca, and fandom thrown in, so what this actually means is that large groups of people, most of whom (including—nay, especially—the women) look like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, dress up in ridiculous costumes and pretend they're living in made-up medieval kingdoms. It's a perfect escape from that all-too-disturbing "real world" into a happy fun land painted by pre-Raphaelites on crack. Pissed off with your janitorial job? Congratulations! You're now a Viking warrior! Are you a 300-pound woman with a beard? Congratulations! Put on a a medieval muumuu and corset your flab with a steel-belted radial tire, and you can pretend you're the sexiest thing on two hooves!

In other words, as the picture on the left demonstrates, I fit right in.

If you visit any SCA Web site, you'll see all sorts of claims as to how educational the organization is, and how they "recreate" all sorts of medieval arts and crafts like "hole digging" and "leechcraft." Don't believe it. Half of it is about the "swordfighting tournaments," where grown men put on armor they make in their basements out of pickle barrels and carpet samples and beat each other senseless with sticks until one gives up or gets sat on by one of the women. Despite the fact that it has more fat guys standing belly-to-belly and grunting than sumo wrestling, the fighting is Very Important, since the biggest badass gets to be "king," and that's when things get interesting. Much like office politics, everyone then cozies up to the alpha-male for made-up awards and titles such as "Knight of the Realm" and "Plague-Ridden Peasant Scum."

The other half of the organization, I should tell you, was the feasts. No one actually ate the food at the feasts, since it would probably kill you. Rather, this was an mainly an occasion for those same unwashed, unshaven men, smelling of unwashed pickle-barrel armor, trying to give backrubs to girls young enough to be their daughters in attempts to get them into bed (and, amazingly enough, succeeding). Meanwhile, their wives and girlfriends would sit around and make bitchy comments about each other until someone threw a temper tantrum. Considering how ridiculous the organization was, the amount of involvement people had, and the emotional stakes they placed in it, were really astounding. Most normal people have better things to worry about than whether or not you can use a Klingon bat'leh in the swordfighting tournaments.

The amazing thing is the depth of this sad delusion—I have seen people have entire conversations about things that only exist in their own heads. Much as in other innane little subcultures, there's a big debate as to who "belongs" and who doesn't. Thus, I have witnessed people wearing kilts and carrying Japanese swords castigating goth kids for wearing press-on vampire fangs. Basing your wardrobe on Highlander or telling people you're a druid is apparently perfectly OK; pretending you're a vampire isn't. Apparently, it's the line between pathos and complete lunacy.

The SCA is kind of like heroin, though: Once you come down from pretending you're someone else, pack up your pickle barrel, and go home in your '92 Hyundai Excel, you still have your shitty job, your filthy house filled with useless medieval crap and empty bank account from buying said crap, and your ugly girlfriend who you never would have hooked up with if you hadn't drunk that fifth bottle of mead at the feast. In the end, your misery is just compounded. The SCA is't a way to cope; it's escapism. It doesn't help you deal with your problems. In fact, it usually makes them worse.

The worst crime though, is that the whole thing is completely irrelevant to the real world. Becoming a Don Quixote in your own mind isn't going to get you a college degree, find you a better job, or clean up the brewing experiment that exploded in your kitchen. It also isn't going to free political prisoners in China or make the federal government stop listening to oil companies. It's just going to make you look really, really dumb, as the picture at the right demonstrates.

So why the hell did I stay in this ridiculous organization for so long?

Quite simply, I loved it. I loved getting out my frustrations by dressing up in armor and hitting people with sticks. I loved getting the attention of every woman in a room by sheer virtue of being one of the only guys who weighed less than 350 pounds and smelled better than a garbage truck. I loved going to the 2-week, 10,000-person"war" in Pennsylvania, drinking all night and fooling around with every willing girl I could get my hands on. (And believe me, plenty were willing—the motto of the place was "if you can't get laid at war, you can't get laid at all.") Shit, I even loved the required listening to the entire Manowar discography.

But mainly, it was the chicks in chainmail bikinis.

In fact, from the ages of 19 to 25, just about every girl I'd ever dated, slept with, or, hell, even kissed, I met in the SCA. Which, now that I think of it, is really pretty fucking sad. I suppose it says something for either my social skills, or exactly how loose some people's mores can get after a few belts of homebrew. Then again, I guess it makes perfect sense that a guy who thought he was Sir Galahad would wind up hooking up with women with chainmail fetishes and autographed copies of The Mists of Avalon.

(By the way, I'm not saying the girl on the left is easy, or that I even know her—If you right-click, you'll see I lifted the photo from chainmail.com, a very disturbing Web site in its own right, albeit with many more pix of this sort. Hey, credit where it's due.)

Still, some good came of it. Besides the fact that I would probably still be a virgin today if it wasn't for the SCA, I did learn some important stuff.

First off, it was like a "do-over" for high school. Ever wish for a chance to do things over? Well, the SCA was a mirror of high school, with the geeks, the jocks, the "in" crowd, and all the rest. Eventually, I got the hang of relating to other human beings, and off I went. Along with this, though, came the dawning realization that my favorite pasttime was a bit ridiculous.

Secondly, it got me into some hobbies I still enjoy today. For starters, I took up fencing—and not the SCA sort of fencing, which consists of two out-of-breath Trekkies poking at each other with car antennas, and then whining about it. I also took up horseback riding, which is a very cool thing. Screw Ecstasy and all the other chemicals people put in their bodies—you haven't lived until you've galloped a horse on a cool fall day. (Needless to say, unlike the actual Middle Ages, there isn't too much equestrian activity in the SCA. The Humane Society just won't let people that heavy get on a horse.)

Finally—and this is the scariest thing of all—it gave me some sort of direction in life. Up until then, in line with what Nice Jewish Boys were supposed to grow up to become, I had vague ideas of becoming a doctor or a lawyer. Somewhere in all the Spandex tights and pugilistic dementia from getting hit with sticks, I found I really liked history. In fact, I liked it so much that I took BAs from my school's History and Classics departments, and then went on to an MA in history at another university. All of which, I should add, has broadened my perspective considerably. Trust me, after you've seen Venice, a bunch of fanboys slugging it out with buckets on their heads on the basketball court of the local high school just doesn't cut it.

Still, there are those out there who need help. Those who, trapped in the Great American Heartland, see no way to liven up their existence, except by slowly ruining their lives with a mass hallucination.

In our next article, we'll examine a specific case I had the misfortune to witness.

For now it can be revealed.

For the first time in print, we will bring to you. . . the amazing true story of Cloak Boy.