In our last article, we took a serious anthropological look at the Society for Creative Anachronism, and how it helped me grow from a very weird, maladjusted, awkward teenager into a mostly-functional (albeit extremely twisted) young man. To recap for those just tuning in, despite all the jabs I took at it, the SCA turned out to, ultimately, have been a good experience for me. It taught me to interact with people, it provided a training ground for learning to operate in the "real" world, and it gave me an interest in history that helped to shape the course my life later took.

Of course, though I'm sure many people have benefited from the organization as I did, others used it as a way to run screaming from reality (sort of the way that college roommate you had for only one semester used ganja and the Grateful Dead). The best example of this flight from the big, scary world that I've encountered is my college flatmate, whose sad tale I shall now relate to you. To protect the innocent and certifiably insane, we shall refer not to him by his proper name, nor by his SCA nom du moyen age, but rather the name he was known as around campus: "Cloak Boy."

Now, this was no ordinary cloak he wore, not an elegant Bela Lugosi cape such as your garden-variety Goth might wear. No, it was a filthy grayish-green piece of shit that he wore everywhere, together with fringed moccasin boots, a red poofy Renaissance-style shirt, and a shapeless gray bag he put on his head and called a hat. And when we say "everywhere," we mean "everywhere": To class, to the grocery store, to the bathroom. His hair was a frizzled mess, and he had never, in his life, shaved, which gave him the aspect of a young and somewhat deranged Grizzly Adams—except for when he was wearing his glasses, when he looked more like a Hasidic Jew trying to pretend he was Robin Hood.

To be perfectly fair, ol' C.B. wore that cloak even before he joined the SCA. He had grown up in one of those godforsaken little towns where the only communication with the outside world is what comes over the TV and everyone gets married right out of high school. The sort of place where Dungeons and Dragons is taken way too seriously. I found C.B. one night in the beginning of my sophomore year, walking around the dorms in that frigging cloak. Naturally, I couldn't wait to show him my suit of armor. Our moving into a house with a bunch of other freaks was inevitable.

Though he worked in the hardware store on the corner for most of the time I knew him, at one point, Cloak Boy had originally sought admission to the university's Fine Arts department. For his portfolio, he submitted a masterwork entitled "The Mating Flight of Dragons." This was a lovingly rendered, skillfully executed, and no doubt accomplished series of pictures of, well, dragons fucking. Drawn, I should add, in chalk on black construction paper. Needless to say, he did not gain admittance to Fine Arts, and it was a shame, too. His work may not have appealed to the bourgeois, conservative taste of the faculty, but any of us could vouch for its worth. Little did those prudish deans know, but C.B. had spent long hours, at great personal risk, observing and drawing the mating flight of dragons from life. Of course, at the time, the rest of us just thought he was just staring at the washing machine and mumbling to himself.

The mating rituals of the Cloak Boy were no less bizarre. He would parade around the neighborhood is his cloak, hat, and boots until some hapless girl commented on his fashion sense. He would then regale her at great length about the Society for Creative Anachronism. If she then showed the least interest, he would stalk her until she either (1) got a restraining order, or (2) joined up. Alas, his romantic endeavors usually ended badly. One girl ran off, got pregnant by some other guy, and charged thousands of dollars to C.B.'s credit card before the thought occurred to him to cancel it. Another wound up downing most of a bottle of Jack Daniel's with one of our friends one winter evening and, consequently, deprived the poor kid of his virginity. Girlfriend #3, I wound up going out with myself for about six months.

Leather, though, was Cloak Boy's real passion. I don't mean S&M; I mean just accumulating bits of dead cow skin. Instead of spending money on sensible things like, say, food or rent, he would run to Tandy Leather to buy endless piles of leather. There was never any rhyme or reason behind his purchases; the sole apparent objective was to decorate our living room with the mortal remains of dozens of cows. This, in a house that was none too clean—I still remember the time C.B. tried to unclog the bathtub with concentrated sulfiric acid, thus melting the porcelain. Filthiest of all was the untreated deer skin that he swore he was going to cure and make into something someday, but which wound up decorating our basement for two years, smelling like cat piss and staring at us with lifeless eyes whenever we went down to do our laundry, as if pleading, "Please! Even dumb animals deserve more postmortem dignity that this!"

Every so often, while we were sitting around watching "Babylon 5," C.B. would get inspired. He would take a perfectly good piece of leather, cut a hole in the middle for his head, and parade around all week in his new medieval costume, which was, basically... a piece of leather with a hole cut in it for his head. When he acquired an old Singer sewing machine, his projects grew more elaborate: He would get an insane look in his eyes, turn a piece of deceased bovine over in his hands, and disappear into his workroom. An hour of banging and whirring would commence, and then he would triumphantly emerge, beaming:

"Look!" he would proclaim. "I made a spice rack! Out of leather!"

It was for the first of his girlfriends that Cloak Boy began constructing the suit of leather armor. Why, I don't know; perhaps he thought she might enjoy the SCA "swordfighting," even though she was 5'3" and weighed maybe 100 pounds sopping wet; maybe he simply wanted to have someone dressed more bizarrely than he. Slowly, this project took shape. Trapped indoors by a Buffalo winter, we watched in horror as the Bride of Cloak Boy stood in our living room, soaked to the skin in cold water, while he boiled pieces of leather in hot wax and pressed them into shape over her body. He had no sense of design; what he came up with had no parallels in history, or even in BDS&M. In the end, it looked like a cross between the outfit the Gimp wore in Pulp Fiction and a Godzilla costume made out of shiny green leather.

Honestly, I don't blame her for running off.

Perhaps worse than the desecration of leather, though, were the chainmail bikinis. The common obsession of all neo-medievalists, I have found, is turning the wire from perfectly good clothes hangers into little rings, and then spending countless hours linking the rings together with pliers into do-it-yourself armor. Of course, ol' C.B. didn't have the follow-through to make a whole shirt: What he wound up with was a wifebeater made out of chainmail. This, he wore over the red poofy shirt but concealed under his trusty cloak, just in case he was attacked by orcs on his way to buy milk. (On formal occasions, the chainmail was replaced by the piece of leather with the hole cut in it for his head.)

C.B. soon discovered that he could use chainmail to stalk talk to girls in a whole new way: by making bikinis out of the stuff (it was, after all, much easier than making whole shirts) and trying to sell them. He also turned some of the leather into suede bikinis. He tried to sell them everywhere, too: on consignment in the head shop, in the local goth bar, to the hippie chicks at the Rusted Root concert at the school. Needless to say, his success in the suede-bikini venture was somewhat less than spectacular. He tended to make more money making manacles and whips for the local S&M community.

At last, Cloak Boy went completely over the edge. Fired from the hardware store—the hardware store ON THE CORNER OF OUR FUCKING BLOCK—for being constantly late for work (for, as you may have realized, C.B. didn't live in our universe, but the parallel universe of Cloak Boy Land, where the clocks run differently), he decided to become an entrepreneur. With a loan from his father, he rented a storefront down the block from the hardware store and filled with the assorted crap he had accumulated: the pieces of leather with the holes in them for your head, the Godzilla armor, the "Mating Flight of Dragons." The suede bikinis. The leather spice rack. There was a tree stump with his Viking throwing axes stuck into it in the middle of the store. A stereo that seemed to always play either Concrete Blonde, or the soundtrack to "Conan the Barbarian" (C.B.'s favorite movie, which he made us all watch at least once a week). The whole thing was absolutely filthy, and in nothing in any sort of order. People would come in, look around, and open their mouths to speak, close them again, look some more, and then walk out without a word.

Needless to say, he went bankrupt really, really quickly.

As for me, I graduated and went down to New York for the summer before starting grad school in Boston. The last I heard of Cloak Boy, he was living back in the small town he originally hailed from, except for occasional forays into the city to sell manacles to the local S&Mers. Thankfully, he has been getting better. He no longer wears the cloak everwhere; usually, he saves it for special occasions such as SCA meetings, Halloween, and bar mitzvahs. I'm glad for that; I really liked the guy.

The reader may think that the entire purpose of this exercise was to poke fun at a poor lost soul. Yet, there's a moral to the story. Cloak Boy, and the SCA taught me a valuable lesson. Culture is not, and should not be, something that's fed to you by the TV; rather, it's something you should create yourself, for the benefit of the people around you. It's easy for people people raised on sitcoms and Cosmo to make fun of the freaks in their silly costumes. Hell, I've been on both sides of the fence. But I also picked up the idea of rejecting consumer mass culture in favor of something that comes from the ground up. Something real. Something authentic. Something completely insane.

What Cloak Boy taught me by example was that you have to find a middle ground between the refusal to conform and the necessities of living in the real world.

Because if you don't, well, then, all you have is ugly chicks in chainmail bikinis.