A gloomy, rainy night in Philadelphia in the late Eighties. The trip down from Troy hadn't been the most pleasant, but Scanner and Audrey had done their best to get us through the wilds of New Jersey in one piece. Fortunately everything else had gone smoothly, and we had successfully negotiated the Scylla of Philcon registration and Charybdis of the Adam's Mark Hotel reservation desk. The hassles behind us, we were all in the mood to enjoy a night of partying.
We'd found our way up to the con suite at first, and then somehow gotten separated. Scanner was off discussing systems programming, video cameras, Eastern philosophy, or some combination of the three, with a group of techno fans from Boston. Zed was nowhere to be seen, and I'd been hanging out with Pomru, Jan and Piper until my attention had been distracted by a cute girl in the corner who seemed to be under full-scale harassment/boredom assault by a brace of anime geeks. While I tried my luck at defusing the situation, Pomru and the girls decided to try their luck at some of the other suites on the 23rd floor.
I managed to extract the babe from the clutches of the two dweebs, but after that it turned out we didn't have too much to talk about, or maybe she was just tired of being the center of attention. She headed off to the elevators, and I got myself a Coke and hung around quietly for a bit, waiting for the next development. It didn't take long for that to come along, as Jan and Piper returned with Pomru in tow, all three bubbling over with excitement.
"You have to see this!" said Piper. I asked what was the big deal, but all three insisted on maintaining silence until we had left the con suite. I followed them down the hallway a few doors, and as Piper knocked on one, the reason for both their enthusiasm and secrecy became clear, for within was a party that was clearly more lavish and sumptuously equipped than the con suite could dream of being. Even of the few faces I could see through the half-open door, I recognized a fair number from various programming events; obviously they'd managed to crash a party thrown by one of the publishing companies.
A portly, bearded fellow at the door who seemed to be functioning as bouncer smiled at Piper. She said "See? I told you I'd be back." Pomru trailed along behind her, beneath the doorkeeper's notice in more than one sense, as his head scarcely cleared the guy's belt buckle. I got a more suspicious reception, as the bouncer shifted his bulk to block my entrance.
"I haven't seen you in here before." As I was fumbling for a snappy comeback, Jan pulled a butterfly knife from her pocket and began flipping it open and closed.
"He's with me," said Jan. The bouncer looked Jan up and down, seemed to do a few quick mental calculations, and said, "Okay, but I'll have to see some I.D."
As I was still underage at the time and had never bothered to get a fake I.D., I figured that the only option open to me was to simply brazen it out. I opened my wallet with a flourish and waved it in the guy's face. He kept one eye on Jan, who was now cleaning her nails with the knife, and deliberately misread my birthdate and waved us all inside.
Once we entered the party proper and I got a good look at the surroundings, I was duly impressed. The crowd was about what you'd expect from the publishing world -- authors, editors, and various hangers-on, but overall a distinctly different mix from what you'd find at the average con suite. For one thing, the vast majority of the attendees seemed to understand and embrace the concepts of proper dress and regular bathing. For another, the male-to-female ratio was much more even than among the regular con-goers. I was so busy gawking at some of the babes across the room that I almost literally bumped into one who was walking over towards the refreshments table.
As I apologized to the young woman, she looked me over and said, "I've seen you around, haven't I?"
"You probably have," I replied, truthfully enough -- she'd been on one of the panels I'd attended that morning, the ever-popular "Gems From The Slushpile" reading. "I've been just bouncing from party to party so far."
Still trying to place me, she asked, "You're an author?"
"Yeah, but not published yet."
"Oh." This effectively ended the conversation for her. She turned on her heel and walked off across the room to where a well-known, and quite frequently published, author was telling jokes and pinching the butts of about half a dozen of the young editorial babes. Well, if that's her idea of a good time, I thought, she's welcome to it.
I looked around to see what the rest of our party was up to. Pomru was nowhere to be seen at the moment, Piper was in one of the conversational circles, and Jan was making herself a heaping sandwich from the buffet. I decided to scarf up some food myself, and ambled over to the table.
The buffet for the party was quite well supplied, with no end of sandwich meats, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, and various dips. But the truly impressive part was the centerpiece: an enormous pineapple in the center of a circle of coconuts, kiwi and other tropical fruit. This pineapple was big enough that it probably won a blue ribbon at the county fair, if there are county fairs in Hawaii. Sitting on the table, its top fronds reached higher than my head, and indeed almost brushed the ceiling.
"How's that for refreshment?" I said to Jan.
Jan nodded. "I'd love some pineapple. Should we take it?"
"Well, I guess you could take a chunk out, but it seems a shame to spoil the display."
A devilish grin began to steal across Jan's face. "No, not here. Just take it. Out." She nodded towards the door.
"You're kidding." Jan's grin got wider. "You're not kidding."
I rubbed my chin and pondered for a bit. "So if we were going to abduct this pineapple..." I looked it over, mentally gauging the weight. "One of us would have a hard time carrying it. Both of us together could do it, but someone'd have to hold the door open."
"Piper could do that."
"Right. But I don't think the rest of these folks would just step aside and let us waltz out the door with our prize. If we had some sort of distraction..."
It might have ended there, because even if Jan had come up with some sort of scheme to draw the attention of the other party-goers away from us, I don't think I would have been willing to go along with it. Jan has different ideas than I do about how much chaos it's acceptable to cause in a public place. But there's something about a con that tends to warp the laws of probability, especially where Jan, Piper and the furball are concerned. Just as I was concluding, not without a secret feeling of relief, that we wouldn't be able to pull off the heist, I noted a commotion on the other side of the room.
A bunch of the editorial babes were giggling and squealing over something, and I picked up various exclamations from their direction: "He's so cute!" "I want to rub his belly!" "Is that real fur?" "Let me hold him next!" To my horror, and even more so to his, at the center of this fracas was our very own orange furball, now the recipient of much more attention than he'd bargained for. I saw Piper at the edge of the group, trying to edge her way in and get a hold of Pomru before he succumbed to this overdose of affection. Piper shot a glance towards Jan and myself, and we nodded and indicated the exit. So Piper thought she was prepared for what we were going to do, but there were still some surprises in store.
As Piper took a firm hold of Pomru and said "Excuse me, but he's mine," Jan and I bracketed the table, got a good grip on the bottom half of the pineapple from both sides, and hefted it off the center of the buffet. Piper made a dash for the door with Pomru in tow, pursued by the gaggle of editorial babes, as Jan and I made the best sideways run we could with our burden, interposing ourselves between Piper and her pursuers. The shock of seeing their way blocked by two fans and a giant fruit was enough to momentarily stun the group into confusion, and in that crucial moment Jan and I hot-footed it for the door.
It didn't take long for the crowd to recover their wits and realize that we were making off with both Pomru and the prize pineapple, and Jan and I realized that our survival might depend on setting the new record for the twenty-yard pineapple carry to the elevator. Fortunately for us, our path of escape took us past the main entrance to the con suite, where a few more fans caught sight of the most unusual procession and stepped out into the hall for a better look, thus further hindering the pursuers from the publishers' party. By incredible good fortune, an elevator was open when we reached the end of the hall, and all five of us (Jan, Piper, Pomru, the pineapple and myself) slammed into the back wall of the elevator to the cheers of the surrounding fans. The door was just closing as the irate editors and publishers reached the elevator bank, and Jan already had her knife out and was carving chunks from the pineapple and passing them out to all present.
We'd been looking forward to having some fun with the pineapple once we got down to the lower floors, but Pomru was so frazzled from the experience that he immediately took a hot bath, and Piper spent the rest of the evening nursing him back to health. Jan and I did take most of the pineapple down to the lower lobby of the hotel, where we passed out pieces to all and sundry. We got a few dirty looks from some of the pros as they wandered through, but Jan still had her knife, which is good for carving up more than food, and Scanner was getting the whole thing on video, so they probably figured it was more trouble than it was worth. Which, ironically enough, was what I'd thought about taking the pineapple in the first place, but then again, sometimes you have to decide to live a little, especially at Philcon.
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