The Ballad of Rayleigh Raccoon

September 9, 2006; 5:14 AM

Long ago, I was Rayleigh Raccoon, a Chuck-E-Cheese-like character who wore a clunky mascot suit and went to various elementary schools and church picnics to teach kids about elastic atom-photon collisions. This experience came in handy when I went to a laser tag arena. The laser beams were made visible by the abundant fog machines, and I found myself explaining why this was to all of my friends. 

The laser tag arena is a place of walls and ramparts, aglow with black light and fog machines, so the laser beams can Rayleigh scatter off the fog and be seen traveling through the air. The laser tag arena issues vests with sensors on the chest, and on the small of the back, and on the shoulders, with a small pistol hard-wired to the vest. You can fire twenty times and get hit ten before you have to return to your base and reset the system, in that time, the enemy can get double points for hitting you. Shooting targets in the enemy’s base gets you ten times the points of hitting the enemy, and the team with the most points after twenty minutes is deemed the winner.

However, the kids we were playing against turned out to be trained pro-fessionals, whom had their timing down, attacking in waves, each in a shorter interval than the last. The end result was that our base was being perpetually attacked. Seeing the bleakness of our situation, I have everyone press on forward, which those kids did not plan for or anticipate. Eventually their command system breaks down and they can no longer function as a unit. As we saunter into the dis-traught enemy base, I use a little trick taught to me back in high school by Scott MacGarvie, a bizarre bodily contortion that allowed all the sensors to be covered simultaneously, even the shoulders. One would think that the human collarbone would prevent such a position... but experience tells me otherwise.

Well, we soundly trounced those kids. They were all red-faced and watery-eyed at the news of their defeat, but disappointment is a part of life, and I was there to teach them this valuable lesson. Well, as it turns out these kids just so happened to be the contenders for the national championship, and we took away their right to compete for the title.

The national championships took place each year in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was less than an hour’s drive from my apartment. I was only allowed to have one person on my team, and I chose my friend Mike who needed a reason to use up his accumulated sick days before quitting his job.

The arena in Cincinnati, Ohio was nothing like the one I was used too. The arena was well-lit, had a huge habitrail-like tube maze over on the one side, completely away from everything. There was no fog, and no ramparts, just foam puzzle mats covering the floor.

The opponents were these snotty rich kids, who’s parents made them feel special by driving them all of the United States to various laser tag contests. Our referee was J.D. Roth, the host of Fun House, a show which is tragically forgotten in favor of the vastly inferior Legends of the Hidden Temple. Still, Legends of the Hidden Temple was better than Masters of the Maze, which now I think about it, was also hosted by J.D. Roth. Or at least it was until he was replaced by Mario Lopez after he left Bayside High, and subsequently fell from grace.

            Mike and I stand at our recharge station, and keep regenerating as the preppy kids advance and deplete their ammo. Then we ran like lightning and annihilated their base.

The kids whine, and cry, and slap each other, neither of them taking responsibility for, or attempting to remedy the situation. While they do that, Mike and I repeatedly reload and attack their base, earning points until we reach the point where it is mathematically impossible to lose. At this point Mike sees that a tile of the arena’s drop ceiling we see a mass of skee-ball tickets roughly the size of a sofa, rubber banded together. I climb on Mike’s shoulders while J.D. Roth tired in vain to pull the former champs apart, and we sneak off with the skee-ball tickets.

            To not seem suspicious, Mike and I go to the skeezy video arcade outside the laser tag arena and play skee-ball for approximately ten hours. In that time we talk and catch up, because we haven’t seen each other much since I moved away, and in the process, we both get really, really, good at skee-ball. They had these clear bumper stickers that said “CAUTION” in all caps, with a black oval outline. I bought enough of these to wallpaper my mom’s house. The management thought this to be suspicious, and we were pulled in by security for questioning regarding our alleged theft of skee-ball tickets. However, security camera footage of us playing skee-ball virtually non-stop for ten hours makes us appear legit.

            Returning to my office, since I have to be productive sometime, I start thinking about one of my decorations. I had a large picture of George W. Bush hanging in the window with the number 666 written across his forehead, hanging in the window where tour groups pass by no less than twice a day. Then any pretentious political conservatives and their children would be scared off. If the pretentious political conservatives couldn’t make their way in Oxford, Ohio, then they couldn’t fit in at any college. This way the children of the pretentious political conservatives would not obtain education and high paying jobs, and they would starve, and their children would starve. Seeing what a shining utopia Oxford had then become, this plan would spread across the nation, eliminating the pretentious political conservative gene.

            I figure it would look better as a tessellated mural, and I run the idea by Judy, the department secretary, when she told me:

“I don’t know about that Ryan, the university’s tessellation artist will need several weeks to make template, as he only makes tessellated murals of Lewis Black and Shel Silverstein.”

Disenchanted, I drive off with Jenny (the girl I was dating at the time) to a mall parking lot to spend the night in my new Toyota Yaris, as a mall parking lot is the cheapest hotel one is likely to find. Two other Yarises (Yari?) of the same light blue color park next me, despite the fact that I am the only car in the entire parking lot.

            I notice the one had gull-wing doors. I mention this to my co-worker Nick, who was honeymooning one Yaris over from me, and he confirms that it was an option that the dealer didn’t tell me about. To make it worse, I knew the guy with the gull-wing doors. I used to work with the one guy. He used to be Anti-Stokes Raccoon, and he would help me explain the inelastic cases of atom-photon collisions. One day he walked off the job, citing our low hourly wage, and that the whole ordeal was itself stupid and lame. He -- and he alone -- is the sole reason the public is so damned ignorant about the Raman effect. Stokes Raccoon couldn’t handle the burden all by his lonesome, and we all eventually went our separate ways.

             “Doc! There’s not enough road!”

            “Where we’re going, we need roads?”

            “What, hell?” I told him before exploding his head, all Tom Savini style with a .44 Magnum, then tossing his headless body out of the driver’s seat and driving away in his car. I’m pretty sure I forgot about Jenny.