Lucky Pants

"These are my lucky pants," Nigel said to me.

I looked this strangely-garbed man up and down. He was attired in a pseudo-pirate fashion; much of the outfit was of traditional pirate standards, but it was thrown off by the occasional modern touch. There was the rag on his head, the long and calculatedly dirty hair, the eyeliner, and the poofy shirt. But then there were the shoes. And the cargo shorts. This was what Nigel looked like every time that i saw him. You know when your parents bought you all those fancy Lego kits, but you almost never built them by the instructions and you always always always traded the little people parts between sets? Nigel's kind of like if you took the head off of the captain of the Skull's Eye Schooner and stuck it on one of the townsfolk.

Nigel is one of the many people that i meet up with annually in Indianapolis, at the Nerd Jamboree that is GenCon. I always make it a point to say hello, if even for only a few minutes out of the year, for exactly the reason of conversations like this. It's not always easy. Nigel's a popular guy in a big exhibition hall.

"Lucky pants?" i inquired. The shorts had a ragged tear that ran straight from the leg hole up to slightly left of center of his crotch. The gash was held together by a leather cord, strung alternately from side to side through further holes punched through the fabric. They looked more like his unfortunate pants than his lucky pants.

"Yeah!" he went on enthusiastically. "See, i've always liked these pants. But one day i noticed that they were starting to develop a hole right about here." He pointed to the top of the rip, just off center from his crotch. "I was so disappointed! But it wasn't going to keep me from wearing my pants.

"As time went on, the hole got bigger. One day, this girl saw the hole in my pants, so she just stuck both of her index fingers in there and ripped it open and gave me a blowjob!"

Me and my small band of geeks laughed merrily at his tale, but Nigel was eying me in a peculiar manner. When the laughter stopped, he pulled a knife.

"Come here," he commanded.

Suddenly i was a little nervous. "What? No."

"Come here," he said, more forcefully.

"No! I don't want to!" See, i knew what he was up to. I was rather fond of the shorts i was wearing myself.

His eyes got really big and a little angry-looking. He started making exaggerated gestures with his hands. "COME OVER HERE, RIGHT NOW! I'm doing you a favor!"

I was pushed toward this knife-wielding pirate by one of my so-called friends. With my pants within his grasp, he stuck a finger in my belt loop and pulled me toward him. He then proceeded to cut a hole in my pants, just to the right of my crotch.

"There! Now you've got lucky pants too!"

The next time that i saw Nigel, it was the fourth day of GenCon the following year and i had not been able to locate him throughout the entire convention. I had been worried that maybe he hadn't shown up, but suddenly, i ran across him in a hallway, in conversation with somebody else. I happened to be wearing the same pants.

"Nigel!" i called, striding briskly up to him. He turned to see who this interloper was. He didn't recognize me at first; not that i so much expect him to, like i said he's a popular guy and i'm sure he has bizarre, otherworldly conversations with lots of strange gamers for four straight days every single year. I extended my hand. "I need to thank you for the best sex of my whole life!"

"Uh...um, you're welcome..." he stammered. I took a quick, exaggerated glance down toward my own crotch. When i looked back up, i saw Nigel doing exactly what i wanted: making an involuntary, reflexive check to see exactly what i was looking at. Once he saw my pants, he burst out into an uncontrollable fit of riotous laughter, because my pants, too, were torn all the way down the leg and sewn back together crudely with a length of leather cord.