Checking Things Out and Checking In
Or
The Day Off
I flew to Chicago with a different mindset than when I flew to Hartford. I felt more confident and relaxed.
This was slightly unexpected, inasmuch as I’ve always been a very nervous flyer. LeeAllure was very generous in helping me through my fear with a little bit of hypnosis over the phone, as I sat in a mall parking lot miles and miles from home. My work had taken me away from home, and the trip to MEEHU was in the middle of a two week stretch where I had confronted work scenarios I hadn’t encountered in years and years.
Rather than have access to my own home office, I was sleeping on my boss’s couch, struggling to meet all manner of deadlines. Lee and I had talked about her helping me with my flying issues, but our schedules never seemed to allow for it. Finally, about the day before I left, Lee and I had a very quick session over the phone.
Because I had no actual privacy I spoke to Lee while in my car parked in a shopping mall parking lot. No doubt mall security was curious about the gentleman in a suit nodding seriously while listening intently on his phone with his eyes closed. The only tell-tale sign that something unusual was happening was the occasional grin as my subconscious helped Lee with her task.
My flight to Chicago was… uneventful, for the most part. Certainly it was less surreal than my trip to Hartford (which had an escaped cat and a bobbing woman). I was given a free flight voucher for moving to an earlier flight, which was nice, though I still had to wait the extra time at Midway for my bags to catch up to me. It also meant I had to rush to make the earlier flight, which meant I had no extra time to psych myself up into my nervous flier mode. All of which turned out to be very good.
I landed in Chicago and navigated the bête noir of all Southern Californians: public transportation. I found my way, somehow, and with no small help from some pleasant Chicagoans, to the Downtown car rental. It was there I met LeeAllure.
Lee had been in town for a few days, teaching a hypnosis class for the local BDSM club. It was good to see Lee in person. In working on our book, we had probably had over 30 sessions over the course of three months, all via Skype. So we had certainly “seen” a lot of each other.
Lee has said that she doesn’t like descriptions of her, but you can find videos on her YouTube channel and pictures on her twitter feed. I can confidently tell you she looks even better in person. Also, she has a calm presence with a dash of mirth (or is it menace?) lying just underneath. She had expressed some slight trepidation about meeting people so early in the weekend, hoping that they wouldn’t try her patience by the end of the event. I had tried to mollify her by saying that this group was really friendly, and that we’d be doing a good deed by being part of the welcome wagon.
When I had first met Lee at NEEHU she practically trance-pounced me, but here at the car rental place, such a trance pounce didn’t seem appropriate. After catching up and saying hi to each other, we were rewarded with our shiny new rental, a lime green Ford Fiesta which we later christened the “Hulk-mobile.” Shortly, we were off to the John Hancock Tower through Thursday rush hour traffic.
Chicago is a beautiful city, but its citizens could use lessons on the use of turn signals and giving proper space to other cars. We wound up at “Big John” with a minimum of fuss.
We were to meet Fay, Emiliana and Sebastian on the stairs in front of the building. We had timed everything to perfection (more on that later).
Fay is terribly, impossibly short. She is a wee ball of fire- all red hair, good looks and personality. We had struck up a friendship over the previous weeks, comparing notes on being subjects and discussing how much we were looking forward to MEEHU. I had also been trying to give her occasional pep talks on dealing with a previous relationship with someone who was-shall we say- less than supportive of her hypnotic interests. (This comparing of notes had led to her looking on my wife as her personal hero. I wasn’t going to argue with that.)
Fay had brought her friend Emiliana, who is, like Fay, impossibly gorgeous, and on first meeting I can only say that I noted that she had an open, but friendly and searching face and glasses that frame a fierce intellect.
Rounding out the group was Sebastian. He’s about my age, but he’s somehow in better shape, better looking, and better read than I am, all despite being from Iowa (these are the jokes, people). He’s a writer with a writer’s gift for observation and evaluation (and nooooo that’s not self-serving at all).I could kind of tell that he was slightly grinning and bearing being among these new people, but also seemed committed to making the most of it.
We greeted each other and made our way up to the 95th floor. The vistas overlooking Chicago were breathtaking. In one direction you could see the wide expanse of Lake Michigan. In the other, the buildings of downtown gave way to the suburbs and, on a clear day, you could make out the flatness of the horizon that typifies the Great Plains. This evening, on the 95th floor, it was a clear evening.
We ordered high-end drinks (I indulged in a rich, luxurious Chocolate Martini- I thought it important to have desert first.) We made small talk and discussed what we were each expecting from the coming weekend.
Shortly thereafter, Tesdenic and her friend Jennifer joined us. Tesdenic is another gorgeous, lovely and friendly woman (poor me, I thought); we’d been having fun in the chatroom together and share a professional vocation. This was her first live event of any sort, and she, like Fay, had brought a friend for support. Like Emiliana, Jennifer had no prior interest in hypnosis, and almost none in kink of any sort, and was there to support her friend.
We drank a bit at the bar, and then walked through downtown to a restaurant down the street for dinner. Somehow, Tes, Lee and I all ordered the same dinner (more on this later).
There is something magical that sometimes happens, and I hope that you can experience it, where a group of people who meet for the first time find a connection. Not everyone in this group of 7 was into hypnosis, and we were all over the kink-scale, from professional hypnotist to first time toe-dipper. Yet somehow we found something to bind us together in such a short time; really, by the end of dinner, I knew that this was a great group of people and, unless there was some unexpected drama, this weekend was going to be fantastic.
—————–
After dinner, Lee and I drove to our hotel and I checked in.
Well, by “Check in” I mean: My name wasn’t in the system. So I gave them my confirmation number, and they found me. Except that I was listed as a “turnback.” Why was I listed as a “turnback”? Because there was a second reservation listed, for me, checking in on Friday. Which meant that, even though I had reserved a ticket in April (April 10th to be precise) and they had misplaced my reservation (even though it was in the system), and had tried to re-reserve me, I was there at 1 am with no room. Fortunately, the woman behind the desk bent over backwards (figuratively, get your minds out of the gutter) to get me a room. In this case a room with a door that didn’t always close all the way and smelled like an unsuccessful attempt had been made to hide the fact that someone had been smoking cloves in it for about three weeks, but a room nonetheless. Fortunately the nice bendy lady at the front desk gave me a fan and some air freshener, which mitigated matters somewhat.
But all of this was made up for by one fact: I had been given the perfect hypnotic room. “What room is that?” I hear you ask?
3
2
1.
Yep. 321. I placed a post-it with “….sleep,” after the room number. Dancecode told me it put him into a trance at least three times during the course of the weekend. Within an hour after finally checking in, I had formalized plans with Lee for the next day, and turned in. I was beat, I was tired, but I was so very excited about the coming weekend.
And, 7 hours in, I still hadn’t been tranced. And that was ok.
Next time: Museum! Magritte! Seurat! Monet! Entering paintings! Perfect meetings! Pynchon singlehandedly keeps the Chicago beverage industry afloat! Shows! Sisterhood! Slapping! Hypno-interrogation! The first appearance of the Hypno-Hand-Egg! May be broken into two parts! Stay tuned!
djpynchon 