Duel of the Fates

Should I not survive, I've left money in my will for someone to read this either at the wedding of Jack Cooke or the funeral of Jay Cooke, with an extra stipend if they are concurrent.  

Because the Campbell boys chose mates based on sentimental rather than logical reasons, the Campbell Clan remained childless for a quarter of a century after the birth of my sister.  She would be the one to break the drought when she announced at family Sunday dinner that a child was on the way.   Katie Aiken had pioneered the process a few months before and declared it safe, at least the child-bearing part; the child-rearing part remained undetermined.  Months later, my boy Jack was born without any hope of escaping a wicked mouth or a mind on his own, as he inherited it from dozens on either side of his genome.  

Sixteen years after his last space epic, George Lucas presented The Phantom Menace to revive his most successful franchise.  I had seen it at a theater that's now closed for the very first showing with some Millsaps kids.  Jay, despite his deep-abiding love for genre films, had not.  At Sunday dinner with grandmother, Jay declared that his firstborn would not survive this earth without a love for Star Wars, and, although he was but four years old, Jay and I should take our young padawan to see The Phantom Menace at the Northpark multiplex cinema.  

Having already seen the movie, I knew it kind of sucked.  Completely sucked, actually, except for one part where the two good Jedi had the greatest lightsaber duel yet with the evil Darth Maul.  Tickets were purchased, popcorn and cokes for three, and we entered the theater only to find that the only seats together were on the third row from the screen.  

As a child, I loved sitting in the front row as it made me feel more a part of the action.  As an adult, I learned that was actually a terrible place to sit because you have to look straight up, and it distorts your perspective on the screen.  We didn't have a great deal of choice, though, so seats were procured with Jay to the left, me to the right, and Jack nestled safely between us, or so we thought.

With Jack being in the first round of children in our social group, none of us were prepared for what it might be like.  The women seemed to have a handle on it, but we men were still determined to carry on as before, but occasionally carrying a tiny mascot with us.  It was still our practice to visit the Cherokee every Thursday for beers and sandwiches and rounds of mutual defacing and sometimes pool or video poker.  

In those days, a pretty dreadful man from Memphis decided to bring topless entertainment to Jackson, and our Thursday night adventures began to end at Tiffany's Cabaret, mere blocks south of the Cherokee.  Jay's contribution to these side-quests usually involved him asking the dancers if they ever regretted not finishing high school and why they wanted that godawful tattoo.  This practice came to an end when one member of our retinue forgot he was borrowing his wife's car on a night when he had the misfortune of winning a Tiffany's Cabaret T-Shirt in a lapdance competition.  When she found the T-shirt he drunkenly left in her car, or rather smelled it before she found it, on her way to work in her car the next day, our visits to topless joints soon came to an end.  While we may have been ready for adult entertainment, we may not have been ready for the adult responsibility of taking a four-year-old to the movies.

Although it had been nearly twenty years since the last Star Wars movie, George Lucas didn't do such a great job writing the script for his return to that universe.  Far too much of the film centers around a frog-like creature who talks like an idiot and has the unfortunate name of Jar-Jar Binks.  Jay was making the best of it, though.  Nobody ever called him Jay Jay Binks, but they could have.  He'd waited so long for more Star Wars, he was going to make the best of it, and even if the movie sucked (which it did), his progeny, the fruit of his loins, his firstborn, was there with him, experiencing this "masterpiece" with him, and that made it worth-while.

Once you're introduced to the character of Darth Maul, you know there's a pretty good chance that at least one cool scene might be ahead.  At some point, this (very cool-looking) Sith knight must do battle with the two Jedi.  I'd already told Jay how cool it was.  After enduring what seemed like days of Jar Jar Binks, Boss Nass, and a teenage Natalie Portman phoning in her lines, you could tell the one cool scene in the entire goddamn movie was coming soon.

Much of the success of the first three films was due to the score by John Williams. Returning to the Star Wars universe, he was determined to come up with something new and impressive.  Knowing in advance that there was just the one cool spot in the movie, he saved his considerable talents for that and composed a moving piece called The Duel of the Fates for the fight between the Sith Darth Maul and the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn.

With the two Jedi facing off against the horned Sith, I could see Jay's knuckles grow white as he gripped the armrest.  This was it--the only cool thing in the movie.  The Lightsaber Duel was about to commence.  Williams' score begins with an ominous choral note.  The light sabers light up with the now famous swisssssh sound.  

Among people I know, there's something of a rule that the more you want something, the less likely you are to get it.  Jay had waited sixteen years for another lightsaber duel.  He wanted so much for it to be cool.  I had told him it was cool. He'd heard the music on the radio and seen video snippets.  This was it!  The moment was now!

Just as the lightsabers first clashed with an electric spark and a bit of smoke, at the bottom of the screen, away from the considerable action on the screen, was the unmistakable figure of a completely naked four-year-old running in front of it.  Jay looked at me.  I looked at him, and we both looked down at the spot between us where Jack was supposed to be safely nestled, now an empty bucket of popcorn.  With a pained look on his face, Jay seemed to plead that, since I'd already seen this part of the movie, I might field this crisis for him.  I mentally ran down my inventory of how to handle social situations and found there was no entry for how one handles a naked four-year-old at the movies, and I turned my hands up.  

We were indoors, and there's every reason to believe that Jack would have survived unharmed had we ignored him for three minutes until we get to the part where Darth Maul gets cut in half (spoiler alert).  I would survive, and Jack would most certainly survive, but if his mother found out we let him run naked through the theater unhindered while we watched the movie, there's every reason to believe that Jay may not survive, and if he did, Jack would be an only child because Jay would spend the rest of his life sleeping on the sofa. 

Regretfully, painfully, Jay motioned, "I got this," to me and left his seat in pursuit of the naked child.  I'm sure there were times when Jay got to see the entire sequence unhindered on television.  The movie wasn't really that great, anyway.  There's just one chance to see the first Lightsaber duel in sixteen years, though, and my brother-in-law sacrificed it for his firstborn.  There would be other times and other opportunities to screw up, but for this one, Jay did the right thing.