By Andrew Grossman

The cranberry juice sloshed invitingly into the glass. The bartender dropped in two ice cubes, too few to sufficiently chill the juice, but just enough to splash me good. I could tell he was sick of me coming in every night with my usual sob story.

“Look,” he said, “it’s not like you woke up one day and suddenly the entire country was back in the middle ages.”

“Oh, really, well dig this” (those last three words were lifted directly from the lyrics of “Everybody Sings the Blues”), I said directly into his mug (yes, he was holding a mug in front of his face). Then I proceeded to tell him my story:

I knew a man named Bart. He was a nice guy. Unprepossessing, as it were. He had a lovely wife named Cindy. Bart had a blue Honda motorcycle that he liked to ride from downtown into the open countryside on weekends. Cindy liked to ride behind him with her hands around his midsection. They both worked in the financial field. What I’m getting at here is that they were quintessentially normal people.

One day over dinner Bart announced to me that from now on he wanted to be known as Bart de Kalamazoo.

“Come again?” I said.

“You heard me,” he said, “and I mean beginning right now.”

Why lose a friendship over a small detail like this? The next thing out of my mouth was a convoluted sentence that ultimately took the form of an address to “Bart de Kalamazoo.”

“And my wife’s name is Lady Cynthia,” he demanded.

Yes, yes, of course, of course, I agreed.

“And we don’t live at 109 Waverly Drive, NW. We live in Kalamazoo Castle. The backyard is actually a jousting arena and the picket fence is a forty-foot-high stone wall.”

No, I wouldn’t agree to that. If his fence was a castle wall, then that meant my wife and I were serfs, since we lived two doors down. One may build one’s self up, but not if it means knocking your neighbors down.

And so I found myself in his backyard on a large horse draped in armor. I mean the horse was draped in armor. I refused to put the stuff on because I was claustrophobic, but noted that Bart did not suffer such problems. I was holding about a ten-foot-long pole that tapered out from my handhold and then tapered down until it reached a point somewhere on the horizon. Did people say “it’s go time” in medieval Europe?

When Lady Cynthia dropped her lace handkerchief, Bart shouted “For King Richard!” and started his charge.

Despite his menacing look, I remained more frightened of my own horse. I felt like I was standing on the ledge of a four-story-high building and the building was tipsy. Retreat, however, was not an option … because that would require staying on the horse.

In front of me was Bart bearing down (becoming medieval had seemed to give him more focus), to either side of me was a George Foreman Grill (on the left) and bags full of little knickknacks (to the right), because you have more space for stuff when you move into a castle. Behind me was the horse’s tail, which felt to be armored when it hit me in the face.

“What happened next?” the bartender pleaded.

Suffice it to say that I am now known as the Squire de Bart de Kalamazoo.