The Moustache Club of America Attends Wizard World Chicago 2004: The Greatest Thing That Has Ever Happened and Don’t You Forget It
“Wuzzat?”
Pass the compressed air, would you? I need to die my brain before someone bothers to read this and commit me.
I was unsure whether or not I’d be able to attend the convention at all, right up until about two hours before my flight was to leave. At that point (two or so hours before takeoff) I decided that no news was good news (in this case, my attorney was supposed to call me at some point during the day to let me know if I’d be able to leave the state; he never called) and caught a ride to “RIA,” as it’s abbreviated.
Once at the airport, I was issued my boarding pass by an exceptionally obnoxious United employee. She had red hair and freckles and was quite short with just about everyone. “Yeah, I can help you,” she’d say with a smile before appending to her statement, “Just as soon as I’m done with this customer right here.” She was “saucy,” you might say. I, on the other hand, would say she was a bitch and leave it at that.
At any rate, I took my boarding pass and my two carry-on bags and made my way to the gate or terminal or whatever it’s called. The “airport geography” or whatever you’d like to call it has always been quite confusing for me. I suppose the terminal is the building and the gate is where you wait for your flight, but who really knows? What I meant to say is that I arrived at the security checkpoint, which filled me with no small amount of trepidation.
“Resonant trepidation,” Berkman observed.
“How would you rate the convention as a whole?” Neville Copenhagen asked with his legs crossed and his right foot jerking about in a manner that could be considered vaguely homosexual. “Tell us,” he requested breathlessly.
Powell, who’d been trampled underfoot like the flavorless salt of the earth, essayed a response in the form of a pathetic belch. He looked up with bleary, drug-reddened eyes and smiled a sick smile. “Oh, it was a real success alright.”
“A success?”
Powell nodded and in so doing fell from his chair and onto the floor. He laughed, vomited and added, “It knocked me down even more pegs… still more pegs! Ha,” he dry-heaved and then wondered, “Will the fall ever end?”
“That’s a tough question,” the balding “Golden Age” specialist commented after I’d posed a question that has busied the minds of “war comic” fans since the dawn of time. Or at least the dawn of comic bookdom. “Nick Fury had the Infinity Formula — which, of course, negated or at least, uhm,” he paused to twist his moustache for courage or something, “Retarded the, ahm, the aging process.”
“Right,” I said with a nod that indicated that I had in fact understood.
“Unless we’re talking about Sgt. Fury circa Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos,” the Golden Age Comic Dealer appended to his statement. “In which he was just a regular guy, so the playing field — ”
“Or battlefield,” Berkman interjected with a real smug bastard of a smile and an equally loathsome chuckle.
The “Golden Age” specialist, who was also the Golden Age Comic Dealer, laughed. “Yes, that’s true. But anyway,” he was all business again, “I think Rock would take him. Even though DC went to great lengths to — ”
“Or at least short lengths,” I interjected with smile that would’ve been smug if it had in its possession a pair of testicles and a chuckle that was every bit as emasculated.
“Would you stop that?” the Golden Age Comic Dealer/”Golden Age” specialist hissed. “I’m trying to answer your question, you know. It’s common courtesy — ”
“Yeah, that’s pretty fuckin’ uncommon in this awful goddamned day and age,” The Chief said with more bitter sarcasm than a Friars Club Roast of Chevy Chase.
Powell shook his head confusedly. He did that pretty often. Georgiy, meanwhile, was grinning like the kid who’s stroking the head of the cat who’s just eaten (“polished off,” as we say in Schenectady, NY) the canary. “Ha ha ha, you am right The Chief,” Georgiy agreed as soon as Powell had finished shaking his head. Naturally, if Powell had nodded in agreement with The Chief, Georgiy would’ve done… well, god knows what because he always agreed with The Chief. Always. But he always sided with anyone who was attempting to crush Powell’s spirit, too. Christ, what “a total chaos,” as one observer put it.
“A total chaos?” the puzzled “con-goer” repeated.
“Right, right,” Danny Smith said as he molested his knit shirt-covered cow udder of a chest with his book of Wil Wheaton/Crispin Glover sketches. But they were sketches of “Uncle Willie” Wheaton and “Dad/George McFly” Crispin Glover on the set of the 1970s television adventure-program “Land of the Lost,” you see.
“He’s fighting the Sleestak!” Smith squealed delightedly as he touched himself. “Crispin Glover’s fighting the Sleestak!”
“Yes, resonant,” Berkman said as he stewed over a recent dumping at the hands of some young thing who studied cultural studies.
“I don’t know how you do things down in Bumfuck, Virginia,” Wrestling Superstar The Virgil said as he sprang to his feet with the all the agility you’d expect from a washed-up pro-wrestler with a baboon head.
“I didn’t mean to offend you, sir,” Powell said. “I just wanted to know the, uh… what the, uh… correlation between comic books and, uhm… wrest… uh… sports entertainment was… er, is… I really — ”
“Oh, an interview, is that it?” Wrestling Superstar The Virgil (later known as “Vincent,” ostensibly) snarled. He pounded his fist on the flimsy particleboard card table to better express his otherwise inarticulate rage. “You wanna interview me?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Powell answered.
Virgil immediately flipped the table over, seized Powell by the collar of his $12 knit shirt and barked, “I get paid $20,000 an interview by the New York Times and the Chicago Song (sic) Times! You heard’a that? You got twenty G’s, son?”
I felt as if I’d soon be “body slammed,” so I gave myself over to the task of shining Virgil’s boots, as was the stipulation of our “grudge match,” which was held in a steel cage. That fucker beat me from pillar to post for a good twenty minutes before pinning me for “the long three.” I lost a pint of blood that night. Can you believe that? A pint of blood.
“Remembering, kids,” Georgiy said as I prepared to board the plane with a quarter-ounce of dank bud in my jockey shorts. He pointed a skeletal finger in my face and enjoined me, “You are the representing of the Moustache Publishers on this now so you must not to being a real pest, you know?”
Powell scratched his genitals and nodded. “Right. I’m here to do a job.”
Georgiy shook his head and sighed. “You aren’t have not listening? Yes. You are the hopeless of a starry’s night in my country’s darkening sky, you know? Wow you are.”
Powell smiled dumbly.
“You aren’t have done by in the story, okay?” Georgiy asked, a pained expression on his hollow face.
“This is where it all happens, kid,” Berkman said as we cruised down some godforsaken highway somewhere between Sherylville, Schererville, Merrillville and Valparaiso, all of which/whom were in Indiana. Still are, as a matter of fact. “This is the America your father sold Bibles for.”
Indeed, my father was quite fond of “Buffalo Wild Wings” and “Starbucks” and “Panera Bread Co.” and so on. Why drink in a bar where the men drink whiskey and eat their own shit or eat the contents of a coffee filter or eat a loaf of bread drenched in expired mustard when you can drink light/lite beer and eat microwave hot wings in a karaoke bar or suck down an ice cold mocha latte peddled by geeks with goatees or eat gourmet bread so small that a half-pound of it wouldn’t fill the stomach of an emaciated hummingbird? My father didn’t know and neither do I. Then again, I’m a brick of hash being baked into a cake by a kid in coke-bottle glasses, so feel free to smoke what’s left of me.
“That kid?” Berkman asked as he pointed in Powell’s direction. The latter had fled the scene like the scared little girl that he was and always, always will be. “No, I wouldn’t say I really know him. He’s just some bump-on-a-log that corporate saddled me with.”
“Corporate?” (The) Virgil asked with a furrowed brow. He licked his sizeable lips (which were riddled with minor burns, no doubt the result of smoking crack from a pipe fashioned out of a discarded bottle) for moisture before adding, “What’s corporate?”
“Oh, the bosses,” Berkman said, “The bigwigs.”
“Oh,” Virgil said with a nod. “Don’t know about those. I call my own shots these days, you know?”
I figure I’m more mature than most people in the sense that I’ve been cognizant of my own worthlessness from a very early age. It takes a lifetime for some men to realize they bring absolutely nothing to the table.
ROSEMONT, IL – A convention was held at the Donald E. Stevens Convention Center this weekend — a comic book convention. That’s right. Rosemont is now the official home of the annual “Wizard World Chicago” media event.
The convention, the attendees of which were almost uniformly male, featured panels, booths and other assorted displays dealing with comic books. “Fanboys,” as they call themselves, could also check out some new video games by leading developers, get personalized sketches from popular comic book artists, eat bad nachos and talk to celebrities like some bitch from the latest Star Wars picture and sports superstar Virgil.
“I won’t talk about any, uh, ‘cornelation’ (sic) between, uh… the wrestling and comics,” Virgil (or “The Virgil” as he was heard to refer to himself from time to time), a professional wrestling great, persisted in saying, even after being paid a million dollars US in cocaine and hookers.
“Are you ready to take your picture?” Dazza asked with the sort of phony smile favored by tiny women with grossly “enhanced” breasts and whose lone talent seems to be the ability to lubricate themselves several times a minute with foul-smelling tanning spray.
“Picture?” Powell mumbled in reply. “Uh… I have a camera.”
Dazza gave Powell a bit of a dumb look, then gestured at her portly photographer, who had a Spectra-brand Polaroid camera hanging from around his neck and whom she paid with fellatio. “He’ll take our picture.”
Powell, who was even more bleary-eyed than normal, leaned on the table and wondered what the hell was going on.
“Only fifteen bucks,” Dazza continued, though she’d now “taken her show on the road,” so to speak, by which I mean that she realized Powell was at death’s doorstep and could not, therefore, hand over fifteen bucks for anything at all. “Come on, guys. Who wants to take a picture?” she whined.
On our way back I asked, “What do you say to, uh… what do y’all say to some, uhm… beers or something? Wanna get some carbombs, Smith?”
“Oh, he only drinks fuzzy navels,” Berkman quipped as he operated the automobile without ever once keeping even a single eye on the road.
“I don’t know, guys,” Smith said in the strangest goddamned voice I’ve ever heard, “Why don’t we just watch a DVD or something? We’ll watch a DVD and drink some soda — it’ll be great.”
I laughed, and I know why but I don’t really know why, you know? I’m not trying to be philosophical or anything, either. It’s just that I don’t know the right words to use. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it was funny to me because it was a very naive and innocent thing to say, but I don’t know why someone’s naiveté and innocence should be funny.
“We’re looking for the last three issues of the Detective Death pulp from the seventies, do you have it?” Berkman enquired on both his and my own behalf. “It was written by a fella named Jacks.
“I don’t think so,” the lispy comic peddler replied half-heartedly.
“Edward I. Jacks,” Powell added once his pushcart of a brain had caught up with traffic on the conversation expressway. “Eddy, they called him.”
“Never heard of it,” the comic dealer yawned.
“Goddamn it, man!” barked the man in the white jacket with a smile for every occasion. He beat his fists on the glass counter, breaking it and cutting his hands all to shit in so doing. “Scrape the dime-bins for it, then!”
The effete comic pusher shrunk behind the counter.
While I was killing some time in the big city (which I’m told is Chicago, IL’s world-famous nickname) before my flight home, I had a great conversation with a female bartender in a downtown bar called Lloyd’s or Lloyd’s Chicago or something. Here it is, transcribed from the recording I made with a handheld digital something or other:
“Another drink?”
“Yes please.”
[Ambient noise.]
“Here ya go.”
“Thanks.”
[Ambient noise.]
“So I was thinking … Uh … I think humankind is a cosmic metaphor for, uhm … For God’s existence.”
[Laughs.] “Oh really?”
“I think, uh … By the way, I’ve been, uh … I’ve been dressed down a lot up here for just coming out and talking to people like this, you know? I mean, that’s how it is, uh … Where I’m from.”
“Oh, you’re not from around here?”
“No, I’m from the S — ”
“It was a joke.” [Laughs.] “You must be from North Carolina or something.”
“Virginia.”
“Oh, I was close.”
“Yeah. Uhm, anyway, I think everyone is the, uh, worldly manifestation of every feeling God’s ever, uh, felt. I mean, we think of them as ‘real people,’ uh … We think of ourselves as real people and, uhm, with multiple, uh … [indistinct] But a god would have to be a more complex being than us, so it should make sense that he’d have more complex, uhm … Emotions, right?”
[Pause.]
“I can tell from the look on your face you think I’m nuts.”
The first day of the convention, I’m told, was the day of “the real die-hards.” From what I gather these people were so “hyped” for this event that they took off work and drove and flew all over the country to get to the damned thing — all this on top of plunking down $50 for “3-day passes.” Some even purchased more expensive “VIP” passes. I’m sure someone would find irony in that statement, but I won’t because I can’t because my tendons were gouged out during the war. At any rate, these people were lined up for city blocks two hours before the extravaganza kicked off. Many of them were attired in the manner of superheroes — “costuming” (or “cosumo” [sic] in Japanese), as it were. Everyone wants to be Moon Knight or his favorite Check-Mate character, it would seem.
“Check-Mate? Boy, I don’t know,” the local dealer with an overabundance of Middle American good nature said, sounding a bit disheartened by his ostensible “lack of comic knowledge.” He hrmmed a bit before adding, “Nope, I don’t have any of those, I don’t think.”
Powell sighed like a balloon filled with the material used to make Bill Cosby. “I’ve been looking everywhere for Check-Mate #1 and #25.”
“Oh, those are great books,” the dealer commented in his thick Chicago-or-thereabouts accent. He wiped a bit of spit from the previous sentence out of his thick red goatee and continued, “But rarer than I like my steak, though, bud. Sorry.”
“It seems so,” Powell just about sobbed.
“If it came down to it,” the “Golden Age” specialist said finally, “Rock would take Fury. But, with this — ”
“Ceh-vit,” I interjected and also mispronounced.
The “Golden Age” specialist glared at me.
“Caveat,” Berkman said, pronouncing the word correctly and sounding like a real prick in the process.
“Thank you,” The “Golden Age” specialist said with a smile. “The caveat being that Nick Fury couldn’t have the use of S.H.I.E.L.D. If it’s Sgt. Rock versus Sgt. Fury, Rock wins. Rock was bigger and tougher.”
I jotted down some notes. Even though this fucker had given me a scolding on a par with the one given Danny Smith by his professor in 1998’s Modern Love, the shit he was telling me was pure journalistic gold. He was giving me enough material to fill pages and pages, which was at the root of a rather sticky dilemma later on, when I had to edit this thing into a two-page book report/theme or a one-minute oral presentation at the head of Howard Hesseman’s class.
“A what?” Dazza balked. “An oral presentation?”
Powell winced. Apparently his offer wasn’t as enticing to the vaguely hispanic 40EEE as he’d thought it would be. “Uhm…”
“Are you trying to get me to blow you?” Dazza barked (or “balked,” too, if you’ve got coin slots for eyes).
Powell laughed the most sheepish laugh a broken shell of a man has ever laughed. “I, uhm… I wasn’t, uh — ”
Dazza rolled her eyes. “Ten bucks,” she said before presenting her palm. “You want your crank yanked a little first that’s five extra.”
I realize the metaphor’s a bit obvious and the connection a bit tenuous, but I never claimed to be able to write anything that was neither.
Berkman appeared quite nervous while talking via the telephone with Jacks aka The Chief. He would trace the wall with his finger, fiddle with knickknacks, scratch both his hair and acne vigorously and so on. “I understand,” he said.
“Understand what? I haven’t said a damn thing, Berkman!” The Chief barked. “I was coughing.”
“Oh,” Berkman said somewhat embarrassedly. “What’s up, then, Chief?”
“Called to tell ya to be careful with the Smith kid,” The Chief said tersely. “He’s on loan from some dirt-rag called The Decatur Gazette.”
“The Gazette? That’s a fine paper, Chief,” Berkman disagreed in the most inoffensive manner his naturally hostile (“naughty by nature”) tone would allow for. “It’s not a dirt-rag.”
The Chief swallowed stogie and said, “You’re right. It’s a cunt-rag. That’s not the point, though. That fat shit’s on loan and he’s to be treated delicately.”
Smith didn’t care for my swearing, smoking, drinking or medicating. The only reaction I seemed to elicit from him was pained sighing. It’s not my fault he grew up in a bubble of some kind, is it?
“Now we’ve come full-circle,” Climachus said after I twisted the cap off my tiny five-dollar airplane bottle of Baccardi.
I poured most of the bottle into the dinky plastic cup of Pepsi-Cola I’d been served a moment before. After a sip I asked, “What’s that?”
“Full-circle, you see,” Climachus traced the form of a circle in the air with his flesh-colored fountainpen. He gave it a thoughtful suck and further explained, “You’re now dealing with the issues with whom you dealt in the beginning.”
Powell shrugged. It sounded logical, he supposed. Then again he hadn’t been paying attention.”What kind of beer do you have?” I asked the latino fellow with the moustache in the vest.
He touched his ear to indicate he hadn’t heard.
“What kind of beer do you have?”
“MGD,” he answered.
“How much?”
“Five dollars,” he answered.
I scoffed. “Five dollars? I’m press, man. Don’t you have some kind of, uh, press discount?”
He shook his head. “No discount, my friend.”
I looked to the rest of the people in line for support but found only impatience. I sighed. “I’ll take two.”
He proceeded to pour two 12 oz. plastic cups full of beer. I tendered a “Hamilton” and took the beers. As I was about to leave, he touched my shoulder and motioned for me to lean closer. I did so. “You come back and I’ll give you a free one,” he said softly.
I nodded. This was a great man.
Indiana — and probably all of middle-America, but I’ve not seen much of it — is a very depressing place. For starters, there’s no variation in its topography. It’s flat land with few trees and even fewer hills. Its businesses and towns and so forth have as little flare as the terrain and, in fact, its towns consist exclusively or almost exclusively of strip malls. A “big town” is distinguished from a “small town” by having a greater number of strip malls or perhaps a Wal-Mart. It really is a wonder that the whole population of the place isn’t completely insane. What is there to do out there? Drink beer? Chew gum? Kill gay people? I can do all those here in Virginia. Only for the former can I be arrested.
“Quit reaching for jokes, kid,” former Chicago Cubs catcher Scott Servais said when I spoke to him on the phone. “People from the midwest — like me, for example — are gonna realize how bad the fuckin’ place is without you beatin’ it into our skulls every five words or so.”
“I thought you were from Texas,” I said confusedly.
“Huh? Who gives a shit, kid? I’ve been everywhere, just like Johnny Cash sang. Chicago really adopted me and treated me like one of their own after I slammed seven dingers for the Cubbies back in ’98, though.”
I nodded, a gesture that signified nothing because I was talking to him on the phone. “Well, thanks for the advice. I’ll, uh, I’ll make the changes.”
“Right, just like ya started liftin’ weights when I told ya to,” Servais replied sarcastically.
I winced. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve been — ”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re built like late-period Woody Allen, huh? Talk to ya.”
Now I just have a headache. I hate this feeling. It’s the feeling of being utter shit that invariably follows a brief instance of relative happiness. It’s awful of such an unfair system? All things considered, I guess he deserves to die.
“He deserved to die and I’m glad I’m the one who pulled the trigger,” laughed bald-headed police officer Chris Beville, reveling in his minor celebrity as the star of John Grisham’s The Stenographer.
“You’d better listen up,” the Chief whispered. “You two had better listen up. I’m counting on you guys showing that shrinking violet of a newsie a good time. I don’t care if you have to liquor him up…”
“He won’t drink liquor,” Berkman interrupted in his characteristically sardonic manner. “He might consent to drinking a soda, but that’s about it.”
“He’s a good kid, tho’,” Powell added for no particular reason. Given that this was a teleconference, I suppose he felt obliged to say something. “One of the best.”
How many photos could Dazza’s ‘photog’ take in one day? 500? I bet she could give more blowjobs in a day than her fat assistant could take pictures.
“Berkman’s saying that,” Climachus purred into Tunnell’s recording device, “Because he himself was molested by a close relative or because he’s a closeted gay. I’d stake my sacred honor on it.”
“Hrm,” Tunnell mused. “Fascinating…engaging.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful. He’s a case on all fours, really. A model case, one for the textbooks. Then there’s that Powell lad. Do you know what finally broke him, Ted?”
“Please, call me Professor Tunnell,” Tunell said cordially.
“The weight of his own body, Professor Doctor. Even at a puny 140 lbs, the weight of his emaciated frame was too much for him to support. He’ll die soon, I imagine. He’s a real sorry son of a bitch.”
She–and when I say ‘she,’ I mean ‘someone’–asked me if I’d get a VD test. Did she know how much that wounded me? She did, I think, and she didn’t care. Why should they wait for me in my inscrutability when they can trade up at the earliest opportunity? I might have some money in my bank account now but I’m still a head case.
“Do you, uh, do you go to the law school?”
There was a fourteen-minute pregnant pause. During this break, I fidgeted with the enormous rasp on my keychain.
Then: “Yeah.”
What could I and we say to her? How could I and we justify my and our existence, in a sentence or two? I’ve and we’ve written this magnificent convention report, I’ve and we’ve written 3,000 pages of text in a year, but at that awful place I’m and we’re just another statistic. I and we don’t belong there. I and we belong at my and our shitty $8 an hour drone job, having meaningless conversations with my and our coworkers about sports and women.
“He must needs understand,” Dr. Blake said as he summarily graded a handful of papers, “That legal writing is not creative writing. He mustn’t make resort to the toolkit of the lazy writer—that is to say, ‘The Brian Powell Bag of Tricks,’ as my dear old father called it–but instead omit all adjectives and adverbs and passion and feeling and love and life from his writing. His verbs must come alive, and he must write exclusively in the active voice.”
Powell removed the pencil from his mouth long enough to stare daggers at his old mentor Blake. “But what if he’s forced to write something barbarous?”
“You mean like this?” Blake inquired, holding aloft a poem he found particularly offensive.
This convention lasted 3 days. 52 weeks made a year, and we were whole again.
Photo credit: John R. Powell. Left to right: Oscar Berkman, Cammy (holding “All Winners” comic), and Brian Powell.
