Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [166]
Either way, it didn’t matter. The result was the same.
We were gone from Earth Two.
Thankfully, the rest of the trip was relatively tame.
We made it to the next town and slept in the parking lot of a gas station where a cheery sign with a cute little big-headed cartoon service-station man happily promised:
Which I doubted.
But our options were limited, so we decided to stay the night and see if the little guy was a liar.
All of us were hoping for, and desperately needing to, sleep. But there were no motels nearby, so we were forced to bunk down in the crowded Duesenberg, each couple with a seat to themselves, though not much else to compensate our exhaustion given that Morgan refused to remove his pants for Sophie, and River forced me to keep a respectable distance from his sister. Highly unfair given his continual enjoyment of the Waboombas finger massage on his own manliness. But apparently hypocrisy wasn’t unique to ‘clothists’.
Despite this, we wound up talking, laughing, and dozing through the night, and after a while, I no longer cared if I slept, or did anything else for that matter, so long as I could continue to take in more, and more, and more of Wisper. She was exhilarating, even when she wasn’t touching me. Her mind was sharp, she was caring and sensitive of others, and her intelligence dazzled me. I began to wonder if maybe John Seward Johnson had found his upstairs maid similarly engaging. Maybe. Maybe not. But did it really matter?
By early morning, stiff in oh-so-many ways, still tired, and more than a little cranky, I slipped into my pants, met with the greasy station attendant as he arrived for work looking nothing like his cartoon counterpart, and convinced him to jury-rig the Duesenberg by offering wads of cash (my credit cards worked again here) if he could be done before breakfast and not ask any questions. He agreed, and amazingly, even though he spent more time looking at Wisper and Sophie than he did at the engine, I had to give him credit; the man brought the dead back to life. It made me wonder what he could do with a loaf, a fish, and a hungry crowd.
As the car idled in the service bay, I went into a small convenience store one block over, and bought enough sweets, and carbohydrates to feed a hyperactive army of kids on a Saturday morning, and before the sugar had even hit our bloodstream, we were on our way.
We arrived at the convention center before noon and stared in gaping awe at the massive lines leading out from the glass-walled main entrance of the building onto the busy concourse and down the crowded street for several blocks. There must have been a hundred thousand people, or more, waiting to get in.
Advertising trucks drove past the throng towing huge displays for whatever late summer, sci-fi, superhero, or fantasy blockbusters might be due out in the coming weeks. People wearing street clothes paraded down jammed sidewalks side-by-side with those more garishly displayed in wild and inventive costumes. Some carried boxes, others original art, many held bags, and quite a few lugged heavy artist’s portfolios. All looked happy, hopeful, and excited.
Every year I came, I was more amazed at how much the convention scene had changed since I was a wide-eyed youth, when only a few hundred people might show up for the entire weekend— all mostly young, all mostly fans of the actual comic books themselves. Now, very few of the attendees actually gave a rat’s fig about comics, or anything even affiliated with them. More people attended these conventions than actually bought comic books in their lifetimes, and why they came was a matter of some debate. It was my belief that their appearance here could—as with so many things—be laid squarely at the feet of Al Gore’s Internet.
Because of the World Wide Web, and all it’s many filaments, the comics convention had become more than just a sales opportunity, promotional tool, and