Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [173]
“Oooh,” I said. “Is this the one with David Ogden Stiers as Martian Manhunter?”
“Yes,” the vendor said.
“I always wanted to see that,” I informed him, then grabbed one, walking off with it, and all the other videos, in hand.
“You can’t take that one!”
“Oh!” I asked. “Do you have the rights to sell this one, too? Either, I mean.” I shook my head. “I think. Are you paying the network royalties for this? I somehow doubt it!”
“You’re a jerk!” he snarled.
“I’m a…” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This man was selling illegal merchandise, committing crimes in broad daylight, and he was calling me a… “Kiss my ass, you little wanker!”
“I’m calling security!”
“You do that! We’ll see who has legal right here to do what!” He pulled out a cell phone, and flipped it open like an arrogant Captain Kirk—which may be a redundancy—and feeling suddenly uncertain of what really was and wasn’t legal, I bravely turned and ran.
“Corky, stop!” Wisper called after me.
In my sudden rush of fear, I had forgotten her, for a moment.
“I have to get these out of here!” I told her.
“It doesn’t matter!” she said. “Will you please, stop? You left your comics behind!”
I quit running and looked around. She was right. Millions of dollars worth of comics, and I’d forgotten them entirely. How could I…?
“This is illegal,” I told her, clearly more upset than I realized and unable to focus on the more important matters at hand. “We had distribution of this video legally blocked in the United States…”
“It doesn’t matter, Corky. You can’t really stop that stuff anyway these days. And who cares? You did something stupid in your youth! You can’t undo it. So what? Welcome to the real world.” “I am not gay!”
“I believe that,” she said sincerely.
“Morgan tricked me! I thought Wosserman was a woman!” I said meekly.
She looked at me as if I’d just smacked her in the face with a fish.
“He has a beard!” she said.
“I thought he was Mindie!”
“Oh,” Wisper said, as if a tiny light had dawned. Somehow that seemed almost plausible to her. “She is a bit on the mannish side.”
“And I was really drunk! Look at the picture!” I held one out. “See?”
“I’d rather not,” she said, glancing away. “Corky, as long as you genuinely go for women, and not men, we have no problem.”
I stopped vibrating emotionally, and just stared at her in shock. How could she be so calm? Especially—I looked down at the videos— especially…
“Everyone makes mistakes, Corky,” she said. “And with technology the way it is now, more and more people are making them on YouTube.”
Slowly, I began to relax. Wisper had an amazing way about her. She could make something like this seem almost normal.
Almost.
“Which is what makes the damn thing so horrible!” I whined, holding out one of the DVD’s with commentary and extras. “It’s like this thing is alive! Mutating! Spreading like a disease!”
“Only to people who go out without protection,” she said, laughing and apparently trying to defuse my anxiety. It wasn’t working.
“I don’t care, Corky,” she said, “so why should you? These things only have power if you let them.”
Again, I settled down a bit, though I just couldn’t get to complete calm. She obviously wasn’t really able to relate. How can someone who hasn’t been through something like this possibly understand what it means when humiliation, that is bad enough in private, suddenly becomes a bestseller on a table that several hundred thousand people walk past in a weekend? When strangers you meet for the first time say: ‘Hey, I’ve seen your video’, then laugh?
Then something stepped on my head. Figuratively.
“You said welcome to the…” I, choked, but had to ask. I didn’t want to know, was terrified to know, but I had to ask. “…welcome to the real world.” I finished. “Did you mean my real world, or our real world?”
“What?”
I swallowed, and tried to be clearer, which was difficult. “What have you done to be ashamed about?