The Angry Czeck

I’ve attended a comic book convention. Once. Several years ago.

The biggest comic book convention in the world is Comic Con held in San Diego. But another big one is hosted in Chicago called Wizard World, where I made my mostly anonymous appearance. Try to imagine what a comic book convention might look like, and that’s it exactly, except different.

I urinated alongside Storm Troopers. I mistakenly wandered into an intense HeroClix competition. I saw Chyna the female wrestler and one of the guys that played a Hobbit in Lord of the Rings. You know who else was there? Lou Ferrigno, television’s Incredible Hulk! There was also a guy who sold a pretty convincing replica of Beastmaster’s sword.

The two major comic book publishers – DC and Marvel – dominate the convention with enormous displays that, with enough drinks, have you believing that you have stumbled upon Jack Kirby’s dual-sided planet of the New Gods. Here you find the newest toys, the latest hero developments, and maybe the guy who’s playing Daredevil’s best friend in the new blockbuster move. Meanwhile, there are men in elaborate super-hero costumes. And there are women hired to wear elaborate super-hero costumes. To mingle with the scribes and artists at the DC and Marvel booths is to rub elbows with the clean upper echelon of the comics universe.

A layer beyond the Big Two publishers, you will find second and third-tier publishers like Devil’s Due and Dark Horse. Their characters are not always well known and struggle to achieve Hollywood immortality, although sometimes a Hell Boy or a Spawn will puncture the membrane. Artists and writers who reside in these smaller booths are generally more accessible if no less geeky than their deep-pocketed brethren.

Beyond this circle lies a great number of vendors who sell a menagerie of items you can’t live without: vintage postcards, back issues of comic books, ninja stars, replica lightsabers, original illustrations of naked barbarian women, antique action figures, assorted costumes, difficult-to-find game pieces, or anything your Mom callously threw away while you were earning a degree in Klingon Philosophy.

The final layer of a comic book convention belongs to a tribe of self-publishers. Festooned with tattoos and piercings and sometimes armed with swords, these grinders of the grain illustrate and plot their own comic books, duplicate them at Kinko’s, and either sell them or give them away to anyone wandering by. To walk among them is to feel insanely rich and successful.

My time at Chicago’s Wizard World was a terrific experience, in part because I had a personal guide – artist Mike Norton, who currently illustrates Captain Marvel. A denizen of the Second Tier at the the time, Mike graciously introduced me and my friends to several artists and industry big wigs. I also got closer to Lou Ferrigno then I ever believed possible. (He’s huge.)

Along the way, I developed a few rules for enjoying a Comic Con. For example, you should not enter wearing your best trousers and button-down shirt (unless, somehow, you have made it your thing). Comic book geeks can sniff out a pouser from a considerable distance. Also, your virgin jokes and your Yoda impersonation will not take you far at a comic book convention. If you ever told a fat joke while touring Graceland, you know what I mean.

Here are a few more useful bits of advice* for attending a comic book convention.

Don’t have a tattoo on your face? Get one.

Kneel to no one! Even if that someone claims to be Zod.

Be careful when asking if a fellow attendee is married because some brides are still in the mail.

Freely mention your online degree in Eastern Philosophy or Alternative Religions. You’re among brothers!

Zod is a Kryptonian. Grod is a gorilla. Todd McFarlane, nobody has seen in quite awhile.

The correct answer is always, “Han shot first.”

Can Wolverine’s adamantium claws cut through Captain America’s shield? Don’t look at me, I’m asking you.

Have you ever put together a killer PowerPoint presentation? Then do not attend Comic Con.

Quick! Name the Golden Age Flash? You’re not ready.

Know the difference between a blaster, a laser gun, and the self-gratification device that the emo boy in the corner is selling.

Two girls for Lou Ferigno, zero girls for you.

That’s it. You should do well at Comic Con. Just don’t ask Stan Lee to draw Superman or expect to receive a Dungeon Master discount at the num-chuk booth. You’ll be disappointed and possibly beat up.

* Originally posted on my huuuuuugely popular twitter account.

Several months ago, while engaged in some high-stakes casino gaming, I observed a young couple snaking around the blackjack tables. The girl was fantastically attired in a flattering skirt and a flashy blouse. She looked terrific; dressed to be seen. Meanwhile, her boyfriend had dressed for a picnic. Tennis shoes. Cargo shorts. T-shirt. Baseball cap. Her effort in her appearance was proportional to her boyfriend’s fashion malaise.

And this is why women pine for vampires.

As mates, we men have turned slacking into a kind of religion. We conceal the trappings of adulthood by joining fantasy football leagues and wearing sandals on any occasion. We’d rather don a dumb hat than comb our hair. Our conversations become passionate only when a sports team is the topic. In short, we are becoming more and more unattractive, like Dorian Gray’s painting.

It wasn’t too long ago when it was cool to be a man. Our idols used to be John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Now we model ourselves after man-children like Vince Vaughn. We wear our sloppiness like a badge of honor – so long as that badge looks nothing like a necktie. Our knowledge is centered less and less on yard care and carburetors, and more on exotic brands of beer and top secret barbecue recipes.

I know. I speak from experience.

I am the Sultan of the Once Per Week Shave and the Undertaker of the Untucked Shirt. My hair appears to have been combed with a lit firecracker, and my ten-year-old automobile rattles with empty soda cans and fast food bags. I am a danger to decent society with a power tool in my hand. If I can pay a real man to fix a toilet or repair the roof, I gladly do it. I take charge with my charge card.

That in mind, I understand a grown woman’s fascination with Twilight‘s Edward Cullen.

Eternally youthful, forever physically fit and ever vigilant, Edward embodies the…er…body of the perfect man. More than that, Edward is sensitive until he has to be rough. He’s moody until he’s charming. He’s just as comfortable trying on slim-fit jeans at the Banana Republic as he is wearing his tailored tuxedo to the Prom. In addition, he owns a massive CD collection which no doubt contains all of Sarah McLachlan’s hits.

Edward may battle “bad” vampires, but he’ll never have a fight with bad cholesterol. Over one hundred years of age, Edward has yet to develop a gut or a suspicious mole or an urge to join a co-ed softball league. He spends his time watching his girlfriend sleep, which (for reasons we human men can never understand) women find irresistibly alluring.

That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Men don’t truly understand what a woman finds attractive. We admire heaving breasts, so we lazily assume that women are just as interested in massive pectorals. And while massive pectorals help, they are only elements in a package deal. We are asked to be sensitive but not feminine. We’re supposed to forsake violence unless a woman’s honor is at stake (in which case, blood becomes sexy). We’re supposed to know where the line is drawn between affection and overbearing obsession. We must patiently support and understand a woman’s faults while working super-humanly to overcome our own.

I can’t understand Edward Cullen. All I see is a moody pretty boy with dirty hair. “It’s the way he looks at her,” says Mrs. Angry by way of explanation. I try to mimic that look – that brooding stare of a lobotomy patient – and I break up in laughter. I can’t do it, not even as an academic exercise. I’m too cool.

So I put Edward into a silo I can understand. Women adore Edward because he’s always getting into fist fights over the unremarkable girl he inexplicably loves. Or because he’s a good looking kid. Or because there is never a dot of mud on his pristine Volvo. Or because he seems to be independently wealthy. I don’t know.

But I do know that the young man in the casino didn’t seem to care how much effort his girlfriend had given to her appearance. He seemed more preoccupied with donating his paycheck to the surly blackjack dealers. She stood off to his side, looking pretty and lonely, watching her slow-witted boyfriend ignore her has he wondered for too long on whether or not to hit on a 14.

It was then that I knew I was observing a secret admirer of Edward Cullen.

Full disclosure: I know nothing about soccer.

Zero. Goose Egg. Nada. Zip. (A typical soccer score.)

I know more about building a steel drum or the Napoleonic Code. How many soccer guys can play at once? Five? Fifty? What’s an off sides? Not even the World Cup referees seem to know. Why do you sometimes get a free kick at the goal, and sometimes you just get to toss the ball back onto the field? It can’t be that hard if even the French understand it. And judging by their early World Cup exit, the French may be just as befuddled as I am.

But I’m coming around.

Somebody asked me what it would take for Americans to embrace soccer. “Winning,” I said, and my answer was met with some guffaws. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t make it less true. Americans like to win. We’re unabashedly selfish in that way. Remember when we followed heavy weight boxing and men’s tennis? Think back. It was probably about the time Evander Holyfield still had two intact ears. And when Pete Sampras still cared about grooming his uni-brow. We followed tennis and boxing because it was chiefly comprised of American champions. We like winners.

There’s something stirring about soccer.

We dislike being thrashed by Europeans, Asians, South Americans, Africans and Australians. (I’d add Canada to the list, but we dominate Canada.) It chaps our hide. Burns our biscuits. Craps in our cowboy boots. We just take the ball and go home to our NFL style football, our basketball, golf, and our hockey. Okay, maybe not hockey, but I’ll wager that most of us are more familiar with Fooseball than with soccer.

We lead the world in tired, lame reasons for dissing soccer. It’s slow. It’s confusing. You can’t use your hands. You can’t tell which players are on the field. Nobody scores. Yet, somehow, the rest of the planet has found something intriguing about the game. For all the confusion it creates on the surface, the simplicity of soccer is apparent to anyone willing to watch it for ten minutes. You kick a ball into a goal. If we can embrace the complexity and nuances of golf – a sport that scores in negative numbers – surely we can give soccer a chance.

After all, we’re winning.

Donovan sees a bee.

Team USA has proven to this Nation that winners play soccer. Sure, we may not have dominated the opening round of the World Cup in a New York Yankees-style fashion, but the Yanks never wavered. Never surrendered. Never conceded. We could have collapsed against a surprisingly resilient Slovenia, or wilted when our goals met nothing but rejection eighty-eight minutes into our match with Algeria. But like Tiger Woods, Larry Bird and Willie Mays, the U.S. Soccer Team pulled it together when a stellar performance was most required.

Surely, we Americans can appreciate that.

***

When my garage collapsed in a cacophonous din, my first thought was that Mrs. Angry’s clothes closet had finally buckled beneath the tremendous weight of her dresses and jeans and blouses. Since I fully expected this to happen, I barely batted an eye lash. But is wasn’t long before I discovered that it was my garage that had imploded – and not my wife’s clothes closet.

Our bungalow was constructed in 1920, and the garage was about as old. A simple wooden edifice, the garage stood apart from the house in the backyard. It was easy to imagine a bulbous Packard or an enormous Chrysler parked inside of it.  When we purchased the house, the garage wasn’t even included in appraisal. Termites had not only reduced the structure’s value to zero, the insects had also compromised its stability. “I wouldn’t put anything valuable in there,” warned the house inspector.

I took the inspector’s advice, though to my eye the garage seemed sturdy enough. The old-fashioned wooden siding was painted the same crisp yellow color as the bungalow. There was a small room built into it where one might assemble a bird house or work with with lathe. You entered this room through a door on the outside, like you were walking into a private club house. I saw a future version of myself inside this rustic space, carefully piecing together a grandfather clock.

Now my garage had become a splintery heap of ruined building materials. My once tranquil corner of the backyard had become a strange moonscape of torn roofing, broken studs, jagged edges of glass, and twisted spikes of rebar. If tetanus had a Facebook profile picture, this was it. I stood before the mess thoroughly chagrined.

“I guess we knew this was going to happen,” said Mrs. Angry. Maybe. But I expected to be living in a mansion atop a dormant volcano in Aruba when it did. Now it was my problem. I consulted with my neighbor, who was active with the neighborhood association. I pointed to the heap.

“If it were me, I’d hire some Mexicans to dump it all in the river,” he suggested. That sounded illegal, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where or how to hire Mexicans. I considered renting a truck, shoveling in the rubbish and disposing it legitimately at the city dump, but the City charges by weight. My garage looked pretty heavy, even in a reduced state.

“How can I get the City to pick this up for me?” I wondered.

My neighbor shrugged. “Too bad you can’t put it in your garbage bin,” he said. “Anything you put in that, they have to haul.”

(!)

When I told Mrs. Angry my plan, her face became a raincloud of doubt. “That will take forever.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but we wouldn’t have to pay a cent.”

“Mm-hm.”

That wasn’t entirely true. The eight-pound sledge hammer and the heavy-duty gloves I bought at Lowe’s cost me about $20 total. The sledgehammer had a sweet fiberglass handle. It felt like exercise just holding it. Privately, I was already referring to myself as “Thor.”

Like many urban centers, The City of Memphis issues each household a large, hard-plastic garbage bin. It holds about 40 gallons, features a flip-top lid and it rolls on two wheels. In the past, I’ve squeezed into my bin tree branches, paint cans, big plastic toys, and even a couple animal carcasses. Often, I stuffed it with so much over-dimensional material into the bin that the lid cannot close. It’s all good. The City of Memphis will cheerlessly take it away.

Bit by bit, I smashed the remains of my collapsed garage into city-approved chunks. Because the lumber had been weakened by 20 years of hungry termites, the siding and the studs exploded into satisfying clouds of dust with every strike of my godly hammer. Thor! Each Saturday, I’d spend an hour pounding the rubble into even tinier bits of rubble. Then I’d scoop the pieces into my gloved-clad hands and pour them into the bin. Thor! Each blow from my powerful hammer was met with a thunderclap of enchanted metal meeting lesser, earthly matter – the sorrowful language of a defeated foe! Thor!

Pound for pound, the roofing proved to be the densest material. Rolling a garbage bin full of roofing to the curb taxes even Thor’s considerable might. I learned to only quarter-fill my bin with that shit. Then I’d reduce the lesser materials (wood, glass, concrete) to manageable atoms. This was an operation that was not without its elements of danger. Several times, hazardous shrapnel escaped the face of my hammer and whizzed past my head at supersonic speed! Bah! ‘Tis nothing to the Son of Odin! More troubling were the mutant-cricket-spider things that lived in the darkest muck of my deconstruction site. Avoiding those, I filled my bin every Saturday and pushed it to the curb for a Monday morning pick-up. Thor!

Three months after my project was begun, Thor’s hammer finally came to a rest. All that remained was the concrete foundation. Everything else had been pulverized and dispatched to some landfill. I had triumphed. I had brought great honor to Asgard.

“Well, it’s all gone,” said Mrs. Angry. That’s what happens when you call down the thunder, baby.

##

Exactly one half of my grandparent’s basement contained all the necessary amenities of a well-appointed rumble room. A cigar-store Indian stood stoically in the corner. There was a small but charming wet bar against the wall. The ancient RCA color television set didn’t seem to have an off button. No one ever made a fire in the fireplace, but there was a nifty model of a steamboat perched on the mantle. None of the furniture was worthy of public display, but each misshapen piece was a perfect compliment to the basement’s dimly lit atmosphere – which, if analyzed, would be 74% cigarette smoke, 15% flatulence, 1% oxygen and the remainder a disturbing mystery.

The second half of the basement, concealed behind the paneled wall of the former half, was an unfinished gulag of plumbing, concrete floors, steel drains, water heaters, aluminum duct-work, cardboard boxes and (for some reason) a super-sad commode and shower stall. A seldom used bumper-pool table sat next to the washer and dryer which were positioned alongside an antiquated refrigerator whose chief function was to keep cases of Natural Lite nice and cold. Unless you (1) needed a refreshing beer, (2) were washing clothes, or (3) were desperate to evacuate your bowels, this section of the basement seemed to hold little appeal.

Were it not for the ping-pong table.

Constructed during a forgotten year from an unknown type of wood and painted gorilla-ass black, the basement ping-pong table was comprised of two enormous pieces. If you ran into it while drunkenly diving for a ball dropped just behind the green net, you’d likely knocked the table (and your hip bone) askew. Putting it back in place required some effort. It was the world’s heaviest ping-pong table not made of stone.

Because it was made of wood, balls bouncing off its ebony surface sounded different than balls bouncing off a regulation table: instead of tok tok tok it was more like poc poc poc. For added challenge, the florescent light hung low over the table, resulting in many aborted volleys. Additionally, a five inch iron pipe ran vertically from the floor to the ceiling behind the north end of the table. If you weren’t careful, you could shatter your hand against it while retrieving a hard serve. The pipe was known as The Third Man.

My brother and I learned how to play ping-pong on that table. Upon every visit to the grandparent’s, we’d venture down the narrow, carpeted steps that led to the basement and engage in hours of paddle-pounding action.* Though I never developed the Asian ability of supernatural spin, I became a fairly decent ping-pong player. My brother learned to fear my overhead smash. I routinely defeated my cousins despite their daily access to the table. I was the Prince of Ping and the Pontiff of Pong.

Over time, the ping-pong table became a default setting in my life. While the world transmogrified into something new with each passing year, the ping-pong table remained cocooned inside a timeless vacuum. The table’s surface may have sported new dents but it never warped. The legs remained sturdy. The Third Man was ever diligent in its mindless quest to break metacarpal bones. The table was like a friend who never aged, never ditched you in favor of a girlfriend, and was always game for a quick best-out-of-three.

When my Grandfather passed away, and then my Grandmother a few years later, the home where they had raised seven children was put up for sale. Inside were many things of sentimental value to me: the desktop pencil sharpener, the cigar store Indian, the wooden office chair, the old game of Risk, my uncle’s collection of model airplanes. But my only real concern was the ping-pong table. I had no place for it, but if I could acquire it I thought I could find some place for it. The ping-pong table may no longer live in the basement, but it could reside somewhere near, so that I could return to its familiarity whenever my life took an unpleasant turn.

Alas, the fate of the ping-pong table is a mystery to me. Cumbersome and unfoldable, I imagine that whoever was assigned to ready the house for sale simply busted up the table before carting the pieces up the stairs. An inglorious end.

* Shame on you.