Shut Up And Listen 126

Chicago Part One

Wednesday Night
I was a little nervous. A little scared. I mean, this was to be my first trip all alone. And it’s not like it was some tiny trip to Toronto or something, it was an almost ten-hour bus trip to Chicago to stay with someone who I had never actually met save for online discussions and posts on message boards. I wasn’t too scared about David not being who he claimed to be, just the idea of the trip itself. After feeling nervous and scared, I felt a little stupid. A twenty-year old being scared of taking a bus? Afraid of leaving home for four days? What a fucking pussy, eh? But Lauren assured me that it wasn’t anything bad. It was totally normal. I didn’t sleep that well.

Thursday—The Trip
I got on the bus at 11:15 am my time and got off at 7:40 pm their time. They’re an hour behind me, so it was like 8:40 pm my time. I did have a couple of breaks. One in Detroit for half an hour and one in between Chicago and Detroit for fifteen minutes. For the most part, my main concerns with the trip had to do with leg room. Seriously, the more I live, the more I realise being as tall as I am isn’t an asset as much as I thought it might be when I was younger. Buses are not built for people over five foot ten. Seriously. It sucks. Especially if you have a carry-on bag like I did; that eliminates a good chunk of room for your legs to move. 
	Crossing the border was an interesting experience because it was fucking scary. I mean, I was scared shitless. I’m going to be brutally honest about our world here and I’m not doing anything more beyond being honest, but: I am a white male from the suburbs who genuinely looks like a “good person” and I am not used to being treated like a suspected criminal. Which they do at the border, of course. It’s not just he questions that you’re asked by the cop, it’s firstly the fact that a cop partially suspects you of maybe doing something wrong that’s unnerving and also, just the tone that’s involved. Never before had the question “And where do you live?” been delivered to me with such a tone. The questions in and of themselves weren’t really anything big. Just stuff like who I was, where I’m from, where I was going, why I was going, what did I have with me, did I have any alcohol or smokes and so on. But as I said, it was still rather unnerving. A fellow passenger observed that I was a bit of a nervous guy, which I am. But I did get through it well. The second officer to question me (one when you came in and one right before getting on the bus) told me to say hi to Kevin Smith if I saw him. I didn’t.
	For the most part, I listened to music on the bus. I brought four CDs with me for the trip: We Were Born In A Flame by Sam Roberts, Hot New Spirits by Tangiers, Big Shiny Chevett 9 (a Radiohead live album that I burned) and Big Shiny Lauren (a CD full of songs as chosen by Lauren). I don’t know, I guess I’m the kind of guy who lives to watch the scenery as I travel. That’s why I liked having the CDs. I never read and listened to music at the same time, I always just did the one. Actually, I didn’t read that much. Maybe three or four chapters. I rather enjoyed watching the scenery most of the time. I saw a lot of billboards on the I-95 (I think that was the highway) in between Detroit and Chicago for “adult entertainment.” I mean, American trucking is built on two things: fast food and porn if the billboards are any indication.
	Really, the bus trip wasn’t too eventful. I wouldn’t call it a pleasant trip though. Probably the best that could be expected, I guess.

Thursday—Enter Lyons
So I get to Chicago, grab my suitcase (something which I worried about, I should add—always afraid someone would just take it, you know?), head inside the bus station and phone Lyons. For my weekend, I was to be staying with one David Lyons, a former lawyer, now student of the University of Chicago. I’ve known David for around two years . . . well, I’ve know of him for around two years. Didn’t really talk to him directly until a few months back, but we both knew each other from our posts and such. We liked to debate various things. So I phone him and he says he’ll come pick me up, so I go sit down and wait. And wait. And wait. Then some guy with glasses and looking kind of lost comes in, looking around. I think this is Lyons and was about to go up to him and see if it was, but then the guy found the people he was looking for. Eventually, this rather large man comes in, looks at me, snaps his fingers, points behind him with his thumb and says, “Let’s go.”
	This was Lyons.
	So I grabbed my suitcase and my other bag and started after him. He quickly stopped and turned around and introduced himself, and with that, we were off to his place. We chatted in the car and such and on the walk to his place and all of that. Nice pleasantries. Since we already kind of knew each other, it wasn’t really awkward or anything. But I was a little surprised that this big guy was Lyons. When I say big, I don’t mean fat or anything, I mean big. He was a few inches taller than me and just . . . big. Someone online later said this, but I agree: he was mafia big.
	At his place, I was greeted with my second surprise from him: a fucking clean apartment. I mean, it was really clean. Just wasn’t expecting that. We spent the rest of the evening talking, eating pizza, reading, watching some TV and whatever. He went to bed before me, which was a little odd to me. Not the behaviour, just the feeling of being in that big city in some guy who I had just met in person’s apartment and being the only one awake there. Just odd.

Friday—Bastardly Morning
The time was seven am, the place was David Lyons’ apartment and the event was being awakened. Seven. Fucking. A. M. I had went to bed at like three-thirty or so. Granted, I did know that the seven am wake-up call was coming because Lyons had work to do. But still. You brace yourself for that kind of thing, but it just doesn’t sink in completely until you actually get to seven am and have to wake up. It was very fucking early. I read a little and watched some TV and showered and all of that before we went out because Lyons had some things to do and it was a good chance for me to get a look at Chicago.
	My impressions are: Chicago is fucking big. Very, very, very big. Far too big for the likes of me. I’m more of a smaller city kind of man. I mean, the sheer size of the city . . . shit. All of the buildings were huge and they needed traffic cops to direct pedestrians and so many taxis! I mean, wow!
	We walked around a lot. He had to do some stuff for his car because he was going to Columbus on Sunday for three weeks. It was pretty humid out and I do not thrive in the heat, I really don’t. About thirty seconds outside of his apartment and I was sweating buckets. But still I pressed on and we walked around and it was nice, I suppose.

Friday—Conventioneers
Before we left for the convention around noon or so, I phoned a friend, Ben from the boards. He had given me his cell number and we agreed to meet up at the con. The con itself wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It was somehow smaller than I thought it would be, bigger than I thought it would be and much more like a flea market than I thought it would be. The convention was divided into three main areas: companies, retailers and artist alley. The company area was nice and spiffy looking with large booths with lots of monitors and bright colours. The retailer area was the flea market-type area. Fanboys flipping through boxes and boxes and boxes of comics, looking for that one issue to complete their run of some title from 1986, you know? And artist alley was just a bunch of long tables with people doing sketches.
	So we hit the con and met up with Ben and his girlfriend, Jenna (a very good sport about all of the geekiness). The question was then what to do? We decided to hit the Ultimate Marvel panel, which then involved finding the room it was in. So, Lyons and I went towards the company side, and Ben and Jenna went towards the artist alley side (as we met somewhere in retailer territory). Lyons and I found it, so he phoned Ben and soon we were all sitting around waiting for the likes of Mark Millar (comic writer), Brian Michael Bendis (comic writer), Joe Quesada (comic artist and current Marvel editor-in-chief), Adam Kubert (comic artist), Mark Bagley (comic artist), and a couple of editors to show up and tell us things that we wanted to know. Near the front, w saw another person we know standing, one Mark Peyton. We didn’t go and talk to him for various reasons (to be perfectly honest, Peyton is not the most popular person at Millarworld—I really don’t mind him, but others do). So they all showed up and the moderator (some guy from Marvel—marketing or something, who cares?) was introducing them. He started on our right, his left with the two editors, then Kubert and Millar, and then on his other side, he announced Bendis and the place erupted with applause, which carried over to Bagley and Quesada. We all kind of found this amusing. So, the panel went on and about three questions in, Lyons asked a question. At first, I was worried about what he was going to ask because, like me, Lyons isn’t shy about speaking his mind, so I had to wonder if this was a “I’m gonna speak my mind” kind of time. What he asked was “Got any news?” Essentially asking the only question most people there cared about.
	They didn’t have any news they were willing to say just yet. They eventually told us all the news as the panel went on, of course. The only real memorable question though was this little punk kid, who had to be around thirteen or fourteen or something like that. He had the fucking balls to ask if Quesada, Kubert and Bagley would look at his portfolio there and then. Now, anyone with half a brain knows that there’s a certain etiquette to this sort of thing and asking right in the middle of a panel isn’t following said etiquette. So they said no, obviously. When I looked back at the kid, I saw what had to be his mom with him, so I kind of felt sorry for him for a brief second. You know, being embarrassed in front of his mom like that and all, and then I remembered that when I was his age I knew better than to as such a dumb fucking question, so I went back to thinking “What a fucking dumbass.” 
	Ten minutes later or so, we left because it was boring. As we were heading back into the convention (the places where panels were held were outside of the convention sort of), we ran into another internet friend, Raj. This was pretty cool because I usually talked to Raj once or twice a week and he’s a pretty cool guy. So the five of us went off looking for the Arcade Comics booth to pick up a copy of Youngblood: Bloodsport as written by Mark Millar and drawn by Rob Liefeld. You see, this comic has a bit of a stupid history, but all you need to know is that as of now it’s only available at conventions and we wanted to see if it lived up to its hype (so you know: it doesn’t). Around this time, we ran into another friend, Tim. Tim had surprised me a little because he was pretty short and totally bald. Good guy though. 
	We found the Arcade booth and bought ourselves copies of the comic, plus another one that’s convention-only right now (I wouldn’t recommend it either). After this, we all sort of stood around talking and wondering what the fuck we should do next. Around this time, we ran into some more people: Steve, Brian and Brian’s girlfriend, Elizabeth. That’s pretty much all of the people we ran into at the con. So we stood around and talked and all of that and people started going off in their separate directions; some people wanted to get sketches, others wanted to just go looking, and Lyons had to go home to do some work, so I stuck around and hung out with Tim. We ended up just walking around, seeing what was what.
	There were only a few things that I really wanted to get at the con: a Paradigm t-shirt, autographs from the guys who do Paradigm (only the artist, Jeremy Haun was there, but that’s cool) and a copy of the New X-Men vol. 1 hardcover. So I got the first two sometime around meeting people and then while Tim and I were walking around, I looked fucking everywhere for it. No one had it. I later found it when Raj, Tim and I came back to the con (more on that later though), but it surprised me how hard it was to find. Probably the funniest moment when Tim and I were walking around was when we were turning a corner and I saw this booth devoted entirely to porn and I said to him, “Hey, check it out: porn.”
	And then I heard a woman’s voice say from behind us, “Hi!”
	I turn around and there’s this fairly attractive woman standing there and she proceeds to tell us that all of the action figures at the booth she was working at were on sale for cheap. But still, excellent timing on my part, eh?
	We ended up walking around for around half an hour or so and then we met up with Raj and decided we were all hungry, thirsty and tired, so we went to their hotel to get something to eat, drink and have a sit-down. They were staying at the Hyatt and were sharing a room. The Hyatt was fucking huge. We went up to the second floor, walked down a few hallways and then took another elevator up to the floor they were on. We got some stuff to drink at the store in the lobby, sat down, talked for a while and then went back to the con. By this point, my feet and my shoulder were aching from walking around and carrying my bag, but that’s the price you pay, eh? We walked around the con a couple of times, and I finally found that New X-Men HC I wanted. When walking through artist alley, we saw porn star Aria Giovanni, who I saw was on the list online, but didn’t understand what a porn star would be doing in artist alley. She was selling pics and videos and signing stuff and shit. And seriously, she was fucking hot. Pretty much identical to her pics, but someone (I forget who) said she was skinnier in person.
	It was around then that we met up with Brian and Elizabeth again. We decided that since the con was closing for the day that we’d all get some dinner and then head back to the Hyatt for the drink-up that was to happen at nine. Since Brian still had to pick up a couple of sketches and Raj wanted to check some stuff out quickly, Tim and I waited in the lobby. Raj came out ten or fifteen minutes later and said that he was beat and was gonna just go back to the hotel and rest. Soon thereafter, Brian and Elizabeth came out and we were off. First, we had to find their hotel, so they could check in and then we were going to go to some make-your-own stir fry restaurant that Brian likes (and sorry, Brian if I fucked up what it is). The walk to the car was long and arduous because we were amongst however many others trying to get to their cars, plus Brian’s car was near the top of the parking garage.
	Finding the hotel proved problematic. We stopped for gas and Brian asked a trucker if he knew and he pointed us in the exact wrong direction, which caused us to almost be killed. We were driving down the highway and this car turns onto it and enters into our lane. It was two-lanes in our direction and we were in the left one and that fucker didn’t know how to fucking turn a fucking corner right. So Brian had to swerve left quickly and then just as quickly swerve right to avoid the median and a sign. He pretty much saved us from getting hit by some fucking van. Of course, he laid on the horn and we all gave the van the finger. And then we drove. And drove. And realised we weren’t where we were supposed to be, so we stopped again and this time got proper directions. Yes, it was the opposite direction of that which the trucker had pointed us in. Fucker. We finally found the hotel and they got checked in. And while Tim and I were waiting in the lobby, this woman went into the restaurant that’s off the lobby, which normally would be a “who gives a fuck?” kind of thing, but she made it slightly interesting. See, she opened each of the two doors with an arm and entered and then turned around and looked at us, saying, “I meant to do that.” Meaning, she meant to open both doors and enter as such. We were baffled why she said that, but it was funny still. I guess.
	By this time, it was 7:30 and we (Tim and I) decided we’d just get some food back at the Hyatt, so back to the Hyatt we went and were dropped off. There, I realised that a day of walking around had made me stink a little, so I changed into the Paradigm t-shirt I had purchased earlier and we went down to the hotel bar, which was a sports bar to get food before the drink-up started. Raj walked us down even though he had already eaten, and because he wanted to hit the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund’s party (which wasn’t what he expected he said). So down we went to get us some food, some drink and to meet some people. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be leaving the bar for over four hours without using the bathroom.

To be continued next week . . .