Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn

Author:Venita Blackburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TUESDAY

IN THE Clinic for Weaponizing Fame in Order to Achieve Public Adoration and a Cover for Myriad Crimes, we attend a comic convention. We are a panelist at a comics festival in Los Angeles. We wait in a bleak space that is a series of dark curtains erected in a room with glass ceilings so high they feel like part of the natural sky.

* * *

The Los Angeles Convention Center, located on South Figueroa Street, housed many events of note over the century and a half or so of its existence, including wedding expos, auto shows, megachurch services of various denominations, the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting, and Herbalife achievement awards ceremonies. The Los Angeles Convention Center would be destroyed to make room for low-income housing that would shortly become high-income housing due to land scarcity. The structure swelled in its pocket of the city, shaped like a colossal battery.

There used to be comic conventions held all over the globe to celebrate fandoms of various degrees of sincerity, the uninhibited joy of reveling in the worlds that began in one mind and were inherited by millions to occupy in various mediums. Mostly, they were crowded. They were crowded arenas of deranged, inebriated, sloppy, judgmental, devoted, delirious, exhausted fanatics of books, animations, film, TV, and games that crossed the planet. These fans argued. They swooned. They wore costumes. They wore black T-shirts. They walked and walked and walked like drone ants set on task by their queen, an unyielding endeavor with no end. The attendees of every comic con were promised a chance to glimpse a creator, a chance to interact with someone that provided reprieve to their lives, enrichment to their lives, meaning to their lives. They were often enraptured. They were often disappointed.

Wigs: Then came the wigs. Wigs have long been a source of power and prestige for the Species from eras that have little record of language other than the blood in the stone. Wigs were crowns and titles, provided authority, wherein the naked head of a man or a woman lacked substance. Wigs were formed from the hair of the poor and sat upon the heads of the wealthy.

At a comic convention, wigs were brightly colored, unnatural to human biology but near perfect in color matching to the invented characters of artificial worlds. Sure, there was a kind of fun to be had, but ultimately a singular driving force pressed the masses to the convention center doors: sex. Young women wore painstakingly crafted costumes of fictional damsels, princesses, warriors, and East Asian schoolgirls with hair any shade found in a rainbow. Men dressed up too, but not with the same level of public expectation and theater. Comic conventions served as thinly veiled group therapy for persons not yet accustomed to going to sex parties but who really would enjoy them.

Eventually every comic convention would be precursory to an orgy.

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