Conventions can feel like a days long performative party at which everyone but me can have fun. It spends energy in exchange for gratitude which, while great, ain’t energy. I like seeing friends on either side of the table, old and new. I like to shake hands and sign my name and say thank you to the people that afford me this ridiculous lifestyle. I like to hug people, total strangers, who look at me and i can see in their eyes that we are alike in ways other people can’t see, don’t know about, can’t understand. Mostly, though, I try to smile and say thank you and to occupy as little space as possible. I try hard to not ask for that exchange, for that transaction, with others who, like me, find themselves on the other side of the table.
I made an exception at Dragon*Con last year. Congressman John Lewis walked by me and I shouted – I mean straight-up SHOUTED – “Congressman!”
He stopped and turned and smiled, all pro. I told him that in a place that was all about superheroes it was nice to meet a real one, and I shook his hand. I said, “You know my wife. Red hair. We were all supposed to have dinner together –”
The Congressman cut me off as we shook. He brought his other hand up to mine and embraced it, turning a handshake into a – into I don’t know what. A gesture of sincerity. “Last year. And your father passed. I’m sorry. That’s terrible,” he said and, shaking his head said very quietly, again, “Terrible.”
He was right. I was a guest at the show the previous year when my father’s tenuous grip on his health slipped for the last time. I left the show and raced the reaper from Atlanta to Charlotte to be at his – and my mother’s – side when his time came that evening.
And indeed, had I stayed, the Congressman, writer/aide-de-camp Andrew Aydin, wunderartist Nate Powell, and Kel and I were supposed to have dinner together. In fact it was during that meal that I texted my wife to tell her dad had died.
And a year later the Congressman remembered.
I praised his book MARCH (Leigh Walton of Top Shelf, who shepherded the project, gave me a copy of the freshly-minted v3 then and there and the March team signed it and you coulda knocked me over) and thanked him for teaching me the virtues of “good trouble.”
Then, to make Kel laugh, Leigh and the Congressman and I took this:
In a crazy sea of humanity, where everyone’s got their game-face on, where everyone’s on their grind, when everyone’s hustling literally and figuratively, this man, this hero, straight-up remembered why, a year ago, we were supposed to meet but did not.
Put aside the man’s career, his history, his legacy – that small, true moment of humanity from anyone would’ve meant the world. That it came from him meant all the more.
So yeah, I’m pretty ride-or-die for Congressman John Lewis, you goddamn butterscotch nazi pissmagnet. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
(Pardon my language, Congressman.)
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