Author: MacPhoenix

Katherine, Chris, and I went into the City on Sunday morning to see Neil Gaiman. Every year there is a big baker’s-dozen-blocks-down-5th-Avenue event called New York Is Book Country. Neil was signing books for an hour, from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm. Those of you who know me personally would be proud to know I woke up in time to make an 8:40 train into the City, with tremendous help from Katherine.

Once we were in the City, we walked about twenty blocks uptown. The weather was beautiful, and being Sunday, there was very little traffic, pedestrian or otherwise. If I wasn’t so grumpy from waking up early and having no sugar or caffeine, I really would have been enjoying myself. As it was, I was begrudgingly grateful that nothing had gone wrong. It was quite a treat to see 5th Avenue closed off from 42st (where the New York Public Library building sits, clever, no?) all the way up to 55th Street. Neil was going to be signing at 49th, where DC Comics had set up a booth in the Graphic Novel section of the fair. We got there by 10:30, and found just a few people ahead of us, milling about by the platform where Neil would sign.

Now I had to get a book.

Or, in other words, I’m an ass. I’ve been a semi-rabid Gaiman fan for years. I have quite the collection of Sandman-branded merchandise, and I have a half-a-dozen special collectors’ edition books, not Sandman-related, written by Neil. I have the Warning: Contains Language CD. I have a 1000-run edition of Murder Mysteries, hand-bound, published by Biting Dog Press. Sure, I have the Hugo-winning Sandman comic, “Midsummer’s Night Dream,” the only comic ever, and forever, to win. At least 50 things I could have signed by Neil? Yes, a conservative estimate.

So here, I’ve gone into the city without anything, and will have to buy a book. But this was no big deal, really, because I wanted to get a copy of Sandman Endless Nights, the first Sandman-related thing Neil has written in years. I (correctly) assumed that I’d be able to get a copy there, even though I wasn’t sure it had officially come out, yet.
At the DC booth, they had four copies on display, two hardcover, two soft. Of course, I was going to get the hardcover, but, no, DC wasn’t actually selling them. I’d have to go to the Borders down the road, I was told. I set off, leaving Katherine and Chris to wait on line. I walk down to the end of the fair, 55th Street, without seeing a Borders book store. Sweaty and concerned, I saw an information booth and asked the nice woman there where the nearest B. Dalton was.

I don’t know why I do this. B. Dalton hasn’t existed in New York in ten years, I think, and yet ask me to name a book store, and I’ll say B. Dalton without pause.
At any rate, the nice woman at the kiosk was old enough to know that B. Dalton was a book store and directed me to the Borders on 49th Street, where I had just come from. I blinked, thanked her, and then headed back down the road. When I got to 49th Street, doubting-Thomas that I am, I scoffed at the idea that I’d miss the book store. There was no Borders building here, I said to myself. See? It’s not here at all… oh, look, it’s a booth right next to the DC Comics booth. Oh. Right.

I got on line to buy the book, and called over about five feet away from me where Katherine and Chris were still waiting. “Hey, look,” I said, “the book is being sold right here.” I gave a sheepish smile.

Then with book firmly in hand, and paper bracelet, used to guarantee those waiting on line a signature from Neil, firmly on wrist, I waited for another twenty minutes or so for Neil, who arrived and started signing early. What a guy. We were given yellow Post-Its™ to write our name on, so Neil wouldn’t have to guess spellings and such, so when I got up to him, he asked, “Jonathan, is it?”

“Mmm hmm,” I said.

And I wanted to say a thousand things to him! Do you want to go get sushi after this, Neil? Murder Mysteries is my favorite short story, but did you know I never got that one detail about the newspaper story until I read the illustrated version? “Ramadan” was my favorite Sandman story, and I think it perfectly highlighted your amazing ability to join real myths with those you’ve made up yourself and pull them together in one hell of an entertaining story. That’s called pastiche, right? I’m envious that you can write so well, so often, and still have the will and energy to update your online journal. You really connect with your audience. Oh, and Daniel, and Delirium, and Mervyn Pumpkinhead, and Door, and Low-Key, and Wednesday, and Shadow, and Snow, Glass, and Apples….

But what I said, after he drew a really cool, really funky Sandman in silver ink on the inside of Sandman Endless Nights, was, “Thank you, very, very much.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” he said, and I moved aside.

Twenty seconds. Twenty seconds with a man of genius, a man who has entertained and educated me, and countless others, for over ten years. And then I moved aside.

Chris gave him a copy of Good Omens to sign, and he wrote, “Burn this book!” We’re not sure why.

We trekked down to Little Italy afterwards, for the last day of the Feast of San Gennero, and I had a stuffed artichoke, Katherine had a cannoli, and Chris had chicken shish-kabob. Yeah, Chris is a real lover of the Italian food. The crowd was thick, and the sun on our backs got us too hot and too tired too quickly, so we left the City shortly afterwards. But I got my book and my twenty seconds.
Hope to see you next year, Neil.

So once or twice a month, I’ll stop at the local Chinese food place. It’s in a great location. I order my food, walk down to the bank, maybe stop in the drug store or supermarket, and then drop back in on the Chinese food place to pick up my hot, steaming order of Egg Foo Yung. For those poor souls, uneducated in the ways of truly disgusting Chinese dishes, Egg Foo Yung is three 3-egg omelettes, cooked in a wok, and served in a dense brown sauce. If I give you a hard time about your Big Mac consumption, feel free to parry with the Chinese omelette. Egg Foo Yung is like cigarettes: I know it is gonna kill me, it’s a disgusting habit, and if you don’t know why I do it, I can’t even talk to you about it. At least, I don’t throw the un-inhaled portion out into the road whilst driving.

Anyway, the greatest thing about stopping for Chinese is the little side shows. During the winter, as I crossed the parking lot, I noticed a strong odor of burnt wood. It was so strong that, as I entered the Chinese food place, I could smell the wafts of smoke emanating from my jacket. It attached to me that quickly. I commented on it, saying that I didn’t start the fire. Ha, ha. As my order was cooking, the staff in the restaurant was becoming visibly nervous over the smell, until we all saw fire trucks come streaming into the parking lot. Within minutes there were, and I am not exaggerating, a dozen fire trucks in the lot. But there was no fire to put out. The pizza place next door has a wood burning oven, and, apparently, they forgot how to open the flue. There had to be sixty firemen there, easily, all just told to go back home.

Last time I was ordering Chinese, a kid on a bike, probably about 16 or so, accosted me as I walked out of the supermarket, asking me to buy him some cigarettes. What a disgusting habit, I thought. No, that’s not what I really thought. What I really thought was, hey! how come he knows I’m old enough to buy cigarettes? And that got me thinking, as it always does, about being a kid and thinking that 30-year olds were so adult, so mature, and had to have it all together by then. Yeah. But I never did ask one to buy me cigarettes or booze. The kid might have gotten lucky with me if he asked for beer, but only if he asked for the right beer.

I’m a beer-elitist. And this was proven to me on that very same excursion for my Chinese fix. There was an old, bummy looking guy, skinny, coupla teeth, pushing a cart on the sidewalk filled with things hidden by black, plastic bags. Now this strip mall does have a supermarket in it, so I wasn’t going by the cart alone to convince myself that the gentleman in question was a bum. He also carried with him a beer can in a paper bag. That was a topper. But, initially, I gave him kudos for his choice of beer. The can was very long, no 12 ouncer, and was black. In my naive elitism, I thought the guy was drinking a Guinness. It isn’t a very practical thing to do, since, I was thinking to myself, the Guinness can is meant to be poured into a glass. The new glass bottle Guinness, they say, can be drunk from the bottle, but I’d still pour it into a glass, being the beer elitist and all.

And then, I thought about the absurdity of my thoughts, very meta. He’s not drinking a Guinness, you dweeb. A Guinness is about $2.50 a can. It’s gotta be MGD or some such. Idiot, I sighed to myself.
We met up in the Chinese restaurant, my beer-swilling friend and me. He was talking to the cashier about his two daughters coming up from Florida, and that his mom was doing well in the nursing home. I still don’t know what to make of that, except that North Babylon has some chatty hobos.

Then, after I picked up my food and made my way back to my car, I got a message, a message from God’s messenger. You see, “The end is near. You, me, everyone you love, every star, every animal is going to die.” That’s it, folks. Wrap it up; nothing more to see here. The photocopied paper clung to my windshield, and all the rest of us who were just so lucky to park there at that time so we could be saved. Sneaky bastard. I was walking back and forth through that parking lot for the past 15 minutes, and I never even saw her.

I’m pretty sure it was a woman who wrote out the treatise on the second-coming of Christ, because of the handwriting, very curly. She didn’t necessarily hand them out, for sure, but I don’t think she’d want to do anything half-assed for the Lord. She seems to have the perennial problem of mixing up “your” and “you’re,” but she did pretty good otherwise. I don’t really want to make fun of this person, but I did get a kick out of this line, which was written lengthwise up the margin of the page: “God loves you, shouldn’t you love him? YES!” Oh, those pesky ambiguous negatives. Yes, I shouldn’t love him? No, I should not love him? No, I should love him? Oh, YES, I should love him. Okay. Got it. Now, I can see this “saving” a Christian who has gotten lost from the flock, and for that we all rejoice, but does it really work on someone who, let’s say, is a confirmed atheist who has written several pieces of Internet propaganda on the silliness of the Christian persecution complex? But, then again, how many of them did she expect to come across in a parking lot picking up Chinese food?