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"Stop fanning yourself!" yelled the comic-book-store manager, Stan, snatching the improvised cardboard fan out of my hand. "The customers don't realize it's hot until they see you fanning yourself. Then they leave!"
No one needed reminding. It was August in New York. The A/C was broken, again. I was running the cash register, sweating in cut-off shorts and a ripped T-shirt. My hair dye (Manic Panic's Plum) had stained my neck. My bare legs stuck to the vinyl stool where I was perched in between displays of Serial Killer Trading Cards (a huge seller) and dusty kids' cards, something proto-Pokémon.
When Stan was done yelling at me, he gave me a little shoulder massage and called me "kid." I rolled my eyes at Darrell, one of the gay guys working the floor. He smiled back. Stan was straight and nerdy, but for some reason (probably related to marketing) he only hired twenty-something gay men and dour teenage girls. I was fifteen.
That summer, my best friend Asia and I were living at my parents' East Village apartment while they were away for the summer. Asia and I stayed very busy. When not at the comic book store, I was in a summer program at Columbia. Asia was taking art classes at the New School and working at a political office. We still had plenty of time to stay up late, cooking pasta shells with butter and salt for midnight dinners, drinking way too many screwdrivers and chain-smoking Camel Lights.
Mostly, I worked at the comic-book store (which was exactly one block from our apartment) in the evening — six p.m. to one a.m., when the store closed. I rang up stacks of vintage Supermans and little Japanese toys and Archie comics for people way too old to be reading Archie comics. Once a shift, I got everyone's deli order and walked down the street to gather up a bag full of sandwiches and sodas. For a week or so there, we were all really into turkey on a bagel with mayo and lettuce, but usually the sandwiches my co-workers wanted were very fetishistic — leaf lettuce, not shredded lettuce, three kinds of cheese, the long rolls, not kaiser.
After we closed, I stayed an hour or so to clean up and do inventory. The street outside was as busy as it was in the middle of the day, so I was never worried about going home so late. The only time I was ever scared was one night at two a.m. As Darrell and I were finishing up, a huge man banged on the wood-and-glass door (we didn't have the gate down). We saw him through the window and cowered. He banged again, loud. "What do you want?" Darrell called out.
"A Cable card!" the guy boomed. "I've got my money right here!" Sure enough, he was holding his two dollars in one hand and pointing at the X-Men display with the other. Everyone was buying X-Men comics like crazy that summer because they came with free cards inside. Everyone wanted to find a Cable card, as they'd printed the fewest of those. It was like the golden ticket. I'd actually started to suspect there were no Cable cards, and that all these X-Men fans were deluding themselves and doomed to own 5,000 Storms.
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| The stories were real stories. There was dealmaking and violence and wistfulness. I ate it up. |
"Come back tomorrow!" I said. "We're closed." The guy, who looked rather like Cable himself, finally left, and Darrell and I looked at each other and cracked up.
I always made sure to work Sundays, too, from noon to six, because that was the only time the workaholic manager took off. Sundays were fun. We turned off the classic rock. We fanned ourselves with impunity. We talked about belt buckles and boyfriends and the worst regular customers, like the guy who would yell at you if you handed him back pennies in his change. "I DON'T TAKE PENNIES," we yelled at each other.
And we read. A lot. Sunday was like Stan's worst nightmare, all of us leaning against displays, giggling, fans swooshing, greasy, mayonnaise-y fingerprints all over the merchandise. It was on such a Sunday that I found Sandman. It immediately replaced Hal Hartley films and the semi-random Scarsdale band Too Much Joy (the album Cereal Killers was on repeat for the entire summer) as the primary influence on me and Asia.
Written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by various people, including the regally named Malcolm Jones III, Sandman was one of the smart-people comics, bought by twenty-one-year-old former art students with good haircuts and cool shoes and by thirty-eight-year-old guys in bands that were actually good. It was common to see Sandman in a stack with back issues of Hate and Love & Rockets. Every Sandman had a zillion references, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare. When you got the obscure ones, it made you feel smart, like you'd just finished the Friday crossword puzzle.
And the stories were real stories. They were all about humans getting tangled up with gods — the gods in this case being the Endless, seven brothers and sisters named Dream (the title character, and star), Desire, Despair, Destiny, Delirium, Destruction and Death (portrayed as a hot, funny, casually goth-y girl). One or the other of the Endless would get his or her (or in androgynous Desire's case, his/her) claws in a person, and page after page of dramatic dialogue and artsy illustration would ensue. There was a lot of dealmaking, and violence and wistfulness. I ate it up.
Some of the storylines took place in parts of New York I walked through every day. In one of my favorite mini-stories, Death has a talk with a skateboarder in Washington Square Park, where we bought pot before we realized 1) it was frequently oregano, and 2) we were girls, and girls never had to buy their own drugs.
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