Neil Gaiman

I went to the Neil Gaiman read­ing & sign­ing at Barnes & Noble here in New York City tonight. Even though I knew he’s about as much of a rock star as a writer can get, I naively didn’t get in line until after he fin­ished speak­ing. Neil hero­ically pledged to stay as long as it took; B&N like­wise promised to stay open (would they do that for, say Salman Rushdie?). A slow real­iza­tion set in that I would have to hun­ker down for sev­eral hours to get my book signed. Turns out I had the whole night free (which is a sub­ject for another time), so I thought what the heck? I have to sit some­where to read the book, why not here and now?

And so the first hour passes. The Farts & Igno­ble car­pet­ing is some­what less than plush and my rear is a bit sore. But sal­va­tion! An employee offers us wrist­bands free­ing us to leave and return at will. Well, at will until 8:45, that is. So I go have an enor­mous burger and fries (a crav­ing, what can I say?) and come back.

Neil (he of the super­hu­man wrist) has already signed a hun­dred or so copies; I could sim­ply buy one and call it a night. So the whole time I’m think­ing, why am I doing this? I’m 31 years old! Not an 18-year-old goth chick or a pony­tailed middle-aged book dealer look­ing to make a killing on eBay. I don’t even have any­thing clever to say or ask him!

Turns out I’m saved any awk­ward­ness around Neil by the woman in front of me. She had a whole spiel pre­pared, thank­ing him for turn­ing her on to sev­eral other writ­ers. On one hand, I’m pri­vately embar­rassed for not hav­ing read a thing by any of those men­tioned, but on the other, it frees me from the pres­sure of strik­ing any kind of rap­port with him myself. So as he signed my book and a first-edition Sand­man hard­cover I had brought along (I’m such a nerd), I sim­ply thanked him for stick­ing it out. He replied that it’s quite easy when every­body is so nice. Poor fel­low looked exhausted, stand­ing just to keep his cir­cu­la­tion mov­ing, but he remained pleas­ant to the end.

I’m inspired to recount a few other sign­ings I’ve attended here in New York:

Sarah Vow­ell

I have a lit­tle bit of a crush on Sarah Vow­ell. Brains and wit (prefer­ably snarky and tart) always turn me on, and it must be said she looked a bit sexy that evening. At the post-reading sign­ing, I asked for it to be inscribed to “Chad.” She looked a bit curi­ous and asked me to repeat it. So I did and man­aged to say some­thing about how she had resisted the oppor­tu­nity to make a dim­pled or hang­ing chad joke. I can’t remem­ber what she said in reply, because she looked me straight in the eye and held it for a moment or two, smil­ing her lit­tle curlicue smile. Whew! Maybe she sim­ply didn’t hear my name the first time, but I’ll cer­tainly remem­ber that look and will con­tinue to enter­tain the fan­tasy that she doesn’t look at every­body like that.

Dave Sim & Gerhard

The writer/artists of the comic book Cere­bus. This was maybe 1998 or so, and I think I had already stopped read­ing Cere­bus; no mat­ter how bril­liant a comics writer/artist Sim may be, I couldn’t deal with his sex­ual pol­i­tics (in short, he started using Cere­bus to expli­cate his increas­ingly para­noid and hos­tile feel­ings towards women — yes, all women. Per­son­ally, I like women a lot). But I found out he was going to be show­ing some orig­i­nal art and sign­ing at a gallery in Tribeca, and decided to go. The orga­niz­ers really laid down the law: Mr. Sim and Mr. Ger­hard will sign only, and not do any sketches. Nev­er­the­less, peo­ple were being quite rude and demand­ing mul­ti­ple sketches on their stacks of Cere­bus books any­way, and I recall the gen­eral atmos­phere being a bit neg­a­tive. So when I came up, all I had was a sin­gle slim issue of Cere­bus and didn’t ask for any­thing. And he sketched a Cere­bus head by his name. How about that? The tetchy misog­y­nist drew me a cute lit­tle cartoon!

Ray Brad­bury

This is a good story. Brad­bury is quite a char­ac­ter; imag­ine a huge red-nosed stone-deaf Santa Claus out of uni­form and you’ll get the gen­eral idea. Amus­ingly, an assis­tant stood by loudly repeat­ing in his ear every­thing peo­ple said to him. A film stu­dent at the time, I asked him if he had ever con­sid­ered pub­lish­ing his Moby Dick screen­play. After a brief delay as my ques­tion was relayed to him at greater vol­ume and prox­im­ity, he rose up and bel­lowed (the­atri­cally out­raged) “OF COURSE NOT!!! When I was a BOY in ILLINOIS, I peeked behind the CURTAINS at the CARNIVAL and had my INNOCENCE SULLIED! Movies are MAGIC, and read­ing a screen­play is like learn­ing how a MAGICIAN does his TRICKS!” (etc… I’m para­phras­ing) I stam­mered some­thing about how I was a screen­writ­ing stu­dent and I only wanted to read it. His assis­tant mer­ci­fully repeated me, and then Brad­bury just as abruptly changed tack: “OH! That’s DIFFERENT!” and pro­ceeded to say some­thing about how a writer can learn a lot by read­ing as much as pos­si­ble. So I can proudly state I’ve been pub­licly and loudly dressed down by no less than Ray Brad­bury, but nonethe­less man­aged to save face.

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