Armand’s Bell Tolls
Armand’s Bell Tolls
It was another bloody convention.
More like a party, really, in that the crowd was smaller and significantly better dressed.
Drake House had been pushing for The Cartoon Museum as the venue, but Lakshmi got them to agree on a comics shop off Shaftesbury Ave, The Black Cape—the first to ever carry my strange mind-child on its shelves.
This meant concrete pillars papered with decades of posters and artists’ doodles, cracked old red leather barstools, and the incongruity of absolute gallons of expensive alcohol ferried by waitstaff on silver platters.
One wall was covered with a blown-up image of Surrogate Goose’s anniversary issue cover.
It was entirely black except for the Victorian-style cameo silhouette of Harcourt in the center with an oversized monocle perched on his little beak.
His curly wig hid an elaborate doom painting of the multiple timelines brought crashing together in this meta-textual canon event of a cash-grab storyline.
There were also posters of the new launch, and an anthology of issues one through thirteen. Nearly five years of my life had been captured in monochrome scrawls of existential flightless birds, stone-faced protector amphibians, and a variety of vaguely dirty, vaguely decolonial Aesopian archetypes.
Lucas’s marketing campaigns—or schemes, or whatever they were—had apparently worked, because a long queue of allegedly semi-famous people took photos or filmed themselves speaking in front of Surrogate Goose iconography.
Some were in costume, others looked like runway models, and a truly disturbing number of them appeared to be barely of legal drinking age.
I breathed through the terror and smiled, keeping my eyes on Lucas.
He was stood off to the side with Sam, Craig, Florabelle, and Abigay, all making silly faces at me behind the celebrities’ backs.
Lucas seemed, as ever, perfectly comfortable, as if wherever he went there was a Lucas-shaped space waiting to be filled.
He’d also made the executive decision to keep us—the proverbial Us—vague at official events.
He’d hang around with my other personal guests, but since cameras were everywhere and my (our) relationship was good content that shouldn’t go to waste or detract from the anniversary, he’d forbidden any PDA.
Which was horribly sexy in a Victorian, nightmarish way. Lakshmi approved, which made it worse.
In her slinky black dress and red heels, Lakshmi moved between people like a white blood cell, an antigen, herding brightly colored influencers toward me, and be-suited automatons toward one another.
Should anyone approach me with a question, Lucas and Lakshmi had joined forces to provide me with a series of readymade answers.
They were mainly variations on: thank you, so glad to be here, so glad you could be here, so glad we could be here together, I am very excited about Surrogate Goose’s future, I am very excited about Surrogate Goose’s past, I am very excited about Surrogate Goose in this current moment, I am generally very excited.
This, which you see before you, is excitement.
Not abject fear and a desperate longing to cuddle my boyfriend.
I got a brief reprieve when Hettie Marks—human boulder, the lesbian, Jewish, gorgeous stone in her sixties who’d founded The Black Cape as an homage to the old Camden cabaret pub—wrapped a muscled arm around my shoulders and bravely talked at the encroaching storm cloud of cameras, phones, and boom mics.
She’d first met me as a hopeful, comic-book-devouring teen, then as a strung-out, comic-book making (if not quite yet selling) twentysomething.
“I known SG was the real deal from the very first issue.” That uncut Cockney rolled across my sunburnt nerves like aloe vera. “Been hawking this lad’s wares ever since, haven’t I? Even if he is a gooner.”
I gave the requisite eye roll. “Can’t help where I grew up, can I?
” I could see Sam whispering to Lucas, likely giving him a crash course in London football geography, class, and historical context.
My sweet cowboy was nodding, frowning, and presumably trying not to look both bored and a bit frightened.
“I got all kinds coming through my shop, and everyone’s welcome, save for TERFs, Nazis, Tories, and Martha Comfrey.
She knows what she did.” Hettie was slowly leading me—and the pack of lightly scandalized journalists—over to the scribble-covered wall near the toilets, known by locals as the Lupanar after ancient Roman dirty pictures. “Show ’em your dubs, love.”
God, this was embarrassing. Like presenting an old primary school project at a work function. Which was almost exactly what I was doing.
With heat camping in my ears, and stumbling over unnecessarily complex explanations for very simple artwork, I pointed out the few graffiti I’d added to the wall as a pubescent narcissist. Then everyone watched as I added a new one—not Harcourt, but a quick self-portrait from behind.
The full Eisner. I answered more questions, then a Drake House person gave a little speech, and everyone laughed, applauded at appropriate intervals, and stopped paying quite so much attention to me.
Once the event had lasted roughly forty-nine years, the music turned up and the lights went from glaring white to a rainbow pulse.
Despite the exhaustion and constant fear of saying or doing the wrong thing in front of the entire comic-reading world, the bass and rhythm crept up my hips in a friendly, familiar way.
The crater in the back of my palette where safety wasn’t ached like a bruised bone, but Sam and Florabelle pulled me onto the dance floor.
“Come on, Armo, you remember how to do this!”
“Yeah, let’s show your Yank how we do it on this side of the pond!”
Where was Lucas? He’d stayed on the periphery with my friends, but now half of them were on the dance floor. I spotted the other half, Craig and Abigay, stalking a server with itty bitty sarnies.
I was doing my best not to feel cheated.
I’d agreed not to cling to Lucas like a toddler to their transitional object all night, but surely we could dance together?
The kind of socially acceptable dancing between adults that wasn’t exactly not graphic, but through a series of what I assumed were elaborate loopholes would permit me to touch my boyfriend in public in a way I hadn’t allowed myself all evening.
So where—
Lucas stood at the end of the bar.
And he wasn’t alone.