Chapter 26
It's Halloween, and instead of spending my Saturday afternoon watching a Jordan Peele movie marathon, I'm stuck with Dinah and Clint at Nessie's Hot Tub.
We arrive late since traffic to the convention center was so heavy, which is not a comforting thought given that this kind of event has a high saturation of eccentric people, to put it mildly.
Upon entering, the song “Funkytown” greets us as we search for our designated booth.
I'm wearing David Bowie's Aladdin Sane makeup with a red lightning bolt, which covers my scar.
Clint is in jeans, a black leather jacket, and sunglasses, apparently trying to be the Terminator.
Dinah is dressed up in a puffy blue minidress decorated with rainbows and a thick white trim around her skirt.
Her cotton rainbow boots make squishy noises with every step.
“Are you some otaku character?” I ask.
“I'm Rainbow Brite!” she says, insulted. “She's a superhero from the eighties, like me. You have no culture whatsoever.”
We stroll past a gallery of characters. Someone dressed as a reptile in a sequined, military-style Michael Jackson costume moonwalks past me.
At the Vaccines Are Satanic booth, there's a man in a vaccine costume getting hit like a pinata by children with their plush Loch Ness Monsters.
Dinah pumps her fist supportively at a woman behind a booth titled “Weather Isn't Real!” Across from that, there's a potbellied guy with iridescent sunglasses and a silky white beard at the Bigfoot Pro Podcast table.
“Can I interest any fellas in a Bigfoot tour?” he yells out to nobody in particular, then takes a swig from a cup of beer.
I pick up one of the pamphlets and ask, “Have you ever seen Bigfoot?”
“I don't see nothin'. I'm blind.”
“Then how could you find Bigfoot?”
He puts his beer on the table and scratches the back of his head like he's digging for memories.
“Welp, my son Troy was camping up in Oregon when a lady Sasquatch creeped into his campsite, screaming and shaking trees and throwing rocks all over the place.” He pantomimes as he narrates, but I'm distracted by the tip of his beard dipping into his beer cup.
“Troy thought he was in big trouble until he realized she was actually giving birth, so he had to be the midwife.
Got Sasquatch fluids all over his tent and car.
Brought that damn tent home and boy howdy, I ain't never smelled nothin' like it.
I'm a believer now. The question is, are you?”
“Yeah, definitely,” I lie, skimming through the pamphlets. Maybe when Felix and I are in California, we could do one of these and make some content out of it. But the cheapest tour they've got is $3,000.
“Do you offer special discounts?” I ask.
The man thinks for a moment.
“No. But my other son Corey currently teaches Bible classes online. He used to make smart bombs for the government. You could enroll with a discount now that we've talked. Are you White?”
“Um… yes?” I say, unsure of what that has to do with anything.
He grins. “Boy howdy.”
Weirded out enough to leave, I turn around and bump straight into a wall of brown fur.
Three whole feet above me is the snarling face of a Sasquatch with protruding yellow teeth.
I shriek and almost fall backward over the table until the Sasquatch removes its own head, revealing a flushed, sweaty man.
“All right, I'm dying in here, Dad,” he says, zipping himself out of the costume. He tosses it on the table.
“Wade! Get over here!” Dinah shouts at me from down the aisle. Clint is behind her, setting up the Dinahmite! booth.
“I need you to watch the booth and try and get people to sign up for our podcast while we wander around,” she says. “I want at least twenty sign-ups by the time we get back. Do your little dancing clown act, but no gay shit.” She shoves a clipboard and a box full of pens into my arms.
I sit behind the table and unenthusiastically grin at the people who pass by. All the other podcast tables have freebies like candy or magnets. There's no incentive whatsoever for anybody to come up to our table.
A goth lady with a filigree tattoo of a skull on the back of her shoulder passes the booth with a golden retriever in a pink bandanna.
Everybody in our aisle coos with a unified “awwwww” as the dog passes each booth.
The woman sets up her own booth at the end of the aisle, rolling out a poster that reads Madame Tiff the Psychic.
I look both ways for Dinah and Clint, and they're on the other side of the room. I sneak out from behind the table and quickly tread over to Tiff's booth.
“I would like to pet your dog. Oh, and I'd like to do a psychic reading,” I say.
“You can pet Mabel for free, but if you want a psychic reading, you'll want to look at the different services I offer,” she says, handing me a postcard that shows her fortune-telling “packages.”
“The cheapest you offer is a hundred bucks?” I ask, coming off a little desperate. She bats her eyelashes and pulls out a purple veil decorated with silver stars from her bag.
“Rent in Houston isn't getting cheaper,” she says, wrapping the veil around her head.
“It's just that… I'm in love with my best friend, but I feel like if I tell him, I'll ruin everything.”
She looks at me like I'm a lost little puppy.
“Sweetie, I charge a hundred bucks to tell people what they want to hear, so I'll tell you what you don't want to hear for free.
You already know what to do. You're hoping I'll talk you out of it.
I won't. Fortune favors the brave and all that shit.
You can't control his answer, but you can still get it.”
“Wow. Thank you. I appreciate your free honesty.”
“Eh, look all around us. I'll do pretty well today. Don't ever underestimate how stupid people are and how quickly they'll open their wallet if you tap into the pit of their anxieties.”
Oh well. At least I get to pet Mabel.
“She's friendly,” Tiff says.
I glance at her biography, which says “horror actress.”
“You've been in horror movies?”
“Yeah. You might have seen me as Dissected Stripper Number Two in Ripper Rampage Part Four,” she says. “But I was the lead in Sasquatch Temptation. And despite what you may have heard, I didn't use a body double for the love scenes.”
“I love horror movies. I'm moving to California next year to be an actor and content creator,” I say.
“Been there, done that, wrote the book.”
“Do you have any advice?”
“My sister got a master's degree in aerospace engineering and works at NASA.
I didn't, and right now I'm here. That's all I'm saying,” she says.
“I had fun working on the films, though.
BloodMunch Studios always has the best contests.
This year they're giving out money for the best horror short. The theme is found footage.”
I glance down, then up, feeling an idea emerge. “How much?”
“Five thousand.”
“Can anybody enter?”
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral. As long as you've got the camera.”
“WADE!” Dinah's voice jolts me and kills my concentration. “You're supposed to be watching the booth!”
I rub Mabel's head one last time and wave bye to Tiff before dragging my feet over to the Dinahmite! booth.
Dinah shoves my shoulder. “Why didn't you get any sign-ups? And why are you talking to that weird gypsy woman?”
“I don't think you're supposed to use that word,” I say.
“Oh, look! The Professor is in, everybody! Shut up and get back to work.”
An hour passes, and not a single person has signed up for Dinah's podcast. The only person who approaches our table is a man dressed as Elvis, who's lugging a heavy cardboard box with both arms.
“Would you be interested in extending your life for a subscription fee of just twenty-five dollars per month?” He pulls out a blue bag of pills from the box and places them in front of Dinah.
“I'm back from the future and got the key to immortality in these here Elvis Elixirs.
If you're prepared for whatever the future brings, that is.”
Dinah throws the bag at his chest, and it plops back into his box. “I'm prepared for you to fuck right off back to whatever toilet you died on, you drug-addled sack of meatloaf. Can't you see we're working here?”
Elvis backs away with a “Thank you, thank you very much” and tries his luck at the other booths. Dinah observes him and strokes her chin.
“Hmm. That's actually a good idea. Why don't we do that?” she says.
“Dress up as Elvis?” I ask.
“I mean sell a product. All we need is to come up with something to market.”
Behind Elvis, Clint sprints toward us with a fistful of papers and the Sasquatch costume I saw earlier.
“We gotta get out of here. I stole a bunch of sign-up sheets from some blind guy at a Bigfoot booth. Now we have a legitimate email list.”
Dinah turns giddy and claps. “You're so smart, Clint!”
“You stole the costume, too? Why?” I ask.
“Could come in handy someday. You never know!” Clint declares.
Dinah and I start taking our booth apart at rapid speed and hightail it out of there before anybody realizes what happened.
Tiff, in the middle of a reading, notices us running by. “Leaving so soon?”
I manage a quick “Bye! Thanks again!” as I zip past her booth behind Dinah and Clint.
“Okay, but you're going to miss the conga line and the Sandy Hook Truther Society doing the Macarena,” she yells as we disappear into the crowd.