by C. M. Taylor
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Trading Tridents
By C. M. Taylor
DecemberCon 2017. John Perlan, aka YouTuber “SmileyNibor,” has come to the con for one reason and one reason only: to see his idol, actor Derek Kitow. And since Derek has announced he’ll be dressed as the original Aquaman, Perlan decides to come as the Aquaman reboot. It helps that he already has the beard and the bod to make a convincing Momoaman.
But when Derek Kitow makes his entrance, he recognizes Perlan from his tiny YouTube channel and wants him onstage! Has Kitow been following him online? Could SmileyNibor’s hero also be a fan? And what exactly does Kitow have in mind by inviting Perlan to meet him after the panel?
“HOW CAN you cosplay for a movie that isn’t even out yet? How can you?” asked Harry adding a vigorous flourish to the fake tattoo he was inking on my arm.
“It’s a great look for me,” I replied. “I knew I had to try it as soon as I saw it back in Batman v Superman.”
It wasn’t really a great look for me. I don’t have the eyes to pull it off. Mine are brown, not the gray that makes the half-crazed persona of New Aquaman work. But the Chinese website where I’d ordered my Wildly Water Grey contacts let me down. They would probably get here in time for New Year’s, but not in time for DecemberCon.
“No kidding. You’ve been working on that spear-thingy of yours since August. That’s just bad luck, if you ask me. There is no surer way to guarantee that an upcoming movie will completely suck than to cosplay it before it comes out,” said Larry, tightening my plastic pauldron.
Harry and Larry had been my best friends growing up. Still were, mostly. But they had come out together a year and a half ago (that is, together together) and now they were unbearable. Drippy, goofy, finish-each-other’s-sentences, have-no-respect-for-our-woefully-single-bestie unbearable.
“Or that the character that you adored in the preview will be exactly that—Preview Bait. He’ll have four lines that weren’t covered in the preview, and the whole rest of the movie, you’ll spend twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the hotness that you thought was coming to show up on screen. I think you jinxed it,” said Harry.
“There’s no way that a movie that is giving me Jason Momoa dressed like this could possibly suck monkey balls.” I held up the Justice League Aquaman movie poster as evidence.
“Fine. Suck dolphin balls, then,” Larry replied.
“Don’t tell me they screwed up some iconic Aquaman moments. Like that time when he taught an octopus that stealing is wrong,” said Harry.
That was the problem with getting into a comic-related argument with the Arrys. It was like trying to out-geek a Reddit thread.
I had no chance to survive. Make my time.
And really, it wasn’t like I knew all that much about Aquaman. I hadn’t even watched Justice League growing up. The Arrys knew perfectly well that, for the vast majority of my life, I had thought Aquaman, aka Arthur Curry, was lame. He breathes underwater and talks to fish. (Woot.) He’s the uncrowned king of Atlantis. (Atlantis. Right. Thank you, mythology blender for this distasteful smoothie.) And even after he finds out he’s a long-lost prince, he decides he’d rather live a quiet life in his father’s old lighthouse? It’s like he retired before the comic even started. Even Aquaman’s relationship with Mera, his assassin wife who came to kill him but stayed to have his babies, is syrupy and lacks the angsty tension of Superman and Lois Lane. So it was fairly obvious to them that it really wasn’t Aquaman that I cared about. At all.
I just hoped they didn’t know what I did care about.
“I think you two just don’t appreciate how hard it is for a face like mine to match an outfit.” I stroked my luxuriant beard for emphasis.
“You could go as Hagrid,” said Larry.
“Or ZZ Top,” suggested Harry.
“Or that homeless guy on Fifty-Third and Main—although the out-of-towners probably won’t get the reference,” said Larry.
“Thanks.”
There was no way that I was going to tell them the truth about my outfit. I was going as the matching half of a pair.
Well.
In my dreams.
In my dreams I was a couple with Derek Kitow. The Derek Kitow, star of the Syfy show Human Street, light of my dweeby little life.
He had made the announcement that he was coming to DecemberCon dressed as Aquaman. Clean-cut all-American Aquaman. Not burly, Tritonesque Aquaman.
Why?
No one knew.
It was presumably some publicity thing, a favor owed to Jason Momoa or DC Comics or somebody.
The Arrys said he had lost a bet.
Whatever it was, from the moment I heard he was going as Aquaman, I knew I was going as the Aquaman reboot. It was either that or go as a drag version of Mera, or Barnacle Boy from SpongeBob SquarePants.
I wanted the sexy version.
And the one that went with my beard.
“Well, I’ll admit, you do have the arms for it,” said Harry. He and Larry were working on the final touches of my costume while we talked. They were inking a version of Aquaman-Reboot’s tattoos all over my arms and upper body.
“Definitely,” said Larry. This was a nice, Arry way of telling me that I was a bear. A fact I was very familiar with. There was exactly nothing lithe or svelte about me. Never had been, never would be. And far too many gays in our fair city were only interested in the fahbulous. Not the frumpy or the freakish or the failed.
Still, I liked the look of me as Momoaman. Shaggy and masculine and fierce. My beard was longer than Aquaman-Reboot’s, passing down to my chest, and I’d braided the end and put on a metal clip. Dreds and tangle and bare, painted chest. I faked the Momoa eyebrow scar. Meticulously inked faux tattoos made a checkerboard all down the left arm. My right arm bore quite respectable plastic armor.
And—I had my trident. A twenty-two-pound five-pronged monstrosity made of scrap metal. (Thank you Mr. W., high school welding instructor extraordinaire, who had somehow managed to teach the basics even to a drama nut convinced he was going to be the next James Dean. You made me more money than acting ever did.)
At this point in my life, slowly but inevitably pushing my way past midthirties, I was starting to accept that Hollywood wasn’t going to come beating down my doors, throwing multimillion-dollar contracts at my feet.
A decade and a half later, and I was still a part-time welder, still in a studio apartment eating ramen, still working whatever gig would throw a couple hundred dollars my way.
And I was okay with it. To me, this meant I was a real actor. Not a shtahr.
So I was never going to throw coke parties in a penthouse and name my adopted-from-darkest-Africa children after my favorite cereal.
Just as well, really.
I had done an infomercial and some voice acting, was a corpse on one of the CSI offshoots, and, courtesy of my expansive beard, I even made it in a “before” picture in a goofy series of Gillette razor ads.
I had thought that I would hate the beard when I first started growing it, but after it stopped itching and I stopped constantly teasing it, I had come to think of it as a perma-mask. A new face that rendered me rugged and mysterious. And too prickly to kiss. No need to feel rejected or to refuse someone who insisted on making out on the first date. Cactus-beard rendered me a robustly aloof loner.
A LOT of people, I am told, use DecemberCon as an opportunity to purchase gifts as part of some other, less-important event that also falls in December. Some pagan pine tree festival, I think, or a zombie birthday.
It is a Decemb
erCon tradition for regular attendees to exchange gifts and then eat a meal with family and friends and at least one adopted guest, who is obligated to wear a traditional wizard hat (a variant of anything from Mickey’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” hat to the Hogwarts Sorting Hat). I had been the obligatory third wheel for Harry and Larry last year, and would be again, unless they cornered some Loner of Dubious Cleanliness to take the role for me.
The seating for Derek Kitow’s appearance was first-come-first-serve, so I volunteered to save seats for the Arrys while they went to explore the myriad of dork-friendly boutiques that filled multiple levels of the conference center. They were grateful. They hadn’t come all this way to fail to blow money on handmade steampunk gear and autographed Sandman nerdery and Red Dwarf beer milkshakes (which are actually very good.)
Even so, my efforts were only enough to guarantee us good seats, not the best.
“Better that way anyway,” said Harry, panting as he caught up to me just as the doors opened.
“Close enough to bask in the glow, far enough not to smell the BO,” added Larry.
I would not have minded smelling the BO.
I also would not have minded skipping out on my besties and finding a seat in the conference hall without them, despite the fact that they had done me the huge favor of strapping on my armor and inking my tattoos. Part of me really wanted to be alone (albeit in a crowd) with Derek.
But I couldn’t very well go around admitting something like my hopeless, pathetic fancrush to the Arrys. I did not look forward to the day they found my collection of Derek Kitow pictures and pilloried me for my obsession. I knew full well they would have no qualms about humiliating me from here to Facebook and back again.
There would come a time for that particular mortification—when the raw wound of infatuation was a little less deep. Someday, maybe when Human Street was a thing of the past, I would be able to look at Derek Kitow without my heart pounding in my ears.
As it was I had to count on facial hair to hide the burning blush, and my grip on my trident as defense against trembling hands.
“Do you think he’s actually gay,” Larry asked no one in particular, “or does he just act that way in interviews to do a little gay baiting on the side?”
This was too much. Derek Kitow was unquestionably not gay baiting, and I needed to set him straight while the introducer went on and on over the cheers of the crowd: “…hardly needs any introduction. We know him from his distinguished filmography—from serious drama to action sci-fi. Winner of five Tony Awards, nominated for Best Actor in a….”
I already knew all this. Derek Kitow was born Derek Kwiatoslaw on June 12, 1988. He was a model and singer (and bellhop and a barista) before his acting career took off. He had studied acting at Occidental College. A brief marriage to a drunken socialite resulted in no children. Possibly because he was—increasingly openly—gay.
Just because he had not always been out of the closet did not mean he was only a gay baiter now.
“Mister! Derek! Kitow!”
He was greeted with cheers and screams, like the rock star he was: stepping out from the side of the stage, one hand up in a self-conscious wave. A big screen on either side of the curtain showed a close-up of his face.
Dark eyebrows and golden blond hair. Leanly muscled with an elegant spring in his step.
He was dressed, as promised, as Aquaman.
But what an Aquaman. He made my Momoaman look like a dime-store Halloween costume.
His scale armor had a weirdly shimmery, iridescent quality, catching the light and giving back rainbows from its bronzy surface, almost like real fish scales. And the green gloves and boots had to have some kind of mechanized device in them to make them breathe and flow as if he were underwater.
He’s a merman.
Love and craftsmanship went into that costume.
It was glorious. Perfectly trim, perfectly masculine. And also the most overtly gay thing I had ever seen him wear.
Beside me, Larry harrumphed. “We all know it should really be you up there,” he hissed in my ear.
I gave him a stern nudge in reply.
Larry still looked like he was going to snark off, but Harry interrupted him with: “But what a costume.”
“I know, right?” Larry replied, “When he said ‘original Aquaman,’ I thought he was going to come looking like a goldfish in spandex.”
“Or a pumpkin,” Harry said. “Remember the cartoon?”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me.”
“But he doesn’t look anything like that. He looks—”
“Gladiatorial,” I cut in without taking my eyes off Kitow, who was high-fiving a group of eager fans pushing their way toward the stage despite the security, grasping at his shining seaweed boots. “A retiarius.”
“A what?” the Arrys demanded.
“A net fighter,” I translated. “Like in The Original Series episode ‘The Arena’?”
Lights went on in the Arrys’ eyes.
I looked back at Derek, pointedly ignoring my friends, but something in the stillness that settled over both of them made me turn my head back around.
The other lights had gone on. The ones that I’d been hoping to avoid.
Harry was staring at me, mouth slightly open. But it was Larry who asked, too quietly to be heard above the crowd, so that I had to lip read: “You have a crush on him?”
I shook my head, more as an attempt to pretend I had not understood than as an actual denial.
“You’re lying. Oh my God!”
This time, I could hear him easily, even above the cheering.
And then Harry was bending over to whisper something in Larry’s ear. And Larry was giggling and nodding.
Crap.
Well, that did it.
I was going up there. There really wasn’t any point in being shy now.
I would have been perfectly content to stay in my middle-row seat and peek at my dream man from between steel prongs. But if I was going to be taunted for the rest of next year as “fanboy” or “Aquabitch” then, dang it, I was going to shoulder my beefy way up to the stage. No point in missing the possible opportunity to clap hands with the man himself.
Leaving the Arrys gawping after me, I parted the sea of people between me and the stage with my homemade trident. My size alone is usually enough to daunt, and shaggy, bearded, Momoa-me made an impressive hole. I was only a few yards away from where Kitow was grasping hands with the mere mortals beneath him when I heard:
“Sir! Sir, no weapons!”
A short, sharp-nosed security woman with salt-and-pepper hair was getting in my face. She looked like someone who would not refer to me as “sir” if I had not been carrying a fishing spear.
“Sir. No weapons! No weapons of any kind this close to Mr. Kitow.”
The tiny tyrant had no respect for my trident! I took an immediate, personal dislike to her. She was not only standing between me and true love, but she was obviously enjoying the chance to bully someone who happened to be bigger than she was.
“Tell you what, you can hold it for me while I—”
“No. You’re going to have to go back to your seat.” Apparently, you didn’t reach the lofty position of “convention security” without glorifying rules for the sake of rules, rather than being alert to any actual danger. Any fool could see Kitow was safe with me.
She was using her hands to direct me as if she were an air traffic controller and I was an airbus. I was going to have to explain to her that I was not getting this close and facing an emotional flaying from my friends, without at least touching the raised flooring on which Derek Kitow walked. But before I could say any of this, I was rescued.
By the man onstage.
“Hey!” Derek Kitow said, and his lapel-mic picked up the word so that the whole auditorium resounded. “Are you—” He was only ten feet away, but I was looking up at him from beneath his pedestal so I had to glance over at the big screen beside the stage to actually read
his expression. Aquaman’s eyes narrowed, then widened as he placed me. “You’re from the Gillette ad!”
Oh my God.
Derek Kitow knew who I was.
Derek Kitow recognized me.
I opened my mouth. Remembered to shut it again.
My brain chose this moment not to be on speaking terms with my tongue.
“You’re SmileyNibor! I saw the video of you making that trident! Get up here! Come on up!”
Derek Kitow knew my YouTube handle. I had uploaded a video of myself doing all the anvil and hand-hammer work for the trident. It really wasn’t an elaborate job, just tacking to keep a few prongs together—not even any pass-throughs like the real Aquaman-Reboot, but I had done it dressed as Aquamoaman and somehow, Derek Kitow had seen it.
And somehow, Derek Kitow wanted me on stage with him.
I felt cold. I felt hot.
I felt like my legs weren’t going to carry me up onto that stage.
I managed to wave my trident at him timorously and ruined my Momoa-look with a sheep-faced grin. There was no way Derek Kitow was actually going to let me onstage with him, was he? Weren’t there rules against that?
The rules against weapons near Mr. Kitow’s person, evidently, did not apply to Kitow himself, and he extended his own brass trident down to me to help me up onto the platform, bypassing the stairs.
I had to focus on making my knees stop shaking and to avoid floundering like a landed trout, but I made it. Onstage. With Derek Kitow.
One clean-cut, classic Aquaman had hooked a shaggy fisherfolk Aquaman out of the tide of fans.
Are you getting this, Arrys?
I hoped I looked a bit more suave from where they were sitting.
With the stage lights on, I couldn’t see back to my empty seat, but I knew I could count on them. At least one of their phones were undoubtedly rolling, despite the “no recording” rule. I even heard a sharp whistle, which might have been Harry, from about where they were, even if all I could see when I looked in their direction was the dogged security woman shooting me an absolutely murderous look, and a few fans, eyes wide as they watched me fulfilling their fantasies. “Who is he?” was written on their faces as they checked their mental Kitow databases to see if they were supposed to recognize me, the way our god so clearly already did.