Digital Hotbox. (Pt. IV)
I can't really explain what I was expecting when the news came down the chain of command that we'd actually have some booth space at the show. I took it more as a moral victory and something symbolic than a major development; being that we were all wrapped up in the middle of an ugly, furious debate with the fist-puppet fuckasuckers over at GameFAQs over the validity of the project, it was nice to get dealt an unexpected trump card. A nice rallying cry. Maybe a little bit of trivia for us to laugh over, somewhere down the road, in those future dream days of salad and big distribution deals. Where we could lean back and toast cheerfully to those days of want and need.
But aside from all that nostalgic bullshit, I hadn't gotten my hopes up. All it had to do was exist. Maybe three walls and some decent quiet. We were so thoroughly burned by the time we came limping up--shoes ballooning with blood and the stems of Dave's sunglasses permanently branded into the side of his bald skull--that anything with a pair of folding chairs and enough room to straighten out our knees would have been fine. We just needed a place to call our own. Get the fucking weight off our ankles, come down from the white-hot stress of fighting upstream through all those lines and hamstrung expectations. Just five minutes to reload.
What we actually wound up with was a room the size of a penalty box done up in porno-purple tones, split jaggedly down the middle with a bunch of prissy French assholes.
It was nothing personal, of course. Just bad circumstance; after thousands of miles, a fistful of quality sleeping hours and the notorious 'brown lung' effect of reentering Los Angeles' atmosphere like a wayward astronaut gagging on the chemical soup of an alien planet, the last thing I was in the mood for was a pissing contest over less than twenty square feet of space. But that's exactly what Dave and I got. No rest for the wicked in the face of our unsolicited boothmates; they'd had enough time to spread out all over every available stick of furniture like a fungus, and it was clear that we were expected to roll with the facts. Step over the yards of strewn cable. Prop up a few brochures next to their heaps of reading material. Avoid jostling the monitors they'd capped off every chair and table with. Tread lightly, and keep our heads low.
Normally, we'd fucking tear this kind of deal apart with scarred knuckles and ninja kicks. But it was half-past that kind of drama; forced into submission by the ugly heaviness of the show and all the obstacles we'd limped over to get this far. So we just sank. Sank onto whatever was handy, sank into a few moments of makeshift zen. Trying to tune out the blitzkrieg of heat and light, and the looping jet-engine thrum of the Harlem Globetrotters' theme music from the neighboring display. Trying to ignore that weird parade of blank faces that would pop through the door, size us up like a carnival freak display, then vanish into the blur of passing bodies.
"So," Dave said, broken grin fixed on his face. "An hour?"
I felt for the guy. This was a fucking drag in any language. He'd carved his way through time and space, three years and a thousand miles, bleeding and chugging down coffee and raw hope, all for the sake of building to this moment... and they didn't even have a goddamned chair for him. I'd offered him mine, but I already knew what his answer would be: sit the fuck down. Get your head straight. I teetered on top of that perforated steel barstool and looked on as Dave dragged the other seat out from under the table, and propped his laptop up on it. The wobbling chrome shape of the PWX logo proudly standing out against the screen's black background, stabbing our banner right into the midst of the shit that we were wading around in. We were up to our chin in it, but Dave didn't flinch; just stepped back out of the way, and waited. Waited. Waited for a whole fucking sixty minutes on his feet, and didn't complain once.
In retrospect, it might not have been so grueling if we'd at least been shacked up with an interesting product. But like everything else on the journey thus far, we'd drawn the prerequisite weird card from the deck; the French fuckers were showing off some kind of 3-D television technology that added an internalized depth field to whatever was running around on the screen. I stayed off to the side of the booth with a fat question mark tattooed on my forehead as I tried to make sense of the blurry monitor, finally getting irate enough to ask the nearest frog what the hell it was that I was supposed to be looking at. Until now, all they'd regarded us with was the snapping cadence of little commands:
"Pleeze moovyoor fute."
"If you would... do not touchzis, pleeze."
"Pleeze, to ze side."
"Pleeze, moovyoor head."
But all of a sudden, the mood warmed up. The sales gear kicked in. The Frenchman directed me to the front of the screen, gesturing grandly at the murky colors swimming around on it.
"Canyu see it?"
"No... I don't think so. The hell am I supposed to be looking for?"
"Ze image. You will know when you z'it."
I feel like I'm getting outfitted for a fucking straitjacket. The guy prods me forward, back. A step to the side. Every angle I'm jostled into provides the exact same headache; trying to focus on the flat screen image is akin to skin-diving in a giant bowl of soup. It sloshes around, colors failing to stay put in their goddamned lines. I'm about to start throwing punches when it suddenly clicks into place. The picture. The depth effect. The merciless, brain-cracking migraine that trying to process the layered projection brings on.
"It... uh. Huh. Reminds me of those old Magic Eye things you'd see at the mall."
He bristles. Stiffening up.
"I should say that eetzmuch... much more than that."
I fail to make sense of that. No surprises here.
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