How could I drag myself back out again after being so plainly exhausted? I know that going to convention right now is the dumbest possible idea. Let’s put ourselves out there with the crowd so we can see what’s gonna happen when you take a sheltered crowd and turn them loose.

For what it’s worth, the night I put myself out there was coming off of another stupid idea – going out into a huge crowd to see some bands play like I deserve it and I’m not putting anyone around me at risk. Have we made enough excuses to absolve ourselves yet? Hope so.

Saturday Night at Saboten, 2021. Phoenix Arizona. I dragged myself out of bed after an exhausting drive two hours north. I managed to squeeze in the kind of shower where you brush your teeth, wash your ass and also shave at the same time. I won’t tell you which body parts I shaved before I left, but there was a need to be….aerodynamic.

The pleasure of the drive was all mine this time – just two hours back on the road the same way I’d dragged my ass home the same morning. Panicked phone calls with friends, calling in favors. If not for a friend letting me know they’d chip in when they heard there might be a story on the line, I never would have been able to stretch my bank account for it.

I swear, the Black Bondage Elf who gave me this money should get a dedication in this story. We didn’t exactly line up properly for most of the night, but it provided me with an in I didn’t have (especially because when I USED to do this kind of shit, this convention has denied me media credentials four years running)

Phoenix shows up on the horizon like a scabbed over piece of skin. Decades of desert farmland and old buildings paved over by city streets and parking lots. Wil Wright once remarked while making Sim City that if they’d attempted to match the scale of real cities, It’d mostly be parking lots. No place I’ve been makes that seem truer than Phoenix. While it’s not quite the spread of a place like San Diego, where it’s not uncommon to park your car and then take a taxi somewhere – it spreads across the valley  from near end to end, broken up by doldrums of highways and their sister parking lots.

Downtown Phoenix, where the Sheraton is located has been Saboten’s #1 home as long as I can remember and probably as long as the convention has been around. It’s one of those downtown high-rise hotels with three floors of ballrooms and whatever kind of room an “executive suite” is.
Saboten is great, because it is notoriously light on security and that lets there be fun for the whole family. Case in point: if you’re ever in the neighborhood and want to check it out, the elevator can take you all the way to the fourth and third floors, where it’s possible to make it back down to the convention halls.

While waiting for my ticket, I got impatient. The hotel had been remodeled and drinking in the lobby wasn’t an option. Absolutely choked, crowded, all of those words that paint a picture of how claustrophobic Saturday afternoon was. I was hit with the overwhelming smell of hotel air fresheners and cheap liquor as soon as I opened the doors.

Honey, I’m home.

I mill around in line and get a feel for the attendees. Restless, but definitely more so than past years. There’s a subtype of anime convention attendee that is a shy recluse afraid to step out of bounds or engage, and I’ve never really ran into many of those people at Arizona conventions. They tend to see the panels they want and quickly leave. Saboten’s the kind of place where old Live action roleplayers rub shoulders with artists and genderqueer crossplayers. An aforementioned aging (respectfully so) Larper talks my ear off about the hotel gin and how “good it feels to be back out there” while I nod and don’t ask questions.

It’s about 3:30 and it’s looking like some improvisation is necessary. Hold-out savings credit cards can work in a pinch, and I’m pretty sure I’m getting given the option for my color preference of Boundary Lanyards. I notice in the crowd that everyone’s mostly wearing black (neutral-contact) and only the horniest-looking guys are wearing green ones, probably expecting hugs from a cosplayer. I want to “fit in” so I pick green too.

Saboten’s website seemed to be down for the majority of the convention, so for the Saturday Night I was there I was perfectly unmoored. The hotel keeps the exhibitor hall up on the third floor, away from the bustle of the regular hotel elevators and crowds. It’s a smart move, and the first place I go.

I’m never surprised that these exhibitor halls all carry mostly the same things. Licensees from California hawk streetwear merch, local artists sell jewelry and prints. “Exhibitor Hall” is “Craft Fair” dressed in neon and where I think the “crowd” spends most of their time. I never saw the appeal of the people who get so exhausted from going from booth to booth with bags full of tchotkes that they have to sit down and rest for a full hour down there, but I have absolutely but Nintendo 64 Earrings before, so.

An hour quickly passes and I sort of get it. I’m just poking around and waiting, and the phone rings. Whoever I’m gonna be spending the next chunk of the night being dragged around by has arrived, and we meet up on the ground floor.

When I’m on a time budget, the best thing I can do is plan on getting into as much trouble as possible in the shortest amount of time. The next few hours happen in a blur: I remember looking at the Hotel-Ballroom guide for a panel called ‘Would You Fap To That (18+)’ but alas, I do not remember attending.

I do remember the legions of streamers and Youtubers lamenting that all of the best panels we’re locked behind No Photography rules, which cut out the majority of people who we’re wanting to report on the campaign. It is true that that’s where the real “meat” of Saboten is. It’s floating precariously above a very wet hotel bar and the amount of red-solo cups you see in casual attendance in the hands of every level of cosplayers is surprising. It’s easy to smuggle alcohol into a convention if it’s in the hotel you’re staying in: go to the room, fill up, and go to the highest floor next to an escalator.

My companion for the night is dressed like some kind of Black Bondage Elf. Venezuela has washboard abs and isn’t dressed as anything specific. Their partner, Julia, is along for the ride for most of the night. What a way to be: getting dragged around a posh hotel flooded with drunken anime fans from god knows where for an entire night. All of the big guests are gone, so it’s up to us to crawl the desperate hotel parties hoping to find, if not a loud party or two, to write down with my own eyeballs what happens in the hotels and backrooms.

Everything that gets left out of that instagrammable, shareable high-quality Cosplay is easy to see at an actual convention. It takes putting your neck out there and really getting to know some strangers (like any good thing); but if you’re not content with all of the stories about nipple tape and underarm chafing and want to be there to hand someone a beer while they’re gluing fabric to their thighs so they aren’t rubbing razor blades on their crotch from photoshoot to photoshoot it happens here. I take Cosplay as a kind of performance fantasy. It starts when someone finally gets on the convention floor in costume. It doesn’t matter if it’s the ill-fit Persona 5 cosplayer tiredly leaning against an elevator while they wait or the spectacularly skin-tight leather clad professionals. Ultimately, they’re both up to the same thing: declaring love for what gives their life meaning. A favorite character, a moment, a meme. At some point, someone dressed as “coronavirus” meanders passed me in the hall. I stop to pull out my notebook.  – –

We’re still in the early part of the night here and there’s no plan. All of the big guests have left for the night, so there’s no real chance you’re going to bump into a voice actor or regular actor or animator or game developer or god knows who’s making who knows what. All of the sane people I hear are in a hotel a block or so over, but pressing convention staff for that gets me a lot of “I can’t tell you.” and “Who are you and why are you in this room?” type questions.

Venezuela stops to get some food, and I pop by the local “Hooters” because I haven’t eaten in a day, and it’s the only place in downtown Phoenix where you’re not liable to pay 55$ for one small pizza and a single beer.

I talk to a tourist from North Texas visiting the convention to see his cosplayer friend – not paying attention to either him or me. They’ve got a dynamic years of sexual frustration I see from these types online I’m not a part of. Lucky for both of us, I’m in the mood to talk. Hooters is a funny cultural artifact to find next to an Anime convention.

I’m dreaming of getting back to place filled with rented arcade machines and EDM. Around the corner from the gaming hall, a collection of dance dj’s you can’t escape from. When I make it back after Hooters, I find a mostly empty gaming hall choked with people running one-shot DND Campaigns and novelty card games.

A glance a table brings me face to face with two empty fightpads and a handful of people running mirror matches in King of Fighters 2001. I look impatiently for Garou Mark of The Wolves, my own home away from home.

Someone I’ll run into later is bragging loudly about being the successful cocaine dealer at his office – in a place where most of the clientele are smoking weed or drinking beer and not doing much more. Well, it depends. We’ll do some later in a hotel room, but he won’t remember I eavesdropped on his entire conversation.My tourist friend is grilling me about what I watch and I give half hearted answers, writing this all down. There’s no better place to focus than finding somewhere with entirely, entirely too much going on. A group of married men gawk at some younger cosplayers taking a break from the convention, people who dress up purely because they love something. They gawk at the women getting paid to be there, too.

“I waited years for this!” rolls off of someone’s tongue flippantly. I write it down, cuz what else is a writer but some type of pervert in public? At least if I took a picture, people would know I’m there. Someone did wait years for this – they shouted that in the middle of a hotel room surrounded by friends. The implication isn’t that they waited years for the convention, it’s that they waited years to be dressed up as their favorite Character and surrounded by friends of all different levels of inebriation.

We’ve got one night to spend and the convention shuts down early. Here’s what I know, by 7:00, there’s almost a 50 person and growing line to get into the 18+ panels. Maid Cafes. Would you Fap To That. Cosplay Lingerie. I’m out of a brochure now and the website got tanked by people visiting it during the convention – it currently looks like it hasn’t recovered.

You’ll have to take my word for it when I say we definitely played Cards Against Humanity in a group calling ourselves “The Catholic Church” while a group of bored-looking women cosplaying guilty gear characters hovered between tables. One of my companions for the night wisely choses to move into the upper echelons of the hotel. We win one hand and leave.

Up on top of the city, I take in the part of the night I don’t feel comfortable writing about. Rubbing elbows with old friends I haven’t seen, whether or not we remember each other. Sitting down on strange hotel beds with the kind of people you can converse with but you’re sure you’ll never make a lasting friendship with. We avoid conversations about the real-world and delve into Star Trek feelings.

Someone asks me what it takes to be a writer. I tell them to move to New York or Los Angeles. We talk about it.

We get kicked out of one hotel party after another. This has been going on for years. As much as I said that the Sheraton Inn was the home of this particular convention, I wonder if all of us freak anime fans are starting to brush up against the normal, honest, regular perverts and middle-managers.

One party after another is how all of these things end, if you know the right people. Venezuela and a rag-tag group of others are in another stinking fucking hotel room hallway. We pass a confused tourist who tells us something like his wife kicked him out of his hotel room. We seem like the right kind of people, and i’ve been convinced all day we are.

An hour later, the tourist is pressing lips against the collar-bone of a Sasuke cosplayer. The rest of us are on a fuel binge of alcohol and ketamine. I take my first hit of the night already so late I have to think about the drive home, and how long it’s gonna take me to put this all in a form that’s ready for the internet public.

The FLCL soundtrack coats the background ambience in a nostalgic sheen. Some of us are 34, some of us are 29, 24, 22, who cares. We’re all here where the moment between all of the pop culture we’re forced to make a connection to meets with reality.

Here we are thirty minutes later. No photos, but a hotel room marketed as “cozy” rattled by a vent pumping in dirty city air. While the straight tourist gets intoxicated and introduced to a new facet of sexuality in the corner, The Pillows distorted guitars vibrate against everyone’s bodies like a blanket of gossip-noise. No symbols left, this is all we’ve got.