The trip always starts with The Drive. I once heard that living as an adult is just a period of drives we have to take. Gasoline journeys to misery: knowing we have to commit no matter what to our lives, and see all of the resolution. That’s what I heard, anyway: it was mostly in reference to a Jude Law movie about a guy who cucks someone.
What’s it take now to get in the vehicle and go somewhere? Getting somewhere. We’re looking for an experience now we can tell everyone we know about. We want to turn up in interesting places for our friends feeds, or coworkers. Here’s the shell industry of hospitality, driving fingers into everything.
Sometimes “The Drive” is a four month period. Wasteful balcony parties where everyone is trying to be who were last time we got seen. Drugs, and alcohol, mutually thought to now be the same category. To those who didn’t get seen for three or four years, however long it’s been. I can see you there. Tired nights spent roaming around packed warehouse floors filled with cosplayers, arcade machines, all manner of ephemera.
Phoenix Fan Fusion did a number on me. A section of partition dedicated to TV actors. I watched people dig through crates of comics that should be free online. A huge, mustached man standing in front of a white banner that declared “COMIC BOOKS FOR $1,000” I don’t look. The front is still like it’s always been: god, someone has found a way to cosplay Stan Lee.
Phoenix Fan Fusion does not happen in a hotel, it happens in almost four of them. Saboten, a convention a few months later, takes it all and crams it into three flours of a southwestern skyscraper. Attending the hotel any other time of the year is an experience like a horror movie. Silent halls filled with pilots and restaurant workers from out of state. Always trying to get somewhere. Well, everything happens here: you just have to be here the wrong month.
The First Weekend of September. An unusually hot month, where the edges of the city catch occasional rainfall. just enough to blow a stinking, humid wind into the center of the metropolitan downtown. For four, or five days, depending on who’s stuck and sticks around, the city is going to be filled with every level of cosplayers. I’m cosplaying too, someone I don’t get to be but a few days out of the year. For once, I am finally like everyone around me. At least, built up in the world around me: something wants to believe that.
In the corner, with a mask on, asking pure and perfect strangers: would you like to be on Deep-Hell.com? That’s the only idea I had at least. Why not try it? Everyone’s on twitch: let’s break into new markets. We can enter the streaming market: it’s deep-hell.com, everywhere and nowhere. Bold Deadpool cosplayers go mostly silent. Everyone falls just a little out of character – no one answers with jokes. It’s a real answer, or they only slip character to read the sign.
Little colony streaming through the hotel like a patch of mud slowing them down. Artist alley to a panel, all of the front and center features of what makes a Convention pushed to the absolute bare minimum. Three floors of complete and total excess. Get drunk on the first floor, get fucked up enough to mingle just half in and half out of wherever you want to be. Second floor: the main attraction. A theme park. Japanese Punk, EDM, a videogame arcade. Maid Cafe’s and Puzzle Rooms. I do not need to go to Nintendo World, you know? I just have no reason to see Avengers Campus.
Everyone’s there because they made a costume. They met a friend. A partner, they learned something about themselves. Some people are there because they have done none of those things. They’re paying to enter, and coming out with an experience. The aura of a product starts to unfold. A square box where Videogames go, with the fighting games people were playing four years ago. It’s where you know where you’re at.
Outside, beaten down in the heats of the Phoenix streets, are a litany of people working punch-card jobs to cater to most of us out here on holiday. The hotel’s party spills out onto the streets for four days – that pungent and nostalgic smell really does come back in the 110 degree heat. Alcohol, drugs, and the adhesive tape catching hangover juice like rainwater. We’re having a blast.
Downtown, Any City USA, once a place only in movies but watched by so many people every little kid who saw them grew up to make sure they could export it anywhere, is the home to your local anime convention. Sushi Restaurants and Vintage Clothing Stores, Barcade’s running constant sets all weekend. You could conceivably drop into any big downtown suburb of America – the kind of suburbs with tall buildings and homeless people but no less isolated little blocks of downtown culture, and not have to worry about seeing anything you weren’t familiar with.
After awhile all of these little conventions, well, they start to run a trend. Art bleeds in from everywhere, and the only thing that starts to change is the cosplay. I stumble, full of bright eyes again through the same hotel hallways. We’ve got a mission this time: Would YOU like to be on Deep-Hell.com? We’re hot, we’re famous, we’re ready for action.
Cameras are primed and put into position. I move them through this tower of a hotel, all of the places the hotel struggles desperately to force up against the convention itself. Don’t be too loud. Armed police officers stand guard outside of hotel doorways, and they have tons of drunk anime fans to argue with. They wave hello when I’m just someone walking in. They stare deep at me when I’m wearing a mask and costume and say nothing. Hotel doors that have long been gathering spaces outside of somewhere I’m being sold art or screamed at through speakers that I can have An Experience are now locked, or otherwise so filled with set-dressing tables and chairs to keep us out. Every time I hear about someone wanting to drag their friends out there at 2am for a party, I laugh.
Saturday night I even swing by to see how people choose to make themselves awkwardly comfortable, but there’s not music, god, not even a cardboard prison for cheap beer. Inside of ballrooms, pulsing rave music bleeds into hallways of rotating cosplayers. Everyone stays long enough to dance to one song and take a picture. The people really into it, well, adhesive tape and sweat. Like got intended. Rows and rows of banquet chairs line the corners of the room, a silly reminder that we might as well be throwing a fucking wedding here.
In those hallways on the Saturday and Sunday nights where everyone’s looking to capture that experience, groups of boys in Demon Slayer shirts bare oiled chests and tattoos and go screaming, mad and raving that they might see a woman with eyeliner’s titties in a panel hosted by Uncle Yuki, the godfather of the local convention scene.
Yuki’s panels are a highlight at any convention out here, places where the newbies go to be hazed and find out what it’s really like – but not really, right? There’s an element to hearing that people actually fuck and do drugs and get Wasted in these places that’s necessary to tell the people attending they aren’t all that weird for wanting to cut loose.
I stand still right where I’m at and watch and wait. Saturday turns into Sunday, but the hotel doesn’t change. It’s easy to lose your sense of place and time, until the energy ramps up and everyone collectively realizes that the fun’s going to be over in little more than ten, twelve hours. The rave eventually empties out, the hallway karaoke done with love on the shittiest karaoke machine imaginable, the maids from each cafe are all finally off shift. We all filter off to where we’re going tonight. Hotel parties spin into oblivion, all the wrong energy, all the wrong vibe, or so I hear.
The one I attend is mostly strangers, and nobody seems to be on the same level. In the corner, people doze. The lights go down and someone’s on a little tiny turntable, checked into a hotel desk. One of the ones with a bible in it. Things fade into a nothing not worth talking about, and half of us spend it out in the hallway.
The same conversation pops up for the first time. You throw these huge things in past years and become attached to them. The hotels, the next year, the convention centers, they use any excuse they can to clamp down on noise . We respond by getting more quiet. How’s that night end? with someone finally sane enough to tell us to get the fuck out of their hotel room afterwards. None of us have a feeling of embarrassment. It’s still Saturday, and nothing will take tomorrow from us.
Sunday though has a unique way of hitting hard enough to prepare you for what’s come. We’ve all caught up with each other, the biggest panels, the biggest events. More people are out now than were any of the previous night. Our little Midgar, our little Kamurucho. When everything is close behind and I’m looking at it from the outside, are we only a year or two away from an “Anime Cons as the Last Walkable Spaces.” article?
Well, like always, here are the people not here: the dead and the dying. Someone else, too. The toughest part of the world a few years ago was the fact that, just before, we all saw friends who would be close pushed off to start something new. The world crashes into us, and now while I’m here, I wonder: If things hadn’t stopped, where would we have gone? In Sunday afternoon I find desperate feelings that nothing is really going to come together.
But it’s also that hangover. Convention and Festival hangovers go hand in hand: nausea, followed by despair, followed by a painful and sour rush of caffeine through rusty veins. I’m laced with fungus and trying not to sweat to death in latex skeleton gloves. It’s just important to be that, as it is anything else.
The Bar rolls around, Sunday night. Well, it doesn’t roll around, because it’s under the most important parts of the hotel for this convention. Two police officers stand at both entrances, defending the last line of society. All of us, wasted in a hotel lobby, trying to find where to go next.
What’s it take to get all of these bodies in the room together? The promise to show off our stuff, but even more than that: a safe space to wear identity as character, a word that you see floating around AT conventions, but that the con itself always functions as: a masquerade. Or, one that the most of us can afford: or, even more sinister, one we’re told we should afford. I run into multiple people every year who seem desperate to squeeze everything they can into one weekend. This is it, summer vacation. They look the most tired out of all of us at the end of the weekend.
What’s luxury going to look like, when everything is branded? When the sons and daughters of the world take over, and everything is built to be sold or bought or displayed – is this a little glimpse into the future? Turned to commercial, the spaces for the non-corporate or popular get pushed a little more every year to the smaller conventions. We want the family here, the con goer, the person puking in a toilet in a bathroom at 3am who tells me with a vomit soaked face what I’ve been trying to get out of someone all weekend.
“I’m just here to find out who I am.”
I have nothing concrete to give them, so I don’t. the little porcelain and shale tile hotel bathroom explodes in noise, the door left unlocked. All of the sound cascades into the reflective interior. I wonder if he found himself that night the same way I had before: drunk, passed out in a chair and letting strangers take care of you. For the sake of it out of everyone, I don’t get their name.
I didn’t buy anything, but that’s what they’re selling and looking in, it’s always about the people and the place. I hear people talk about what they want out of these, and what they wish they could make all weekend. Recapturing, not nostalgia for what was supremely popular enough to fill the hallways: but I do remember the strange sea of harley-quinns and deadpools, the dwindling sightings of virgin-killer sweaters.
I try not to be so stuck in the past, because watching with present tense is like seeing something that divides into an amusement park or one of the good malls people talk about: where every teenager could hang out and display the latest style: and people from all over, even outside, do show up just to be seen. They’re all over, doing a lot of pointing in and hovering just on the fringe. Cosplay Artists hang out and talk shit about the people who buy their prints, and especially the semi-professional. That’s a story I hear every year.
Invisible hotel workers keep the production going all week. A lavish, external and internal view of luxury. All of it feels a little cheap, and the carpets and hallways are obtuse in the way luxury trickles downward to sustain itself. The uniforms of the staff, the cadence and rhythm of valet cars. I have this job, outside of here, too. Make living here as a luxury supporter, if you can.
Sunday morning, the walls come crawling out from under themselves. Sunrise at the pool, like all good weekends should end. A little simulation of vacations that we never get to take with people close to us, because who’s got the time or the money for it? The front desk staff don’t, or maybe they’d be here. Anyway, the pool is mostly lukewarm, and there’s no hot tub.
A hotel without a hot tub feels somehow incomplete – we’re demolishing or burning down all of the hot springs, I should get this one graceful feature of nature and i’d better be able to steal it, but no, here in this hotel I couldn’t afford for an event I remembered I didn’t need to buy anything at. Pissed off and silently stewing about it for way too long, because I can’t even jump the fence into a hot tub. Rise, my consumer pettiness: the one thing still liable to fall for the bummer of our moist, stucco and drywall ikeapunk future: when I get out, I am looking forward to Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, aren’t you?
The moments between that, though, I decide to keep to myself.
Plenty of little moments of laughter, can’t feel guilty there. The hot tub though, the sole face of inconvenience. We skirt by all of the rules without getting yelled at and they’re still going to take away the hot tub one year. Sunset turns on the concrete heating coils immediately and blasts all of us in the face. Well, we made it. the long party is over now. We’ll all change or we wont, but mostly everything between then and now will be anxiety. There are only so many opportunities every year we all get to cut loose in a massive store, one where not everything is for sale.
suspicious hotel imagery