The smell is the first thing that hits you when you open the door: the vaguest hints of nachos and dip, more than healthy amounts of caffeine consumption, all together making for a volatile mixture.  There's no mistaking it; it's nerd B.O.

This was the highlight of any visit to a local comic book store for myself all throughout high school, the odd way musty bookshelves could intermingle with the sweat of a thousand afternoons spent playing Magic: The Gathering and munching down on chips and dip.  For sheer avarice glee, nothing beats the trek to the local geek hangout.

Before you judge me too harsh in my assessment of the patrons of this and similar establishments, littering the strip malls of America with collectable Star Wars action figures and Silver Surfer issue #1, let me state that it's all right, I know these people.  I was once one of them.  All through my early teens, the lure of comic books was hard to resist.  I gave in once I discovered Spider-Man sometime around my eighth birthday, and for several years you would have been hard-pressed to find a bigger devotee of the illustrated word.  I went nuts for it, as well as G.I. Joe and Star Wars action figures, who would often do battle in the realm of my imagination irrespective of the facts of each's mythology.  I was, in short, a geek, a dweeb, a comic book nerd.

Then something happened: I discovered rock and roll.  Somewhere in my early teens, I disposed of my earlier idols such as Superman and the Flash, and found new champions of might in John Lennon and Frankie Avalon... then I realized how lame Frankie and his late '50s compatriots were (the Nsync of their day) and got down to the nitty gritty of punk.  In effect, comic books ceased their hold on me, as I became obsessed with lost Beatles singles and live Joy Division performances that replaced my long-held love for Marvel and DC.

I think of my conversion to rock and roll as being a "Road to Damascus" experience, replete with divine intervention.  God didn't want me spending my life obsessing over the battles of Peter Parker or the really lame "graphic novels" that detailed Batman's descent into madness.  Instead, I committed myself to a new religion.

I went off on that tangent not to convey that I was now "cool" or "hip" enough to escape ridicule (I still bear some nerd-like qualities, and I doubt I will ever be rid of them), but to illustrate that I was given a choice, and I chose the road... well, most traveled, really.

I was able to escape from the clutches of lunk-headed superheroes in tight bodysuits that left nothing to the imagination.  The denizens of the comic book store I visited (or more accurately "was forced to visit," as it was often my friends who wanted to pop by for the elusive 'Man of Steel' or rare Chewbacca with kung-fu grip action figure) had chosen the opposite path, and had given in to the Dark Side.

This store in particular didn't just specialize in selling hard-to-find geek relics: there were tables set up for "gamers" to do their best Monty Python impressions while informing their opponents how they planned to "smite you with my magic orb of balsamic essence" or some such nonsense.  The sad part was not the establishment of a gaming area per se.  Instead, what really made this place pathetic was the amount of people who spent ALL DAY shuffling cards and planning which special power to use next to open the "Mystic Realm of Neadoria", or some such nonsense.

Guys my age and younger, and older, would spend their time playing endless matches of Magic, Dungeons and Dragons, and endless role-playing games where bountiful maidens were kidnapped by shape-shifting werewolves/magicians, and you had to take on a Tolkien-esque amount of characters in order to... to... well, I never hung around long enough to figure out just what the objective was, but suffice it to say I figured this guys could go into the night if their moms didn't have to come and pick them up.  And that was just the thirty-year-olds.

Now, being a former comic book junkie myself, I couldn't resist the temptation to peer through the stacks for the issue where Spider-Man killed the Green Goblin with the Goblin's own jet pack (which, if you remember, had the spikey "ears" turned down from a previous altercation and thus pierced Norman Osbourne's chest) or the Hulk issue where an entire town was destroyed by a nuclear blast contained inside a gigantic sphere... or maybe not, I can't recall.  I also took delight in the collection of old Star Wars toys from the era B.J.L. (before Jake Lloyd's atrocious "Annie" in Episode I), especially the Boba Fett figure.  But I wasn't about to go anywhere near those gaming tables, which seemed to be the Black Hole of Nerdom.  I preferred to keep my distance, only occasionally overhearing when one poor soul lost all his holdings in The Land Beyond the Farthest Ice Flow or something to his opponent in a well-played hand of D&D.

Perhaps the funniest element of the locale was just beyond the eyes of most casual customers, hidden on the other side of an innocuous bookshelf with "never-were" comic: The porn stash.  Here, a few feet away from the nacho-chomping mole people of the comic book universe, was a cornucopia of hard-core, bondage and domination, bizarre sex magazines, just ripe for the picking.  In full color glory, the women of these magazines seemed able to perform wondrous contortions whilst still keeping the cucumber in place... I digress, but the point is here was all this assortment of real women doing real things with real fruit, and
none of the nerdlingers sitting at the fold-up tables just a few feet away seemed to give a damn.  This was truly the saddest aspect of it all, as far as I was concerned.  Sure, these rejects may have had no shot at talking to a real girl, but they could have at least taken advantage of the genuinely spank-errific material at their favorite hang-out.  Years later, I saw an MST3K "shorts" feature which reminded me of the mindset these guys must've had, at least when I was there: A young man obsessed with his industrial arts course, during which Tom Servo and Mike had the following exchange...

Tom: "But what about GIRLS, young man?  Girls?"
Mike: "No, chisels..."

I often tried to embarrass my friends (after all, they had dragged me here against my will) by trying to show off a little of what I'd found to them over the bookcase, while they were earnestly engaged in their quests.  I should probably reiterate that I, as well as my friends, didn't constitute the "cool" section of our high school; far from it, we were often the lowest rung on the social strata.  But whenever we felt like we were the worst of the worst, all we had to do was visit this place.

I never made any purchases during the many times we paid our respects to the High Court of Mediocre Geeks, but I did find myself tempted at times.  There was the aforementioned porn, but I still held out hope of finding a real girl so I decided not to press my luck.  Then there were the rare Star Wars figures, and various bootlegged VHS copies of several films I liked which (in my pre-DVD player days) were awfully attractive with their "special feature included" blurb.  But I was cured of any such interest when my cousin purchased the long-lost Star Wars "Holiday Special."  Ugh... bad memories coming back... another tale for another day, perhaps if I'm up to it.

Well, as it happened, my obsession with music provided me with an excuse to make a solo foray to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen one fine afternoon, in search of a way to view the "New Order Story" video a friend had sent me from Europe.  New Order (and their previous incarnation Joy Division) had become my main source of musical longing, and I searched high and low for the elusive 12' single of "Blue Monday" and several other rare items.  The rarest of these was "New Order Story" which detailed the history of the band over two hours.  I still salivate when I think about it... anyway, like I said, a friend had sent a copy my way, but it was incompatible with my VCR.  Without getting into specifics, I basically needed a converter-type-thingy-majig to hook up to my VCR so as I could view the video as it was meant to be (and not as the storm of static I had so far been able to achieve).  I searched high and low for such a convertor, but to no avail. It seemed that there wasn't much of a demand for convertors for European videos, or European videos either, in the upstate of South Carolina.  I felt frustrated, angry, and frustrated again.  I didn't know where to turn... until I remembered the comic shop.

True, I had been snarky and judgmental in the past of these Renaissance Fair rejects, and I had often caught the wincing reaction of these mainly indoor creatures when I had dared to let in a little sunlight by simply opening the door, and I had made crude gestures and noises while hiding behind the porn stash, but I needed a convertor for my European video, and they dealt in convertor-things for foreign videos (what with the large collection of bootleg anime I found there, each video seeming to promise more explicit scenes of big-eyed schoolgirls with no panties... except in anime), so I had to swallow my pride and make that trip.  Imagine my surprise when, upon arriving at the off-white store front of the strip mall's happening spot, I discovered a hand-written sign declaring that the store had "moved downtown," apparently to continue their proud tradition of providing safe haven to kids with nothing better to do than role-play as a mystical wizard getting booty on the side.

The end of an era... no longer would I be able to come here to make myself feel better, reassure myself that, whatever failings I had, I had never sunk this low.  The life of runes and nacho-only meals was not for me.  Those who had bravely ventured to the depraved ends of nerdiness were now in a better place... probably another strip mall with five or six lingerie stores adjoining their new location, I thought.  Wherever they were, I knew that there would be someone like me coming along, not afraid to look for the porn stash, and wondering just how the hell he had avoided this fate.  To that unknown wiseass, I say only this...

There but for the grace of Darth go I.

- Trevor