My First E3: Part 5

[Late to the party? Get caught up by starting with Part 1.]

The L.A. Convention Center is a confusing, poorly designed space, especially for a first-time E3 goer. The place is chopped up into several cavernous halls: West Hall, South Hall, and Kentia Hall. The only "hall" I'd ever heard of previous to this was the "mead hall" that Grendel lays waste to in the Old English poem, Beowulf. Ah, 9th grade English class.

To make matters worse, each of these halls is approximately 4.3 miles from the other halls. So, if you get confused and head to the South Hall for an appointment that's actually in the West Hall, you can forget all about making the West Hall appointment.

I was trying to get the lay of the land in the name of locating the Press Room, where I would, hopefully, acquire an important object known as the press badge. The press badge is the key to E3, only instead of being wrapped in tinfoil and buried under some dirt in a planter, it was buried inside several tons of steel and glass inside the convention center. The Press Room, according to the useless L.A.C.C. map I was peering at, was not located in any of the halls, but in a "Meeting Room" on "Level 2A-1."

For the second time that day--but far from the final time--I was lost.

As I studied my map like Magellan, certain that I was on the cusp of discovering a lost, game-loving civilization--a civilization that I was sure I was always destined to be a part of--convention-goers milled around me with a great sense of purpose and direction. Almost everyone wore baggy-type khaki shorts and carried giant backpacks. A guy with a mustache walked by talking excitedly into a cellphone. "We need to get the live blog of the Nintendo presser posted NOW, NOW, NOW!" he said.

His trilogy of NOW's jarred me out of my map-gazing stupor. Live blog? Nintendo presser? What the shit? Not only did this guy have a cell phone, which seemed like an incredible indulgence at the time--like the last passenger on the Titanic, I was still clinging madly to my plug-in-the-wall AT&T home phone--he was speaking a language I did not understand at all.

The guy saw me staring at him as he barked still more important-sounding jargon into his fancy phone. He gave me a dismissive look before he and his dumb mustache strode off into the buzzing throngs.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with self-consciousness. I felt paranoid, as if all of these khaki-shorts-wearing, backpack-carrying people around me knew full well that I had no idea where the fuck I was going or what the fuck I was doing here. I recalled my first days in New York City, when I was constantly certain that I wearing the wrong clothes and doing all the wrong things; clothes and actions that were forever exposing me as some kind of banjo-plucking, jug-band-blowing rube from Upstate New York. (Which I was.) Here I was hemorrhaging cash, riding mysterious blue buses around L.A., looking for sets of keys wrapped in tinfoil, sleeping in some lady's apartment in Santa Monica who I'd never met before (and at this point, still hadn't met), looking at unreadable maps. In my head I heard that creepy Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street singing his creepy song, "One of these things is not like the other..."

I put away the shit-ass map and instead started to look at the people around me. I studied them the way that Jane Goodall studied her beloved tick-eating apes. Some people already had badges hanging around their necks; some people did not have badges. I focused on the badge-less. I noticed that they all seemed to be milling towards one particular nearby escalator. I followed these badge-less apes. I rode their escalator. And voila, they led me straight to the Press Room.

While congratulating myself on my display of cleverness, I located the "U.S. Media" line and took my place at the end. When it was finally my turn, I walked up to the attendant, a chubby, gray-haired woman who looked as if she'd recently had her entire mouth removed and had a frown tattooed in its place. I handed her my New York State driver's license--one of the so-called acceptable forms of I.D.--along with one of my flimsy, totally junky business cards. She looked these items over, shot me a skeptical look, then punched some data into the computer in front of her. She then spun around in her desk chair and stared at the large, humming printer behind her.

We both stared at the printer for awhile. Man, was it ever a big printer. It was the biggest fucking printer I'd ever seen. After a few agonizingly long moments, the printer began to groan, making a sound not unlike the front door of a haunted house opening. Then a small index-card sized piece of cardboard emerged. Without a word, the woman slipped the bit of cardboard into the pocket of a clear plastic envelope that was attached to a lanyard.

She handed the lanyard to me. "That's your badge," she said. "Try not to lose it."

Outside the press room, my need to don the badge became almost physically overwhelming. I found a quiet corner, then inserted my head through the loop of shoestring. I felt like I'd been knighted. I half expected a blast of clarions, or maybe a flock of dirty pigeons to take flight.

I looked at the badge, which, from my perspective, was upside down. It was still warm from the huge printer. Below my name, at the bottom of the badge, was the indicator of who I was here at the convention: MEDIA.

I let the badge fall to my chest. I surveyed the milling crowds below. Everyone was waiting for the clock to strike 10, so that the doors to South, West and Kentia--well, nobody was probably waiting to get into Kentia--would officially open.

With my badge in place, I suddenly felt a great sense of pride and belonging. I felt the day's momentum shifting in my favor. I was no longer a cash-hemorrhaging banjo-plucking outsider here. I belonged here now. This piece of cardboard hanging around my neck proved that I belonged here now. I belonged here because I was MEDIA.

I got onto the escalator, and as I descended into the crowds, I thought, Look out, you game-loving motherfuckers. Here I come.

My First E3: Part 3

[Missed earlier chapters? Read one and two.]

According to my MapQuest map, Maryanne's apartment was only a block off Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from the Jack In The Box.

Santa Monica Boulevard was lousy with lumbering buses--buses which I would come to know intimately soon enough--and a fleet of sports cars with their tops down being driven by beautiful women wearing sunglasses that made them resemble prehistoric bugs. But a mere half block off of Santa Monica Boulevard, things abruptly got far more peaceful. Birds were chirping. I could smell the salt in the air blowing in from the Pacific. After the millions of terrible things I'd heard New York people say about L.A., it didn't seem too bad so far.

All the buildings on Maryanne's street looked modern and clean. They weren't old and crumbling with huge banks of garbage cans crawling with rats out front like they were in Brooklyn. In fact, I didn't see any trash at all. Where did California people put their trash? New York people put their trash out front, as if they were proud of it, as if they were saying, "Fuck you, here's my trash."

Maryanne's building was a humble, sand-colored structure with a large, clean glass door and not one bit of trash out front. Per her instructions, I peered into the planter next to the building's entryway. It's the second ficus tree in the concrete planter from the left, she had said on the phone. As nonchalantly as possible, I began to dig through the cedar chips at the base of ficus, not wanting to draw attention to myself.

I dug a path with my bare hands around the base of the ficus. I dug casually at first, and then with an increased amount of urgency, as my digging turned up no balls of tinfoil. I double checked the building's address. (I was at the right address.) I re-counted the ficus trees. (I was digging beneath the second ficus from the left.)

"It's not here," a voice said. I recognized the voice. It was my father, only as usual, he sounded like he was using one of those voice-changing things to make him sound like Darth Vader. "You went to New York, and you made a fool of yourself, working that terrible, shit job and running up loads of debt," the voice said. "And now you're here, looking for a key left for you by a total stranger that's supposedly buried beneath a tree. All in the name of doing what? So you can go to a videogame convention. Look at yourself. You've got your hands buried in the dirt on a strange street in a strange city, looking for something that simply isn't there. Do yourself a favor and go home before you permanently erode the last shred of dignity from the Skywalker family name."

My dad, to put it mildly, hasn't always been supportive of my life decisions.

As much as I try to ignore The Voice, it still has power. Just as the voice began to work its strange voodoo on me, just as I began to feel sick to my stomach with doubt and anxiety, I found it.

I fucking found it.

The ball of tinfoil was there, exactly as Maryanne had promised. I unfolded it quickly, feverishly, peeling back the layers, until--voila--a pair of keys fell out. I wiped my hands on my pants, brushing off the dirt, then picked up the set of keys off the sidewalk. I inserted Key One into the lock on the glass door and turned. It opened. I dragged my crummy suitcase inside.

"Fuck you, Voice," I said, wheeling my suitcase into the elevator. "Eat my ass, Voice."

I knew that this wasn't the last time The Voice and I would battle. But in this particular moment, I was right and The Voice was wrong. And that felt really fucking good.

Maryanne's apartment was located on the third floor of the building. It was clean and neat and very adult, with photographs on the wall, a few pieces of semi-tasteful art, and a glass dining room table that appeared to be slightly too big for the apartment. A water cooler stood in the center of the kitchen. I'd never seen a water cooler in a private home before. (Yes, I had led a sheltered life up to this point.) To have one in your apartment seemed terribly indulgent to me. I found a glass in the cupboard, and filled it up, watching the air bubbles rise to the surface inside the cooler.

Man, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a glass of water as much as I enjoyed that glass of water.

I found the spare bedroom where I'd be staying. An extremely large piece of exercise equipment that appeared to not have been used in long time occupied the bulk of the room's square footage. A bathroom with a shower was across the hall.

I thought, I will be OK here. I thought, I am safe now.

As I mentioned earlier, Maryanne is the mother-in-law of one of my classmates from graduate school. I knew that this very spare room where I was staying was where my friend and his wife slept when they visited Maryanne. Thinking about my friend and his wife using this same exact bed made the place feel much less foreign to me.

The show floor opened at 10 a.m. the next morning. According to my MapQuest map, the L.A. Convention Center was an incredibly long way from Santa Monica--probably at least several hundred dollars by cab. I had to figure out some other, much more cost-effective way to get there.

I switched off the light and tried to get some sleep.

[More soon.]