Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(63)
“Geez,” Josie murmurs.
“Yeah. Anyway,” Lawson says.
“You should look them up. See if they’re available for a rematch,” I say.
Lawson tries to sound cheery. “Hey! That’s an idea. I should do that.”
“Because now you’re really good at fighting,” I say.
“No, yeah, I got it.”
We drive on for a couple more moments.
“Your turn, JoJo,” I say.
“Oh, great.”
“You still don’t have yours?”
“No, I do.”
“Well, then.”
“It sucks compared to Lawson’s.”
“Not a contest.”
“All right. So this one time I had to go pee in a port-a-pot and I was wearing a one-piece romper.”
Hour Nine and a Half
Delia’s gone eerily quiet. I don’t know if it’s the Cobra Venomm wearing off, exhaustion, anticipation over meeting Divine, or something else entirely. She’s staring out the window almost purposefully. Like she’s looking for something. Or someone.
“You okay, DeeDeeBoo?” I ask softly.
It’s a moment before she answers. “I’m good. You good?”
“Yeah. My ass is crying out for mercy. Any time in our lives when we were not in this Kia Rio is but a distant memory.”
“We have always lived in this Kia Rio.”
Hour Ten
Dawn is breaking, and we can finally make out the Florida landscape. I thought it would look a lot more tropical and exotic. More palm trees and parrots. It looks disappointingly like west Tennessee. Endless miles of green foliage cut through with blacktop highway. Rows of pine trees. Lots of pickup trucks with Confederate flags.
I wonder if this disappointed my dad too, or if he accepted the reminder as some sort of penance.
Hour Twelve and Forty-Seven Minutes
We arrive at the Convention Center Days Inn. We check in, set an alarm for two hours, and fall on top of the beds without even taking our shoes off. I plummet into a dreamless sleep.
We buy our tickets and enter the convention center. It’s a buzzing hive of nerdery. Dude cosplayers as Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, Michael Myers, Heath Ledger’s Joker, the Babadook, Leatherface, White Walkers, Daryl Dixon, Beetlejuice, lots of generically creepy clowns, and zombies. Girl cosplayers as Samara from The Ring, Harley Quinn, SkeleTonya, Ripley, Wednesday and Morticia Addams, Lily Munster, Eleven and Barb from Stranger Things, Lydia Deetz, Buffy, and creepy clowns and zombies.
There are also these guys and girls called sliders, who wear kneepads, metal caps on the toes of their shoes, and gloves with metal plates on the palms and fingers and take running starts and slide on their knees and bellies on the convention center floor. There don’t seem to be any standards as to what constitutes good or skilled sliding, so it’s sort of like watching kids sliding in their socks on a newly waxed floor. But they look like they’re having fun.
Booths sell masks; busts; DVDs; posters; comics; bobbleheads; Funko Pops; jewelry; homemade perfumes, soaps, and candles with labels in Papyrus font; intricately decorated replicas of human skulls; custom Ouija boards; makings for spells; knives and swords; corsets; animal bones; taxidermy; vintage toys, lunch boxes, and medical instruments; pulp paperbacks; and art prints.
Long, snaking lines of people await pictures and autographs from cast members of The Walking Dead, Buffy, Penny Dreadful, and American Horror Story. There’s a joyous, childlike, infectious air of good-natured goofiness all around. I’ve seen no fewer than three Jack Skellington tattoos.
Delia seems more in her element than I’ve ever seen her. She’s taking it all in with the broad smile and buoyant wonder of someone who suddenly feels a lot less alone, who sees new possibility in who she is. It makes me happy. She points out people who had bit parts in obscure grindhouse flicks, other horror hosts, directors, writers, and artists. I didn’t grasp the depth and breadth of her knowledge. She must spend close to every minute we’re apart acquiring more arcana.
The thing is, I don’t feel like I quite fit in. Even though lord knows I’ve seen my fair share of awful horror movies. Even though I’ve devoted hours of my life every week to horror hosting. Somehow I feel like I’m watching people through glass.
Delia and I are costumed and made up as Delilah and Rayne. I actually feel more comfortable dressed this way here than in my normal clothes. Lawson appears to have gone (hilariously and adorably) with his best notion of bodyguard chic: a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black Vans. All he’s missing is sunglasses and an earpiece. He’s taking his role very seriously—hovering behind us, silent, stoic, and on high alert for any threat.
We’ve been there about an hour, wandering aimlessly around the convention floor booths, in a fog from exhaustion and sensory overload, when someone shouts, “Rayne Ravenscroft! Delilah Darkwood!” in a strong upper Midwestern accent.
We turn. It didn’t occur to me for even a second that someone might recognize us. What a silly thing to be surprised by, though. If there’s one place on earth someone might know who we are, it’s here.
The shout came from a man who appears to be in his late forties, with a graying goatee, wearing an Indiana Jones hat, an olive-green short-sleeved button-down shirt, a tactical kilt with a cell phone clipped to the waistband, and those goony dad sport sandals that are illegal to wear if you’re not at least a forty-two-year-old man with nightmarish hairy orc feet. They’re at least a size too small, and his toes—which look like they were pedicured by lowering them into a tank full of piranhas—extend over the edge. He saunters in our direction unhurriedly. He walks like how a tuba sounds. “Rayne, Delilah,” he says again in a tone of vague irritation.