ONE WEEKEND TOWARD THE END OF HIS PUBLIC LIFE, AS he and his ex-wife plied their yearly course along the circuit of comic book conventions, bickering, bantering, holding each other up when the sidewalks were icy or the stairs steep, Sam Clay found himself in Cleveland, Ohio, as a guest of honor at the 1986 ErieCon. ErieCon was a mid-sized regional show held in the ballroom of a Euclid Avenue hotel that stood, until it was demolished, across the street from a grand old movie palace that soon after also succumbed to the wrecking ball, during one of the spasms of redevelopment that have tormented Cleveland’s slumber for the past forty years.
People who saw them making the con scene in those years were often touched by the steadfast way that Rosa Kavalier—born Rosa Luxemburg Saks in New York City in 1919 and known to the world, if at all, as Rose Saxon, a queen of the romance comics—kept hold of the elbow of one of her ex-husband’s trademark loud blazers as they moved from curb to counter, from ballroom to elevator, from bar to dining room. They were, people said, devoted to each other. And undoubtedly this was the case. They had known each other for more than forty-five years, and though no one ever quite untangled the complicated narrative of their various creative and romantic partnerships over the years, mutual devotion was certainly part of the story. But the truth of the tight grip that Rosa kept on Sam was that, after a series of unsuccessful operations to repair his damaged retinas, the man could barely see a foot in front of his face.
“She’s my seeing eye dog,” he would say, and then he would wait, wearing a shortsighted grin, as if daring his ex-wife to find no humor in his witticism, a challenge she was always ready to accept.
But to the people who knew Sam—old-timers, friends, and enemies from the Golden and Silver Ages, the beaming young (or formerly young) protégés who regularly radiated from the formless warmth of the Kavalier-Clay ménage—it was obvious how humiliating he found his poor vision, his lousy teeth, the hobbled, foot-dragging gait that had resulted from the surprise return, when he hit his sixties, of the polio that crippled him as a boy. Sam Clay was a professionally (if not always convincingly) fierce man whose mighty shoulders and Popeye forearms attested to a lifelong regimen of push-ups, dumbbells, and the punching of speed bags. You could see that he hated every moment he had to spend “hanging around Rosa,” in his own formulation, “like a persistent fart.”
On this particular Saturday afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1986, therefore, when it came time for Sam to transfer custody, from his plumbing system to the hotel’s, of the Dr-Pepper-and-orange-juice cocktail (mixed by a secret formula known to and palatable only by him) which he had been swilling from a thermos all morning, Sam got up from the “Kavalier & Clay” table in Artist’s Alley and set forth alone to find the men’s room, which, according to the guy at the next table, lay just a few steps outside and to the left of the Cuyahoga Ballroom’s gilded doors. How hard could it be? Rosa was off somewhere having a confab with some skinny little thing named Diana from Comico, and Sam’s new assistant Mark Morgenstern (later known for his work on the DC Vertigo revival of the old Pharaoh Comics title Earthman) was attending the Klaus Nordling tribute panel. And Sammy, Sam decided, could goddamn well find his own goddamn way to the toilet.
As it turned out, there was no bathroom just outside and to the left of the ballroom’s gilded doors; or perhaps the ballroom had more doors than Sam knew about, or featured less gilding than he had been led to expect, or maybe, he thought bitterly, he was just so addled-pated and purblind that he no longer knew his left from his right. He spent ten minutes blundering around the elevator lobby, responding with cheerful irritation to greetings and good wishes from blurred faces and voices that sounded as though he ought to know them. But his attention was wholly occupied with the effort it cost him not to appear to be lost, blind, and in desperate need of a pee, so that he might as well have been in a crowd of strangers. There was an unpleasant incident with a large potted fern, and a compromising entanglement with the legs of a display easel. Sam’s dignity—an attribute with which, until quite recently, he had never been unduly burdened—would not, it appeared, permit him to admit that he was in need of assistance.
At one point he found himself in an intimate, metallic space whose acoustics suggested a washroom or stall, and he knew a horrible instant of hope and relief before realizing that he was in fact riding an elevator. He got off at some floor and walked in some direction, trailing his right hand against the dark-red softness of the hallway’s flocked wallpaper because once, many years before, in an issue of Astounding, he had read that you could always count on finding your way in and out of any labyrinth as long as, from the moment you entered it, you kept one hand in continuous contact with one wall. This expedient may, or may not, have had something to do with the fact that, twenty-five minutes after setting out from Artist’s Alley full of piss and confidence, he succeeded, not without effort, in locking himself inside a broom closet.
Like most grave mistakes his became apparent more or less upon commission. The bright, burgundy, flocked-velvet blur of the hallway went black. The door shut behind him with the decisive click of some instrument of execution snapping to. There was an acrid bubblegum stink of disinfectant and the damp-bedsheet smell of old mop heads. Sammy knew a moment of pure infantile dread. Then in the darkness he smiled.
“At least,” he pointed out to himself, unzipping his fly, “there’ll be a bucket.”
With a chiming like some liquid carillon he relieved himself into the rolling mop bucket whose contours his shoe tips then fingertips had revealed to him. Bliss, fulfillment through evacuation. He zipped up and began, with fresh dread, to contemplate the impossible task that lay before him, which consisted of shouldering the now almost unendurable and infinitely imperiled burden of his dignity while pounding on the door of the broom closet and screaming for help until he was hoarse, all the while enjoying the piscine bouquet of his own urine. He opened his mouth, ready to scream. Then he closed his mouth, experiencing second thoughts about this course. When, after all, they finally discovered his corpse, or perhaps his skeleton, in this closet, huddled over a bucket of ancient pee, that would perhaps be embarrassing for some people, but not for him, because he would be dead. He slapped the door once, twice with the flat of his hand. He leaned against a steel shelf stacked with rolls of toilet paper in their paper wrappers, and readied himself for the final indignity, and sighed.
There was a rattle—the doorknob—and then an insect scratching, wire feelers. And then a burst of light and air.
“I saw you go in,” said a boy. “Then I heard knocking.” A boy in a red baseball cap. An open mouth, maybe some kind of dirt around the mouth. Sammy leaned forward to get a better look. About ten years old, a standard-issue little American kid but with something sly in his eyes and an overall air of injury or grievance. He was wearing a red jersey with the word LIONS running in old-timey script across the front, and in his hand he held an open Swiss army knife. The grime on his lips a streak of chocolate, a chocolate crumb or two. A Hostess cupcake, or perhaps a Ding Dong.
“It smells kind of like pee in there,” the boy said.
“God, you’re right!” said Sam, waving his hand back and forth in front of his face. “This hotel really is a dump.”
He stepped out of the closet and shut the door behind him.
“Hey, thanks, kid. Guess I—” But what was the point of lying? Would he ever see this kid again? Guess I just wandered into a closet. “Guess I had the wrong room. Thanks.” He and the boy shook hands, the boy’s boneless and reluctant in his. He gestured with his chin to the little red knife. “Pretty handy with that. What are you, the world’s youngest second-story man? Hotel dick know about you?”
The boy blinked, as if doubting his own reply or the wisdom of even making it. His breathing came wheezy through congested nostrils.
“I’m an escape artist,” the boy said at last, making it sound dull, offhand, disappointing, the way he might have said “I have a shellfish allergy.”
“That so?” Sam felt his heart squeeze at the sound of the words “escape artist,” the deviated-septum rasp, the eyes that sought to slip free of the enforced deadpan manner of a ten-year-old boy. “Good with locks?”
The kid shrugged.
“Yours was easy.” The boy refolded the pick blade into his knife and returned it to the pocket of his jeans. “I’m actually not really all that good.”
In his semi-blindness it took a moment for Sam to realize that the boy was crying, softly, and had been crying possibly for a long time before he took it upon himself to rescue the old guy in the closet.
“Hmm,” he said. “So what are you doing, wandering around the hotel, freeing strange geezers from broom closets? Where are your mother and father?”
The kid shrugged.
“I’m supposed to be downstairs. At the league award lunch.”
“You like baseball?”
Another shrug.
“I take it they aren’t handing you any awards.”
The boy reached into the pocket of his blue jeans again and took out a crumpled wad of paper. He handed it wordlessly to Sammy with an expression on his face of utter disdain for the paper and its contents. Sammy unfolded and smoothed it out and then pressed it right up to his right eye, the stronger, to read it.
“‘Nice Try Citation,’” he said.
The boy leaned back against the far wall of the corridor and sank slowly to the ground until his forehead touched his knees.
“Long season?” Sammy said, after a moment.
“Ninth place,” the boy said, his voice muffled and small. “Out of nine. Also I have personal problems I don’t care to discuss.”
Sam considered pressing but decided that when you were ten all your problems were more or less personal.
“Look at me,” Sam said. “I just peed into a bucket.”
This seemed to make the boy feel better about himself.
“Listen. I don’t know what the trouble is. I’m going to, uh, respect your privacy there. But I appreciate your helping me. I’d like to pay you back.” He reached into the hip pocket of his suit pants and then remembered that his wallet was in the breast pocket of his jacket, hanging over the back of the chair in Artist’s Alley. “Only I’m, uh, busted.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “So I guess I need to find somebody else who’s stuck in a jam, and do the same for them like you did for me. Creed of the League of the Golden Key.”
“Huh?”
“Forget about it. What’s your name?”
“Hey, dickhead!” A gang of boys, wearing red Lions jerseys and red caps tumbled into the hallway from the elevator and stood. “Vaughan!” The voice, cracking with mockery or pubescence, seemed to be issuing from the largest among them. “What the hell are you doing up here? Coach is looking everywhere for you! He called your mommy, dickhead!”
“You best get your ass downstairs!”
“Hey, Vaughan, who’s the old guy?”
Sammy took a step toward the boy, Vaughan, and lowered his voice.
“They want to give you another certificate?”
“A trophy. But I saw mine. The head was missing. I guess maybe somebody, well. Broke it off. When I saw that, that’s when I left.”
“Come on, Vaughan!”
“Hey,” Sam told the boys, flexing his Popeye arms, and putting as much Brooklyn into his voice as he could muster. It was, still, a decent amount. “Whyn’t you punks get the hell out of here and leave the kid alone?”
The red mass hung a moment in the hallway, wavering like the afterimage of a bright flash on his damaged retinas. Then a moment later it was gone.
“You ever read comic books?” Sam asked the boy.
“Not really. Like, Archies?”
“Archies. No, well, Archie has his place. But—”
Sam reached a hand down and offered to help the boy to his feet.
“Look, they got a big show going on downstairs. Cuyahoga Ballroom. A comics show. You might like it. Take Doctor Strange. He’s a magician. You’d like that one, I bet.”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“You ought to check it out.”
He pulled the boy up and stepped away from him.
“I’d better get back to the banquet,” the boy said.
“Suit yourself,” Sam said. “‘Suit yourself,’ that’s good advice. I wish somebody’d given it to me when I was your age.”
They went to the elevator and the boy pressed the button. They said nothing when it arrived and the doors opened, and nothing until they were halfway down.
“‘Suit yourself,’” the boy repeated. “I let you out of a dark, stinky closet where you could’ve died, you give me some cheap advice.”
Sam looked at the boy and saw that sly light in the boy’s eyes again.
“Ten-year-olds,” Sam said, as he got out of the elevator at the Mezzanine. “God help me.” The doors started to close on the boy and his chance to redeem himself and repay his debt of freedom. He stuck his arm in and stopped them from closing. “Check out the show,” he said. “That’s my advice to you. Cheap as it may be.”
“I can’t,” the boy said. “I really don’t think I can. But, uh, thanks.”
“Vaughan. What’s the rest of it?”
“Brian K. Vaughan.” It came out in a rush, a single word, almost a single syllable.
“Uh huh. What’s the K for?”
“Kellar.”
“Like the magician. Self-Decapitation, right? Harry Kellar. That the guy?”
Brian K. Vaughan looked shocked, almost put out, as if his middle initial represented a grave and powerful mystery of which he had hitherto believed himself the sole initiate.
“Yeah,” he said wonderingly.
Sam stepped back from the doors, and drew back his hand with a Harry Kellar flourish, and the door slid shut on Brian K. Vaughan who, having called home from a pay phone in the lobby, received permission to stay after the league banquet and attend the remainder of the Saturday session of ErieCon ’86, at which he purchased a copy of Strange Tales number 146 (featuring Baron Mordo, Dormammu, and the Ancient One), in Very Good condition, thus altering the entire course of his future life, not to mention the lives of those of us who are fortunate enough to know and appreciate the comic book genius so wildly and thoroughly on display (along with the estimable talents of Steve Rolston, Jason Alexander, Philip Bond, and Eduardo Barreto) in the pages that follow.
He and Sam Clay never saw or spoke to each another again. (2009)