The Dude and The Douche
I think it's just important to remember that no one falls into a simple set of labels. It's even more important, I think, to learn from your mistakes and to fight for the positive choice.
--Lindsey Buckingham
It's been 371 days since I wrote the first half of this story. Though I have little interest in finishing it, I have to get The Thomas Jane Affair out of my head.
Why don't I want to write Part Two? The simplest, one-word answer is "embarrassment"; not just at what happened after visiting the RAW Studios booth, but at the horrendous writing quality of the first installment. Jesus, will you look at this?
"If the main character of those offshoots happens to wear a cape and fight crime, you’d be hard-pressed to find a passerby who could tell you what year their comic series debuted."
I know what the point of that sentence is, but a new reader could break their neck on those jagged words. I'd like to say I've gotten better in the last year, but that could just be wishful thinking. They say that the only way to improve an artistic skill is through daily, hard practice, but I can't tell if writing five movie reviews (and special pieces, like this one) a week has made me better or just more verbose.
See that? "Verbose". No one talks like that. But I think in fifty-cent clusters that often land on my keyboard as six-dollar word bricks. As unwieldy as these sentences can be, they're choice prose compared to my extemporaneous speech. I advise anyone asking me an on-the-spot question to wear hip-waders to avoid getting swept away in the tide of stammering half-thoughts and bursts of impenetrable faux-eloquence.
(By the way, this isn't the kind of thing one brags about in a public forum, eight days out from conducting a major interview. But my innate lack of good judgment is key to the story I'm about to tell.)
Instead of killing you with another poorly delivered dose of Hunter-Thompson-lite, I'll jump right to one of my life's low points.
The guy pointing his finger at me in the picture above is comics artist extraordinaire, Tim Bradstreet. He may look like the love-child of John Cusack and James Gandolfini, but he's really very sweet. That stern finger-wagging is all in fun, but there's no acting in my expression of panicked agreeability. You see, the guy standing opposite Bradstreet--the one deliberately not looking into the camera--is Thomas Jane, whose glare suggests he's finally found the guy who keyed his car.
Rewind about five minutes:
As more and more people figured out that Thomas Jane was doing an impromptu signing at the RAW booth, the crowd became even more shoulder-to-shoulder than usual. Fortunately, I'd been right at the front of the table as numbers began to pick up, putting me at the front of the "line". Though I'd had my fill of Jane earlier, I was attracted to these beautiful Punisher prints that Bradstreet was selling--particularly a grim, blue-toned painting of the actor as Marvel Comics' premiere vigilante. I bought one off of Bradstreet and asked him if he thought Jane might sign it as well.
"Of course!" he said, smiling. I waited for Jane to finish talking to another customer and then re-introduced myself. He looked through me from behind those aviator glasses with the vaguest hint of recognition and signed a slightly more legible version of his name than he'd managed during our first encounter. I then asked if I could get a picture with both the artist and the model.
Bradstreet nodded and motioned for a buddy to take the photo. In that moment, Jane answered my question with a cold, stern, "Why?"
Shocked, I muttered something like, "I just think it'd be, um, really, uh...cool".
Jane shrugged.
Out from behind the table came a guy I immediately recognized as screenwriter Todd Farmer. A few months before, I'd seen him get butchered in My Bloody Valentine 3-D, and who could forget his role in Jason X?* He greeted me as I pulled the digital camera from the outer pocket of my laptop bag. In that instant, Bradstreet and Farmer's smiling faces were sucked into the eyeless, stone-faced void of Thomas Jane's hard stare.
Of course, I fumbled the camera, which flew out of my butter-fingers and crashed to the floor. The battery cover snapped free and slid under the table. The memory card spun out, landing elsewhere. I fell to my knees and scrambled to pick up the pieces of the (miraculously) still-functioning camera. There was no room to maneuver or see amidst the crush of shuffling shoes and bunched tablecloths.
Worse yet, my frayed nerves amplified the white noise of the convention center, forming a pounding, thought-blocking wall between my ears. I snapped out of my fear coma when, from somewhere high above me, I heard Jane grumble loudly, "Come on, already!"
Within seconds, I'd shoved all the pieces back into place and shakily handed the camera to Farmer. He snapped the picture shown above.
He gave Jane shit for not turning around, convincing his friend to manage at least a half-smile.
After getting off two more shots, I shook Farmer's hand and wished Bradstreet a happy rest-of-the-con. Jane had already been absorbed by the mob, smiling and signing autographs for people who actually had their shit together.
I walked away from the table with a stunning piece of art, signed by two people I admired, and a camera that'd been operated by Todd Fucking Farmer. It should have been the greatest mid-afternoon of my life--or at least that weekend. But I felt empty and sad, and I just wanted to go home.
The trauma of public humiliation, though brief, had made me sick to my stomach, and a guy who I'd loved for years (in movies) turned out to be a total dickhead. Or was he? Was it me? Was I the problem? Had I turned out to be the inarticulate, clumsy fanboy that I couldn't stand to be in line behind at conventions? Or was this just a perfect storm of awkwardness and opportunity?
Later that evening, exhausted, I plopped down in my hotel bed and turned on HBO. They were showing the first episode of Jane's new series Hung. I sat through the whole thing in disbelief. Had I really just met this person? In spite of my raw feelings, I couldn't help being in awe of his tremendous acting abilities; not that he does anything spectacular in the show, but there's no indication that the witty everyman is, in real life--at least sometimes--really, really unpleasant.
I still haven't figured it out how much of this story happened because of my own insecurities; maybe I radiate some kind of nerd-douche aura around famous people. But at least this sad tale has a happy ending:
The next day, I saw Todd Farmer standing in front of the RAW table. As I walked over to him, Jane, who was signing something a couple feet away, looked up and gave me another look of half-recognition--this time accentuated with a bone-chilling sneer. Farmer was pleasant, though, and agreed to do an interview with me for Chateau Grrr. He jotted down his contact info on a scrap of paper and bid me a great day.
We spoke on the phone about a month-and-a-half later, and he couldn't have been a nicer, funnier guy.
In the spirit of pleasantness, I didn't bring up The Thomas Jane Affair.
*Put your hand down.