The air was cool and still on that particular April evening . Crickets chirped in some far off shadows, though their mating calls were deafened by the somber cries of 2 AM traffic. It had taken me three hours to finish calling every friend I had in the Phoenix metropolitan area, only to realize they both suck, and they suck hard. I debated with myself whether or not I had the required confidence to sit in line outside of the Tempe Marketplace Cine Capri until sunrise, entertained only by my 1990’s-era imagination and an iPod with a copy of The Dark Knight and Britney Spears’ “If U Seek Amy.”
Yet the final reward for such bravery, I soon surmised, was worth far more than any uncomfortable social situation. X-Men Origins: Wolverine , the only worthwhile movie of 2009, would await my ever-wise critique five days before the rest of the country — the rest of those peons — could even guess which Seth Rogen movie previews preceded the film of all films.
The trek from the start of the line to the end was a long and arduous one. The wagon train of geeks, nerds, dorks, and dweebs stretched for miles; each mock camp of sleeping bags, PSPs, and Redbulls larger than the next. I walked over the other bodies of fallen fanboys, unable to finish the holy pilgrimage, and who, with their last dying breaths, were forced to watch their stoic comrades continue without them. The words of Vonnegut found me at each lukewarm corpse — So it goes.
And at last my journey came to its end. The last foot of that line, the only line I would ever need, greeted me with three film school dropouts in red vests. I directed my inquiry toward the more female among them after catching my breath.
“Is this it? Is this the end of the line?”
“Yeah, it was,” she answered, presumably using the same perturbed tone she had directed towards countless other naive English graduates. “We closed off the line at nine o’clock. But have a good night.”
“What?”
“We can’t give out more tickets than we have. We had to turn away about 2,000 people at nine. Have a good night.”
My innocence lost, I could only manage to spew out that basic, eternal question, appropriate only for the most dire of quandaries. “What?”
“Have a good night.”
I missed the line to get in line, and like Adam forced out of Eden, I was cast out into the dark abyss and commanded to find the dim glimmer from my father’s Honda Element. The still, cool air seemed more frigid now, intent on making me feel just as intangible and unnoticed as itself.
So it goes.
