The Three High-Verbals, Part 1

Originally published November 2, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1459

“It’s gonna be great!” said Harlan Ellison, which is usually enough to set off warning bells in my head.

The new great thing that Ellison had masterminded was to be my introduction to, quite simply, the big time. The Big Stage. The Rilly Big Shoo, as Ed Sullivan used to say. Ellison had put together an evening of debate, discussion, and mishugas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The concept was that Ellison, Neil Gaiman and I would take the stage as—in the spirit of the Three Tenors—the Three High-Verbals.

Now I wasn’t particularly daunted about the concept of essentially lecturing at MIT, probably because I was too stupid to be worried about it. I’d spoken at dozens of conventions, perhaps hundreds by this point. No matter how hairy it got, it couldn’t possibly compare to the single most daunting challenge ever presented me. That occurred at a New York Creation Con one afternoon years ago, when I was standing in the back of the room and the panicked organizers ran up to me to inform me that featured guest Wil Wheaton not only hadn’t arrived yet, but was stacked up in air traffic over LaGuardia. But he was supposed to be on stage in five minutes. Unless he was packing a personal matter transporter, that wasn’t going to happen, and they begged me to get up on stage and “entertain the crowd”… i.e., stall. And I did it. Kept a packed ballroom with about two thousand people entertained with discussion and Q&A for well over an hour before Wheaton finally showed up. So I figured I could handle MIT.

Besides, the notion that Neil and I were going to be part of a trio with Harlan as the third was ridiculous to me. I knew perfectly well what would happen: Harlan would take charge of the evening, and we would just keep up and hold on as best we could.

So everything was put into place, the arrangements made, the event publicized…

Well, not really. In point of fact, virtually nothing was done to publicize the event until barely ten days before it actually occurred. The ball was not only fumbled, it was booted halfway down the field. Word finally started to leak out, however, and ticket sales were quite brisk as we filled most of the 1200 seat hall with minimal publicity efforts. If they’d actually mounted a genuine ad campaign, we could have had it SRO. I mean, Harlan singlehandedly could have sold the place out. Same thing for Neil. And at least thirty, maybe even forty people would have turned out to see me. And no, I’m not being self-effacing, just realistic. Neil pulls in three, four hundred people at a store signing. I pull in twenty. I like to believe that my readers simply have better things to do with their time than come out and see me.

Even my eldest daughter Shana pitched in. Armed with fliers, she went to comic book stores. The first one she went to, she said to the clerk, “Excuse me… do you know about a talk being given by Harlan Ellison, Neil Gai—” The clerk immediately cut her off with an exasperated, “No, I have no idea when or where it is or how to get tickets, and I wish to God people would stop asking me about it!” Quickly she explained, “You don’t understand. I have fliers here with all the details. I was hoping I could put them here in your store.” His eyes widened and he said eagerly, “You’re the person I’ve been looking for!” Which is usually a nice thing to hear when the person saying it isn’t a cop.

The evening came and I was utterly calm until Harlan gave me his pep talk.

“You better have your ‘A’ material ready. Only the best stuff,” he said as we waited backstage. “You’ve only done conventions up until now, and that’s like playing lounge acts compared to this. This is the main stage, the Big Time. Your introduction to the Big Leagues. If we pull this off, other schools around the country will ask us to speak there, so you don’t want to screw this up.”

Words to that effect.

As you might surmise, I was a nervous wreck by the time I stepped out.

The format was that I would come out first (alphabetically: David, Ellison, Gaiman) and do fifteen minutes of whatever I wanted. Then Harlan would come out, likewise do fifteen minutes, then ditto Neil. After that we’d chat it up and do Q&A with the audience.

I thought the format as conceived by Ellison was a worthy one, but doomed not to turn out as planned. Why? Because I figured Harlan would get on a roll and there was no way he was going to keep it to a quarter of an hour. I would turn out to be right.

When I came out, the audience response was positively thunderous. Easily the best reception I’ve ever gotten. I then announced myself thusly: “Hello. My name is Peter David or, as I will henceforth be known, the fat guy who is the opening act for Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman.”

And a heckler shouted something out. I don’t remember what he said, but I knew I had to deal with it quickly. So without missing a beat, I shot back, “Get your own lecture tour, asshole.” The response was immediate and thunderous as the audience roared with approval. I’d shown the guy who was boss, which actually is pretty easy when you’re up on stage and have a microphone.

I then told the crowd, “One of the topics to be discussed tonight is the art of writing. Now sometimes you go to a movie and people will claim, ‘Oh, this movie was so manipulative. The director totally manipulated the audience.’ The thing is, manipulating the audience is what writers do. It’s what we excel at. So when a movie director or writer is accused of being ‘manipulative,’ what’s really being said is that he simply got caught at it. But we all do it, all the time. We’re like magicians, and sometimes someone spots us with a card up our sleeve.

“Now the way I endeavor to manipulate readers is via the juxtaposition of humor and drama. I’ll use the humor to gain reader empathy for the characters and, thus, when something goes wrong, it will have that much more impact. And then I’ll present a dramatic sequence with something funny happening at some point just to give the audience a chance to laugh and therefore relieve the tension.

“So what I’m planning to do is manipulate you.” This got a loud laugh and applause, and then I looked in the direction of the heckler and commented, “Except for that guy, who probably spends most of his evenings manipulating himself.” More cheers. Yes, it was that kind of crowd. “I will read you something sad that will bring you to tears,” told them, and then will tell you anecdotes that will make you happy and laugh and forget any of the sad stuff.

Which was what I did. I couldn’t have been more upfront with them. I opened with my CBG column written right after the World Trade Center collapsed. Audience members were crying. Backstage, Harlan was dying, convinced that I was sucking the life out of the audience and assuring Neil, “Don’t worry, Peter’s depressing the hell out of them, but I’ll bring them back to us.”

He needn’t have concerned himself. The anecdotes—time-tested “A” list material about Harlan and Neil and a couple of young women who wanted autographs—brought the crowd from the depths of depression to a point where they were laughing and applauding. Yes, I had not only played upon their emotions shamelessly, but had even told them that that was precisely what I was going to do. So my conscience was clear.

Then Harlan came out. Forty five minutes passed rather than the allotted fifteen. About what I expected.

And then things that I hadn’t expected began to occur…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Friday will conclude the tale of the MIT appearance.)