Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (16 page)

Lou Astor, convinced of my general ill-will toward furries, sent me on my way with nothing but a “godspeed.” Not wanting to bother trying to educate Mr. Astor on the wonderful ways of Super God, I waved good-bye and hopped into a waiting taxi. My suitcases full of spy gear were stuffed safely in the trunk.

Yeah, about the spy gear…

I mentioned earlier in the book my intent to attempt honest and straightforward communication with as many of the featured subcultures as possible. Unfortunately, it was simply impossible for furries to be one of those subcultures. Something Awful, my employer and home for nearly a decade, had somehow developed quite a reputation among the furry fandom.

I say “somehow” when I know exactly how. Over the years, a number of Something Awful’s members and readers have, sadly, engaged in harassment of furries both on and off the Internet. These activities have included spamming their websites with harassing messages and going to their conventions to mock and insult them. These regrettable actions sadly resulted in Something Awful being branded as a “hate site” in the furry community.

I planned to travel into the heart of darkness, Anthrocon 2008. My shady dealings with Something Awful made me seem to be a hatemonger and even if I was not ejected from the convention, my identity could be a disruption that spoiled any chance at objective observation.

A firsthand investigation of furries meant going incognito. It meant spy gear and surreptitious recording during my interviews. It meant becoming a furry.

The first step in that transformation involved meeting with a costume supplier in Pittsburgh by the name of Maopaws. Costume supplier was the way he described himself in his e-mails to me, but Maopaws’ Costumed Amusements had no signage, no shop windows, and no stock available to buy off the shelf. He didn’t supply costumes to Las Vegas showgirls or movie sets, he custom made fur suits for furries. Period. No other business that I could discern.

The taxi dropped me off in a Pittsburgh neighborhood that looked like it had been built during the height of the Great Depression and had just continued to get sadder from there. One look at the destitution and I knew I wouldn’t be getting another cab here. I handed the cabbie an extra twenty to keep the motor running.

Forlorn brick apartments slumped against one another. Liquor stores and convenience stores were encased in bars and wired glass. The address Maopaws gave me was just another walk-down basement apartment waiting for the wrecking ball. The stairwell smelled like piss, and broken glass crunched underfoot.

Maopaws answered the door after three buzzes of the doorbell. He was a sniffling, pale man with the high cheekbones of the Prussian aristocracy and the drooping chin, watery eyes, and slumped posture of the Prussian children confined under the stairs.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Maopaws,” I said. “I ordered the costume.”

“Come in, come in,” he said, and showed me into his dark studio.

Shelves and workbenches and piles of felt, like a mad-tinkerer’s workshop, collided with the reality of a man living in his workspace. A huge purple dog’s head was balanced on the tank of a mildew-stained toilet. A white cat slept on the deflated body of a fox. Barely any light made it through the stained, leaded windows, and the walls were covered with sewing patterns.

The ceiling was low enough that I had to stoop on my way through each doorway. It was like the lair of an evil hobbit.

“Which one was it?” Maopaws asked, stepping nimbly around a stack of furry comics.

“The ah, the special,” I said.

“With the holsters?” He laughed and began to lead me deeper into the grim bowels of his workshop. “You must be into some weird shit, my friend. I do front and back flaps. Holes for butt plug tails. I’ve even done some…”

He pushed aside purple beads hanging in long strands over a doorway before continuing.

“Even done some tear-away pieces up top for titty play.” He snorted up a wad of phlegm and spit it into a sink as we passed. “But holsters in the head and tentacles? What is that? Dildos?”

“Don’t worry about…wait…did you say tentacles?”

“Oh, yeah,” he grinned, his teeth yellowing and uneven. “I had to go with an unusual design. You said you didn’t care what the animal was.”

He pulled aside another curtain of beads and revealed my costume.

“Five hundred,” he said and began to pick at a scab on his arm.

“A squid?”

“Cuttlefish,” he corrected. “It’s cuter.”

Two fist-size plastic eyes bulged from either side of an enormous white headpiece mottled with gray airbrushing. The suit’s tentacles served as the body, extending downward from the head and covering the grayish tube of fur. Two smaller tentacles were flexible and not pinned down, allowing me to use them as arms, while the two larger hunting appendages were for my legs.

That was how Maopaws explained it all to me. He even tried to convince me to let him dress me in the costume. When I refused to reveal my naked flesh to his black-nailed claws he sighed and pushed a set of crumpled instructions into my hands.

“Follow them exactly,” he warned, “or the whole thing might fall apart.”

I emerged from the basement workshop and ascended the stairs, struggling with the awkward bundle of the white furry costume. When I approached the cab, I saw the irritation explode from the driver. He was a large Jamaican man with dreadlocks drooping out of a beanie beret like the tentacles sticking out of my roll of butcher’s paper.

He hopped out of his cab and said, “Gwan go maas! Aint a ting gwan in there.”

He was right, there was no way the costume was fitting in his trunk, but with a little cajoling I managed to convince him to let me put it in the backseat while I rode next to him in the front.

“Ya crezzy ya bumbaclot, wit da ting. You an yours is!”

I was staying at the Westin Hotel, which turned out to be the hotel of Anthrocon and the hotel of the New York Yankees, in town to play the Pittsburgh Pirates. A similar coincidence happened at 2007’s Anthrocon, when the Milwaukee Brewers ended up in the hotel with the furries. Bob Uecker posed for photos, but the Brewers Radio Network’s host Jim Powell was less kind.

“At first it was kind of funny to see these people wandering around the downtown streets and filing into the hotel,” Powell wrote in his blog, “but after the novelty wore off it just made everyone feel creepy.”

The Yankees were not hanging out in the lobby when I arrived at the Westin with my parcel of cuttlefish costume, but I still got the creepy vibe. There were furries everywhere. Even when they weren’t in costume, you could detect them by their excited conversations and use of Internet catchphrases. I just kept my head down and borrowed a luggage cart as I wheeled my suitcases and my new fursuit into the hotel.

It was a relief to be back behind closed doors with the cuttlefish suit. Carrying it around was enough of a horror. The idea of putting it on was downright terrifying. I felt sure I would be identified immediately as an impostor.

The next morning, I left myself about an hour to get dressed in the costume to make it to the convention on time for the opening ceremonies. A lot of furry activities were taking place in the Westin, but the majority of official convention events were being held across the skywalk at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

I was not able to get dressed in an hour. The cuttlefish costume was as elaborate as a model airplane, but the instructions provided by Maopaws were nearly illegible. His illustrations were done in an intentionally cute anime style that did not correspond very well to the anatomy or dimensions of the costume. He also drew me, or whoever the person was donning the costume in his instructions, as a spiky-haired Japanese student with a persistent erection.

I appreciated his gratis inclusion of “front and back yiff flaps,” but since he had no idea why I ordered a costume with a bunch of holsters and straps, his interpretation was a bit off. I had requested the holsters for my spy gear, but Maopaws’s illustrations accompanying the instructions assumed the direst possible purpose. Dildos abounded, as well as anal beads, a bottle of lube, and some sort of V-shaped object that I still do not fully understand.

I rolled around on the bed, crushing tentacles and pulling on sleeves with my teeth. The suspenders and straps securing the body to my shoulders and midsection were the hardest part, forcing Houdini-like feats of stretching to fasten one-handed from inside the suit. The whole time I was thrashing around and struggling to get myself and my spy gear into the costume, I had a clear view of myself in a nearly floor-to-ceiling mirror.

I looked disgusting. Red-faced and sweating, I collapsed on the bed like a dying man growing out of a giant alien asparagus. The head portion of the costume looked back at me from the paired bed. One huge and blue eye, glassy and lifeless as a doll’s, stared at me unblinking. It was a reminder of my shame and the lengths to which I would go to write a book.

Journalists captured by al Qaeda should have to awkwardly shuffle a mile in my shoes. Furry tentacles.

I rode the elevator down with two guys in Yankees caps wearing street clothes. They had the schlubby looks of support staff, not players. They gawked at me, but said nothing until I stepped out of the elevator.

“Calamari comin’ through!” one of them shouted.

The one with the beard.

I’ll make him pay for that one day, I thought.

The walk through the lobby to the skyway could not have been more humiliating. It was like that part in
To Catch a Predator
on TV where the child molester sits down on the stool and has to pretend like he isn’t a child molester while Chris Hanson reads his child molester chat logs. Only worse than that. Worse than being revealed as a pederast on national television.

There was much worse to come.

Losers and Outsiders

In the first minute I spent inside the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, I saw more signs of the apocalypse than are described in the entire Super Revelation of Super John. I saw Darth Vader as a fox with breasts. I saw a man selling artwork of giant anthropomorphic horses and tigers crushing buildings with their immense genitalia. I saw a dolphin furry flapping his fins with annoyance at a booth owner charging too much for a homemade comic book.

There were hundreds of attendees, dozens of booths, and many dozens of people dressed in full fursuits. There was a hormonal buzz in the air, from the graphic artwork on display, the costumes, and the raw nerdy hookups being arranged around the edges.

Here was a place where the man dressed as a lion had no problem lying down with the man dressed as the lamb and would even be willing to splurge for the quarter that makes the motel bed vibrate.

I realized quickly what a fool I had been to allow Maopaws to choose whatever animal he wanted. There were no other cuttlefish in attendance. As far as I could tell, there were no other cephalopods at all. The reality of this was a steady stream of furries, in and out of their fursuits, walking up and demanding a picture.

The weirdest pictures were the ones with the kids. There weren’t a ton of kids and they weren’t allowed into certain areas, but when a parent walked up with a kid and wanted me to a take a picture it was a really weird feeling.

There I was in my cuttlefish suit with a visible front and back flap for furry sex and standing next to me were two kids in
Lion King
face paint. There was something perverse even though there was nothing explicitly sexual. It was like leaving a closed box full of dildos on your coffee table or letting your kids ride in your sex swing.

One thing you never really think about until you are in a fursuit is how difficult it is to carry on a conversation with someone else in a fursuit. It was difficult to be heard through my fursuit and it was difficult to hear others through my fursuit. Two fursuits meant double difficulty.

“Mmmmph mmmmhmm oh mamam Redcat,” went a normal fursuit introduction.

To which I would answer, “Thanks! I made it myself!”

Occasionally the fursuiter said something else to me like, “Mmmmph mmmmmhm mmphmmhmm yiff?”

My stock answer to that one was, “Not now, I’m feeling tired.”

This usually convinced them to take their picture and be on their way, but a few continued to hang around and even rub their stinking paws on my costume. Literally, they had paws that smelled like they had spent the last six months marinating in a jug of body fluids.

On a camping trip I would have brought out a pot and a ladle and banged them together until I scared the animals away from the garbage cans. Sprinkles the Panda and Took (pronounced like mook) the Tanooki were a little more persistent. They stopped short of grinding on my tentacles like I was the catch of the day, but only just. They hugged and rubbed my back and there was little I could do to stop them other than flap my tentacles around ineffectually.

The conditions were appalling inside my cuttlefish fursuit. It was smoldering hot, at least 100 degrees. I was drenched in sweat in a matter of minutes. The suit was not quite properly ventilated and as time passed the air became heavy and unpleasant. And then there was trying to walk.