The guy must have been seventy, maybe seventy five. He sat across the bar from MJM and I and was staring at the 3-day passes we still had dangling from lanyards hanging around our necks.
"You two went to the Comic-Con today?"
The question wasn't directed to either of us specifically. It was just thrown in our general direction.
"Yep," I replied, "Comic-Con is my jam. Started attending Comic-Con when I was eleven. Not here in Denver of course, in San Diego, where I grew up."
MJM chimed in, "He's a geek! This was my first Comic-Con, but he went when we were kids! He even stayed at the El Cortez!"
The gray bearded man across the bar looked at us both and said, "So you're into Sheldon's thing."
Which stunned the living shite out of me. I looked over at the old man and asked, "Do you mean Shel Dorf?"
The old man looked up from his drink and said, "Yeah, Shelly. Growing up in Detroit, Shelly was always into spacemen and superheroes. He was a weird dude."
I was taken aback, to say the least. In my entire life I'd never encountered anyone outside of Comic Fandom who knew who Shel Dorf was, much less knew him in Detroit.
"Wow," was all I could muster as a reply, "You knew Shel in Detroit?"
"Yeah," the old man answered, "I knew him when we were kids. Weird but smart dude, always drawing."
The idea that I'd run into someone who had been a childhood friend of Shel Dorf was stupifying. The fact that I'd run into him at the Rose, as dodgy a dive bar in Wheatridge as it gets, was incredible.
The old man and I talk a bit longer before he had to go - all the while dealing with interjections from MJM regarding how geeky we both were.
*I'm still kinda stunned by the encounter.
*This conversation actually happened.
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