The booths there had some of the weird stuff too, ranging from weapons and steampunk clothing to action figures and random memorabilia to movies, TV shows, and weird pornos based off of Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-man, and other TV shows or movies.
I was 17 going on 18 in a few days. Every year, my siblings and I all get one bigger gift for our birthdays, and this was mine. My dad and I spent two days wandering around from booth to booth, picking up random souvenirs, talking to artists, and taking in all the people in weird costumes running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and the two of us were following suit. Something important to know about me and my dad is that we're both huge dorks. We have the same personality, and often, it you leave us on our own, you can bet that we'll get ourselves into some sort of trouble.
This time was probably the worst trouble we've ever gotten into. Or at least that he got into.
It was our last day at the convention center. We stopped by for a couple short hours just to squeeze in the last bit of excitement and buy any other last minute gifts that we wanted to get. I was at some random booth with a myriad of miscellaneous action figures and comics and steampunk stuff. There was nothing in particular of interest there. As I turned around to leave, I realized that Dad was no longer standing next to me. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen. It was so cram packed that people were shoulder to shoulder in every direction. Even though he's my dad, I felt a little bit like a mother who had lost her small child at a department store. For some reason, with the combination of a huge comic convention with a bunch of weirdos running around selling all sorts or random junk plus my dad wandering around on his own seemed like a really bad idea. In this instance, I was right.
When I eventually found him, he walks up to me with this excited look on his face. "Check out what I found!" he says to me. He proceeded to whip out one of those telescoping police batons and swing it around. "It's the thing he uses in "Kickass!" Cool. I liked it. After he played around with it for a while, he pushed it into the ground to close it and put it back into his pocket.
After that, we only spent a little bit more time at the convention center, and headed back to the airport to catch out flight home. I went through the metal detector. All clear. Then Dad did. He wasn't so lucky. He probably forgot to take off his belt or something silly like that. The security guy had Dad empty his pockets, and that's when the police baton came out, which we both had completely forgotten about somehow.
After a brief explanation of where we had just come from, what it was, and what it was from, the security guy thought we were pretty cool, and that our souvenir was even cooler. Even so, he had to go get his supervisors to make sure everything was all clear.
Dad and I stood there in silence for a few minutes, when we saw the security guy come back, flanked by two big, angry looking police officers.
Uh oh.
They proceeded to ask us all these questions, like what we were doing in New York, where we bought the baton, and let us know it was illegal for civilians to own them in that state. Oops. Naturally, we apologized, and explained we had just bought it at the convention, and that we were bound for Cincinnati where it's okay for civilians to own these, but that if they needed to take it away, that was completely fine, and once again that we were sorry about the confusion.
Rather than doing anything reasonable, like exactly what we offered, they proceeded to get really angry about how people at the conventions sell a ton of illegal stuff, and went on for a good while on how "This is a REALLY big problem." They sounded like a broken record after about the fifteenth time they restated that phrase.
Before I move further, I feel it's important to give you a better idea of what my dad is like. He's not a big guy by any means, and he's struggling to keep what little hair he has left. In terms of looks, he looks like a much more domestic version of Walter White from Breaking Bad. I've only ever seen him angry a few times in my life, and he's usually pretty easy going and jokes around most of the time. He's also a computer engineer who does top secret defense programming for the government. I grew up my whole life never really knowing what exactly he does and always getting that line, "If I told you, I would have to kill you." This is also his wild card that he pulls in jams occasionally, and he pulled it in this one.
"Well, I actually work for the government, doing defense programming. My security clearance is actually probably higher than both of yours! Would that help at all in this situation?"
They didn't take it very well, and after about an hour of deliberation, they established that they were going to take him to jail, and that I could either go with him, or go ahead and head off to my flight home. Obviously, I was going to stick through this adventure to the end.
"I'll go with him."
"No. You can't. We don't have anywhere to keep you."
Even though they were taking my dad to jail for the stupidest reasons, this small part of the conversation really ticked me off.
They put him in handcuffs and took him away. Everything else went fairly smoothly. The flight attendant at the desk was freaked out that a teenage boy whose dad had just been arrested in the airport was getting on the flight. There was also the really fun 45 minute long phone call with my mom trying to convince her that Dad was in fact locked up in jail in New York and that I really did need her to come pick me up from the airport. I guess we're a little too sarcastic sometimes, and it seems a little too similar to the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Dad got home later the following evening. They had him in jail overnight waiting for his turn in night court. He went around talking to and praying for the inmates in the cell with him, earning his jail cell nickname, "the Preach." Apparently one guy had his face slashed open at a gas station and the cops arrested him for carrying a 6 inch pocket knife. After he got out and finished up in court, they kept his jacket as "evidence."
Apparently sometimes things are just such a "big problem" that there's just no way it can be handles in a reasonable manner.
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