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So, this one Friday night recently, I mussed up my fauxhawk, plonked my vintage cabbie hat on top, grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes and my lucky Bic (lucky Zippos are Jersey), slid my cool-ass wide brass-buckle belt around my old paint-spattered pinstripe lowriders, pulled on my hoodie (flames up the left sleeve painted by my friend Marja—kind of cool but geeky at the same time, in a good way), and headed out into my neighborhood—which I won't name, but which you probably know anyway. The sidewalks were moving with good-looking people out for the night; everybody seemed hot and interesting and untouchable all at once. Just like I like em.
I was meeting my buddies at our local, the one where all the old German dudes used to hang out before the yuppies moved into the neighborhood and destroyed it, and I was early. So I gave the good word to Tom behind the bar, ordered my Schlitz (Pabst is over—thank God), and settled into my barstool to wait, wondering how long I would last before I headed out for a smoke, and whether that girl by the door that I gave the Eye to on the way in might still be there—the one with the "Foxy" tattoo on her inner arm. And that's when it happened.
This guy sat down next to me. At first I hardly noticed him. But I did see something—he had a lighter the same as mine in his hand. Gradually, one detail at a time, the rest of this guy got clearer and clearer in my peripheral vision, and before I knew it I was just staring at him openly, seeing all kinds of things that I guess I'd never really seen before, or wanted to see.
Because, here's the thing, the guy was me. Same Team Zissou edition Adidas, and the exact same messed-up fro I had, and the exact same big-buckle belt (well, his buckle was a cowboy boot and mine is shaped like an old owl) with low-slung paint-spattered pants, and the exact same t-shirt ("Getting Lucky in Kentucky") I was wearing, and—get this—he was wearing a hoodie with obviously custom-made cool art shit on it. Then I looked down the row of guys sitting at the bar, and it just got hideouser and hideouser: they were all me, every last one of them. We were all the same guy. We'd probably all tracked over here in the same size pants, looking at the same girls and jingling the same fistful of change in our front pockets, the same denominations of currency, down to the last identical penny.
And then it got worse.
Guy Who Was Me But Not Me saw me staring at him and actually said, I swear to God,
"Whaddaya lookin at, faggot?"
I had no response. I stood up. I was probably still staring. He was one of Them. But he was Me. Or at least, he'd cracked the code—he knew where I lived and what I wore and what I drank last year (yes, he'd ordered a PBR), and he was talking with my bartender in my bar, and I just felt heartsick. It was over. Cool was over. This beautiful thing that we thought was ours, happening outside the mainstream and safe from its grabby clutches forever, was theirs now.
And it made me think.
But first, no thinking. First, I paid up and slammed out of the bar and walked home really fast, kind of sweating and seeing gray smoke in front of my eyes, but the gray smoke couldn't hide the fact that I could still see everybody on the street and suddenly we all looked like imposters.
But maybe you're the imposter, I thought. (The thought kicked in around the time I stopped speed-walking and seething and got myself a slice with olives.) Maybe those people we were trying to keep out with the tacit rules and the obscure band references and the special hard-to-find clothes, maybe those people on the outside are the real ones, and you're the imposter. Isn't it cooler to just let them in, since they've got the key anyway and the key apparently just involves wearing certain shoes and knowing which bar to go to? I don't know, it seemed kind of right at the time. At any rate it calmed me down.
I gave up on that Friday night and went home to smoke in peace in my own kitchen and watch an episode of "Freaks and Geeks" on DVD. (Which, yes, it's Apatow, and Lindsay went on to be Velma, but you can't hate it because it's so damn good.) Right when I turned it off I thought, Maybe coolness as a club is over now, and that's a beautiful thing too. And then I thought, What you need to do is memorialize it before it's all finally gone—the world you once knew, where cool shit ran free like a little bunny in a field full of rainbows, but nobody knew about the bunny, or, they knew there was a bunny somewhere but they couldn't figure out how to be a bunny themselves, or they needed the bunny to write for Vice Magazine so they could feel better about not being bunnies, or something.
So I started writing haiku, and you know what, it really helped me feel less alone—like other people remembered the way things used to be, the way I remembered them. Before the commodification of cool. Actually, I think I've heard that before—I probably didn't make that up myself.
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Hipster Haiku
Siobhan Adcock
0-7679-2373-1
October 2006
$9.95
I've just decided
Freelance videography
A bad career choice
I contribute to
literary magazines.
Via internships.
Aspiring DJ
Spins at Mervyn's on Sundays
Mondays at Payless
Sanitation guys
Don't understand fierce street art:
Picked up on trash night
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