There’s a handful of times in my life where I wore a denim jacket with blue jeans. Actually, that’s not really true; when I worked at the horse ranch I dressed like that all the time: baseball cap, denim jacket, plaid shirt, t-shirt, blue jeans. But there are three notable times where I wore a denim jacket and jeans that people had a big reaction to it.
The first time was in the city, my first winter in San Francisco. I was sitting on a bench on Market Street, watching people go by and writing a poem. At that time I used to go around everywhere with a pad and a pen and write poems. So I’m sitting there writing a poem when a balding, middle-aged guy with a beard and glasses approaches me and asks me if he can buy me a cup of coffee at the nearby Jack-in-the Box. Sure, I told him. Why not? I talked to strangers all the time back then. I thought nothing of it.
I’m sitting in a booth and he walks over with two cups of coffee and sits down. It transpires that he thought I was a gay hustler (because of how I was dressed — all denim!) and this was his attempt to pick me up. After an awkward moment or two as I digested this development, we continue talking. He’s more embarrassed than me. “ I don’t usually do this,” he tells me. He’s a college professor. Whatever, I shrug.
I guess by way of making conversation he tells me a story of when he was younger, going home with a much older man. The old guy asks to be tied up. So he ties him up. “ Now do something mean to me, “ the guy says. “ So I did,” the professor tells me, laughing. “I tied him up and left him there.’ That’s not what I meant!’ “ the old guy says as I’m on my way out the door.” I smile and shake my head.
“So what were you writing?” the professor asks me. “You were writing something when I walked up.”
“Just a poem,” I said.
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.”
I hand him my pad and he reads the poem I wrote entitled “ Market Street.”
It reads:
Sitting here on Market Street, strangers come and talk to me,
thinking that I might be from the same strange world as them
or at least an illusion they can control.
But my world is my own
and like their own phantoms
I do not obey.
The professor’s jaw drops.“ You were writing that just as I walked up?”
“Yup.”
The next time I wore all denim was at the local university in Sonoma County several years later. I was wearing my ranch outfit: 49er baseball cap, denim jacket, plaid shirt, t-shirt, blue jeans. I was standing in the hallway waiting for my political science class to start.
A classmate, a younger, snotty long-haired kid comes up and asks me, “So where you from? A farm or something?”
I looked at him steadily and said, “I’m a couple of thousand miles from where I grew up. And you know what? I’ve probably done more drugs than you. So you can lose the attitude.”
We talk a little more and it turns out he was part of some peace protest on the Golden Gate Bridge, against the Gulf War. I said, “Didn’t that protest turn violent? They said on TV that protestors were throwing rocks at cars.”
“Whatever it takes to get people’s attention,” he told me smugly.
“So that’s true? You guys were having a violent peace protest? Doesn’t that strike you as ironic?” I asked.
“It’s all about getting that media attention. It’s all about that power. ”
“Really? You guys suck. I hope the next time the fucking cops shoot you. “
Time passes. I’m working at the liquor store. Lovechild is a regular fixture in my life. I ran into her late one morning at the bus stop at the end of my street. She was looking pretty bedraggled, having been up all night.
“I just fucked three guys last night,” she told me, grinning. She put her hands on her knees and wiggled her ass at me. “Wanna fuck?”
“—No.” I said flatly. And we both laughed.
She tells me she’s staying in the apartment complex right there by the bus stop. She forgot her keys. Can I give her a boost over the backyard fence so she can get in?
“Sure,” I say. As I help lift her up, I pause.
“I’m not helping you break in somewhere, am I?”
“Maybe…no, no, I’m just kidding.” She laughs.
A month or so later, maybe less, it’s my night off and me and my brother decide to go downtown and eat Mexican for dinner. Its summer but a little chilly with summer fog, not that unusual for northern California. I opt to wear a denim jacket with jeans, figuring who’s gonna notice?
Jim and I are walking down the main street towards the burrito joint when I hear a voice
call out,”Well, aren’t you just a vision in blue?”
It’s Lovechild, laughing at me. She’s sitting at an outdoor patio table with some little blonde, bearded redneck in his thirties. I really took no notice of him.
I grimaced, shaking my head. As me and my brother walked on, Lovechild ran up behind me and rubbed her hands on my head and neck. I was immediately engulfed in my least favorite smell.
I turned around. “Really? Patchouli oil? I’d rather you rubbed dog doo on me. I fucking hate patchouli oil!”
She grinned. “I knew you’d hate it.”
“Thanks, good guess. Thanks a lot,” I said bitterly as I walked off, reeking.
The very next day, either from the local newspaper or from customers or both, I found out some guy in town had killed himself with a shotgun.
Later that week I ran into Lovechild. She was in hysterics. She knew the guy. He was her roommate. It was his place she had been staying at. It was his apartment I helped get her into. It was the same guy that was sitting with her at the patio table when Jim and I walked by.
“It’s all my fault!” she wailed.
“It’s not your fault,” I told her.
“You don’t understand. He did it in front of me, he made me watch when he shot himself. It was all because I wouldn’t fuck him. He was in love with me but I’d only blow him for the rent but I wouldn’t fuck him. So he shot himself! In front of me! It’s all my fault!”
“It’s not your fault,” I repeated. But I couldn’t help thinking to myself about the irony of the situation.
Here was a girl who had fucked every guy in a twenty-mile radius but for whatever reason, she drew the line at him. He didn’t look any worse than any of the other dirtbags she went with. It must have been because he was in love with her and she didn’t want to encourage him. Or something. None of it makes any sense. It was just more terrible thing to add to Lovechild’s heavy burden of guilt and shame and degradation.
12. A Vision in Blue
Partly a story about the author’s sartorial habit of wearing a blue denim jacket with blue jeans. But more tellingly, we hear about three reactions to it: a middle-aged guy who assumes Chris’s style of dress means he is a gay hustler and accordingly tries to pick him up; a snotty college classmate who derides his mode of dress as that of a hick; the frank admiration of Lovechild, who calls him “a vision in blue.”
There are extra dimensions to these narratives. First, we hear Lovechild’s horrified realization that her rejection of a suitor has prompted him to kill himself. Second, we see the author outside his role of “liquor store guy” –as rancher, as poet, as college student, as philosophical observer of the ironies of life. Of coure, the latter is his truest self–the one revealed, although not so labeled, in every narrative he writes.