I once worked with this girl in San Francisco, who, like many of the young people living there in the ‘80s, wore some variation of thrift shop chic. (I, myself, wore one of my dad’s old suit jackets over a plaid shirt, pairing it with jeans and sneakers.) Anyway, she came into work one day in some thrown-together ensemble of secondhand vintage clothing, topped off by a pair of clownishly large men’s shoes. Even by the aesthetics of punk rock fashion, it looked ridiculous—so I said, “Does your dad know you took his shoes?” before laughing loudly at my own joke.
She responded with a gentle, lofty toss of her head, “You can’t hurt me. Because I have inner dignity.”
I was stunned. “Inner dignity? Inner dignity? Dammit, I hate inner dignity! It’s my nemesis!” I said as we both laughed at my defeat.
Years later, I worked with this one girl at the liquor store, Savannah, who wore different punk rock outfits every day, some more outlandish than others. One day she came in wearing these candy-cane striped tights. So I said (referencing the elves on the Rice Krispie cereal box), “Hey, which one are you? Snap, Crackle or Pop?” (Oh, she was pissed.) She didn’t have inner dignity.
And neither do I, for that matter.
In this brief vignette, the author expresses a theme that underlies many of his longer narratives: the gap between appearance and reality. In this case, the “appearance” is literally just that: the clownish clothes of a girl working with Chris in the liquor store, while the reality is the “inner dignity” that she claims for herself. It could serve as an introduction to the collection of stories that take place in “Fredy Wood’s Market.”