Occasionally a complete stranger will talk to me, or make some observation apparently for my benefit. In England this would almost always have been about the weather. Here in Texas, the weather occasionally crops up as a subject with which to engage strangers in conversation, but not with the same frequency because there's not much to discuss once both parties have agreed that it's too fucking hot and a bit of rain would be nice seeing as how we haven't had any since 1974. Without the staple of meteorology, casual Texan conversation has a greater potential for going somewhere weird and pointless, and here's a top ten of my favourite misjudged and bewildering attempts at conversation.
1. 'So that's how you like it, huh?'
I was outside Lowes hardware store locking up my bike when I heard this observation. The speaker was a man in his late sixties, by my estimate, and he made the observation with a gentle smile as though amused to find himself saying such a thing. I was initially bewildered, but soon deduced from his subsequent commentary that how I like it was my bicycle still being there upon my return from the store. The man seemed to be unfamiliar with the notion that one might secure a bicycle so as to prevent it being nicked, and thus was he duly and quite profoundly entertained by this bold new idea. Had I been participating in an orgy, and had I just discovered some new and unusual perversion to be more pleasurable than anticipated, some third party observing, so that's how you like it, huh? would have made more sense given the jovial tone of its delivery.
2. 'That's what you gotta do - you gotta zap cancer.'
This may even have been the same guy who commented upon how I like it, and certainly the amiable cadence with a faint whiff of senility was the same. The location however was a sandwich joint, specifically with myself stood at the coffee machine filling my cup. I was wearing a t-shirt on the back of which was a cartoon lightning bolt underscoring the instruction to zap cancer, so in essence the man was simply agreeing with my t-shirt. The t-shirt had been produced as some sort of awareness raising deal relating to the late Skip Brooks, then undergoing treatment for cancer. Members of his family were staging numerous events and happenings so as to raise funds for his treatment, and the t-shirt was part of that.
'Yes,' I said to the man who had agreed with my t-shirt, because I didn't know what else I could say. I suppose congratulating him on his ability to read would have been poor form.
3. 'I like your bag.'
This one patently comes under the heading of polite attempts at conversation, but makes the list by virtue of repetition, it being an observation which has been made so many times by the staff of my local supermarket as to have become just plain weird. So as to avoid constipating certain cupboards in our kitchen with a surfeit of disposable carrier bags, I now take a reusable PVC thing to the supermarket - which I visit daily so as to avoid having to make a single massive expedition at the end of the week. Sometimes the woman at the entrance greets me with, 'I like your bag,' or sometimes it's the cashier as I'm flapping it about in preparation to load it up with tins of cat food; and they all like my bag.
Yet it's just a bag, average looking PVC, or something of the sort, a bland animal print pattern purchased from the very same supermarket a few years earlier. If they all like my bag so much, I'm surprised nobody bought one for themselves when they were on the shelves. It's not a particularly annoying or offensive observation, but it does seem odd. I suppose that of all the things of mine for which any of these people could express admiration, my bag is the least likely to get anyone into trouble. 'I like the way you move' would seem overly familiar, for one example.
4. 'I guess you like to mow your lawn.'
The lawn mower was seemingly fucked. I'd found a small engine repair specialist, and luckily it was situated on the Austin Highway, less than a mile from our home therefore sparing us the headache of trying to fit the mower in the car. I was pushing the mower along Northeast Parkway towards the Austin Highway when I spotted him up ahead. The area is mostly industrial units, not all of which are occupied, and common land, so of the few people you see on foot about half of them are either already drunk at ten in the morning, or don't seem like they would have any objection to being drunk at ten in the morning. This guy was maybe twenty, a muscular skinhead covered in tattoos, and apparently wearing just dungarees with only one shoulder strap in place. He was watching my approach and I could tell he was going to say something, maybe try to sell me meth. I maintained a steady pace, resisting the urge to cross the road and thus reveal my fear. I set my head down, looking straight ahead as I pushed the mower.
'Hey, buddy,' he said in greeting, sounding unexpectedly jovial.
'Hello,' I replied, sparing him just enough of a glance to show that I was neither fearful nor in any way alarmed by his appearance. He was just some dude greeting me in the street and here I was reciprocating. It wasn't a big deal, at least not for me.
'I guess you like to mow your lawn,' he observed happily.
'Yes,' I confirmed.
I guess that was the only thing he could come up with.
5. 'I don't cook!'
I stood in line in HEB, waiting for the guy ahead of me to pay the cashier. My purchase of cat food was on the belt and from the corner of my eye I could see the customer who had just arrived behind me. She had a trolley and was lifting something out of it, and I had the feeling she was waiting for me to look around to see what it was; so I looked around in spite of my better judgement. The woman was small and old. 'I don't cook!' she exclaimed happily, apparently in the belief that I'd been wondering. A set of three cast iron skillets, small, medium, and large, sat on the conveyor belt where she'd placed them with a theatrical display of effort. I assumed that the full length version of the joke would be something along the lines of here I am buying a set of three cast iron skillets even though I don't cook, which itself raises the inevitable question of why she had bought them; but I wasn't really interested so I didn't ask. I'm sure she had her reasons.
6. 'Get your exercise!'
I'm not entirely sure this counts by quite the same terms as the others, having been shouted by Stacy who is, I suppose, a neighbourhood character, someone I see out and about walking her dog with some frequency and who routinely barks some sort of greeting in my general direction. She is of a grizzled, sun-dried appearance and has that rootin' tootin' quality common to some Texan women of a certain age group. Previous utterances have included the traditional greetings of good morning or even howdy, but also random observations that her dog is ninety-three in human years. On this occasion, she yelped get your exercise, entirely without the preamble of a greeting, as a friendly, if startling, observation offered in what I took to be a spirit of encouragement. I was riding a bike at the time and was thus indeed getting my exercise. I still say a simple howdy would have been significantly less weird.
7. 'Would you mind if I took a photograph of those eggs?'
The enquiry in full was, 'Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I took a photograph of those eggs you have there in your basket?' and was delivered in a possibly rural Texas accent by a balding, red-faced man, dressed casually and stood behind me in the supermarket. On top of all that which I had in my basket sat a box of a dozen eggs, the Central Market brand, costing more than the others on the promise of the eggs having been laid by happy chickens rather than chickens in cages and pumped full of drugs. I was so flummoxed by the enquiry that I could hardly refuse. The man fiddled with his phone, chuckling, 'My dad's gonna be real tickled when he sees this.' I didn't like to ask why, because there seemed to be a good chance I'd regret asking. Having paid up, I made my way home wondering if the photo of my box of eggs was about to turn up on one of those what will those crazy liberals think of next? websites. Later I considered the possibility that maybe the guy's father supplied eggs to Central Market, but that theory didn't fully make sense either. Maybe, much like Edith Massey's character in Pink Flamingos, he just liked eggs.
8. References to cowboys.
These occur with surprising frequency and have thus far always taken the form of either a greeting, or a response to my own initial greeting, variations including well howdy, cowboy or even ride 'em, cowboy because I was on my bike at the time, delivered in either an exaggerated Texan accent or what may well unfortunately be how the person actually speaks. The reason for the greeting is doubtless the fact of my wearing a Stetson hat, giving me the appearance of a cowboy if you're about five or if you don't live in Texas. I wear a Stetson because the sun is strong in Texas, I burn easily and dislike sunscreen or unguents on my face, and because it additionally provides protection in the event of rain - at least as much as an umbrella. I even wear my Stetson when travelling beyond Texas because, aside from the above considerations, it makes for a convenient receptacle to which the contents of one's pockets may be transferred when going through airport security; and because it rains in England. Cowboy jokes cracked by young men in elegant tracksuits are at least understandable in England where a Stetson is a rare sight; but actual cowboys are common in Texas, and about a third of the population of San Antonio wears either a Stetson or something which could be mistaken for one, so observations concerning the same only seem weirdly redundant, equivalent to I see you got yourself a fine pair of shoes there, shoe-boy!
9. 'That's the wrong bike!'
This was a heckle from a middle-aged woman sat upon a second floor balcony as I road past the apartment block on the way back from the supermarket. I was riding my mountain bike up a slight incline towards Harry Wurzbach Parkway. The woman seemed to be grinning in a jocular fashion so I assume the comment was part of some joke I didn't understand and was therefore yelled in genial spirit. It was followed closely by some other presumably related observation which I didn't catch and which may have shed light on the first part of her address. Clearly the bike wasn't the wrong bike in so much as that I was the owner, but perhaps the woman thought some other model might have been better suited to movement up a slight incline. Who fucking knows?
10. 'Now reward yourself with some water.'
I was cycling on the Tobin Trail. It was noon and pretty hot, probably somewhere in the region of 90° Fahrenheit, and a guy in yellow lycra yelled something as he rode past on his mountain bike. It was the second time I'd passed him that day, and he'd yelled something during our previous encounter too - about an hour earlier - which had sounded like coming up on the morning. It had sounded like half a sentence and therefore didn't make any sense to me, so I'd bobbed my head in acknowledgement of his expectoration and thought no more of it. This time, I was listening to Jay-Z's Blueprint III album on my Discman, which I was loathe to interrupt, but I really wanted to know what it was that he'd said, so I stopped, pulled a bud from my ear, and asked. 'Now reward yourself with some water,' he repeated loudly, apparently having assumed that we were both part of a team dedicated to exercisational empowerment and motivated by healthy sports hydration as reward for our being the best we can be. I'd already drunk my customary bottle of iced tea back at McAllister Park just as I do every day, and therefore had no need of this advice, aside from which, water is boring. I suppose the instruction wasn't anything more than the vaguely neighbourly verbal equivalent of a high five and should therefore be regarded as harmless, if a little over familiar, but its instructional thrust seemed like the thin end of a wedge at the other end of which one might reasonably expect to find you need to go a bit faster to get the full cardio-vascular benefit, or maybe you shouldn't eat so many pies, you fat fucker.
Oddly, I was similarly heckled by a random stranger about an hour later in the parking lot of HEB, but it was in Spanish so I didn't understand it. He seemed to be smiling amiably so I assumed it wasn't anything I need worry about, and suspect it probably would have been a bit more interesting than the thing about rewarding myself with water had I requested a translation.
No comments:
Post a Comment