Charles Dickishness
Accosts old couple in supermarket, beats himself mercilessly
I have noticed of late that I am mean. “Not torturing animals mean, or knocking a stranger’s hat off to provoke her mean,” I said, tripping over the pronoun. Charles Bukowski raised his print to all caps, reciting:
“YOU’D HIT ME BUT YOU WOULDN’T HIT A MAN!” “HELL NO, I WOULDN’T HIT A MAN, YOU THINK I’M CRAZY?”
I didn’t actually knock anybody’s hat off. Where did that come from? It was an image from the opening of Moby Dick when Ishmael realized it was time to go to sea when he started to knock off hats. I don’t mean that he was an unscrupulous hatter, that’s a chemically induced madness. He was mad at boredom, and needed to be back on a whaler. He was getting testy with other people. That’s how I was today. And yesterday too. Since I found out we’re being visited daily by UFOs I have been alienating people.
I was at the supermarket earlier. There was a woman about my age at the front of the line and behind her was a man of about the same age. They appeared to be prosperous and normal. But they were stalled about 24 feet from the register, and couldn’t seem to bridge that distance.
I had that nervous feeling one gets when the expected protocols are not being followed. Like, when it’s not your right of way and the person who has the right of way waves for you to pull on out. This is not an act of kindness, it is an act of dementia. When the register was open, the hatless woman waved a different hatless woman, who was in the adjacent line, a line with a register of its own, to go in front of us, to our register.
That’s when I wanted to knock her hat off, had she been wearing one, but I said, excuse me, but is there some reason you aren’t moving up to the register? The man behind her was her husband. I didn’t realize that, as he was carefully spaced six feet behind her and holding a single item. He said, “There’s somebody at the register.” Of course there was. The person they had waved up there.
“Have you been vaccinated?” I asked him
“Yes, we have.”
“Then what is your issue?”
“I don’t have any issues.”
“Then, do you see those stencils of shoes ahead of us? That is the six foot spacing we used to need before we got vaccinated. So move on up there.” I didn’t ask him why he needed to be six feet away from his wife, or why everybody in the supermarket and most people on the street are still wearing masks. It’s San Francisco.
As I was walking to Peet’s with my neighbor this morning we were having a laugh about San Francisco being in a trauma about giving up the masks. “I think wearing a mask outside is virtue signaling at this point in the game,” I said. “Giving up the mask is like giving up party loyalty.”
And yet I obediently put on a mask to order at the window at Peet’s, because I don’t want to be that man who does not know how to check out at the grocery store. How hard can that be? Has he no practice? Why was he six feet back from his wife? This sort of behavior draws attention to itself. I begin to listen for a foreign accent. Are these aliens?
There are UFOs everywhere. The whole goddamned Atlantic coast is air traffic out of control. “What the fuck is that?” A UFO zooms past. From the cockpit an old woman in a pale blue surgical mask flips off the Navy pilot. They are among us. The only way to spot them is that they do not know how to buy their groceries.
At a deeper level, I wish I did not have that bullying instinct. At one level, I am in the right, but that isn’t the same as being kind. I was not kind to these people. I begin to regret my behavior as soon as I see myself in context. And there is a voice in me, whether from my head or my heart I do not know, a musical, female voice, saying, “you probably need some supplemental testosterone.”