Originally from issue #12, September 2007.
My bus route, the 358, never gets old. Sure, it has its down weeks where the normal person seems dominant. But then there are those times when the oddballs and characters rear their individual heads to remind us all that the 358 is indeed its own beast. It’s never entirely 100% safe but seems just enough so as to lull you into a sense of false security that the 358 will always remain the place for the well-dressed, sane, “normal” populace. Instead, it is the great equalizer for most of society, merging freaks, poor, middle-class, upwardly mobile, white, black, Asian, Latino, and many more groups of people. And of course, every now and then, we get the really interesting people. Beyond “strange” and beyond “weird” but just taking it to a new level of being so a-typical that you just have to respect them for it. One of those people came onto the 358 recently. And while he was interesting in his own right, it’s the conclusions I drew from his appearance that provided me with even more insight into how incredibly fucked up/hilarious things are in this world.
As I have mentioned previously (issue #10) I ride on an articulated bus every day to and from work. On this particular day, I was sitting in the front left side (if you would look on the bus from above) of the rear part of the bus. About ten blocks from where I get on the bus, a man gets on the bus and with him is a child about the age of seven, which I am guessing at due to the fact that he was missing some of his teeth. The boy had long blond hair past his shoulders that flowed in what some might call “golden locks.” No doubt his parents were former hippies and despised their parents for making them keep their hair short as kids and saw their son’s long hair as a way of spiting their parents, thirty years later. The boy wore sandals, a red sweater/sweatshirt and slacks. He appeared to be, for all practical purposes, just another kid. He and the man with him took a seat in the middle part of the bus, on a bench seat that rotates based on which direction the bus turns and which was forward and to my right. The boy spent most of the bus ride staring at the wall of the bus.
The man that sat with the boy was who really caught my attention, however. The man was white and of medium build and stood a little over six feet tall. He was probably in his 40s and had strawberry blond/brown hair that was tied off in a ponytail. He had a goatee that was graying and on his head he wore a fedora with a red feather in it. He also wore a maroon silk shirt, black slacks and socks and black leather shoes. He wore a braided belt around his waste and overtop it all he wore a dark olive green trench coat. Even in Seattle, you don’t need a trench coat in August. He brought along with him a wooden cane. It was fashioned fairly well with darker wood for the shaft and lighter colored wood for handle. The odd thing was that the cane wasn’t used for walking purposes at all and was used only as an accessory. But to top it all off, this mystery man wore an eye patch over his left eye. A fucking eye patch! Wow. And while some might think it wasn’t real, I saw a bit of a bandage underneath it, which says to me that it is there because of a legitimate eye injury.
To summarize this fellow, it can only be said that he was no doubt a stereotypical older nerd who somewhere decided along the way that if he was going to be a nerd, he might as well be a snappy looking nerd, even if it wasn’t communicated to the general public that he was snappy looking. Something seems to happen when people get trapped in their own subculture where acting, dressing and doing things a certain way take on their own meaning, but outside that group it makes no sense at all. No doubt this man was stylish amongst someone, somewhere, but to me he looked more like an evil politician from Batman. An evil politician who had no doubt lost his eye in a tussle with the Caped Crusader, hence the eye patch. I’m sure his vocabulary was full of such phrases as, “You’ll pay for this Batman!” and “You haven’t heard the last of me!”
The thing that really got me about this whole thing was the more I thought about it, the more I contemplated what it must be like to lose an eye and how that would change your life. And in this guy’s particular situation, it dawned on me that when he lost his eye, one of two things had to happen in regards to the rest of his look. The first option is that he was just a normal looking guy, maybe he’s that boy’s dad and he and his wife were raising the kid and everything was good in the dude’s life. He wears tracksuits, sweaters, jeans, and t-shirts that say things like, “Yellowstone National Park” and that has a picture of an elk on it. He has a job and everything is cool with him. While there are ocular diseases that can take the eye out of commission, I prefer to think he lost it in some heinous accident, trying to build his son a tree house when all of the sudden the nail flies out from under his hammer at a strange angle and strikes his eye. His son is out there watching and starts screaming and running away while the man tries to take the nail out. It’s the kind of thing made for a horror film. Or perhaps he was at work in some office and he asked a co-worker for a pencil and the co-worker threw it too hard and it bounced off the man’s hand into his eye. This time it’s the co-worker running away screaming bloody murder and the man is left trying to pull a pencil out of his eye.
Whatever the case may be, the guy now finds himself without an eye. And looking at himself in the mirror one day with his one good eye he says to himself, “Well, this definitely changes everything.” And then realizing the scope of his statement he says, “Yeah, it DOES change everything!” And suddenly the combination of losing his eye and being around the time of his mid-life crises strikes him and he goes out and buys the fedora, the cane, the trench coat, and all that shit. His wife is upset by the change. “What’s gotten into you? It’s like ever since the accident you’ve got this dark side I never knew about.” And things start to go downhill from there. They get a divorce, he starts playing D&D, spending his free time on EverQuest and being awkward and elusive at his job. His co-workers don’t understand him, and his son, while thinking it’s cool he can finally grow his hair out, is somewhat freaked out by his “new” dad and spends a lot of time staring at the wall on the bus.
The other option, which in my mind is more likely, is that the guy was already dressing that way. He already was out of step, married to a woman who is somewhat out of step and has a son who likes to stare at the wall on the bus. One night he’s playing World of Warcraft at home at 1am and notices his left eye going blurry and decides its’ his body’s way of telling him it’s time to quit. So he does and goes to bed. But the next morning it’s no better so he goes to the doctor and before he knows it, he’s diagnosed with some eye disease and has to get his eye removed. The doctor prepares him for this change and informs him he’ll have to get an eye patch or a glass eye. The doctor really pushes the glass eye, as it’s not so a-typical. The man goes home wearing the eye patch and says he’ll think about it.
That night, he looks at himself in the mirror with the patch over his eye, still mourning the loss of his eye and all that it will mean when suddenly it hits him. He says to himself, “Wait a minute…”
He goes to get all of his gear, wearing the trench coat, the fedora, and holding the cane. “WOW! I look AWESOME!” he yells and goes to show his wife. She doesn’t seem real impressed but he remains upbeat. Finally, this is something to complete his look while simultaneously setting himself apart from his nerd peers.
I guess there’s a third option of him always looking like that but being bummed about losing his eye, but come on, why would that happen? It’s a fucking eye patch! No doubt he’s already training his son to grow up to be like him and soon after finishing college his son will go home to visit and the dad will pull him aside, saying, “Ok son, it’s time to go through your transformation.” Hopefully he’ll have prepped the son about the need to lose the eye in order to carry on this new family tradition of awesomeness; otherwise that searing hot fire poker through his eye will be a real unpleasant surprise.
