Looks

Last night, I'm smoking a cigarette on a sidewalk in Westport and overhear two young men seeking a lighter. I turn, anticipating their request, and the one on my right, Zoo York hoodie and earnest face, strikes up a conversation. “Just got off work.” “Me too.” “Oh yeah—where do you work?” The usual questions, but they don't bore me, because I have the cigarette, its distracting pleasure and future alibi for my departure. Then, he asks, “Well what do you really want to do? I doubt you're the kind of guy who wants to work service jobs the rest of his life. You look like a painter.” I forget the alibi as we're discussing books; he likes Vonnegut and Daniel Quinn—“Don't judge.” I'm still marveling, like a painter?, and hate to say it, but he looks like a service employee who just got off work. At work, in a stocking cap and ugly frame for my face, I'm all strange glasses and stranger mustache, and look odd to most of the shiny clientele. In high school terms, a loser or reject. The short Asian man who parks his Maserati out front, and tips us 10 on the way in, 10 on the way out, looks like Jay Gatsby to me. The bevy of women who climb out of elegant coupe, four of them!, in shoulderless pastel dresses, together look like Easter eggs, separately, like former homecoming queen candidates. My sixth-grade math teacher looked like a plump pigeon, and one of my classmates, a fellow member of the traveling basketball team, looked like a small bear. This young woman who approached me outside the restaurant on a cold night at work, she didn't quite look like a punk, not quite a hipster. While she smoked a cigarette and I had the desire to do likewise, I learned she grew up in Collins, 45 minutes from the small town I once called home, so there was plenty to discuss, although we didn't exchange names and it was too abrupt to trade numbers. Another one of my coworkers, a handsome man whom you'll always find chatting up plastic-looking women, younger or older—he has an elaborate scheme of classification for them: pumas, lionesses, cougars, sabertooths, and so on—looks like Clark Kent from the Mediterranean, and it's rarely too abrupt for him to ask for their numbers. But it was tonight: “Only two girls flirted with me. Y'know, Valentine's Day, they're with dates.” Here is a man who looks like he would listen to Garth Brooks, but listens to Nickelback, and when I drive his Hummer to the garage, the streets look like a battlefield and I feel entitled to run over anything that gets in my way. Of course, by offering this excuse—“collateral damage”, and everything seems to be in my way. The group of young black kids mobbing outside the movie theater and the police cars, lights flashing, and officers on horseback—the scene looks like a game of cat-and-mouse to me. But to my coworkers it looks like youthful nonsense, they greedily await pepper spray and arrests, and to the patrons at this upscale establishment, grimacing and asking for the latest updates, it looks like trouble and they urge us to be careful, probably fearing more for the safety of their vehicles. Politely, when I get the chance, I tell them how I see it, and to a surprising lot of them, it makes sense, as you can see from their nodding glances and smiles.