Friday, April 22, 2011

Coxcomb

Because I had just spent three hours in the company of some of the most motivating people that I know, because the wine was sweet and the talk light and chittering, because I thought that I’d just seen the face of a distant friend, I was smiling. I was smiling at someone that I’d mistaken for Derek Churchill, this stranger’s mohawked silhouette mildly reminiscent of a form which my muted eyesight came to recognize through nights black as pitch and punctuated by shrieks, some months ago. Though completely out of context, I, smiling, took a double take at this individual, intent on greeting him.
Perhaps I should have noticed the lack of a chainsaw. No sooner did I look back than this person, gesturing his coxcombed head at the door I’d just exited, shouted out, “What, is Garth in there?”
“Excuse me?” I responded.
“Garth Brooks,” came the snide retort.
I then began to take in the surroundings, the features distinguishing this person from anyone I knew, and the fact that I had been insulted. My crystal castle of a pleasant evening cracked. And I, breaking along with it, said the most sensible thing that came to mind, “I could out-punk you.” He yelled after me, and I repeated myself. Then, as he cursed and screamed at me like a lonely child, I walked the remaining 50 feet out of the building. I did as I said I could do. I exited his merry, violent frame of existence, never to impart on him any of my own wisdom or worth. I out-punked him.
I skip over songs by KMFDM, Skinny Puppy and the Sex Pistols on my mp3 player during my hour’s commute back to the sticks. No Garth Brooks, and apparently, no friends in low places. I detour from my normal route to verify, out of love and concern, that my boyfriend’s wallet is, in fact, in a lost and found box at a closed convenience store. Still, I couldn’t pass up the chance to hear that track by the Dead Weather. They are unloading a new shipment of cedar coffins at the local funeral home when Allison Mosshart starts singing “Hang You Up from the Heavens” for the third time. “I wanna grab you buy the hair and sell you off to the devil.” I must really like that song.

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