Thursday, January 11, 2007
regothing
Here’s a second little story about people who are not so dark as they might have appeared:
There’s a curious little alcove I pass on my way to work: In the pedestrian lane, just off Mish, there’s a dry cleaner’s shop on the ground floor of a tall office building. Its main entry looks like every other dry cleaner in the city, but it’s also got this little service alcove set back from the main wall of the building a few yards further down, a yard or so deep and just wide enough for a door. What you get then, is a long tall wall with a little cubby built into it, about two or three feet square, with a door in the back.
What’s curious about this alcove in particular is that the door in which it terminates is clad in highly polished stainless steel, hung so deftly that it forms a permanent mirror. Had some alterations done? Check’em out in the alcove – make sure those cuffs hang straight. And of course, you always see people sneaking peeks of themselves as they walk past. Some are brazen and some are coy, or even seem embarrassed by their own opportunistic self-examination, yet still I see them do it all the time. The reflecting alcove is a place to be seen seeing oneself.
One dreary morning a few weeks ago I came trucking my truculent way to work and made ready to steal a quick sartorial once-over as I went past the alcove, just to make sure my pants weren’t on backwards or anything, and that’s when I saw:
He is crouched at the corner of the alcove in a dark trenchcoat, like a big black scarab. His hair is waved and pomaded and so black I think it might be blue; his pale skin glows with subdued lividity and the ground at his feet is strewn with cosmetics. The containers are white, pink, ochre and ebony, but the colors they contain are monochromatic – bonewhite or inky dark. Hunched thus over his pallid palette in the early morning, a haunted look on his youthful brow, he is preparing for his day in the corporate trenches at the beck and call of somber, pasty people by making himself paler, yet darker, than all of them put together. He has already freshened his pallor with a new coat of powder, and now he’s applying more graveblack to the orbits of his sunken eyes.
Judging from the number of cosmetics littering the pavement where he kneels, gazing raptly at his reflection in the alcove, it’s a complicated process. Regardless, for his impending stint in the artless, humorless, stubbornly normal world he’s about to confront, he must gird his loins for the effort and properly re-goth himself.
I’ve got one more of these little “not so dark” gems for you. I suppose you’re saving all your comments till the series is complete. I mean, I’ve got to suppose something.
