Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Hide in Plain Sight

and now, the first of three stories about people on the street who aren’t so dark after all:

I saw it from the lofty perch of my bus seat, but then again, they probably wanted me to stick around and keep watching.

We were crawling past Union Square on a sunny summer afternoon.  It’s a busy park in the middle of the city’s prime retain district, recently re-landscaped with a declension of broad grassy steps leading down to busy Geary Street.  Folks come from far and wide to sit on those steps and bits of lawn to rest and watch the street go by.  On a nice day like this one was, the sides of the park are packed with a crazy random sample of city folk.  It’s great peoplewatching – especially for peoplewatching the peoplewatchers.  People enjoying the sidewalk menagerie seem to forget, as they gape and pass judgment on the passersby, that they themselves are wide open to scrutiny as well.  The observing of the observer, one might say.  It is an ancient conundrum, and one we’d all be wise to keep in mind. 

I sat on my bench on the bus, then, and watched the parkside crowd slowly unfurl as the square crept past my window.  And that’s how I noticed those two:

They were a couple, sitting close together on a grassy step mid-way up.  In the riot of bright summer colors and tan skin around them, they stood out in dusty worn-out black denim and leather, pale skin and dark tattoos, reluctantly relaxing.  Their combat boots were clunky and scuffed; their clothes bore numerous safety pins, band patches, and extraneous zippers.  They looked pretty retro glam-punk, were I forced to make up a cultural hybridization for their affected style.  Her hair was coiffed in a revised pageboy, with lots of complicated parts and poufs.  His was, by contrast, much simpler: a razor-thin four-inch Mohawk in vibrant fuchsia.  As they chatted languorously in the bright warmth, the garish blade of his radical, radial hair carved jerky patterns in the air. 

What really caught my eye, though, was the woman in cargo shorts and a knit golf shirt, aiming her pro-sumer digicam with its 15” lens at him, cowering in a deeply twisted posture beside a low step about six feet in front of them.  Was she trying to evade detection as she snuck a photo of him, right out there in the open with her gigantic camera?  I mean, could she be any more obvious if she wasn’t trying to hide?

Well, I reconsidered as the bus pulled me away, maybe she doesn’t need to be so concerned about being detected by the Mohawk glampunk.  That dude certainly didn’t seem like such a master of subtlety himself. 

fun, eh?  more to come here at the Hut.... for now, goodnight....