This morning I spotted my first Cell Phone Talkin' Convertible Drivin' Man in months. He sped by me on my way to work in a black Acura convertible, a cell phone pressed to his ear, a pinky finger pushing his Oakleys back up the bridge of his nose, a cream-yellow golf shirt complementing his tan. Half a block down he eased to a halt at a red light. I caught up with him and found that he had blocked the crosswalk. This guy, with his Tourettish barking laugh and enthusiastic convulsions of agreement with his cell phone, was incapable of actually stopping at a red light. He kept inching forward until the grille of his car extended just beyond the crosswalk, effectively forcing me to risk my life if I wanted to cross. So I waited out the last thirty seconds of my walk signal until this miserable stock-trading twit could peel away, saying "Yeah yeah!" and "Of course, yeah!" and "We'll set up a meeting and talk about it" into his cellphone.

The strangest thing is that, as I was watching Mr. Financed talk on his cell phone and compulsively fiddle with his sunglasses, someone else was watching me. Behind him idled a rusty red pickup with two guys in T-shirts, the passenger letting his arm hang out of the car as he stared at me with inscrutable intent and the unblinking gaze of a reptile with eyebrows (and a T-shirt, I guess). I glanced at him, realized he was staring, looked back at OCD Cell Phone Man, looked back at Reptile Passenger, and he was still staring. Why? What have I done to be stared at with veiled hostility by strangers? In the 1980s strangers shouted at me frequently, but I had a mohawk, so it was understandable (perhaps even justifiable).

People with mohawks thrive on the abuse of passing strangers. It makes them tough. They stride down the street, feeling stronger and somehow taller with every "Hey faggot!" and "Your mother took acid when you were born!" (that one Dopplered nicely, I tell you). The more abject you looked, the greater the power.¹ Unless you were clearly suffering from malnutrition, and then you were a homeless person, someone without the prospect of a middle-class future that most of us could look forward to. That was the funny thing about all the teenage punks I knew. None of them, despite their rejection of their parents' values, ever imagined a life that was any less comfortable than the one their parents enjoyed. The few who qualified as genuine street kids were usually too dazed by hunger and drugs to formulate a future or a system of values. Those were the ones who got beat up at gigs, who called your name from alleyways, who spent all day in the park next to a bicycle and bummed cigarettes off strangers. Scarier still were the girls who dated these guys, faces painted with eyeliner spiderwebs, hair teased up and sugar-watered into hard crimson spikes. These girls were scary (or maybe I was the only frightened one) because they sought out the most abject, the craziest ones, who shivered in trenchcoats on hot summer days and sold cut-rate drugs to inexerienced teenagers. These were thugs with empty stomachs and black eyes, and I wonder whether they saw the bored middle-class punk teens who flocked around them as peers or meat.

¹In Victoria Park downtown there's a ratty looking guy who wears a sport coat with the sentence "I Don't Want to Be Your Friend" emblazoned or perhaps safety pinned to the back. I always wonder what he'd do if we started following him around, desperately trying to be his friend, sidling up next to him and trying out gambits like: "So... is that your Minor Threat tape?" or "How 'bout those downtown security pigs? You smell bacon too, huh?"

parode - exode