Email
PrintStore with a view
I took a beginning acting class in college and we did an exercise imitating each other’s walks. Some kid got in the center of the circle and started to shuffle, kicking the floor with every step. The class immediately shouted my name. I was stunned, totally unaware of how I walked. Too funny.
The way a person walks says more than Facebook ever could. Profiling may be bad form, but it sure is fun. So from a perch inside my record store on High Street across from Ohio State, I watch all sorts of characters walking by. It’s both parade and poem (every person a line of a verse), their body language communicating something.
So forgive me if I got you wrong one March day as you flowed by my window; observing and reporting is one thing, interpreting another.
The first dude is a geezer with a white beard who looks like Moses without his power cane and whose long white mane suggests wisdom while his clothes say prosperity was never his best friend. His ruddy complexion indicates good health, but his eyes are two small pools of fear.
A hipster passes the ancient without noticing him, intensely intent on smoking a cigarette. Think James Dean in his first acting class. Hipster’s head is down, way down, for he is deep in thought. Or so he’d have you believe. As if on cue, another junior hipster passes him the other way, giving The Smoker a nod, as if to acknowledge his mastery of menthol coolness.
An ancient black man with a cane, a limp and a worried look is passed by a guy in a banana yellow hoodie so immediately noticeable against the day’s three shades of the same oppressive gray. He is walking violently. He either just failed a test or is on his way to flunking one. Or maybe his girlfriend just broke up with him. In either case, his war face is on and it is screaming bitter defeat.
Then comes the first sorority girl show horse. She’s armed with a Starbucks, unplugged headphones and a cigarette, placing each foot very prancingly in front of the other like a thoroughbred. Quite the air, yet she sincerely seems to be engaged in quality yak. No stress there. Lucky girl.
Now the spitters.
A gritty looking gutter punk with a battered skateboard, an emaciated dog on a leash and a huge beat-up duffel bag over his shoulder spits a cometlike streak of saliva right in front of the store. Dude, you’ve just lowered the quality of life. Some time later, a girl in facial tattoos unleashes her own contribution, as does a hip-hopper with pants at half-mast. It reminds me of when I was in Europe and the only person I saw spit publicly was an American in a Phish T-shirt—in front of the Vatican, of all places. Americans, you can’t take them anywhere.
Now it’s after 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the foot traffic builds: a heavy young dude in heavy clothing moving like a battle tank; two guys sharing wide smiles and laughing at the window poster of Frank Zappa in his revealing leopard skin undies; a frowning young woman in headphones as big as Mickey Mouse ears; a girl looking at her guy looking at a girl.
Then I see my favorite couple of the day. He resembles Isaac Hayes in a tam; she looks like Lauryn Hill in a good mood (also in a similar Andy Capp cap). Appearing mature, they stop in their tracks, exchange a few words, nicely it seems,
then turn 180 degrees and head back the way they came.
Their well-executed act of communication pleases me in some odd way.
Last but not least: Two street dudes on bicycles trying to talk to each other while vainly circling each other on the sidewalk. One falls.
Oh, the drama of life’s winners and losers in transit.
