Pine Street Hustle

I was sitting on my stoop on a nice summer evening, not really minding my own business, sipping a screwdriver, and smoking a cigarette. This kid walked up and sat down on the steps of the place next door.

How you doen? My names Mike.

I said, How you doing, Mike, my names SteveO.

Before I knew it, or was even aware of it, I was getting hustled. He started off by telling me he was living up the street with his girlfriend. I told him I had moved in three days earlier, and he asked me if I just left my wife.

I said, No, Ive never been married.

He asked me if I go bothways and I told him I was straight. It took me a while to convince him of my total lack of bisexuality, but I think he finally started to get the picture. He shifted gears and tried to hustle a screwdriver out of me. I told him there was no way I was going to fix him a drink, so he tried to talk me into giving him a sip of my beverage, all the time calling to passing friends (who were all of the male persuasion).

He ended the conversation as I was explaining to him how unique I thought the City of Philadelphia was, when he said, Look man, I gotta hustle some fags. I need to make some money. No hard feelings.

I didnt notice the pun at the time. When I think about it, its all a play of worlds.

I went back upstairs, found my clipboard, and a yellow legal pad, went back outside, sat down, and started to write it all down. In a matter of five minutes, a panhandler got four pennies out of me (which I had picked up earlier off the floor in the hallway), a skateboarder almost got run over by a line of cars when he took a nasty fall right in front of the line of traffic going east on Pine. He got right back on the board and kept on cruising, giving me a smile and a thumbs-up as he rolled past.

A police officer clomped by riding a large appaloosa horse, and a guy rode by on a bicycle shouting obscenities at a person riding in a cab. I also began to notice the patrons of the coffee house on the corner, a place called the Last Drop Coffee Shop. Having moved from the western suburbs and not being a viewer of MTV, I was unaware of some of the styles that are being adopted by some of the city slickers that frequent the Last Drop, and the bar across the street, a place with no signage, called Dirty Franks. I noticed several different shades of hair color, bright green, bright red, and multi-colored. One guy walked by with purple, red, and blue hair.

I was impressed more with the Kool-aid hair coloring than the pierced noses, eyebrows, and cheeks. I also noticed that black tattoos, filigree style, are another popular form of self-expression.

I have always (since my college days, anyway) admired the iconoclastic nature of some people, and I understand why the younger people today want to be different from older people. We grew our hair long, and demonstrated, bombed a few ROTC buildings (an act I never supported), supported all sorts of civil rights movements from Black Pride to the feminist movement to the sexual revolution.

To me, bright orange hair is cool. I do wonder, though, about the mind set of those who feel the need for a nose ring, or six to eight eyebrow rings above one eye, or covering an arm with seventeen to thirty tattoos. Dont get me wrong, theres nothing at all wrong with it. I wonder why one would want to cover ones self with various art works. Ive always thought the body is more of a temple than a canvass, but what the hell, nobodys getting hurt, and the fad supplies employment for more than a few body artists. It seems that the tattoo is now an acceptable form of expression. Perhaps even a bit habit forming. This form of art has transcended the realms of drunken sailors and go to hell bikers, and has made its way to the University of the Arts as well as the University of Pennsylvania.

Why would the person away from home for perhaps the first time, emblazoned with the desire to do something really independent, something shocking (at least to their parents, grandparents, etc.), want to do what we did, that is, grow their hair long, sport shaggy beards for the men, and no bras for the women, when they can devise their own ways of challenging the values of the older generation?

Its all simply a matter of style, and eventually the pierced tongues, eyebrows, bellybuttons, and nose rings will go away for the greater part of the population as these purveyors of puerile plumage enter the real world, rather than the MTV version. Until then, live and let live, and be thankful that people are still finding ways to go about freaking others out, in so many different ways and with so many formulas.

We can only imagine what the next generation will do. By that time, maybe technology will be so advanced that people will be able to change skin colors. I can see it now. Well finally be able to see if people really mean it when they say, Im not prejudiced, I dont care if a person is blue, green, black, or whatever