White Life #0: Punching pregnant women who smoke
Starting today, recurring feature Translation Nation will be joined by White Life, an exclusive peek at the wild weird world of Straight White Men from your boy on the inside.
As anyone who has spent time with me in a populous urban environment can tell you, I have a tendency to attract the conversational attention of strangers. I’m a young white man of Irish descent with short hair and a medium build living in Boston. Because of this, I can look as much like a cop as a banker as a grad student or a hoodrat on the T. Gay men read me as gay, straight men read me straight. Norms read me norm and weirds read me weird. Wealthy people have occasionally thought me down-and-out while the down-and-out ask me for money.
Some have found this chameleonism suspect. My first roommate in Boston had a recurring nightmare that I’d one day stab her in the back and laugh in her face. (We are still friends.) It makes me feel like a living, breathing DMZ marking the borders among several different social strata in the city. Ankle-deep in many puddles, if you will.
Of all the people I interact with on a regular basis, white men definitely initiate the most bizarre conversations. All their/our phobias, isms, and insecurities air out in the close confines of a shared elevator or sundown bus terminal.
White Life will be a chronicle of the strangest of these interactions. Here’s the first.
In the Miracle of Science last Friday, I approached a guy leaning against the wall next to the bathroom door.
“You in line?,” I asked him.
“Naw. My girlfriend’s in there,” he replied.
Being straight-literate and seeing that he was guarding the door for her, I nodded, moved a few steps away, and turned around so that we didn’t have to share any unneccessary eye contact. I took out my phone and started scrolling through text messages when I heard him rustle behind me.
“Hey. I need a ruling on this one…”, he gestured out the window at a group of women in line for the club next door, “Is she pregnant or just fat?”
“Uh… I don’t know.”, I replied, sounding as disinterested as possible.
“Because, man, that really pisses me off. Pregnant like that and smoking? That’s fucked up. You know?”
“Yeah, well. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t.”
“Pregnant chicks should NOT be smoking. Man, if she’s pregnant, you know what I’d like to do? Go out there and just punch her in the face. Bam. Fucking smoking when you’re pregnant.”
Before I could formulate a thought, his girlfriend opened the bathroom door and his investment in our conversation evaporated. He put his arm around her shoulders as I brushed past them and walked back into the bar.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:33:59 (PDT -04:00)
I look fwd to future entries in the series!
This reminds me a lot of the summer several years back when I worked for the Cambridge Pahk Depahtment. Weird how I could be made to feel in (class, sexual, ethnic) drag despite also being, if we must, a SWM. Chameleonic, indeed, dude — though it’s clear that whiteness (denied to us irish-americans in earlier periods) affords us such shape-shifting privilege where other phenotypes don’t.
Rather than ignoring or brushing off the conversations that my always straight if not always white coworkers initiated with me, I took it upon myself to reorientalize the garbage man.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:16:54 (PDT -04:00)
I see your amazon link and raise you another!
Friends with less chameleonic appearances and inclinations have criticized me in the past for not making a stink when these conversations happen. They suggest my “uhh”-ing and “err okay”-ing is complicity and I should be ashamed.
They may be right but I’ve heard and seen crazy things by simply going with the flow (not to mention gotten myself and others out of some hairy situations) so I’m not likely to go radical on randoms anytime soon.
Maybe White Life is my due penance (Irish-Catholic reference?) for these moments of complicity. I learn a lot by reading daily life stories from people of various other shades and stripes but rarely do I see such accounts from this side of the spectrum.
We’ll see how it goes…
August 12th, 2008 at 16:29:37 (PDT -04:00)
I definitely don’t recommend going radical on randoms, but a good subversive one-liner can go a long way sometimes.
August 12th, 2008 at 16:32:20 (PDT -04:00)
oh you hahvad radicals with your wit and your one-linaz!