These days my brain has been kicking in and just throwing me completely with random flashbacks of seemingly nothing. Today it was a memory of a man whose name I don’t even know because at the time of this story I was probably only four or five years old.
It was the late 80’s and this guy lived in a small town in New Hampshire as an openly bi-sexual man. He was… an oddity… in every way. He was also the only man to work making clothes at the same sweatshop as my mother. This was ironic considering he only wore one shirt — for maybe twenty years. I remember it well. It was a tie-dye T-shirt that had been worn so often that it was literally just rags draped over him, huge slashes and tears, I mean there pretty much was no shirt left, just some tattered fragments of cloth where the seams still clung on for dear life. There was no back to speak of. To this day I have yet to meet a more loved shirt than that one!
Maybe I am remembering him these days out of empathy – I mean holy fuck, that must have been a shit life… an openly bi-sexual man in a small town in the 1980’s?! WOW. He didn’t even get respite at work… the women in the sweatshop were horrible. Never have I met a more bitchy crew than those clucking hens! And if they weren’t bitching about men they were picking on the only dude in the room who had the misfortune of owning a cock and balls. Once he came in with a nose piercing. These lovely squabbling ladies immediately started in on this.
“How do you blow your nose with that thing in?”
“When it’s cold do you get booger icicles on it?”
“It’s like a shiny zit! How do you not pick at it?!”
This went on for a few weeks until the nose ring mysteriously disappeared. Not much later so did this unfortunate fellow. And so ends my story… a tale of both humor and horror. To this day it still sucks to be a minority in a small town, an individual and eccentric, but so long as people like this still flagrantly deny this reality I still have hope. So if by some weird chance this poor guy is out there reading this – I hope you’ve found whatever it is you needed in life. Thanks for giving those biddies something to squawk about!
