Mads, my Norwegian companion, and I went to the opera the other night, and on our way out, he stopped at the coat check. I thought perhaps he’d learned his lesson after last time he’d stolen someone’s coat, but Mads and learning a lesson go together like oil and water.
The man whose claim ticket he had lifted had checked a mint green Members Only jacket. Mads put it on, left it unzipped, and pushed up the sleeves.
“You have to be kidding me, man,” I said.
“What, this is hot!”
As we walked down the street, we passed a guy in a red Adidas track suit with a matching bicycle hat on, doing the robot on a flattened out cardboard box. There were girls around him with teased hair and acid wash jeans, clapping him on, next to guys with mullets and faint mustaches laughing. I turned to Mads, and his white dress shirt had been replaced with a pink Izod-Lacoste polo, collar sufficiently popped. This wasn’t going to be good.
As we walked further, two men in overalls and painter’s caps jumped in front of us and started dancing. We turned, and another guy was doing the worm on another cardboard box. Then a girl in a suit with a fedora on started dancing with Mads, and he danced back. A police car drove by, but it was longer and boxier than it’s modern counterpart. Two cops with no hats on got out and watched the proceedings. They were almost bursting out of their tops they were so muscular. They had on aviators, and they looked straight ahead, seemingly at nothing, before high-fiving.
I had a sense of what was happening, and ducked out while Mads was low-fiving a young kid in sweatpants and a headband who just did some breakdancing in front of him. As I moved away though, my vision got cloudy—the world had gone from digital to analog in front of me.
I ran to the nearest T stop to escape. As I went to put my Charlie Card against the turnstile though, I realized there were no readers—I needed a token! I searched my pockets for any money I could use to buy some. I pulled out a wad of change, and lo and behold, there were three tokens in among the other junk I had pulled out. I put one in the slot, and went to go through, but it jammed.
“Don’t wuhrry about it, I sawr ya put it in. Hey, you comin’ from the game? How did Clemens pitch tonight?”
I got on the train, and it creaked along, the car filled with people smoking. I kept a low profile until we made it to our stop. When I got topside, the world was clearer again, I had made it back to digital. Three days later, Mads came home, his face fully made up, wearing a white OP T-shirt and pair of ripped acid wash jeans.
“Don’t even say it.”
Gwen looked up from her work on her comic book.
“Actually, we could sell those pants on Etsy, they’d command a good price.”