Help Keep Santa Cruz Weird - CornFed (the ebook reader txt) 📗

His name is Robert but you would have never guessed it. I would figure it was something odd like Poindexter or androgynous like Pat. When I first saw him, I was a bit unsure about the gender. There are certain outfits people wear that creates an illusion of gender-bender. The entire time you’re looking at them, your mind is at work filtering all past experiences with the memories of men and women, each article of their person being measured against a gender image in your mind.

Normally, instincts override analytics and you get something echoing in your mind to the affect of “Hot chick. Must have. Now” or “Man. Big muscles. Don’t irritate him.” But every now and again, like today walking down that street in Santa Cruz, California, my instincts draw a blank and my mind must start piecing together the puzzle. It came up with man. A man dressed like a pink clown minus the big shoes and the ferris wheel in the back ground. A man dressed like a pink clown minus the birthday party full of kids wanting to see another pony balloon. A man dressed like a pink clown with pink LA Gear high-top tennis shoes, holding a pink parasol. And smiling.

No man wearing pink should be smiling like that.

I didn’t know quite what to say to this pink man. What exactly do you say to a man dressed like this?

“Hello, so, nice day we’re having. Why in the hell are you dressed like that?”

I did what most human beings would do, including the ones ahead of me. I waited til I had walked past the pink man, turned around, and took a picture….being ever so careful to keep my legs moving so as to not be so obvious. According to my tourist handbook, taking a moving picture at the local “ecclectica” is not as intrusive as a flat-out standstill shot. Pink man never missed a step. Parasol in his right hand, waving his left hand at humanity, walking slowly down the street, and smiling. I’m not sure walking slowly is a good phrase to use here. Perhaps shuffling his feet like he had sand in their underwear yet managing to make some forward progress would be more adequate. I had my picture is all I really cared about at that moment.

It wasn’t until 30 minutes later in time that I began to wonder a bit more about this pink man. As I was walking back to the car, pink man had set up shop in a little nook between two stores. Nothing had changed except the motion of his legs. He was still smiling, he was still twirling that pink parasol with his right wrist and he was still waving at humanity with his left. You never really got the sense that he was directing his enthusiasm at you until you stepped in front of his wave.

I took a lesson from pink man and slowed my walk down to a wandering tourist type walk. One step forward, look left, one small step, look right, another small step, ponder the moment, repeat, and eventually make it somewhere pertinent to life. In this case, I looked and pondered that pink man.

I began to notice some things I hadn’t noticed before. His shoes, they had sparkles on the shoelaces, official 1980-ish LA Gear sparkles. His face, it looked like it had sparkles on it as well. Those cheeks, painted up with a cross between red and pink makeup, accentuated his rotund face. He looked to be about 6 feet tall. His smile seemed a bit forced, sort of social experiment forced. It didn’t resonate at the gut level. It seemed more intellectual, more analytical, more calculating than pure.

Although he looked more female-ish than male-ish, his outfit wasn’t put together by a woman. Nothing really coordinated in the style sense of the word. There were little flowers on his wrists, each housing a yellow smiley face. There was a stuffed animal hanging from his side. It was, get this, pink. And the beads. I had never noticed those before, several long silver strands hanging around his neck.

While occasionally checking out a few female passerby’s, my eyes caught sight of pink man’s belly. It was a roof over the rim of his pink dress, if you could call it a dress. It looked like he had ripped a curtain off an elderly ladies window and wrapped it around his waist. It was uneven. And there was this thing about his chest. Nothing is more loathsome than a man dressed in pink with curly black chest hair winking at you. I had seen enough. I didn’t want the wind coaxing a stray chest hair in my direction.

Over the next few weeks, pink man was in and out of my thoughts at random times. I thought myself a bit queer the way I kept bringing him up in conversations with friends in Georgia. As with most newly interesting things in life, the freshness fades as new shiny objects are noticed. In Santa Cruz, the homeless people became my muse.

That was until a group of Southern raised gentleman from Florida paid a visit to Santa Cruz. Customers in Santa Cruz on business. Santa Cruz and business are an odd word combination.

While I remained at the office on the first day of their visit, they hunted around Santa Cruz for food and happened upon the same path as myself. I had never mentioned pink man to them. I sort of didn’t discuss pink men with customers, didn’t seem all that professional. Plus, how was I to know who did and who didn’t dress in pink when no one was looking? Best to be safe I thought.

When they returned from lunch, I was expecting comments on the beautiful California weather, the ocean view just down from the office, the all vegetarian hamburger joint mistake, the homeless men wandering the streets, the rich hippies in the curtain-less homes along the ocean…. something about the overall weird feel of Santa Cruz.

“Did you see that crazy loon dressed in pink swirling the parasol?”

Pink man was back. They, like me, had taken a picture. As expected, it was the same pink man I had seen. Same outfit, same location, same smile, and the same damned parasol. I felt somewhat secure in the fact Santa Cruz was home to only one man dressed in a pink outfit. The homeless man sleeping outside the office didn’t seem so interesting anymore.

We made plans for lunch the next day not based on culinary tastes. It was purely a pink man visit under the guise of feeding the body. We parked and walked toward the restaurant. The walk reminded me of trailer park specimens, taking the extraterrestrial investigator to the exact spot the space alien had abducted their chickens. My Southern friends were walking me to where they had the close encounter with the pink kind.

I still wasn’t prepared to engage the pink man. They never taught me anything in college about handling pink men. I have some sort of street smarts and I still didn’t know what to do. I generally run away from transvestites but he wasn’t really a she. Just a he who could be a she dressed like a clown. All I could manage was the same walking-and-turn-around-while-being-inconspicuous act as I had done weeks before.

Lunch went by fairly quick. Of course, every other conversation piece was about the pink man and I was constantly being teased for talking about him so much. I couldn’t help it. I had a thousand scenarios in my head for the answer to the most philosophical question one could possible pose in a situation like this:

What has to happen to a man for him to dress in pink, paint themselves up like a rogue clown, twirl a parasol, walk slowly down the street, smiling, and waving at thin air, day in and day out?

I asked the waitress, partly because I wanted to know about pink man, but also because she was a cutie pie by Georgia standards.

“Well, he used to dress in garbage bags. The pink outfit is a new addition the past few months. Some say he’s rich and just crazy. Other says he lives in a nearby apartment and just does that to amuse himself. I personally think I don’t know what to think.”

We agreed that the answer to our question was more important than other pressing matters. With camera in hand, we boldly approached the pink man, hoping to get to the bottom of this.

I freely admit I didn’t know what I was going to say as I approached him. I mean, he’s standing there dressed like a gay rodeo clown, smiling and waving and I’m about to possibly touch on some hidden turmoil that could prompt him to swat me with that parasol. He might be what we Georgia boys would call a Billy-Bad Ass, a man who just sort of lingers around you, drawing attention to himself, until someone invades his space. And then the ass whooping occurs. God, what would it do to my reputation if I got my beat up by an overweight pink man?

“So, what’s your deal? You seem happy.”

Pink man shrugs his shoulders, the clown head temporarily touching his left shoulder.

“Are you trying to spread love? Is there a spiritual reason why you’re so happy? Did you find God?”

Another pink shrug.

“What’s your name?”

“Robert”

His voice was deep. I was expecting something squeaky accompanied by toots from a horn. Even a soft voice wouldn’t have caught me off guard. But this was testosterone talking. This was someone who had gone through puberty at some point in his life, was probably endowed with the proper male appendage and the associated bundled goods. And he’s wearing pink.

“Robert. Nice to meet you. I’m Russ. What are you doing out here?”

Another pink shrug.

And then I did something that I wasn’t exactly expecting myself to do. I reached to hug him. I was caught up in the moment and it is customary for me to hug people when I’m feeling all happy horse shit. It wasn’t a full frontal hug where you stare deeply into someone’s eyes. It was one of those “today is just a damned good day to be alive” one-armed man-to-man-side-by-side-that-a-boy kind of hugs. Robert jerked away like someone had poked him with a cattle prod. He evidently saw it differently. I think he thought I was gonna try and kiss him or something. Pink men, even though they look all lovey-dovey to the eye, as a rule, you can look, you can take pictures, you can even make dumb talk with him, but you cannot touch. There is no such thing as a pink hug.

He agreed to a picture. As I stood to the side of Robert, I was expecting an odor to drive me another few feet away. He had a surprisingly neutral odor. I anticipated something a bit extreme…from Chanel #9 all the way to 5 day old sun-rotted tuna. He had a nothing smell. A pink smell, if you will.

The next few weeks were abuzz with Internet research and emails requesting a picture of my encounter with the pink man of Santa Cruz. Come to find out, he was quite the local celebrity. His proper name was Robert Steffan