731

Queenie

“No, I’m dead serious, man,” Barry insists. “Sell me what you’re wearing.”

“You need to seriously go fuck yourself, man,” the man answers, shoving Barry aside with sufficient force to make him stumble backwards and collide with a bike rack.

“I need your damn clothes!” Barry bellows at the man’s rapidly receding, FUBU-clad figure.

Barry hasn’t exactly fallen to the ground, but almost. He’s awkwardly commingling with the bike rack and has to wrench himself upright. In doing so, he snags his pants on a sharp burr protruding from a protuberant galvanized bolt.

“Shit!” he exclaims on discovering the resulting rip in his brand new Gap 1969 Limited Edition Premium Jeans (rigid rinse, with selvage trim on the coin pocket). They and his brand new Gap (PRODUCT) RED™ cotton T—in soft black with the word “HAMME(RED)” raggedly silk-screened to simulate a cracked and faded, dozens-of-washings look—had been purposely selected from an official Gap window manikin to impress Queenie, the object of Barry’s ardor, with (a) Barry’s Zeitgeist-synchronized sense of style and (b) Barry’s deeply ingrained social awareness.

If the jeans by themselves don’t get the job done, Barry had reasoned, then surely the fact that half the profits from his T-shirt had gone or would eventually be going to a global fund to fight AIDS, will.

In other words, mission accomplished.

Or so Barry had believed while brandishing cash at the Gap. He’d even embellished the ad hoc ensemble with a military-inspired wool jacket featuring four extra-generous flap pockets, shoulder epaulettes with button closures, strapped cuffs, and a concealed nylon hood.

It was all over but the waiting, Barry was certain—meaning, the waiting outside the bodega where Queenie had been shopping the day she saved his sorry ass (as Queenie had put it) when his Harley had fallen on top of him, and she had lifted it from his sprawling person with the apparent ease of a mommy freeing a traumatized two-year-old from a toppled trike.

Four days he had waited. Four days! And then, on the fifth day, there she comes, glowing and gliding towards him like an ethereal form, moving as if in slow-motion through a throng of faceless pedestrians paralyzed in their tracks by her grandeur.

The world becomes a blur for Barry as Queenie floats past him and into the store. He stands there shivering in the sweltering heat, waiting for her to emerge, his heart marking the minutes at two beats per second.

Barry hears her before he sees her. Hears her calling, “Yeah, man, the same to you!” And as she slides back into the sunlight, he hears himself speaking to Queenie, saying, “Hey—remember me?”

“No,” Queenie answers with a tone that’s equal parts indifference and impatience.

Barry gulps like some kind of over-the-top buffoon in some cartoonish melodrama. Like Jack Larson as “Jimmy Olsen,” for instance, in any 1950s episode of Adventures of Superman.

“I’m the guy you pulled the motorcycle off of,” he says, pointing. “Up the street? Over there?”

Queenie’s amber eyes give Barry a thorough going over, then light up with recognition. “Jesus Christ, it’s the Marlboro Man! Who you tryin’ to be now, Jack—that ‘Bono’ dude? And why you wearin’ that fuckin’ coat in this fuckin’ heat, man?”

Barry realizes he’s sweating buckets, but carries on as though he weren’t, as though he were indeed channeling Bonovian cool. “Listen,” he says, “I just have to ask you again—”

“Ask me what?”

“If you’ll go to Starbucks with me. When I asked you the last time, your exact words, as I recall them, were ‘No fuckin’ way.’”

Barry smiles at Queenie after saying this. Smiles like they’re sharing a joke or reminiscing about some distant contretemps whose memory they’ll shortly be washing away with raspberry mocha.

Queenie smiles back at Barry and keeps smiling at Barry while delivering her reply. “I’ll put it a little differently this time,” she says, giving his bulky pockets and pointless epaulettes a final, bemused inspection. “How about, ‘No fuckin’ way—José.’”

She leaves Barry standing there, slack-jawed, in a puddle of perspiration. All seems lost as he watches her walking off, swinging her bag of groceries in sublime unison with her strides.

But then Barry sees Queenie checking out a FUBU man who’s passing her on the sidewalk and coming his way, and decides all’s not lost after all.

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