“He was so tough, I thought he was a hipster.”
Yeah, you don’t hear that much, the general rap on hipsters being that they’d rather oil their beards than bite off your ear in a bar fight.
My wife likes hipsters.
“They dress so neatly,” she says. “They’re not like those slobs who go to the Walmart in pajama pants with the bottom of the legs all dirty and dragging on the floor.”
I myself am no big-box store baboon in the matter of dress. I once went to the local Walmart after work wearing cufflinks, wingtip lace-up boots and a tweed sport coat with a subtle red stripe woven into the fabric.
“I couldn’t have been safer,” I told my wife later. “Everybody thought I was a parole officer.”
I’m not going to say, “Some of my best friends are hipsters,” either because it’s not true. The first time I lit my pipe and a passing hipster asked me how long I’d been vaping, I quit hipsters.
Then, last week, I learned hipsters are tough. In fact, they’re tougher than a night in a Georgia jail.
When a juice establishment opened near the newspaper where my wife and I work as reporters, I was happy. I like juice. I like orange juice. I like apple juice. I like grape juice. I like grapefruit juice.
“I like juice in the morning,” I told my wife. “Maybe they’ll have breakfast, too. You know, bacon and eggs.”
She looked at me like I was a bacon baboon and left the office.
“Try this,” she said when she returned.
In her small, pale hand was a clear plastic cup, maybe a pint. The liquid in it was green, the exact shade of pond water on a 104-degree Midwestern morning after cows have been, shall we say, standing in the water for a while. I know that color. I’ve seen how it’s made.
Understand that when my wife says, “Try this,” I do what she says. If she were to hand me a gallon jug of bleach and tell me to take a swig, I’d say a quick Hail Mary, close my eyes and drink. I do whatever she tells me to do. We never fight, and I sleep soundly.
I cannot describe the flavor of what she made me drink without referring once again to that tepid Midwestern farm pond and its strong flavor of cow squeezins.
“It’s a smoothie,” she said.
Turns out it had avocado, ginger, mint and some kind of grass, and it tasted as though it had been run through a cow prior to serving.
“Hipsters drink this, right?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “It’s nice to have a juice bar so close to the office.”
It’s not, of course. It’s not nice at all. It’s horrible, and it threatens my black coffee-centered way of life.
But I’ll tell you something: That one good-sized swallow of pond water smoothie taught me that your average tight pants, beard oiled, light-pink gingham shirt hipster is nobody’s daisy.
If you can get up every morning and, right after tasting toothpaste, drink a cup of cow squeezins with a subtle flavor of guacamole, you’re tougher than anyone I know, including one 300-pound guy I know who’s nicknamed “Tiny” and can bite a piece out of a beer glass.
Tiny’s in jail right now. He bit off a guy’s ear in a bar fight. When he gets out, I’m taking him to the juice bar. By then, I’ll be used to drinking cow squeezins. We’ll see who’s tough.