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How'd we end up at the Buck watching a little
person
get 86d? It started when Mike asked me if I knew
anyone selling a car cheap so he and two friends
could drive down to LA, dump the car, and fly on
to Costa Rica to surf for 3 months. We were in the
7-11 parking lot, waiting for Joel to check his Wall-
ingford PO Box. It so happened I did know someone
looking to sell a fuel efficient beater cheap, so I said,
My friends had their car broken into, right rear
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passenger window smashed, they were going to donate it but if you
buy it it will help fund their 6 week trip to Thailand. The
'88 Corolla 2-door hatchback is parked in front of our place, so I suggested
meeting Owner at
the Buck to look the car over. The
plan worked great, except Owner couldn't make it, so Ben, Mike, Joel, Taylor,
Jay, and I ended up at the corner table trading beers
when a diminutive man with one front tooth missing and a shining demeanor
asked if he could join us. Maybe the Buck is a gay
bar after all, as rumor has it, we discussed as the not too tall man went
for his stuff and returned with a box of Sun laundry deter-
gent and a stack of CDs. (What is wrong with me? I never asked his name or
what was on the CDs.) Soon thereafter, the owner
came and told him to leave; he'd given him all the chances he could when
all his bartenders told him he was trouble. Well, the
truth was the man seemed too drunk to function and his demeanor, while shining,
was more than any of us wanted. So we let
him go and watched as he pulled his shit together on the sidewalk and don
a green parka with fur lining over his backpack--
which gave him the appearance of having a hump. He sat with his back against
the wall beneath our window for a while, then
rounded the corner, disappeared, and returned soon thereafter giving us
the finger. Well, we'd all been drunk before, so we
didn't take it personally, but it still made me sad about all the promises
I break to myself. |||| Time was, I thought the difference
between dwarf and little person was purely semantic, but it
matters much more than that. Semantics is just words, people
have feelings. It's unfair (and misleading) to categorize anyone by a criterion
as arbitrary as size. Let drunkenness speak for itself. |
