MY REAL NAME IS FLOYD.
But as property of Warner Brothers, you'll know me best as the ash-haired rabbit who sold his reputation as a border gangster to become a company mascot. The much beleaguered catchphrase: "What's up, Doc?" follows me to the mailbox, the fruit stand, the rose resin park bench, to the ten-cent showers at my gym. And I've learned over the years that this is a better way to live that not being recognized for anything at all. For example, last week, I scored three free carrot cupcakes at Junior's. That was just for impersonating myself -- which I don't know if you've tried, but if you find yourself suddenly stuck trying to live up to your own imitation, people tend to think that you will stop the world to show it to them. (And furthermore, that you will do it for free.) But I refuse to give up the subway. I will never give up the A express train. And that's not because I particularly enjoy having my picture taken with a Japanese tour group passing Port Authority, but if it so happens that one of the pleading members of your tour is an eleven year old in a propeller hat with Down's Syndrome, what am I going to do... be a dick about it?
It comes as a surprise to most people that I am related to the man on the hundred dollar bill. And when I turned six, I was given one of the first issued bills printed with Benjamin Franklin's face in a crystalline frame. It sleeps at my bedside, untarnished, a presence either of forgiveness or burghal chastisement depending on the state of my finances that week. This week, I'll probably sell it.
But this is my first time at a pawnshop.
There's the sound of moths dying in the furnace. The smell of tar and fingerprints and aging sulfuric body fluids. A Greek shaving his eight year old son's eyebrows with an electric razor turns to me, as if I have just caught him putting his son in a dress. I presented the creased bill with authority and proposed no less than a grand. I started to notice the quiet slither of some shifting presence from behind me as the pawnbroker laid out each hundred. (One alligator, two alligator, three alligator, four...) When I told him he was six hundred short, I felt the intimation of a hand send a gentle pulse of terror to my earlobes.
"Listen to Bugsy," came the voice from behind me. "He SAID you is $600 short, PAL!!"
I meet his gaze with slow moving armor. Like some clever shapeshifter he appears closely in my periphery like something between Sammy Davis Jr. and a wolverine. He aims a .45 at the pawnbroker and makes him dole out the remaining $600 in startlingly naked view, demanding that he dump the contents of his cash register into my alligator skin satchel.
This man's name, I will learn in ten seconds or less, is Edgar Wilby -- formerly of Wilby Hunting Corps. A man that I recognize hereupon from my days of trying to evade internal border control. Once boisterous rivals, we are from this moment on, once again, two men in kilts, on the run from ourselves.
And armed with twelve grand and a produce truck, we are about to go in search of paradise...
-- FOR MORE, e-mail trystantrazon@gmail.com --
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