by Brian Watkins
Some time ago I was walking down a prominent city street, preparing to cross the road when something mysterious happened to me. A car that was driving by slowed down, and the driver—a middle-aged man—made some signal at me that baffled me beyond comprehension. He motioned with his left hand by flinging up his index finger which was quickly accompanied by a second finger, and then brought them both down making a fist which he emboldened by gripping it tight. He did this twice. What? I looked behind me to see if he was trying to communicate with someone else. No one. It was me. He was doing his hand jive at me. I gave him a blank look and he kind of drew me in with this intense stare that you would only see in a Telemundo novella or something. What was that? I wondered. Did I just miss something? Was he trying to tell me something? Was he trying to sell me something? Was he asking for drugs? Was he soliciting drugs? Do I look like a drug-dealer or drug-doer? Maybe. Did I shave? Wait, I don’t think I shaved, so I might look a little more like a drug-doer than usual. Was he in a street gang? Impossible, he looked so normal; he wasn’t wearing a cape or anything.
After mulling over some possible answers to these hand-signals I tried to put it out of my head as something that I should just give up on… but I couldn’t. It plagued me for days.
What did it mean? Was it sex? Was this guy selling sex? Was he asking for sex? Does this happen? Are their hand signals for sex? What if I accidentally said yes? Does a guy that hasn’t shaved for a day look more like a prostitute or more like a guy who would hire a prostitute? Which is worse? I’ve never even seen a male prostitute. Do they exist? Dammit. I froze. Is he turning around? He kind of is turning around. Is he turning around to try and have sex with me? Wait, no, he’s just taking a left. It’s just a left. If it was sex, do I look like that kind of guy? Have other people thought this and never told me? I would hope they’d tell me.
Back to him: I started feeling sorry for him. I don’t know why, but I just did. I shouldn’t have really, but I did. Why did I feel sorry for him? The whole mystery of this thing just kept befuddling me. So much so that I reached a point of sheer glee; the tipping point of this mystery became a grand absurdity. My eyes began wincing and were accompanied by a slight grin. My pursuit of understanding what had just happened was exhausting. This was completely inexplicable. This hand signal: What. Did. It. Mean. Maybe he used to work at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and was one of those guys in the funny jackets that are constantly using those weird-ass hand-signals to buy and sell grain or something and old habits die hard. Maybe he had some tick or syndrome that I’m not aware of. Maybe I’m too ignorant. Why don’t I know about this syndrome that makes you make hand signals to strangers? Geez, I should feel guilty for being so stupid. So I kept exhaustively wondering about the man with the syndrome who was selling drugs in an upper-middle class street gang and wanted to “throw down” after selling me a share of wheat from the Merc and asking for sex.
I could talk about how I judged this situation right off the bat without compassion or how my prejudices disease my mind when something I don’t understand creeps up there, but I won’t. We all know that sin exists, blah blah blah. What is more important to me here is the mystery of it all. The power of mystery within the ordinary is often something we miss. There is a corporeal yearning for extreme anonymity and mystery that underlies our daily existence and we tend to shrug it off when we "don't get it." We are willing to subscribe to beliefs that adhere to such mystery but refuse to encounter it with reverence and awe unless it is done on a movie screen or stage and called art. Why should we deny it when it appears in material flash-form? How do we think art got started in the first place? I’m amazed at how hell-bent I am at trying to explain that which I don’t understand. Where’s the fun in that? It’s like I have some pride-ridden claim to knowledge that I cling to with a death-grip, and I refuse to let go of it until I either forget about it or get too lazy to try and understand it. Maybe the man with the secret hand signal was a little divine glimpse into something I don’t understand… either that or a prostitute. Maybe both. If God has taught me one thing it is that he loves irony.
I want to take more joy in that which is ridiculously out of the ordinary and impossible to explain. This sounds ridiculous but I think it’s valid. A friend of mine and I saw two men sword fighting in the park yesterday, literally, with real swords. What the hell is that? There is a man-made maze for cats that resembles a McDonald’s playpen in the backyard of the house next to me. We call it the cat circus. There are over thirty cats that live in it. What is that about? I don’t know. A buddy of mine once told me about a time when he was in a park late at night and there was a car parked and sitting in the driver’s seat was an actual deer with it’s hooves on the steering wheel. Whether he was high, crazy, or it actually happened I don’t know, but in any instance his story (whether it was true or not) inspired mystery, awe, and inversely was some backwards way of getting to hope. It was also frickin’ hilarious.
It seems that as human beings we are stuck in this in-between place, this incomprehensible mess that we often don’t want to admit to until we “get it.” The contemporary Irish playwright Conor McPherson talked about this "in-between" phenomenon in a recent interview. He calls it, “An awareness of the predicament of being alive.” He went on to say, “We're alive in this cold and mysterious universe, and we're only very small. That seems to me to be a stunning predicament.” Perhaps if we confront this predicament with sincere awe and wonderment we would all sympathize with it a bit more. Perhaps. I don’t really know.
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