I'll Be Your Mirror #2

Who was that tiny woman and how did she get to be so ghetto?

You know how it goes. You're out in public and you see someone who looks familiar. You know you should greet them but you just can't figure out who they are, what your response to them should be. In my case this is compounded by the fact that I'm almost blind and while I have a hard time with people's names I never remember a face. Having been through the embarrassment of greeting a number of strangers with intimate cordiality I've taken to waiting for the other person to break first. They're the ones with fucking eyes, let them make the call.

(I've always thought that if I was a Dick Tracy villain my name would be No-Eyes.)

But sometimes they get closer, you get closer, and it gets obvious that they're in the same boat as you are. They know you -- but they don't know you and they have no idea what to do.

Well, this happened to me the other day and I learned something about myself. It was just like an After School Special except the ending was more unsettling than heartwarming.

Here's how it went.

I was in Berkeley Bowl the other day. Me and the missus were doing our big shopping trip for the week and I was in a semi-distracted state. (You drag me away from a project when I'm in mid-effort and no matter what else happens after that my brain is still going to be working on that project. My mind has a powerful engine and a terrible transmission.) That was when I spotted her.

She was a very small Asian woman, I'd guess in her forties, and as soon as I saw her she saw me. Her eyes got wide and she was about to speak...

... and then the moment passed and so did we. That was the beginning of our little dance. Again, you know the routine. You see someone in the grocery store and for some reason -- they're cute, they're appalling, whatever -- you notice them and then for the rest of the shopping trip part you keep running across them. It was one of those.

I totally knew this lady. I knew the kind of relationship we had -- a please and thank you thing that had been going on for a while. I mean, I'd known this woman for years.

But how did I know her? From school? Did she work at Berkeley Bowl? Was she a friend of Karen's? It was driving me nuts -- I knew the relationship was somehow more intimate than any of those, more personal.

And then came the moment of truth in the produce section, in the aisle separating the melons from the citrus fruit. We'd entered without noticing one another and there we were, getting closer and closer. It was too late to turn around.

And then, as we passed, I gave her a quick visual greeting, indicating with body language a mild and courteous recognition of her person.

Her response was so out of character that I had no basis for reaction. There's this look -- and here I'm revealing my racism -- that I get from time to time when I'm in places like my home-town of Richmond or Oakland or the rougher parts of Berkeley. The gesture is only displayed in bad neighborhoods with a predominantly black population. I mean it's totally fucking ghetto. Totally. These days I mostly see it when I'm coming and going to the corner market that my pals insist on calling the stabby store, as in, "I ain't going to the stabby store, are you fucking kidding me?"

It's a quick head motion that's not a nod. It's more like an anti-nod. The head lifts quick and smooth, just a couple of inches. The mouth stays still, neither smiling nor frowning, and eye contact is made for just a fraction of a second. It's the cranial equivalent of snapping fingers -- a gesture that takes a certain level of cool to pull off and if you can't do it you don't even try -- the penalties for failure would be dire. She pulled it off perfectly.

What made this so incongruous is that it's a specifically male bit of body language. More than that, it's a tough-guy move. While I'd gotten this a few times from non-blacks it's always, always, always been from the kind of person who's presence makes me conscious of the possibility of violence -- a possibility to which I must confess a certain over-sensitivity.

The meaning of this gesture is pretty nuanced for tough-guy crap. It says, "Here I am and there you are and there is no animus between us. You have a right exist and so do I and we are living in a harmonious moment. Good day, my brother, and do not even consider fucking with me because I will tear your ass up." It's a gesture that allows the performer to be threatening and non-threatening at the same time. It's an old-school thing, has nothing to do with current culture -- it's not in any videos or movies that I know of. You only see this on the street.

So getting that look of cold-blooded Mutually Assured Destruction-style acknowledgement from a wee tiny Asian woman in Berkeley fucking Bowl was a brain twister. It was like going to a museum and having one of the docents walk up and say, "Yo yo yo I got that smoke." A total what the fuck moment.

I was telling the missus about it on the ride home and that's when I realized who she was. Ever had banh mi? Vietnamese sandwiches? They are swell. Tasty, cheap, and healthy. These are people who understand the importance of balance in a sandwich and they know how to use vegetables -- marinated julienne daikon and carrot, sliced cucumber, cilantro, fresh jalapeno -- to bring everything together in a startlingly digestable symphony of flavor.

The woman who'd baffled me worked behind the counter at the Saigon restaurant in downtown Berkeley. (It's right across the street from the Subway. I don't know how Subway stays in business when there are cheaper and better sandwiches at the Saigon...) I've been eating at the Saigon from time to time since I went back to school -- the prices are competitive with home cooking so I don't feel too guilty about it.

So I was in the car running the mental tape of the scene in my mind and I realized that there was a moment's hesitation on the banh mi lady's part when we passed each other, a gap between my silent greeting and her use of that grotesquely inappropriate gesture. And that was when I realized...

(cue dramatic violin crescendo)

She had been imitating me!

Honest to god, I don't know why they let me out of the house.