NONFICTION

Image cour tesy of Brandon Chinn

wag’s revue 63

Wag’s Revue

ON DOUCHEBAGSRobert Moor

“Now that we’ve infiltrated the mainstream, we have ample opportunity to mess with people… So far, we’ve done it in a classy way—we made music we like that’s weird, but it also got picked up on the radio…. There are so many clichés we can fall into. An ultimate goal [of ours] is not to become a douche bag.”

—Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT, SPIN Magazine, Nov. 2008

I was 22 years old and about as stable as a three-legged

chair—sleep-deprived, underfed, plagued by night terrors from

the malaria medication—when I first learned that whiplashy

sting you feel when your self-image is radically altered in a

blink. Pierre and I were standing tenuously on the back bumper

of a motor-rickshaw as we tore down a dirt road studded with

skeletal cows, and Pierre said what he said, and I felt the funny

feeling. My head did not feel like it was spinning so much as

structurally reconfiguring itself from the inside out, recklessly,

with great speed and considerable damage, as it must feel to

undergo an Ovidian transformation. This happens to people

every day. The corporate employee of 42 years finds out that he

has become obsolete; the fashion model presses an index to the

corner of her eye, gingerly flattening her first crow’s foot and

wishing she’d finished high school. A soldier finds out the war

is over, a prisoner is released, a former president leaves office;

all three stare out a window and realize, with a growing sense

of dread, that they are no longer equipped for life back home.

In my case, I learned that I came off as a douchebag.

The smoldering, wasted landscape of Bihar rolled by. Pierre

blinked a few times, perhaps registering my wince with a feeling

of regret. Manifold connotations clicked through my head: a

rubber bulb with a hose attached; a guy I knew in high school

64 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuewho nicknamed himself “The Hammer” and got laid off from

Bear Stearns; a summer’s breeze through feathered, shoulder-

length brown hair, and the words “Sometimes I just don’t feel

fresh, even after a shower”; snickering in sixth grade French

class; oddly, a tea bag soaked in vinegar; Jägermeister; toothy

smiles; Jimmy Fallon. I performed a quick lexical dissection.

Douchebag? Douche-bag? Douche bag? Sort of a douchebag.

A real douchebag. That fucking douchebag. The word began

to disintegrate. The closer I looked at it, the harder it was to

discern exactly what it meant.

At the time, Pierre and I were living in a monastery in northeast

India. Each year (the now-defunct) Antioch University took 20

students to the home of the Bodhi Tree to live amongst a handful

of Burmese monks, to study the Dharma, and to adhere to the five

precepts of a Buddhist pilgrim: no sexual acts, no intoxicants,

no lying, no stealing, and no killing living creatures. There

were no televisions or computers or even radios allowed in the

monastery (in fact, only rarely was there electricity), so when

we weren’t writing candlelit exegeses about the metaphysical

implications of Pratityasamutpada or eating or meditating or

sleeping, we resorted to other, increasingly outdated forms of

human entertainment: we played chess, we traded books, we

speculated about the sex lives of our professors, we crawled out

onto the ledge where we weren’t supposed to sit and dangled

our legs over the swampy vegetable patch, and most of all, we

talked.

A favorite topic of conversations was to recount our first

impressions as we first appeared to one another in the London

airport. But it quickly became clear that this was not always a

pleasant topic of discussion. In the hermetic environment of

the monastery, where there was so much talk of deconstructing

identity and fostering an understanding of no-self, old layers of

social identity had a tendency to flake and shed. With a shaved

head and more or less identical clothes, it was easy to forget who

wag’s revue 65

Wag’s Revueyou had been back home. Digging up those old social identities

too often felt like unearthing a shoebox full of embarrassing

middle school photographs.

It was clear that these first impressions were tricky things,

often false, but they could also be terrifically revealing. As

a cognitive process, snap judgments appear to be a primal

function of our lizard brains, an instantaneous sorting method

by which we weed out friend from foe. If we could look through

the human brain as if through a Terminator’s red-tinted gaze at

the exact moment it first encounters someone new, we might see

the mind’s eye highlight and zoom in on a number of visual cues

(anatomical, sartorial, behavioral), flit through a computation

as quick as neural lightning, and then display, in glowing boxy

letters, a pre-defined category into which the person should be

filed, and by which his future actions will be predicted.

Apparently, upon first laying eyes upon me, Pierre’s brain

flashed:

DOUCHEBAG (var.: FRATTY DOUCHEBAG)This is what stung.

“Fratty” was not a word I would normally use to define

myself. Back at home and at college, among my friends, if

anything I tottered toward the opposite end of the spectrum:

I was bookish, left-leaning, a pacifist. My friends and I were

not in fraternities. In fact we made fun of frat boys. And as for

“douchebag,” to my mind that just sounded like a slur. And yet,

to Pierre, a fair-minded person and a fellow liberal arts student,

as I materialized in the airport wearing a button-down shirt

and a (non-Castro, non-trucker, non-porkpie) hat, with short-

cropped hair and unexamined Midwestern sensibilities, the

visual calculus of my appearance equaled ‘fratty douchebag.’

Something did not fit. We had stumbled into a linguistic gap,

a divergence in perception, one signifier with split signifieds, a

symptom of what I will call the Chasm.

66 nonfiction

Wag’s Revue

�It is no secret that the structure of colloquial speech is far

less rigorous than that of the academe. Meanings of slang

terms fluctuate according to geographic locality and personal

preference, and only rarely does even a rough consensus form

around the definition of a given term. One needs only glance

inside the Urban Dictionary to find the myriad, haphazard and

often conflicting definitions we give to young words. However,

once every decade—due to some underlying social need for

a new way to name, differentiate, or disparage—a given term

suddenly jumps into sharp focus and is readable by all. Thus

we receive the Beatnik, the Hippie, the Punk. What was once

a put-down is sharpened into a full-bore social identity, and

sometimes—as in the case of the aforementioned—adopted and

celebrated by the once disparaged. I suspect this same process

of sharpening (if not the reclamation) is happening right now

with the word “douchebag” in our nation’s urban centers. I can

see it taking shape in smoke-filled mouths, rolling around on

tongues. The last flecks are being shaved from the mold; it is

readying itself for re-release.

The perplexing thing about the word “douchebag” is that

it refers to something specific that most of us know and can

point out when seen, and yet we have trouble making explicit.

(“You know one when you see one,” runs the tagline of Obvious

Douchebag, one of the many new douchebag-focused blogs

on the internet.) Our inability to form a working definition is

perplexing precisely because the word is so widely used. Once

you start listening for it, you will hear the word everywhere,

spoken with increasing frequency and ferocity. It has been

exploited of late to elicit cheap laughs—most notably by

comedy shows like The Daily Show and 30 Rock, those middle-

aged miners of youth slang—to the point where it now risks

wag’s revue 67

Wag’s Revuecollapse from hyperinflation. This phenomenon appears to be

systematic. As a particular epithet (“bitch,” “punk,” “idiot” and

to a more obvious degree, “fag” or the vague adjectival usage

of “gay”) gains social relevance by targeting and disparaging a

certain demographic, it is inevitably adopted into the popular

lexicon as a blanket insult. The epithet’s pointedness, precisely

the reason for its ascent, then becomes blunted through sloppy

or overzealous usage, and eventually the word grows stale, loses

favor, and fades into the background. Once irrelevant, the word

persists, fixed but distant, in the ever-growing catacombs of the

English language, to be excavated by future generations as the

need arises, but only rarely as it was originally intended.

�We all know where the epithet originates, and in part why it

was once so devastating; it refers to a soiled object, a private

shame. ‘Shithead,’ ‘motherfucker,’ ‘piss ant’; all appeal to us,

initially, on the literal level of their imagery. Perhaps just as

importantly, ‘douchebag’ is fun to say. It rolls lushly off the

tongue like a rush of water, with a big plosive burst at the end. It

is nigh onomatopoeic, near pornographic. Pronouncing it feels

like a release, with all the hearty thud of a kick in the ribs.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “douche

bag” was first used to refer to something other than a female

cleaning implement some time in the 1960’s, when it was used to

describe “an unattractive co-ed, or by extension, any individual

whom the speaker desires to deprecate.” Other sources imply

that the term originally indicated a woman of “loose moral

repute.” In Mary McCarthy’s The Group, set in 1933, the douche

is considered an effective contraceptive instrument, and so by

extension any woman who was found using one was thought

to be promiscuous. Knowing the way that social mores were

structured in that era, it is not so far of a leap from “loose” to

68 nonfiction

Wag’s Revue“unattractive.” Where the term took a leap across the gender gap

from describing unattractive women to describing contemptible

men remains unknown.

Already we find the word slipping, morphing, its pleasant

mouth feel and nasty connotations tempting it into sentences

where it doesn’t belong. In the 1980s, the term suddenly became

popular among teens as a blanket insult—used for example to

disparage a teacher that one does not like—though it lacked any

attached cultural codes. (Unlike, say, the word “nerd”; there

was never a film called Revenge of the Douchebags, and could

not have been, for exactly this reason). It is perhaps out of a

sense of 80s-inspired nostalgia that the term was resurrected in

the early 2000s, along with various other appurtenances from

that bygone era.

In reviewing the earliest literature on douchebags from the

early 21st century, it becomes clear that the word was for a long

time used to describe a certain kind of man—gelled hair, fitted

baseball cap, multiple pastel polo shirts with popped collars

layered one atop another—who is stereotypically thought to

have originated in or around New Jersey, but who, sometime

around 2002, suddenly began popping up everywhere (perhaps

not coincidentally) just as the nation became familiar with the

notion of “metrosexuality.” At the time, there was a cultural

need to name and disparage these people, this aesthetic, and for

a period the word “douchebag” filled that void. The words “tool”

and the racial epithet “guido” now seem to have superseded

“douchebag” to describe a person this mien, at least in New

York, though that is not always true for all speakers. More

importantly, even though we lack a unanimously agreed-upon

name for them, their particular aesthetic has been ridiculed

to the point where it has faded from the public dialogue. (See:

“My New Haircut,” YouTube: June, 2007.) The result is that

few slang-savvy people today would describe a douchebag as a

greasy, Italianate, overtanned, testosterone-rich gym rat. We

wag’s revue 69

Wag’s Revueknow that kind of guy; he’s not a douchebag; he’s “something

else.”

Perhaps in an unconscious response of this shift in meaning,

there has been a rash of hip publications declaring the word

“dead,” among them Esquire, SF Weekly, and Gawker.com

(twice). Wrote one reader to the Gawker editors,

[the word “douchebag” has] been completely played out. the number of times i hear it now applied to any circumstance other than what i believe to have been its true intention is getting annoying. furthermore, i feel the douche’s themselves have co-opted the word and use it against hipsters and the like. people who aren’t particularly witty, or even funny, have begun throwing around the word douche (in my opinion denigrating the original beauty of what it represented).

Yet, despite all the ([sic]-riddled) clamoring about its demise,

the term persists, though often with increasingly bizarre

applications. In a September ’08 Radar magazine article also

titled “On Douchebags,” Lynn Harris made a valiant effort to

widen the term’s definition beyond the confines of guido-style,

but in implicating such figures as Roy Cohn, Henry VIII, and

Jacob (son of Isaac), she effectively exploded the term beyond

any usable proportions. So the question remains: What is a

douchebag? What in its “original beauty” so enamored us to its

use?

�The answer to our question lies in the thicket of popular

culture—specifically, in the structure within which the

mainstream culture and the era’s predominant counterculture

are formed and interact. More specifically, we must examine the

70 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuepeculiar way that these two spheres of social influence always

seem to arise in a slightly staggered opposition to one another.

It would seem reasonable that in any given decade, there is a

mainstream culture and a predominant counterculture that

rise and fall concomitantly. But this isn’t how it seems to work.

Indeed, the rise of a new counterculture does tend to give

birth to a new kind of mainstream (a mainstream which either

incorporates or repudiates the defining ethos and aesthetic

of the counterculture), but the irony is that by the time that

mainstream is more or less fully formed, the counterculture to

which it is a response has already been gutted and replaced by

a new one (which is itself a reaction to the new mainstream). In

this way, we as a society define ourselves in overlapping waves,

always through opposition, but all too often those we’ve set our

sight on have already disappeared over the horizon.

America has always branded its outcasts: Greasers, beatniks,

anarchists. Mountain men. Cowpunchers. Witches. However, it

isn’t until the culture wars that began in the 1940’s, incubated

throughout the repressed

McCarthy era, and finally

exploded during the Vietnam

War that we see a particular

counterculture rise to a

position of power and vocality

from which it was able to

spin around the looking glass and brand the mainstream. In the

1940’s, these were the original “hipsters”—fiery bohemians and

blacks who were “hip” to jazz. The buttoned-up mainstream,

in this era, was branded as “square.” The counterculture

was able to sharpen its identity by explicitly opposing the

mainstream, and in being forced to craft a response to this

assault, the mainstream redefined its own mores. This (at once

mutualistic and antagonistic) form of cultural symbiosis was

most pronounced in the years that followed Vietnam: first the

‘Like it or not, we have entered the Age of the Hipster Mainstream.’

wag’s revue 71

Wag’s Revuehipsters (and later, the hippies) had their squares, then the

punks their preppies, the slackers their yuppies, and recently

the emo kids their fratboys. In this dynamic structure, where

the friction between the two opposing camps produces much

of the creative energy that drives our trends, I believe that the

hipster now finds his antipode in the douchebag.

I am confident this is true because I keep hearing the word

“douchebag” used by hipsters—in all the little farflung boho

corners of New York City: Williamsburg, Bushwick, Astoria—to

describe people who are unassumingly rooted in the realm of

the mainstream. Since returning from India, I myself have been

called a douchebag no less than six times by hipsters. (Once, in

print.) On one occasion I pressed for further explanation. I asked

a 19 year-old RISD student if I was acting like a douchebag. “No,

you’re nice enough,” she said. “But you’re wearing a collared

shirt, and loose jeans, and that’s what douchebags wear.”

Everyone knows this. “I bet you even have abs,” she said, with

a smirk.

This, then, is the new douchebag: collared shirt of any kind

(besides flannel), pants that don’t cling, physically fit. As the

prevailing style and ethos (post-modernism, hyperactive trend-

following, esotericism) of the hipsters gains visibility and begins

to shape the mainstream through fashion and advertising (just

as that of the hippies and punks and grunge rockers before

them), this particular image of the douchebag—an after-image of

the previous, now diminishing mainstream style—will develop

alongside. In point of fact, this process has already officially

begun. It occurred at roughly around 6 p.m. on September

the 6th, 2008, when Kanye West hung up his preppy gear and

chose instead to don a starched white dress shirt, top-button

buttoned, a David Byrne-esque gray flannel suit and oversized

sunglasses to perform songs off his newest album for the MTV

Music Video Awards. So goes Kanye, so goes the nation. Like it

or not, we have entered the Age of the Hipster Mainstream.

72 nonfiction

Wag’s RevueAnd so our primary task in this essay becomes, paradoxically,

the simple aim of defining what exactly a hipster is and

what mainstream cultural image he is resisting. This task is

surprisingly difficult, and not (as it might at first appear) simply

because the term “douchebag” is inchoate and half-formed, or

an empty mask. After all, you know one when you see one. (You

just can’t describe what you’re seeing.) This issue—the difficulty

of constructing clear definitions and delineations—is at the very

heart of the problem, both in the way that the douchebag defines

himself and in the way that he is defined by his namers. Like the

hipster, he bristles at the mention of his name. Unlike a square

or a preppy, he finds no solace in shared identity, no strength in

numbers. And this is problematic. We are becoming afraid, all

of us, hipsters and douchebags alike, to peak around the easel of

cultural taxonomy and examine our caricatures.

�The douchebag can most succinctly be described as a posture

rather than a style. I say “posture” because it is deeper and more

functional than “style,” which connotes superficiality, and yet is

not purely behavioral or psychological, either. A posture is an

attitude made physical, and can be read in a glance, before the

subject even opens his mouth. Though television is chockablock

with douchebags and people calling each other douchebags,

and thus is a ripe hunting ground for examples, the douchebag

posture is for me perhaps best typified by Andy Bernard (as

played by Ed Helms) from the NBC version of The Office. You can

read him from his smirk—that a unique mixture of unflinching

entitlement, measured success, and undue sense of self-worth.

When he opens his mouth, his words only confirm what his

posture telegraphed. “I went to Cornell. Ever heard of it? Yeah,

I graduated in four years…”

But that’s just me. Someone else might say that Ryan is the

wag’s revue 73

Wag’s Revuebiggest douchebag on The Office, while someone else might

say it’s Michael. (The show, it turns out, is positively rife with

douches.) Part of what makes the show so successful is that

each character represents a different facet (indeed, archetype)

of the mainstream—the preppy mediocrity, the arrogant

20-something, the desperate corporate clown—which correlate

to figures in our lives. As to which of those people you perceive

as a douchebag, well, that depends on who you are. A true

hipster might look at The Office and declare that they are all

douchebags, none more than Jim, because he alone had the

potential to be something else. In other words, “douchebag”

is purely a subject-variable designation, but I hold that it

always retains a similar (if not identical) relationship to each

subject. Like shadows—all douchebags look different, but the

relationship between douchebag and the perceiving subject

they reflect is always the same.

In India, Pierre thought I was a douchebag because of my hat.

James, a rather insecure pseudo-hipster himself, at first glance

thought I was a hipster, because I was wearing a t-shirt from

American Apparel.

You think I am a douchebag for writing this. I think it actually

looks kind of pretentious (ergo, hipsterish).

This is how the Chasm begins to form.

�Last weekend I was walking down Bedford Avenue in

Williamsburg, what was once and to some degree still remains

a sort of Haight-Ashbury for hipsters, when a friend from out of

town started pointing at people and asking if they were hipsters.

“What about that guy?” he whispered. “Oh, what about her,

with the glasses?”

My roommates Jordan and Spiel patiently answered that yes,

the guy in the lumberjack print jacket was a hipster, and definitely

74 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuethat guy on the fixed-gear bike in the 20 degree weather, and no,

well, it’s a little harder with girls, but she was probably just a

trendy Upper East Side high school girl slumming it for the day.

The out-of-towner, perplexed, finally broke down and asked,

“So what the fuck is a hipster, exactly?” Jordan and I, pensive

as ever, balked. Spiel, who was wearing a Wake Forest hoodie

and baggie jeans and who knows how to fix dirt bikes and has

absolutely no fucking clue who Nico is, and therefore by virtue

of distance sees these things a bit more clearly than the rest of

us, answered without hesitation:

“Skinny jeans, dude.”

While it seems simplistic, that is perhaps the clearest and most

elegant taxonomy that has ever been devised for identifying a

male hipster. (Identifying female hipsters, as was mentioned,

tends to be a bit more problematic, for various reasons that we

don’t need to go into here.) Every other physical characteristic

that we might elect as a telltale for the hipster male —the thick-

rimmed glasses, the faux-blue collar attire, the mustaches and

beards and shaggy hair, the eclectic musical tastes, the vintage

bikes—can be shed or altered as the need arises. (The adoption

of the fixed-gear bike as a hipper alternative to the traditional

racing bike a few years back is a great example of this.) The

skinny jeans, however, persist through the incarnations, but

only because a viable alternative does not yet exist. On this front,

the hipsters have unwittingly painted themselves into a corner;

anything looser than skin-tight is deemed mainstream, unhip,

douchey. What else is left for them to wear to cover their asses

in the wintertime? Parachute pants? The only other alternative,

the one they seem to have chosen, is to simply grow slimmer,

more rail-like legs, to allow a yet further slimming down of the

jeans, until, presumably, they wither to stems and altogether

disappear…

The problem, as you no doubt have noted, arises when non-

hipsters start wearing skinny jeans. In say three years, once

wag’s revue 75

Wag’s Revuemore or less everyone (save the diehard fratboy, who will be left

frozen in time like a curio in our collective cabinet of wonders,

along with the zoot and the disco fan and the head-banger) starts

wearing slimmer-cut jeans, how will we parse out the hipsters

from the rest of us? More importantly, how will the hipsters

parse themselves out? To put it another way, our problem is that

as the mainstream slowly assimilates and consumes the hipster

aesthetic, we necessarily lose sight of what a hipster really is.

As is evidenced by the above two paragraphs, a hipster is, by

design, easy to mock, easier to loathe, and yet very hard to pin

down. Because, unlike the hippies or the punks, the hipsters

lack a central storyline (a defining manifesto, a set of shared

moral values, a historical narrative), which we can seize upon

and use as a pigeonhole. This lack of storyline leads many to

mistakenly assert that the hipsters have no ethos, no guiding

light. This is wrong. But it’s exceedingly tricky to explain why

it’s wrong. In order to pinpoint a hardier defining characteristic

than “skinny jeans,” we must wade into some pretty murky,

mercurial depths; we must define that which willfully resists

definition.

�The first and most obvious reason why most people (including

many critics of the hipster movement) cannot properly grasp

the significance of this counterculture is because they fail to

follow its roots to their base—namely, in postmodernism.

For the phenomenon of hipsterism is, first and foremost,

both a symptom and a cultural iteration of postmodernist

developments in theory, literature, fashion, and art.

In his much-discussed article entitled “Hipster: The Dead End

of Western Civilization” in the July 2008 issue of Adbusters,

Douglas Haddow writes,

76 nonfiction

Wag’s RevueAn artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization — a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” —a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

What Haddow’s thesis so plainly fails to take into account is

the fact that artificial appropriations, in a post-modern world,

are in fact a creation of something new and significant. He—like

the magazine for which he writes—too often falls into the trap

of pre-postmodern literalism, yearning to find some tangible

“meaning” (by which I think he means “philosophy” or “moral

agenda”) in the hipster movement, which he can then begin to

plug into his own social framework and criticize. But the hipster

movement has never really been about meaning. Jacques

Lacan laid a finger on the heart of postmodernism when he

famously elaborated upon Freud’s findings in psychoanalysis;

namely, that “truth manifests itself in the letter rather than

the spirit, that is, in the way things are actually said rather

than in their intended meaning.” In much the same way, the

hipster movement is more about the method and tone of

expression than the expressed meaning; as deconstructionists

emphasized the surface of language, hipsters celebrate the

surface of modern life. “Meaning” (in the way Haddow defines

it) has become a cliché, and beside the point. The political

causes, liberal social mores, and revolutionary mythos to

which previous countercultures subscribed have all been co-

opted by the mainstream, printed onto bumper stickers, used

to sell Priuses, parodied on South Park. In a perverse twist,

capitalism has managed to make personal “depth” appear

wag’s revue 77

Wag’s Revueshallow, and “shallowness,” somehow, deep. What hipsters

concern themselves with (in their literature, their music, their

fashion) are the ways that past phenomena can be clipped and

combined, snipped of their attached “meaning” but not of their

engrained aesthetic appeal, and in that way made shiny and

flat and cool. Cloud-like, without noumena, the true hipster is

immune to attack or parody. So in this sense, Haddow is dead-

on, but unwittingly so: hipsters are intentionally shallow; they

are intentionally doomed.

The definition of a hipster (like that of the douchebag) can best

be described as a posture (or, some might say, a pose), which is

a contradictory reading of the mainstream at all times and at

any moment. As far as I can tell, the most common symptom of

this posture is a distinct allergy to repetition and a revulsion for

cliché. Indeed, the primary process by which a hipster defines

himself is through labeling (and subsequently eschewing) other

things as clichéd, old, or played out. And so, the hipster finds

him or herself on the cutting edge of fashion, music, literature,

and film, precisely because he or she is a fan of all things that

resist the mainstream, more or less regardless of quality. If a

new movement is to emerge, it will be on the cusp, never in the

middle, and thus in the domain of the hipster. The flipside, of

course—and this is their curse—is that the moment that a given

trend catches on and becomes socially visible, it is assimilated

by the mainstream, and becomes unhip.

In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin foretold how mass production

would “emancipate the work of art from its parasitical

dependence on [bourgeois] ritual.” While he was prescient in

many of his predictions, he failed to envision the rapidity with

which capitalism and advertising would rush to fill the void left

behind by the loss of “aura” surrounding that antiquated mode

of production. These days our most visible and talked-about

aesthetic objets have become both symbols and products of

78 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuemass production, stamped all over with logos: MacBook Airs,

Volkswagens, Calphalon pans, Pepsi cans, Nike kicks, the sleek

new interface of Google Chrome. Consequent to this rise in

design-capitalism was the co-opting of identities (particularly

youth identities) to brand and sell these items. The hipsters—

who have read Benjamin, as well as Derrida and Barthes and

Foucault and Bakhtin—are sharp to the “withering effects” of

mechanical reproduction, of commodification and advertising.

Moreover, they were born in the miasma of hyper-consumerism

(their first glimpse of life was the silvery glimmer off the logo on

their obstetrician’s Armani frames, the snowy cap of the Mont

Blanc pen tucked into his shirt pocket, and behind that, a poster

for Pfizer), and they grew up in an era that was, by any objective

measurement, exponentially more saturated with advertising

than any that had ever preceded it in the history of man. They’ve

watched closely as each previous counterculture was processed,

purchased, caricatured, and made into Halloween costumes—

the beat with his beret and bongos, the hippie with her tie-dyes,

rose-tinted glasses, and plastic oversized flower. It makes them

sick.

Corporate powers have already begun trying to capitalize

upon the hipster movement, with limited results. One need

only look at how long it took them to adopt the hipster’s love

of irony (an early, failed attempt at cultural resistance) and

deploy it for its own purposes: in the production of Burger

King advertisements, retro lunch boxes, trucker caps, and

graphic tees; or to surf the flashy new hipster-targeted website

of Colt 45 malt liquor, which invites burgeoning artists to “ink”

the design of their new can; or watch the online ads featuring

Paul “the Original Dollar Menunaire,” McDonald’s ironically

mustachioed, exceedingly flat-intoned cartoon spokesperson;

or walk inside an Urban Outfitters, just once, and really look

around. It will make you sick as well.

Hipsterism is in this sense a pure, almost enlightened

wag’s revue 79

Wag’s Revuekind of rebellion. They know that the game is rigged, that the

counterculture always gets swallowed. So, in the only way they

know how, they turn off, tune out, rise above.

Of course there are other, less noble factors at play in the

recent move towards hipsterism: a thinly veiled vanity, the thrill

of keeping a secret

or knowing more

than your neighbor,

a desire to vindicate

or erase vestiges of

high school or middle

school awkwardness,

the sense of

community that

shared but esoteric interests can foster. But first and foremost,

I would argue that hipsterism is a natural and inevitable

backlash against the universalizing forces of capitalism and,

more specifically, advertising. The work of the market is to

widen, to broaden, to debase; to make a product available

(and appealing) to as many people as possible. The hipster is

the latest iteration of a long intellectual tradition which seeks

always to sharpen, to restrict, and to heighten, and which in the

process, invariably fetishes the obscure, the enigmatic, and the

absurd.

The hipster’s allergy to repetition and capitalist co-opting

might even be laudable, if it were not so manifestly hypocritical.

If, for example, the hipster movement had given birth to a

series of cottage industries, the flowering of individual style,

and a do-it-yourself philosophy of material production, if it

had in other words truly been what it always showed promise

to be—a trend without trends—then we might have seen the

birth of a sustainable response to the problems that fashion

and trend-ism engender. Instead the hipsters took an alternate

route; unwilling or unable to achieve an atomization and hyper-

‘It may very well be that hipsters are the

best-prepared group of people in

America for the looming economic

apocalypse.’

80 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuepersonalization of style, they tacked towards the postmodern,

creating a sartorial bricolage of fashions clipped from the pages

of history and trimmed to match. Certain trends—the scarves

and the oversized glasses, the infamous skinny jeans—caught

on, and in this way the image of the hipster started to develop

in the darkroom of our public consciousness. The 21st century

hipster, who understands this process on a molecular level

and whose hackles raise at the first whiff of it, is then forced to

switch up his or her style, to abandon his or her favorite artists,

and to denounce and cannibalize those who have yet failed to

adapt, labeling them, somewhat cleverly, as “hipsters.” The

hipsters are quick, you must give them that. Unfortunately, the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction is quicker, better financed,

and has been doing this for much, much longer. It will subsume

these new trends as quickly as the hipsters can create them, at

an ever-increasing rate, as long as the hipsters continue do so in

a collectivist manner.

�In recent months, a slew of eulogies have been published

declaring the death of the hipster. Some claim that growing

media awareness of the hipster aesthetic and lifestyle has

ensured its demise. However, as was addressed above, this does

not so much portend the death of the hipster movement as it

ensures the death of that particular incarnation and aesthetic.

Because of their uniquely amorphous and decentralized

outlook, hipsters can always shed their skins, to strip off their

tattered tights and toss out their non-prescription glasses and

slip into some new, less-easily codified disguise. The demise of

the hipster will not come at the surface, in the growing staleness

of their “look”; it will come in the failing of their modes of

operation and their impetus for rebellion.

Another, slightly more convincing argument says that the

wag’s revue 81

Wag’s Revueascendance of Obama and the dawning of a new political era

will melt away the angst and cynicism that defined the hipster

movement. This might be true. It certainly seems difficult to

maintain the same level of hostility towards the mainstream

when that mainstream has elected a president who is so clearly

aligned with the hipster political ethos (what little of it there is).

The problem is that, in order to assuage the hipster’s feeling of

unease and cynicism, Obama needs to reform not only all three

branches of government, but also the media, the advertising

industry and much of the business sector, which are not under

his control. In all likelihood the hipster movement will die of its

own attacks long before Obama or anyone else in government

is able to radically overhaul our current (cynicism-inducing)

system of consumption.

Finally, with an historic recession already underway and

a full-out Depression looming on the horizon, some claim

that an economic downturn might take the sexiness out of the

hipster lifestyle. Indeed, if one looks across nations and across

generations, it is difficult to find an economically hard-pressed

community who intentionally tries to look poor. Hippies and

backpackers are despised in India, because the locals see them

as they appear—dirty, sloppily dressed individuals who take

little care with their appearance. To this day it is exceedingly

rare to find a rich person in India who intentionally tries to

dress poor, much less one among the vast majority of the less

privileged. The logic then goes that, as the failing economy

drives America into a state of real and lasting destitution, ironic

approximations of poverty will suddenly lose their appeal. Of all

three major arguments for the demise of the hipster, this seems

the most convincing, but it too has its flaws. Because, although

hipsters may actually become poor in the years to come, they

still hail from a certain socioeconomic and cultural background

which in some ways immunizes them from the demoralizing

effects of poverty. They still have their college degrees, and

82 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuetheir long-cultivated sense of style, and their unique aversion

to overt wealth and status. In fact, it may very well be that the

hipsters are the best-prepared group of people in America for

the looming economic apocalypse: as the rest of the country

suffers and scrounges and grows depressed, the hipsters will

flourish like drought-resistant ferns in the newfound paucity,

luxuriating in a truly bohemian and ascetic lifestyle. Having

practiced for this day for years, the hipster will finally find

him or herself living in his or her long-imagined dream, where

simulated pauperism has become real, where hardship is other

than self-imposed, where shopping at secondhand stores and

drinking cheap beer is a necessity rather than a choice, where

artists really starve.

�Heretofore, there has been a certain unspoken conceit to

this essay; namely that I, as someone who has been called a

douchebag, am somehow more knowledgeable or reliable a

source on this subject than say, a hipster. While a first person

perspective is necessary to convey the experience of being

called a douchebag, it is not necessarily best for conveying the

experience of actually being a douchebag. In fact, the great

majority of douchebag theory published on the internet has

been penned by professed fans of the word, those who apply it

liberally and with a certain sense of vindictive joy. The word,

like “hipster,” is one that is almost never reflexively applied. It

takes something extra, some outside and objective force, to jar

one into realizing that he is in fact a douchebag, and just exactly

what that term means.

“So I started Googling myself, you know,” says John Mayer,

to a TMZ cameraman, “And I had to kinda put it all together at

once to realize, at the end of it all, I’m kind of a douchebag.”

This last clause it not one that you hear very often. But what is

wag’s revue 83

Wag’s Revuestriking about this confession is not the fact that Mayer admitted

he is a douchebag (he is, almost definitively), but rather that it

was only by viewing his atomized and refracted image via the

internet, among his fans and detractors alike, that he came to

realize this fact.

It took the internet to jar John Mayer into realizing that he is

a douchebag, because in some very real sense it was the internet

that made him a douchebag in the first place. Without surfing

the web (or watching MTV, or flipping through gossip rags),

John Mayer to himself is just one man. He is blind to his many

two-dimensional avatars running around LA pouting, smoking,

simpering, wearing sunglasses, going boogie boarding,

carrying the tote bags of his current celebrity girlfriend, eating

ice cream, flirting with Ellen, bar-hopping with other quasi-

celebrities, tearing down Rodeo Dr. in a vintage Land Rover,

glibly collecting speeding tickets. In fact, it is entirely possible

that John Mayer, due to the sheltered nature of the Hollywood

lifestyle and a natural human aversion to seeing oneself from a

hostile third person perspective, was one of the last people on

earth to know just how incredibly saturated the world is with

John Mayer.

One month after staring into our cultural lens and conceding

himself a douchebag, Mayer took to his blog to defend himself,

not by denying his label, but by disassembling it. (His task, one

might argue, is not all that different from that undertaken here.)

In his (admittedly, more ham-fisted) analysis, Mayer posits that

the epithet is launched out of jealousy, or a sense that fame has

been dealt to the undeserving.

“Is being a douchebag actually all about having a bigger smile

than someone else deems you deserve to in life?” he asks.

This question deserves asking, because many of the people

on the internet who are most frequently deemed douchebags

(Brody Jenner, Dane Cook, Kevin Federline) have accrued

a level of fame that far outstrips any real or perceived talent.

84 nonfiction

Wag’s RevueAnd indeed, this must be part of the impetus to originally label

a person a douchebag. Fame is a social equivalency to ego, and

as has been stated before, unwarranted egotism is a telltale

characteristic of a true douchebag. (The reasons for this will be

addressed a bit later.) However, I would argue that something

else is at work in the labeling of douchebags, because this notion

of undeserved fame does not explain the widespread usage of the

term to describe thoroughly talented individuals (Sean Penn,

Bono, Paul Krugman), who are nevertheless over-exposed. Or

what of those other celebrities, who have gained a considerable

(but not tabloid-worthy) amount of fame with little-to-no visible

talent? Why is Dane Cook considered a douchebag but Larry the

Cable Guy merely a hack? And more importantly, why is fame

an indicator of douchiness at all? Whose decision is it to make

someone an object of public interest, the object, or the public?

In his blog post, Mayer launches a spirited defense of Pete

Wentz, the bass player for the band Fall Out Boy, who, according

to Google (via Mayer), has been called a douchebag over 11,000

times. However, from the start Mayer departs down the wrong

track, assuming that Wentz’s perceived shortcomings lie in his

music. If he had taken the time to closely read some of those

11,000 blog posts, Mayer would have found that the prevailing

criticisms center not around Wentz’s artistry but rather around

his hairstyle, his clothing, his wearing of eyeliner, his dating

of Ashlee Simpson, even his decision to have a child at such a

young age (which was widely regarded as a celebrity stunt, part

of a rash of celebrity pregnancies—what will one day be known

as the “babies-as-accessories boom” of the late aughts). Note

that the very language of these criticisms are structured around

and through the filter of gossip news. The central complaint is

that Wentz is both too affected and too common. Numerous

references are made to his shopping at Hot Topic, a popular teen

goth clothing store found in most American shopping malls.

What then is Wentz’s crime? It is that he dresses like someone

wag’s revue 85

Wag’s Revuethat we have met and, probably, disliked. He is both too visible

and too vulnerable, and for whatever reason, this combination

invites relentless attack.

This brings us to the central question of this essay: If the

hipster is in fact a creature who is first and foremost allergic to

repetition, what then is the douchebag? Answer: The douchebag

is exactly that— a repetition, a living cliché. If the hipster

celebrates obscurity and his image is a cultural obfuscation (a

fractured scattering of the light thrown off from past styles), the

douchebag’s crime is that he is, in a cultural sense, too legible.

Since celebrities are both shapers and reflections of the

mainstream—shaping, due to their enormous influence and

visibility; reflecting, because of stylists and personal shoppers

and PR managers and agents and focus group researchers

who are paid to maximize their public appeal—it is wholly

unsurprising that they are the people most often labeled as

douchebags. Celebrities are the most hyper-legible people on

the planet. The only ones who manage to escape the label are

those who manage to somehow obscure themselves, who shy

away from the public eye or surround themselves with mystery.

This creates a peculiarly disillusioning effect, where the more

one zooms in on the life of a famous person, indeed the more

human a celebrity appears, the more he or she diminishes

in our eyes. Scarlett Johansson appears on Letterman and

reveals herself to be just another jappy girl from Manhattan;

it comes out that Vin Diesel is a lifelong fan of Dungeons and

Dragons and has a dorky laugh. (This is phenomenon is true of

literary celebrities as well; I cannot think of a single author who

rose in my estimation after I glanced at his or her dust jacket

photo—with the twin exceptions of Joan Didion and Samuel

Beckett.) We don’t want our celebrities to be human, to have

depth and imperfections, those real, schlubby, pathetic, every

day imperfections that every real human being has; rather, we

prefer the cool, tragic flaws of the historically beautiful and

86 nonfiction

Wag’s Revueshort-lived. We too want shallowness. We too want doom.

While the rise of the hipsters cannot be blamed for this

phenomenon (the real has always disappointed in the face of the

imagined and unknown), it is a central tenet and core malady of

their lifestyle. Though the attraction to irony faded long ago, its

impetus did not; namely, the fact that hipsters find earnestness

unattractive. Countless times I have heard hipsters use the word

as an insult or a value judgment. (“I respect Conor Oberst, but

Christ, he has got to be the most earnest guy alive.”) Earnestness

is after all a kind of emotional legibility, a straightforward and

unadulterated display of one’s inner workings. It is also an

incredibly vulnerable and scary state of being, particularly to

one whose chief stance in life is defensive.

Perhaps this explains why hipsters are so drawn to illegible

fictions, obscure texts. Specifically, why they seem to flock

around those great name-droppers of the modern canon—

Borges, Rushdie, Murakami, Kundera, Coetzee, Sebald, and,

most recently, Bolaño. This name-dropping (which permeates

hipsters’ conversations, their music critiques, their blogs) is

symptomatic of a curious and perhaps detrimental attraction to

the unknown and the exotic, and aversion to the known. A page

studded with names that one only vaguely recognizes, obscure

poets and philosophers and painters, is illegible but attractive,

like a page of Sanskrit script; the known and great, on the other

hand, appear stale in comparison, shrug-inducing, the way we

react upon seeing Monet’s water lilies or watching the balcony

scene in Romeo and Juliet.

Hipsters are both incredibly competitive and monumentally

insecure; theirs is a restless reordering of the pyramid of

genius, and a continual reevaluation of where they fit into that

architecture. Everyone below is a douchebag, especially if they

have happened upon any success; everyone above is a genius,

except if they are tarnished by the stigma of being a genius that

everyone has read. The legible geniuses all fall beneath these

wag’s revue 87

Wag’s Revueconquerors, this withering gaze of the literate hipster. Joyce

remains a genius, because he is very hard to read. Pynchon,

Faulkner, Beckett, to some degree Wallace—geniuses, all.

Hemingway, in contrast, is a douchebag, as is Vonnegut and

Salinger and London and Twain and yes, Eggers. Anyone whose

prose is plainspoken and earnest and unadorned suffers, for the

basic crime of not talking over our heads, and not exasperating

(or, they might argue, elevating) us in the process.

�The question of legibility, or rather the phrasing of the

douchebag question in those terms, is quite attractive, not just

because it fits quite nicely into this essay, but moreover because

it can serve as a useful key for cracking the cipher of just exactly

why douchebags act the way they do.

The douchebag, above all else, seeks a kind of internal

legibility, or in simpler terms, normalcy. (And make no mistake,

legibility is a kind of textual normalcy; without the normative

rules of grammar and spelling, without common idioms and

known conceits, without overarching institutions like the

OED or the Académie Française to regulate and cement the

structures of language, written discourse would very quickly

vacillate towards illegibility, wobble towards nonsense, grow to

resemble the work of children, or madmen.) If you listen to his

judgments of others, the douchebag reveals that, above all else,

he strives just to be normal, to not be “weird”; in fact, to not

be labeled at all. Who strives for something so mundane? In a

culture where normalcy is as quicksilvery and fleeting as ours,

where trends seem to shift at an ever-increasing rate, and norms

are demolished and reconstructed yearly—in a culture such as

this, achieving a state of normalcy can be a kind of triumph, like

remaining atop a spinning log amidst whitewater whirls. The

hipster, meanwhile, deftly throws pebbles at the douchebag

88 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuefrom atop his own spinning log, slipperier still, while smoking a

cigarette and smirking at the douche’s pathetic effort.

So where the hipster veers away from the mainstream, the

douchebag veers toward it; that is just his way. He yearns

more than anything for a stable, non-shifting center, where he

can comfortably reside without receiving derision or ridicule.

When he succeeds in this task, he is free of stigma, not invisible

so much as omnipresent. For that moment he is structurally

centralized, an every-widening nucleus, invisible to himself but

projected everywhere he looks. He fits in. And yet the center

shifts, inevitably it shifts, and with it shifts popular taste. The

douchebag shifts with it, but glacially, he is too slow, too rigid.

Against his best instincts, he goes out and buys a pink polo

shirt, because that’s where the mainstream has shifted (as he

has divined from television and movies, pop stars in music

videos, models on billboards for Ralph Lauren). And, to his

amazement, for a short while his pink shirt receives newfound

attention from the opposite sex. For that brief moment, he is

again well dressed, well adjusted, normal; a figurehead on the

bow of the mainstream. But that moment passes, and soon he

finds himself being called a douchebag once again.

In order to not be labeled, one must now trade in his jeans for

new, skinnier jeans, his hats for new, more eccentric hats. But

because of the rapid rate at which hipsters adapt and reinvent

themselves, these too he will have to change in less than a year’s

time, lest he again be called a douchebag. There is no semblance

of a stable mainstream. The douchebag, only wanting stable

ground upon which to stand, must leap from style to style,

playing a game he never wished to play in order to attain a

normalcy that never seems to come. The hipster, not wanting

the mainstream to catch onto his style, keeps changing, and

dragging the mainstream behind at a quickening clip. The cycle

is vicious: the douchebag will always be called a douchebag; the

hipster, always a hipster.

wag’s revue 89

Wag’s RevueThe famous douchebag arrogance comes with the false

assumption that normalcy has been achieved. The douchebag

who considers himself “relatively normal” thinks he is speaking

from a centralized location, a place of authority. To the outside

observer, however, he simply looks mediocre and smug.

Although that mediocrity is sometimes genuine and innate, as

natural as having a funny nose or crooked teeth, oftentimes it is

an act of almost gracious restraint, a self-humbling, a dumbing-

down of one’s persona in order to not appear arrogant or

pretentious. I should know, I did this for years. The problem is

that this act of humbling rarely coincides with actual humility.

And indeed, why should the douchebag be humble? He is at the

center and apex of all things. The average American douchebag

is a model citizen of our society: masculine, unaffected, well-

rounded, concerned with his physical health, moral (but not

puritanical or prude), virile without being sleazy, funny without

being clever or snide; he is at all times a faithful consumer, an

eager participant and a contributor to society. He buys what

the mainstream tells him to buy; he listens skeptically to the

current hits and

reverently to the

hits of the past. In

all respects he is the

Hegelian synthesis

of the sixties culture

war: taking a hit off his bong during the timeouts in the Packers

game, he keeps his eyes on a flashing advertisement for the

Marines. If he is high (or poor) enough, who knows, he might

just enlist. He is everything he has been taught to be; he does

everything society asks of him. And for all of this effort, he

assumes that he will be granted a slight, unspoken modicum of

respect and admiration.

This respect—respect predicated upon normalcy rather

than superiority—is exactly what the hipster withholds.

‘The Jonas Brothers have already started wearing keffiyehs.’

90 nonfiction

Wag’s RevueWhat’s worse, the mainstream seems to become more elusive

each year. Already, we can see social norms drifting towards

those of the hipster. Just as the stain of twee, glum nerdiness,

which spilled over from the emo movement, is slowly leeching

out of the hipster aesthetic and being replaced by a hardier,

woodsier tone, so too is the spirit of the frat boy fading from the

mainstream, and in its place appears the douche in the skinny

jeans.

Undoubtedly, decades or years or perhaps even mere months

from now, these mentions of specific fashions will look painfully

outdated, as frivolous as the 19th century concern over the trend

towards increasingly outlandish collars, or a conservative

bemoaning JFK’s scandalous decision to forego a hat when

stepping out of the oval office. But the unspoken philosophical

underpinnings behind the fashion shifts will remain relevant

and worth discussing. The problem with this fashion shift is that

hipsterism was never designed to be a mainstream movement;

in fact quite the opposite, it is functionally incompatible

with the mainstream and structurally dependent upon that

incompatibility. Its integration into the mainstream would,

in all likelihood, result in a kind of cultural schizophrenia.

Without a postmodern philosophical backing and resistance to

capitalism, hipsterism quickly devolves into just what it always

appeared to be to the uninitiated: a shallow, meaningless, vain,

hyper-consumerist, self-hating and poisonous system of living.

The most obvious flaw of the hipster posture has always

been a peculiar and nagging sense of inauthenticity, a self-

consciousness and insecurity, which draws them like moths to

the seemingly solid and unpretentious aesthetics of the blue-

collar and urban poor. When the hipster aesthetic infiltrates the

mainstream, this duplicity becomes refracted and magnified.

For a visual explanation, a ghost of douchebags future as it

were, turn on MTV’s The Real World: Brooklyn, get real close

to your television, and stare into the blank visage of Chet, the

wag’s revue 91

Wag’s RevueMormon virgin, the aspiring video jockey, he of the Buddy Holly

glasses and faux-hawk and v-neck t-shirt. Look into those blank,

blinking, wide-set eyes and behold the conflict and inconsistency

that lies therein, and you will see where we are headed in the

years to come.

�The Chasm exists because our culture is in a state of flux. We

are in the process of reevaluating our norms, and as soon as

this process is complete, the Chasm will close again and our

judgments of other people will firm up. It is not necessarily a

bad thing that the same person will appear to be a hipster to one

person, a douchebag to another, and something else entirely to

himself. It merely means that our definition of “normalcy” is

momentarily in question. Like hermit crabs, we are in the process

of sloughing off one aesthetic and adopting another. In this

case, the mainstream is picking up the style that the hipsters are

leaving behind. I imagine a similar thing must have happened in

the mid-1970s, when the symbols of the hippies (the shaggy hair

and mustaches) began bleeding over into mainstream culture,

or in the mid 1990s when the mainstream swallowed the Seattle

grunge movement. The inaccuracy of labels at these points of

transition highlights how very superficial and unimportant they

ultimately are. And yet we still must live in a world where these

labels are the basis of snap judgments, and those judgments the

preliminary basis of friendship.

At this point in an essay, the Greifian move (which is to

say the sincere, neo-intellectual move) would be to give some

pithy, modest proposal that could conceivably remove us from

this mainstream thrust towards superficiality and historical

derivativeness, since I fear that they will lead to those other

hallmarks of hipsterism—namely, quasi-nihilism and a creeping

feeling of inauthenticity. And so I give this humble plea to those

92 nonfiction

Wag’s Revueof my generation: craft a new kind of mainstream, which is a

reaction to rather than an imitation of the hipster aesthetic.

But somehow this does not seem likely to happen. The

wheels are already in motion, the Jonas Brothers have already

started wearing keffiyehs, and more and more the people on

my television resemble the people I thought were hipsters six

months or a year ago. Douchebags have never been good at

cultural rebellion anyway, and there is no reason to think they

will start now.

Perhaps the only solution, then, lies in appealing to the other

side. If the hipsters could craft a style that was truly impervious

to the co-opting influence of the mainstream, then the well

would run dry as it were, and the mainstream would be forced

to redefine itself on its own terms. One possible way to achieve

this solution has already been suggested, which is to opt for a

movement based upon purely personalized expressions of style.

The DIY (do-it-yourself) movement is already picking up steam

in many parts of the States. Its incarnations are wide-ranging,

from DIY fashion websites and one-of-a-kind jewelry to ultra

small-scale farming (less pretentiously known as “gardening”)

and the newly formed Church of Craft. A movement

composed purely of individual styles (with their only defining

characteristic being the mode of production), would be equally

as resistant to the commodifying effects of capitalism as the

hipster’s current bricolage style, and it would be even harder

to replicate for economic gain. However, the shift to a purely

DIY aesthetic would take an enormous investment of personal

time and possibly money, and moreover, it just might not look

that good. There’s a reason we allow specialists to manufacture

our clothes, because they have devoted their lives to the study of

design. That’s what the division of labor is all about: it frees us

to live our lives while maximizing the quality of our purchased

goods.

wag’s revue 93

Wag’s RevueThe only other option then—and I propose this purely for the

good of the hipster, to save them from their feelings of cultural

persecution—is a willful laying down of arms. If hipsters truly

wish to live a life free of the debasing influence of the mainstream

and its pathetic approximations of their meticulously curated

style and interests, maybe they will need to try a new tactic: to

pick one style and stick with it, to opt for classic timelessness

over a kind of protean freshness, and to, in essence, grow stale.

(One might also say, grow up.) Just like the hippies and proto-

hipsters before them, the hipsters must allow themselves to be

swallowed by the mainstream, to stand up in its full light and be

passed through its machinations and emerge on the other side,

naked and legible to the world, open to ridicule but free from

self-consciousness—to in effect, become douche bags. Christ-

like, they must sacrifice of themselves so that the rest might find

some cultural redemption, and they might find some lasting

peace. Indeed, with their beards and long hair and wasted,

sunken physiques, many of them already look the part. Now all

they must do is raise their arms, hang their heads, and wait for

the spear that will set them free.

But then again, this would spell death for the hipster movement

as we know it. In fact, one might argue that this whole essay has

been a trap, baited with promised enlightenment, camouflaged

in academic jargon, poisoned with injurious advice. Or, even

more precisely, maybe it is a snapshot of that which demands

fervently not to be photographed—like the pygmy deep in the

jungle suddenly brought to light, given universal visibility in a

flash but robbed of its soul.

Revenge of the douchebags, indeed.

wag’s revue 94

Wag’s RevueTHE WEEDS

Eve Hamilton

Some waiters are serving life sentences. Everyone knows

who’s hurting more than they are, everyone knows who’s going

to break next. Serving, drinking, serving, drinking. When

someone falls off the wagon, they might show up anyway, they

might stumble through their side work and hope the manager

doesn’t notice their quivering hands. Of course, managers can

fall off too.

The day I walked from campus looking for a job, George

was in his first week as general manager and three days into a

bender that didn’t stop to sleep. He lifted his damp cheek from

the marble countertop, clutched my résumé but didn’t read

it, and hired me even though I’d never waitressed before. My

first night, the owner—a calm, giant man with a braid down

his back—sent George home to sleep off the booze. One waiter,

Billy, made sure I was doing alright because I probably looked

as lost as I felt. He recited an autobiographical limerick: “There

once was a man from Pawtucket…” and I laughed.

Kate lit a menthol in the parking lot behind the restaurant.

Exhaling into the late summer air, she scoffed, “Billy? He’s a

cokehead and he has a kid. Stay away from that, sweetheart.”

When the night’s done and the people are gone, the rules

change, the music comes on, uniforms fall off, bottles are

momentarily pilfered from behind the bar while the GM is

downstairs swearing at the cooks and sliding his fingers down

rows of numbers on credit card print outs. One waiter, Steven,

passed us all shots of Jack—me, Billy, Chah-lie the Portuguese,

bobble-headed baby-faced Jonah and little Max the busser with

dark circles under his eyes. We clocked out. We made it to Hot

Club down on the water, where it smells like fish and brown

liquor. Billy offered me a ride home and I accepted.

95 nonfiction

Wag’s Revue

I awoke and passed my eyes over his body. His skin was

summer-tanned and taut. He had clean features and hair so

blonde it was nearly invisible. His eyes were slate blue, mythic,

the sort of eyes everyone notices. (“Have you ever looked into

his eyes, it was like the first time I heard the Beatles,” Steven

joked, quoting Superbad.)

Murphy’s Pub down near the Dunkin’ Donuts center right

before last call looks like a waitering convention: the Cheesecake

Factory crew in all-white, staffs from Federal Hill with black

ties, us in white button-downs and jeans. Waiters make good

customers: we don’t ask for extra bread, we order another

round, we tip 20%. With the waiters, I wore my accent a little

differently, laughed along when they complained about how

kids from over at the college don’t tip well. We don’t tip well, I

realized.

Billy kept his hand tight on my thigh. “I hate that, when

people say I’m a cokehead,” he said, “I had a phase when I did a

lot of drugs, when I didn’t care about anything. But until three

months ago, I was going to meetings everyday, working out,

taking the EMT course. People talk, but they don’t know what

they’re saying.” He said he was going to be a firefighter soon, so

I told my cautious, well-brought-up friends that I was dating a

firefighter.

When he’d pull up to my apartment to pick me up, he’d turn

on his emergency lights and lean on the horn. I’d come out and

he’d be holding the passenger door ajar for me, yelling “Get in

the cah!” He owned a few dozen pairs of Nikes that he kept in

their original boxes, only wearing them when we went to dinner

or movies and being careful not to scratch them. He insisted

on paying, always had a few hundred in twenties folded in his

pocket. Once, as we were crossing a puddle-strewn parking

lot, he thrust his arm in front me holding me back, and mimed

throwing his jacket over the water so I could safely cross. It was

wag’s revue 96

Wag’s Revueall a joke: his interests, his Rhody accent, his tenderness. After

we made love, he’d shake my hand and introduce himself: “Hi,

I’m Bill.”

But the bouncers and spinners at clubs and pool halls called

him “Crypto.” One of the grill chefs at work, (“Matt, call me

Splat”) had known Bill since kindergarten and called him

Crypto too. It was a nom de plume, a tagger’s alias.

Billy drove me into the cuts so I could see his murals. Alleys

and lots lined in chainlink, underneath freeways and bridges.

He told me how difficult tagging is, being scared, being up high,

only getting one try, trying not to get caught. He told me how

to steal twelve cans of paint at once. We drove the streets and

he pointed out the murals and told me the stories of the street

artists who’d been there, telling the histories of control and loss,

reading runes of an English dialect people like me don’t read.

He showed me his portfolio, polaroids of the letters C-R-Y-P-

T-O sprayed twenty-feet tall on the sides of dozens of boxcars

and overpasses. The snapshots were ordered chronologically: he

grew from a tough adolescent to a handsome twenty-something,

then his hairline receded slightly. A photo of his little girl fell

out at the end, onto the hardwood floor. I didn’t want to snoop.

I put it back in the album.

He is an artist, I told myself.

I told Steven everything. He lived a few doors down from me,

worked lunch and brunch with me. He’d puff-puff the hollowed

filter of a Parliament Light and light it. He was a sweet, self-

proclaimed wop with a chinstrap beard. He behaved more

like a mayor than a waiter. He spoke in catch-phrases, shook

hands, asked folks how they were doing tonight. He was deep

into a quarter-life breakdown, had moved back to Providence

and taken a waitering job to prove he was worth less than his

mechanical engineering degree, which he had decided would

never be used. He carried valium on his key-ring, but never took

97 nonfiction

Wag’s Revueit. He would remove his glasses during a shift when he didn’t

want to know how slowly, or quickly, time was passing. He

called me “doll,” and confirmed that “Bill-boy is a good guy.” I

was more comfortable around Steven than Billy.

There was a girl in Italy who Steven was in love with. She was

going to come back for Christmas, he said, and then he’d tell her

how much he loved her.

In Cranston, at 3 A.M., I recorded back-up vocals for one

of Tako’s hip-hop tracks. Encased in a padded booth and

headphones, I riffed “I just can’t get over you” over and over.

Tako was Portuguese, Native American and Puerto Rican, his

head of cornrows rocked with religious fervor when he mixed,

his fingers flying over knobs. He pulled my voice onto a screen

and dissected it, strained it, made it into something I’m not.

Singing back into the booth, my voice sounded as if I belonged

to that world. Billy sat in the lounge, sketching out the insignia

he planned to tag on the studio wall for Tako. They picked a date

when he would come over and paint it, plans they had made

before and broken. The basement studio was buried in the

concrete of what had once been a mill. I sat at a dying upright

piano and pressed on the keys. Dust and silverfish stirred in its

guts.

We climbed from the basement and Billy pulled his low-

riding Honda onto I-95. Ninety, one-hundred, one-hundred-

ten. I clutched the seatbelt across my torso, and didn’t say a

word. I saw oncoming bends of the road like tidal waves, calm

at a distance, crushing at approach.

We got to my place and he said he should probably just drop

me off. I wanted to argue with him, convince him to spend the

night with me.

He used my bathroom, came out clutching a plastic bag of

powder.

wag’s revue 98

Wag’s Revue“Brunch is hell,” Steven said, stamping out the first cigarette

of the morning. I was still up when the birds rose at dawn, lying

in bed, yelling at Billy in my mind. I finally fell asleep around

six and dreamed him back into the bathroom, dreamed that

bag swirling down the toilet. I dreamed him back across the

puddle with his jacket thrown across, I dreamed him shaking

my hand after making love. I dreamed him into my bed on that

first morning, tracing my eyes along his summer-tanned skin.

“You in the weeds? You weeded?” the waiters asked. It’s a

term that only waiters know and one they don’t use unless they

have to.

The weeds are when you feel your hands scooping ice into a

pitcher but your body has forgotten that it belongs to you and

you don’t even know where you’re supposed to walk with the

pitcher you’ve just filled because instead you’re remembering

that the gorgonzola was supposed to be on the side for 73 and

that bald guy wanted a spoon, and as you cross the dining room

you can feel the eyes of every person who wants something

from you that you cannot possibly give them—to just get some

refills for the kids, to tell you the chicken is undercooked, to ask

whether the mussel preparation with saffron is gluten free—and

just as you are about to put that fifteen person order into the

computer a bottle of ketchup explodes red across the tiles and

the chef points out that you are retarded and a credit card stripe

goes dull and somebody asks if you can break a hundred and

your manager circles like a vulture above a rotting corpse and

you fantasize about ripping off your fucking apron and walking

out the door, perhaps into oncoming traffic, because there is no

conceivable way that anyone could save you from the awfulness

that is this job.

“Like death, the weeds must ultimately be faced alone,”

Steven said. I suppose it is like what someone must feel as their

mortality swirls inside an erring vehicle, or a body of water

sucks them under, or, crouched in a bathroom stall, they wish

99 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuethey could re-locate sobriety. Or when you realize he’s not just a

mixer, he’s a dealer. And he’s not just a waiter or an artist he’s—

“What are you doing?” Billy called and asked.

“Reading a book.”

“You’re wicked smart.”

Billy first took me to his house in the dead of the night.

He’d said he had two roommates, but by roommates he meant

parents. In the big box windows facing the street his mother

had constructed an elaborate scene with miniature trick-or-

treaters and papier-mâché jack-o-lanterns that flickered with

electric bulbs all night long. He had regular Coca-Cola in the

fridge, which he’d bought just for me. He, like most every Rhode

Islander I’ve ever known, only drank Diet. And, in the morning

he warmed my clothing in the dryer, to protect my skin against

the cold air in his childhood room.

Nights became this, whispering beneath the drone of his

parents’ snores. We’d stop at a Sinclair gas station on the way to

Pawtucket the bucket and he’d buy Diet Coke or yellow Vitamin

Waters, explaining, “These yellow ones have caffeine, the others

don’t.” He’d buy microwavable Tostitos cheese with Doritos, or

Cheez-Its. He’d have Lost, Mad Men, The Office, or It’s Always

Sunny in Philadelphia recorded. There were two lace-doily-

draped sofas, but we’d share one, pelvis pressed to pelvis, brain

dead. We’d watch until five or six. I’d think about how I had

class at 10:30, but wouldn’t mention it to him, because another

episode meant another hour with his body laughing under mine.

“My mom made all the curtains,” he told me. They matched

the lampshades. She was once almost Miss Rhode Island, but

his father had not let her compete. For weeks I didn’t meet his

parents, but smelled their menthols and knew the sounds of

their sleeping.

When we ran out of new episodes, it’d be the Food Network,

wag’s revue 100

Wag’s Revuewhich taught us about mirepoix, the French holy trinity. I told

him that cilantro and coriander are the same, that what they call

a burgundy is basically pinot noir. Once, in front of a table of six,

he asked me in a quasi-theatrical waiterly-voice, “You’d agree

that the Le Grand Pinot Noir would be an acceptable substitute

for a burgundy?” It was if he’d explained to the customers that

we were sleeping together.

And one night, I was on, working the booths in the back,

and Billy walked in with his little girl. Word in the restaurant

spread that Billy was there with his daughter, and I watched

them walk through and sit in my section. I ran downstairs and

outside because I wanted to tell someone that I was terrified.

But instead I filled a water pitcher and walked over and said hi

to them, wearing a voice that was both waitress and coworker,

girlfriend and adult around child. She wore a small pink coat,

which he took off tenderly and set on the booth alongside her.

He ordered her salad with chicken fingers, cut up her food into

small bites, told her to sit up straight. They both colored on the

white paper laid across the tablecloth. I watched them from the

back, didn’t want to stand next to them and interrupt father-

daughter time. They only got three nights a week. He tagged

C-R-Y-P-T-O over and over on the table, and she scribbled.

“Luna, say hello,” he told her, and I don’t believe she said

anything back. She was shy. She was beautiful.

“I’ve been an insta-daddy once too,” Steven told me over a

pitcher at Minerva’s (not a great place, but Steven liked to go

there to sweetly accost the girl who took phone orders, his

attention rousing her customer-less nights. “How’s my favorite

Portuguese lady?” he’d ask. She was square-nosed but otherwise

not unattractive. She would blush). His tone hinted at the fact

that he sympathized with me, but he spoke as if becoming an

insta-parent is a phase everyone goes through, and I needed to

101 nonfiction

Wag’s Revueget over myself.

His ex in Georgia had two daughters. He referred to her as

“the best lay I ever had.” He always gave titles to the girls he’d

had: there was “the most beautiful girl in the world,” “the only

girl I ever loved,” “the best girl I’ll ever get.” He talked about

the girl in Italy every day, referred to her as “the girl I’m gonna

marry.” Sometimes I thought about how the girl in Italy maybe

didn’t exist.

Luna, Billy and I went to Wal-Mart so I could buy white button

downs from the little boy’s section, size 16 for $15. White shirts

quickly soak up wine, aioli and ink; we all went through them

like toilet paper. Luna and I strolled the aisles together, she

slipped her tiny hand in mine.

One morning I realized that during the night she’d climbed

into our bed.

The Minerva’s waitress insisted she was hardly Portuguese;

the furthest she’d been away from Rhode Island was Virginia,

once. Steven dreamed of Italy. Billy had taken exactly two

flights in his life — one to Vegas, for his honeymoon, and one

back. Luna had a t-shirt that said Las Vegas. The shirt bothered

me. The timeline was never clear to me, but for three months

he and his ex-wife had been married. I knew, too, that has wife

had been a stripper. It seemed unlikely now that he’d ever take

a flight again, “because of the baby.” He always referred to Luna

as “the baby,” even though she was almost four.

Luna danced with silly rolling eyes to songs in her head. She

was proud of her innie belly-button and ran room to room

before bath time. She demanded we watch her talent shows,

that we play grocery store, that she have one gumball now and

one gumball later. She had long mermaid locks and her eyes

pooled with tears when he brushed them.

“Daddy, excuse me,” she’d scream over and over if he and I

tried to hold a conversation while driving. Sometimes he’d reply

wag’s revue 102

Wag’s Revuewith feigned attention (“Yes, Luna?”), sometimes with sarcasm,

(“Oh I’m sorry, Luna, I forgot you’re the only person in the car”),

sometimes there’d be a note of real anger in his voice (“Will

you hold on a minute?”). She always wanted the music louder.

She didn’t mind his hip-hop, but she preferred her sing-along

CD. We drove in his hot little sports car: twenty-seven-year-old

father, twenty-year-old girlfriend, and three-year-old daughter,

busting the speakers with: Dinah won’t you blow, Dinah won’t

you blow, Dinah won’t you blow your horn—

For three days Billy’s parents went out of town and I saw his

house during daylight. We rose with Luna jumping on the bed,

made Folgers and eggs downstairs. When he poured her milk

instead of juice she sobbed. She finished her fit and he ironed

while she and I watched Curious George. He pulled her little

jeans onto her and chided her for getting big. Every time he

dropped her at his ex-wife’s mother’s house for the remainder of

the week she cried hysterically, grabbed his knees. Sometimes I

felt she was jealous of me. Other times I realized that there was

no way he would ever love any girl as much as he loved her.

“Cocaine is a marvelous drug,” Steven said, “But I can’t touch

the stuff.” It was because of the panic attacks, same reason he

never worked nights. I got used to them. Every once in a while

we’d be out somewhere when he’d suddenly turn to me and ask

if we could get out of here, his face pale and voice low and shaky,

the valium in the key ring rattling around. We’d leave together

and I was his friend.

I came to Steven upset when Billy disappeared. Stopped

answering my calls, stopped calling me back. Every minute I

would invent another reason to call him, to see if he answered

this time. What was the word Rhode Islanders use for submarine

sandwich?

“What’d you expect?” he tried to sound tough, but I knew

he was sympathetic. “You’re young,” he finally said. He called

103 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuehimself “nearly-thirty,” though he was just twenty-five: “I’m

staring down thirty like it’s a barrel of a gun,” he’d say. He pissed

on someone’s stoop. He broke his empty beer bottle against a

bus stop. He held my hand and swung it back and forth as we

went running to the next bar.

With as little warning as when he’d left, Billy showed up

again, mumbling something about his phone battery, a stray

wandering out of a wild stint in the woodwork. His eyes were

small and dark. He laced up some fresh Nikes, held open the

door for me, bought me a nice Chinese dinner at a restaurant in

Massachusetts that advertised its fresh sushi on late night TV.

He was back but I’d caught worry. Whenever I suspected

that he wasn’t calling me back, my thoughts got angry. I’d scrub

Luna’s magic marker tattoos from my legs in the shower, take

the graffiti picture of my name he’d done off my wall and hide it

in my bottom drawer. I’d delete his number, knowing I’d get it

back when he called.

His mother’s front windows were lined with pilgrim figurines,

turkeys, and cornucopias of ears of corn and squash weaved

from raffia. Luna was still talking about Halloween. She didn’t

realize it was over, because no one had taken her trick-or-

treating.

The easiest way to get Luna to go somewhere was to race. Luna

always won the races and Billy always got dead last, panting

and collapsing in pantomimed face-plants. We put on jackets

and raced through the crisp brown leaves at Slater Park Zoo.

Fanny the elephant had spent thirty years of her life chained to

a barn there. Billy remembered Fanny, remembered boy scouts,

remembered his brother-in-law who was fatally stabbed at a bar

down the street. The plastic tunnels electrified all of our blonde

hair. I wondered if the low-talking thirty-something mothers

with state-of-the-art strollers and protective sunglasses thought

wag’s revue 104

Wag’s Revuewe were a family. Did I look like Luna’s mother or her sister?

Did Billy look old enough, mature enough to have kids?

Because we always exchanged the same stories twice, Steven

told me about how he was an insta-daddy in Georgia again in

the back of his Turismo. He’d bought the Turismo off this kid

Barnabe who parked it in the lot behind the restaurant, paid

$700 cash for it, which meant he’d given up medical insurance

for the rest of the year. It was low-riding, maroon inside and

out. Steven owned four cars, but only drove one of them. The

Ford was the everyday car, the Rabbit was for summers, the

Camry sat in his grandparent’s driveway on Federal Hill and the

Turismo was his point of vanity.

A couple of drinks and we’d go out to the Turismo, turn on

eighties rock radio, light cigarettes. “I could do anything to this

car,” he’d brag, “I could take a dump in it, I could light it on

fire. Nobody would care because it’s mine. I’d say to them, ‘do

sumfin ‘bout it!’”

He could do anything in the Turismo except drive it. It had

no plates or insurance; it sat in a lot shielded by bushes. “Apra

il libro,” Steven said, as he propped the trunk open with a

tree branch. He was taking Italian classes so he could woo the

girl he was going to marry, but the only phrase he could ever

remember was “Open the book.” Tracks of snow melted across

the warming glass. We laid in the back and fantasized about

driving to Savannah, to San Francisco, to somewhere. Steven

spent most of his time planning escape routes. All the waiters

did. Wiping down hundreds of pieces of hot wet silverware

they’d discuss how much they owed, how long it was going to

take, where they were going to go when they got free.

I flew home for Thanksgiving. Billy called me after I’d landed.

I was in the car with my father on 580. The City glistened over

the Bay’s late autumn mists. “Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco

treat…” Billy sang into the phone. At home, I spent a lot of time

standing in the bathroom, running bathwater. I went to my

105 nonfiction

Wag’s Revuehairdresser and had him cut off my hair. My parents asked how

the firefighter was. I said he was fine.

“No hair!” Billy yelled from his window as I stood outside TF

Green Airport, breathing into the collar of my thin coat.

Billy’s mother had four kinds of store-bought pies congealing

in the fridge, and instant mashed potatoes stirred with peppered

ground beef. He nuked bowl after bowl as he talked, his eyes

were small and dark. He said he’d slept through Thanksgiving.

“If somebody wants me to take an eight table section, I will. If I

have a bag of blow, I’ll finish it, even if I don’t want it.” He said.

“I just get bored, I’m just never content with anything.” We all

think such conditions are unique to ourselves, I wanted to say.

“I’m gonna go visit Bill and Bob,” he told me, euphemistic AA

lingo for climbing back on the wagon. “Hi my name is Billy and

I-I-I-m baaaack,” he said chuckling.

He stroked my skin, looked at photos of my childhood home,

my dog, my family. He paused at the snapshot of an incarnadine

sunset over my grandfather’s porch at the lake. I told him about

the slopes, the cabin, the water so cold you couldn’t breathe. I

said he could fly out for Christmas, if he wanted. I told him I had

a free ticket he could use.

I pictured explaining to my parents, or to anyone but Steven,

what exactly Billy was. I remembered standing outside some

dealer’s house at four in the morning while Billy threatened

to kill him. I remembered Luna dropping four nickels into a

porcelain piggy bank and saying wishes, “For Chuck-e-Cheese,

for Daddy to kiss Mommy…”

He was going to visit Bill and Bob. He didn’t have a problem

with coke, just coke when he was drunk, so he was going to just

give up drinking. He was going to just give up brown liquor,

because brown liquor made him violent. He was just going out

after work, but just for a nightcap. He was going to a sick show

this weekend, could I take his Saturday night shift? If he saved

an extra two-hundred a month he could get a studio apartment.

wag’s revue 106

Wag’s RevueHis parents liked having him and Luna there. He was going

to have enough money to start trying to get a firefighting job,

maybe June. Maybe next year. He always gained a little weight

in winter.

The windows had angels. The Food Network told us everything

there is to know about struffoli, a fried Italian holiday treat

neither of us had ever tasted. He molded his body into the sofa,

didn’t bother with Luna, let her bother me. For the first time,

I mentioned to one of my friends at Brown that I was dating a

coke addict with a kid.

Steven wrapped his big hairy body around me. His boa

constrictor’s cage lamp lit his room up red. “You know when

you’re surfing, and you’re tired, and you just get that one last

dinky wave, and ride it all the way to the edge? That’s what you

need to do,” he said. Steven was counting down the days until

the girl in Italy flew to him. He trimmed his chinstrap beard.

“How’s my favorite Portuguese lady?” Steven said, and

the Minerva’s girl blushed, wished us a happy New Year. She

grabbed us a pitcher before we could even ask for it. “You are

an angel, how do you always know what I want?” Steven said

happily and turned to me with a look of blank sadness: “She

didn’t come home for Christmas. Or at least I didn’t hear from

her. I sent her flowers but she didn’t call.” I told him I had

thought that might happen all along. He looked at me with the

same stupid eyes I’d looked at him with for so many months,

and said, “Really?”

We finished our drinks and then two more and flick-flicked

our Parliament Lights. We were sopped in feeling like victims,

of getting what we deserved, of having known better. Outside,

Providence spit out whatever kind of weather it wanted, rain

or ice, sleet or slush, and the sun gave up and set in the early

afternoon.

wag’s revue 107

Wag’s Revue

R E C E D E

Alison Fairbrother

108 nonfiction

Wag’s Revue

Tea Shop Press © 1999$13.95

wag’s revue 109

Wag’s Revue

EDEN BOOKS

110 nonfiction

Wag’s Revue

不Published byInterdiction PressProvidence, RICover design byCover photographs by

wag’s revue 111

Wag’s Revue

PWR www.wagsrevue .com

112 nonfiction

Wag’s Revue

VELVET © 2006

velvet p r e s s

wag’s revue 113

Wag’s Revue

All works cited are copyright of their respective publishers.

.