Two weeks ago, I posted an entry entitled On the Wearing of Hats, Part 1, in which I discussed the raison d’être for my daily wearing of a shit-brown-colored truckers’ hat. The entry sounded noble, but missed the entire point of my wanting to write it in the first place, which wasn’t to explain why I wear the hat, but rather to talk about the strangeness that has crept upon me ever since I took to wearing it.
I was born and raised in Irving, Texas, a giant, sprawling suburb of Dallas, Texas, whose claim to fame, something emblazoned in huge signs as you entered the city limits on any of its major freeways, was that it was the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
From my earliest recollections, I hated it.
I hated things about it that as a kid I couldn’t articulate, but still knew I hated. I hated its flatness. I hated its lack of consequence, criss-crossed the way it was by six-lane interstates full of people trying to get through it as quickly as possible. I hated the women, plucked and caked and fake-boobed. I hated its over-abundance, the way everyone owned a mansion with a giant lawn and a swimming pool way too large for the small families inside. I hated the glass buildings, shiny and polished and cold. I hated the emptiness of the streets, the largeness of the properties making walking impossible. Dallas was L.A. without the stars. Dumb people making dumb money from dumb oil.
(The one thing I didn’t hate, and this is utterly incongruent, was the Dallas Cowboys. I loved the Dallas Cowboys. I still love the Dallas Cowboys. It’s actually an anomaly common amongst arts-oriented Dallas, Texas-escapees. We all love the Dallas Cowboys. Go figure.)
The yang to my Dallas-hating yin was California. As early as I can remember hating Dallas, I can remember loving California. My father was born in Long Beach. He had pictures of himself, standing tall next to a ten-foot longboard, in lengthy surfer-styled swim-trunks (unusual to see in the 80′s, the days of short shorts), tanned and smiling with the ocean as backdrop. He seemed loose in a way that you never saw in Texans. I wanted that looseness.
I’d never been to California, and my imaginations of it were much different from its reality, but by the time I went to high school I knew I’d end up there and began prepping for it. I never wore cowboy boots, or big belt buckles, and I even wore blue jeans that weren’t the normal shade of blue. (Lighter-colored blue jeans were considered alternative in Dallas, Texas.) More importantly to this story, I began paying careful attention to my language–I dropped ain’t and y’all and yep from my vocabulary and started inserting like whenever appropriate. (I got my California-speak from the movie, Valley Girl, popular at the time. This ended up leading to some confusion concerning my sexual orientation, as my metaphors tended towards the theatrical, but that’s a story best left for another time.)
I left, of course, and never looked back. I went to college in Northern California, lived in San Francisco for a decade, and eventually made my way up the coast to Oregon, where one could live a West Coast lifestyle on less dime. Everything’s been peachy since, at least from a geographical-comfort perspective, and no one’s ever questioned my West Coast status.
Until lately. Until I started wearing the truckers’ hat.
Before the truckers’ hat, it had popped up in my speech every once in a while, my gumshoe Texas accent. My speech would slow down when I would speak to my Dad on the phone—I’d slip into the sort of shit-giving, making-light-of-the-serious that Texans are known for. “Yep, pops, you’re like the Terminator with that pacemaker and them artificial hips.” Cops, too. Every time I would speak to a cop the Texan habit of playing it stupid would come out. “I didn’t see no stop sign nowhere, officer.” (Incidentally, playing it stupid with cops is completely self-defeating. Not once has it worked.) And once, in the midst of a sexual tryst I was having with a girl I’d flown in for the weekend—while I was self-sequestered in bum fuck, retiree Arizona to write the great American novel—we spent two days over-exaggerating Southern accents to diner employees, just for kicks. “You got somethin’ to swat these here flies with, miss? I can take a lickin’ to ‘em for ya, if you don’t mind.”
Like I said, it crept up on me. In addition to the truckers’ hat, I’ve grown long sideburns, almost mutton-chops, and when it’s sunny (which isn’t too often in Portland, Oregon), I tie it together with a pair of brown-lensed, aviator-style sunglasses. In my head, it’s a Hunter S. Thompson thing, but to most of Portland, I look like a slightly mental Southern transplant.
I honestly can’t say how it happened, if my ensemble created an expectation, and if the expectation subconsciously changed my speech patterns, or if the hat-wearing just happened to coincide with my becoming a parent, and the reversion of yourself as your own father that happens when you do so (although my Dad never really spoke like a Texan himself, so that can’t be it), but ever since I started wearing the hat, I can’t stop talking like a Texan. I call my daughter missy. My son boy. I use the word rill as an adjective. “That’s rill strange.” I even act like a Texan. When my wife gets on me (see, I’m even writing like a Texan!), I chew on the inside of my cheek a little, and answer her real slow and thoughtful-like, as if she were a cow.
It’s so… weird. Parents at my daughter’s school come up to me and ask me where I’m from. And I have to tell them. And when I tell them, they NOD.
I think it’s time to switch to a beret.
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