I generally steer clear of people whose necks are more than 25 percent tattoo-covered, but the sidewalk outside the Safeway was narrow and we were headed right toward each other. This wiry twenty-something gentleman, whose excited smile was as yellow as his wife-beater tank top, was going to say something to me. I just knew it.
“You look exactly like someone,” he shouted. “Yeah, someone famous.”
Then to a fat woman across the parking lot — his common-law wife perhaps — “Hey, who does this guy look like?”
I knew the guy he was thinking of, but I didn’t want to help him out. I just shrugged and smiled and walked by him. It was hot and I had limes to buy; cachaca drunk straight is intolerable.
But I digress.
Because of my high-school-football-player-gone-soft physique, my sunglasses and my mini-fro-bushy-sideburns combo, I am often told that I remind people of noted slapsticker Jack Black.
Something about sideburns makes people without them think that anyone with them looks like anyone else with them. I’ve been called Elvis a few times, too. And if I ever hung out with drunken 20th-century historians, I’m sure I’d occasionally be the target of a slurred, “Hey, guys, check out George McGovern.” I look as much like him as I do Jack Black or Elvis.
So that’s the bad part.
The good part is that people with sideburns tend to like other people with sideburns — creating sort of a brotherhood of the hairy-cheeked. It’s not that sideburns connote any specific personality traits — like, if someone has a mustache you know he’s probably either a biker, a porn star or a douche bag (or my dad, who is none of those other things). But there is a kinship among us. Maybe we all just sort of subconsciously bond over having been called Elvis for our entire adult lives; I’m not sure.
The point is: Yeah, I have to deal with the occasional looky-loo telling me I’m the spitting image of Jack Black or George McGovern or whoever, but I also have something on the sides of my face that bestows membership in a pretty cool club.
1 Comment
September 4, 2008 at 12:54 pm
As one who has been perpetually sideburned for about 16 years now, I concur.