Hat Guy

Of course, my daughter had questions about the giant extraterrestrial spaceship hovering over our city. Her questions ranged from the conventional (“What’s it made of?”) to the profound (“Why?”) to the perplexing (“Was it always here and we’ve just forgotten?”) to the redundant (“Why?”).

I said I had no answers for her, which was hard to do. Parents want to be able to provide clear answers to their children or, in lieu of providing clear answers, to be able to make up some more or less convincing, realistic-sounding bullshit. But I found I couldn’t do either in this instance. Usually I can make up more or less convincing, realistic-sounding bullshit to explain, say, rainbows or toasters or where hats come from. But now I was tongue-tied. The gigantic alien mothership had tongue-tied me.

“I’m sorry,” I said one afternoon in response to one of her questions, after we’d procured ice cream cones from the ice cream stand. “I’m tongue-tied.”

“It’s understandable,” she said, pointing upward. “I mean, what a mind-fuck, am I right?”

My gaze followed the linear extrapolation from the tip of her finger and came to rest on the bright silvery underbelly of the massive spacecraft.

“I guess,” I said, licking my rapidly liquefying double scoop of vanilla.

But it’s weird how a person can get used to things, even highly unusual things like giant hovering alien motherships. It’s sort of like when my friend Charlie started wearing a fedora every day, out of the blue. I’d never even seen him wear a hat before, not even a ball cap, and then, one day, blammo: Charlie was the acting mayor of Fedora City. I asked him why.

“Why, Charlie?” I’d said. “Why the hat? Why now? And also what’s it made of?”

Charlie had shrugged his considerable shoulders and made a kind of sputtering sound with his lips.

“I guess I’m a hat guy now,” he’d said. “I don’t know what to tell you. And it’s felt.”

“So you’re a hat guy now. Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Charlie had snapped his fingers as he said that. Charlie’s finger-snap was pretty fucking first-rate, too: loud and crisp, like the crack of a baseball bat in mid-October, but with a little tang of dickishness, too, like when someone bites into an apple with exaggerated theatrical gusto: That’s right, Brian—got myself an apple.

“OK then,” I’d said. “By the way, that was quite a finger-snap, Charlie.”

“Thanks.” Charlie had grinned and adjusted his fedora needlessly.

“Let me ask you something, Charlie. You practice that finger-snap at home?”

“What? No. That’s just how I snap. That’s my normal, unrehearsed snap.”

“Charlie…come on.”

“I’ve always been able to snap like that.”

“After practicing at home, you mean,” I said.

Charlie had stopped in his tracks, then. He’d put his arms akimbo, just like on TV. He’d said he didn’t like my line of questioning, not one bit. But I didn’t relent. And by God, after about an hour, I got Charlie to admit that he’d practiced his finger-snaps at home, along with two of his most tried-and-true faces: the Inquisitive Single Cocked Brow Face and the Empathetic Downturned Mouth Face, with Accompanying Slow Head Nod.

But I got used to the hat after a while. And now? Shit. Now it’s like it’s not even there.