I Call This Look…

Billy Does Bushwick

Billy could not be less Bushwick, and he knows it. And he knows everyone else in line and at their laptops at Swallow this morning knows it, too.

He has the same bi-weekly $14 haircut he’s been sporting since his Boy Scout days back in Little Rock, and he’s sure that’s part of it. When he ordered these shorts he thought they’d be quite a statement, but now the color looks more Nantucket cranberry than punk-rock red, like he’d originally hoped. He thought this flannel might help — his roommate Claire informed him just last week that the 90s are back — but this one comes off as more Brian Wilson than Kurt Cobain.

Being so obviously not of this place eats Billy up inside, and he’s not sure what else to do about it. Clearly, moving from Bay Ridge to the windowless center bedroom of Claire’s railroad on Melrose (with her 2 long-haired cats and her knitting nights) was not enough. And anyway, he knows he’s ten years too late to this place. He knows he can’t buy cool. And yet.

Should he get a tattoo sleeve? A septum piercing? A fixie? Or should he just stop fighting it? Call it normcore? But is he too bland, even — not ironic enough, even — for normcore?

It’s not till he makes it up to his internship at the Frick this morning, as every morning — surrounded by 60-something-year-old curators in the sumptuous interiors of a Beaux-Arts mansion — that Billy will again feel truly comfortable in his own skin. But don’t expect him to ever admit that to himself. Not for a long time yet.