The Haired Hosing
I met the man watering his driveway with somewhat of a predisposition that can only come about from observing someone watering concrete in the first place. Concrete is not grass; once set it does not require water to remain healthy and grey.
“It’s dirty,” said the man, when I mentioned the constant state of concrete death to him. Or, better yet, the constant state of not being alive. For something must have lived once in order to receive the title that is death.
“We’re in a drought,” I said, hoping to elicit a more conciliatory response from him.
He shrugged, and swept his arm holding the hose in an arc, so that the water began to splatter at my feet. A pang of annoyance shot through me, but I remained grounded. I was barefoot, and feeling the water wash over my hot feet was somewhat of a relief. I would hardly admit this to him, though.
The man jerked his upper lip; it danced beneath his nose. He had a large nose for a short, solid man. It bristled with the promise of thick nasal hair. A solid mass of a man, he was hairy all over. Wearing a once-white singlet, from his arms sprouted wiry black hairs, all colluding to form a thick matte across his bronzed skin, in what? An effort to protect him against the cold? It was surely genetics. I decided to change the conversation.
“Did you ancestors water their driveways?” I asked him. He raised the hose a little higher. The water began to splash onto my ankles, clinging onto my skin in little droplets. “Or were they just hairy?”
“What are you talking about?” he said. He appeared bored. But maybe that was just the perception given by his large, bushy eyebrows, and their stubborn state of stillness. He hadn’t raised, lowered, shifted, twisted or bunched them together since the beginning of our flooded conversation. The water congealing at my feet flowed onwards, down past the driveway and into the gutter. It gurgled into the drain, its short-lived lamentation on finding itself expunged from a hose only to land on concrete. And concrete, as I think I’ve established, is not grass.
“I’m just trying to find the link between hairy people and people that pointlessly water their driveways,” I said. He finally met my gaze.
The man shrugged yet again — I thought that maybe it was the hair on his shoulders that required often a readjustment. An unnecessary number of blooming hair follicles weighing him down in the summer heat.
I shrugged too. Even if it was just to show him that he had no monopoly of shrugging in this conversation.
The man then proceeded to step over the hose, so that only the nozzle was pointing out between his legs. He then raised it up to his crotch level.
A jogger came by at that moment, before doubling back decisively. From the shock, I imagine, of stumbling onto what seemed to be one man urinating on another. In a gushing stream.
The man smirked, his eyebrows bunched, and with one final flick of the hose, he walked up to the tap to turn it off. The water stopped flowing, and he began to wind up the hose.
“Thank you,” I said, hesitantly.
“Just hairy,” he grumbled.
“Excuse me?”
“My ancestors,” he said, glancing up as he rotated the handle on the hose reel. “They were just hairy.”
“Right,” I said. I shrugged and walked on.
Matt Querzoli wrote this. Follow his writing blog, his letters to strangers blog or his blog blog if you liked the post, or even the bloke himself if this tickled your proverbial pickle.