Image courtesy of a friend whose obssession with hats inspired this story.
Saludos a todos
This is my Friday freewrite for @mariannewest’s Day 1070: 5 Minute Freewrite for the prompt: “Do you like my hat?”.
Egg Head
Do you like my hat? Jack asked excitedly, as if he was showing a new look for the first time and needed approval.
Joe was shocked when his friend, Jack, got out of the room dressed up, yet wearing a hat. This was not the 1920s, Panamá, or rural Mexico. It was Jack’s daughter’s 21th-Century wedding, for Christ’s sake. Joe thought this might be the only moment his friend would not be wearing a baseball hat. He had never seen his friend’s bare head. They had been working together for over 20 years and Jack had managed to bypass all dress codes insisting that his hats were an integral part of his occupation. His outstanding and intimidating reputation preceded him, as well as his ruthless anti-smartass barrages, so no colleague or authority would ever dare to question, challenge, trick or mock his ever-hated head.
Joe had been to rivers, beaches, discos, long trips, and all kinds of life-threatening situations with Jack and he had never seen him drop or take his hats off.
[end of five minutes]
What? Jack asked tired of Joe’s perplexed look. Not a damn thing, Joe said resigned. Where did you get that fancy hat? I had it sent directly from Italy. Jack answered still hoping his friends could appreciate his good taste. It was elegant and still athletic item. The fabric was soft, you could tell without even touching it, and yet there was a certain rough texture enhanced by every intersection and contour. Simple, but distinguished; not too formal to make a man who had refused to age look too mature or serious; not too big to distract anyone’s attention from a body that was carried as an intimidating machine; not too small to reveal more than what he wanted people to see from the part of his body that was both his greatest source of pride and of embarrassment.
The former mane gave way prematurely to a drastically receding hair. The first hat, a "loan" from a bad customer, was meant to stop his hair from falling, something Jack attributed to his town’s scorching sun. He stopped exposing himself to high temperatures and became a night owl. He made sure he would make always good money to never walk and buy a hat to match every piece of clothing. Far from stopping his hair from falling the addictive use of hats precipitated it, turning Jacks’s head into a boiled egg. Some said it was "the curse of the bad customer".
The shock produced in the audience when the drunk impertinent guest, trying to win a bet, snatched his hat off while Jack was dancing with his daughter, was only comparable with the shock we suffered when we saw Darth Vader without his helmet for the first time. There was nothing his best friend could do to stop him from shooting the guy in the head before he could say “Jack Robbinson”. You could say the poor bastard fell dead at the drop of a hat.
For their life’s sake, no one in the party remembered ever having seen Jack without his hat.
Thanks for stopping by
