I noticed people are treating me differently since I switched from my baseball cap to a floppy fishing hat. When I wore the baseball cap down low I came across as menacing. If I walked past and looked at your girlfriend, you’d get shivers. I never wore it backwards. That would be inappropriate and silly. That cap shaved years off my age. I usually walk fast, wearing a look of determination, convincing others they’d better get out of my way.
In fact, younger guys took it as a challenge and tried to walk faster, negotiating narrow paths, using shoulders and elbows, triumphantly glancing over their shoulder as they passed me. When I jogged in my baseball cap, I could still convey fitness, even though my actual body wasn’t moving all that fast. The bill covered my face, adding to some mysterious quality that made me a force to be reckoned with.
My fisherman’s hat – similar to what Woody Allen wears, although black – presents me in an entirely different light. I look years older; find my body instinctively stooping when I walk. Younger people don’t compete, assuming if I speed up I’ll pull something and they’ll be responsible. They hold doors for me and offer their seat, smile kindly the way one does with harmless seniors. They even talk louder and speak slower to me.
In NYC, many mistake me for a tourist from Maine. If I look around, taking in my surroundings, they assume I’m confused. Some ask me fishing questions and I make up answers. I also look like a gardener, which generates mulch inquiries. I make up more answers. I’m a very accommodating fellow.
In my baseball cap I look like a Joe, but the fishing hat makes me a Leon or Earl or Jeb. Sometimes I check my reflection in store windows and realize I look kind of silly, but completely harmless, which is why more strange women strike up a conversation with me now. I guess I seem wiser and avuncular in this hat.
The other day, on a whim, I switched back to my baseball cap and everything started in again. All the tension, the competitiveness, the intimidation – truly exhausting. I have come to believe all the great peace makers wore fishing hats in their spare time. I suspect Stalin had a stash of baseball caps he used to frighten underlings. Then again, Churchill never wore a hat except a bowler, which connotes a whole other range of possibilities.
When my fishing hat blows off, for some reason it doesn’t go very far, unlike the other, which has been known to travel city blocks away. At least the one with the wider brim covers my prominent ears, always subject to crimson color in warm weather. Under my baseball cap, people assume I’m mad, embarrassed, diseased, or have uncontrolled blood pressure. Red ears get me lots of sympathy. Even when I look so damn intimidating it’s scary. – Joe Del Priore
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