“(…)el más ilustre de los pistoleros del sur,”

instant fame

He has just bought today a copy of the original Space Oddity pressing by David Bowie. He is Michael Furey in the last paragraphs of “The Dead” by James Joyce. He has just read Maus and thinks that he wants to be a comic-book writer. He has just laughed with the swallows of Monty Python. He has just put a needle on an old Beatles record with a second-handed Technics turntable. He has just glimpsed the young silhouette of Michael Jordan at a slam dunk contest, signing with his body a part of history. He has just felt his body trembling with “Psycho Killer” heard for the first time. He is a Shakespeare crowd scene. He is The Iliad. He is a Neanderthal igniting for the first time a branch that will serve him to cook wild and wildly a buffalloo, or a bird or an endlessly prehistorical animal. All the men fornicating are the same one man: Adam. All the men reciting Shakespeare’s lines are Shakespeare. He is all the classics and all the timeless moments.

A young man pays with cash for a leather jacket. Leather is always a timeless classic. It is the vapours of the dead skin what impells to action. It is essentially humane and it is only a leather jacket.

He moves with a paper bag that brags for itself. After some congresses with feminism and gender studies lectures he suddenly lets go and the flow of fashion and money buying manly is again a comfortable home. A leather jacket that is bought with half time jobs is a statement. Or so he thinks. He sees an emacipation of skin. Flesh, as it were.

Probably whenever he needs to pay for an issue of the International Journal of Comic Art he will find himself in the necessity of asking mother. The procedure will be done as always. He’ll pretend not to spend too much on Amazon. He will order and he will be comfortably receiving a beautifully edited collection of academic writing. There will be no magic in it. A young man that wants to become a scholar finds secretly and somewhat humbling to live with his mother.

But for today, he just bought a leather jacket. He’s never liked it but today he has a leather piece in his closet. The dead skin smells great, he thinks. He has never been a classic until now.