The seventh—and possibly last—excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress. For the first six excerpts, please click (in this order) here and here and here and here and here and here.
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Friday night, September 7, 2007:
Cassie doesn’t feel like reading, not that she has anything to read anyway, having donated all her books to the Salvation Army the day before graduating from college a month earlier—now the poors could afford to read, out of masochism or genuine interest or both, nearly-impenetrable highbrow analyses of their favorite lowbrow culture. She doesn’t feel like watching television, either, despite having splurged for expanded basic cable (63 channels, US $49.99 a month, no porn, not even any scrambled porn channels, if those still exist). She feels similarly about the thirty-four DVDs (Digital Video Discs or Digital Versatile Discs) she purchased for eleventy-jillion US bucks for her cultural studies classes, DVDs containing mid-Twentieth Century mainstream movies she herself analyzed, her essays never earning anything less than an A-minus; she would gnash her teeth on the rare occasions she did receive that lowly grade—what a perfectionist, ha ha. (Those DVDs probably should’ve gone to the Salvo, too. When she cleans house, she cleans house.) Surfing the Internet makes her shudder, perhaps due to the riptides and wipeouts that accompany surfing. And perspiring in her submicroscopic, air-conditionerless apartment? No effing way.
So she decides to visit the South Side’s least-hip hipster bar, The Localite, for the first time in weeks, to gawk at the interesting clientele. And, why not, she should dress as interestingly as possible herself. Having recently entered her idea of a retro-Nineties Riot Grrrl phase, she puts on her baggiest T-shirt, the camouflage one she stenciled NO MORE WHITE MAN CULTURE across the front of in large capital letters, in black spray paint. (Have we mentioned she belongs to the white race herself? Yes, we believe we have.) She also wears beige cargo shorts and black combat boots and a black unzipped pleather jacket. Plus she eschews makeup, and she eschews shaving her legs, and she eschews shaving her armpits. But (to add some stereotypical femininity to her look, for that incongruous touch) she does attach a pink barrette to her near-crewcutty, bottle-blonde hair.
At the bar, sitting alone at a table, nursing a glass (US $5.50) of that lower-economic-stratum favorite, Stibben’s®, The Beer for When You Want Just Beer™, she checks out her fellow patrons, who predominantly wear what looks like clothing from previous decades, such as rock music T-shirts, rap music T-shirts, grunge music T-shirts, tie-dyed T-shirts, ballcaps advertising defunct businesses, ballcaps advertising Pittsburgh professional athletic teams from when those teams didn’t suck, pleather jackets, pleather pants, pleather skirts, pleather boots (or anything else pleather—Cassie the vegan doesn’t mind this petroleum-based product), and new-wave dresses (combos of neon shapes and neon squiggles and neon smears and—in the more festive designs—neon confetti). Some of these hipsters may have found the above items at thrift stores, but Cassie has the feeling most of the hipsters shop at vintage boutiques, those establishments that sell old, lower-economic-stratum clothing to rich jerks at rich-jerk prices.
Which doesn’t mean the (presumably) rich jerks here tonight don’t look stylish. Lots of them do. But beyond that? Her Riot Grrrl look would piss off the patriarchy; no one else, however, poses a threat sartorially (or likely politically) to the greedheads and misogynists and warmongers in charge. Even the music—cheeseball Eighties rock, which the hipsters surrounding her enjoy listening to allegedly ironically—wouldn’t perturb the ruling class, which in all likelihood enjoys these tracks sans any irony, actual or feigned, a kewl veneer for PR (public relations) purposes for amoral plunderers.
As she takes a careful sip of her beer, she sees a stranger approaching her. You could call him a generic white guy—28 years old, presumably cisgender (though not too many people used the word “cisgender” in 2007), medium-length brown hair, average height (about 5’9″ [175.26 centimeters]), average build (about 200 pounds [90.71 kilograms]), crisp Hawaiian shirt, Eighties-style designer jeans (if not actually from that decade). She sets her glass down just as he arrives.
“Whoa-ohhhh!” he exclaims, taking a few steps backwards, fluttering his hands around in front of him, “I better call the cops, ’cause you just stole my heart!”
Cassie chortles. “Yeah.”
“Yeeeeah!” he says, pointing at her with both hands, each hand alternatingly poking the air several times.
“You got any other clever pickup lines?”
“Lemme think.” He’s obviously imbibed more than one drop that night; besides the manic gesticulating, he also overenunciates in that hyperactive way some drunks (such as Cassie’s mom’s former boyfriend, the gropey one) do before faceplanting onto the floor. “Ohhh, yeah—I seem to have lost my phone number. Can I have yours?”
“Certainly. You ready?”
“Hold on.”
He removes his cell phone from his back jeans pocket. His finger hovers over the buttons, ready to punch in that important info.
“Ready,” he says.
“Okay. Area code 412.”
“Four, one, two.”
“555.”
“Five five—hey, wait a minute, don’t the fake numbers in movies start with five, five, five?”
“Yup.”
The generic white guy pauses. “Ha ha ha ha ha,” pointing his phone at her, “a rill movie buff!”
“I guess so.”
“I like movies too. If you actually gave me your number, we could—”
Another white guy she’s never seen before—29 years old, presumably cisgender, light-brown mullet, 6’4″ (193.04 centimeters), 230 pounds (104.33 kilograms), biceps bulging out of his black T-shirt, thighs bulging under his non-designer jeans—walks up to her table.
“Hello, Jonathan,” the muscular white guy says, addressing the generic white guy.
“Ohhhhh, hi, Troy, how ya doin’?”
“Fine. And you?”
“Fine.”
“What you up to?”
“Nothin’. Just talkin’ with a lady here.”
“Do you know him, miss?”
“Nope,” Cassie replies. “I just met him.”
“Do you want him to talk to you?”
Cassie doesn’t mind. Inebriated horndogs have always amused her. But that other guy—
“Not really,” she answers.
“Aw, come on!” Jonathan protests. “I thought we had a great conversation going!”
Cassie, shrugging her shoulders: “Ehhh.”
“I think you should stop talking to her,” Troy says.
“Awwww!” Jonathan says.
“Go somewhere else. This venue has plenty of space.”
“Ha ha ha, yeah, ‘venue.’ ”
Troy points at him, then points in the opposite direction.
“All right, all right!” Jonathan says, shoving his cell phone back into his jeans pocket. “If she can’t recognize great conversation, I might as well find someone who can! Someone better-looking!”
“So long,” Troy says, waving goodbye.
Jonathan walks away.
“Uh, thanks,” Cassie says.
“No problem,” Troy says.
“You the new bouncer here?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d heard this venue had hired a new bouncer.”
“Actually, I prefer the term ‘security coordinator,’ but you can call me a bouncer.”
Three-point-seven-second pause.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Troy says.
“Cassie.”
“Cassie?”
“Yup.”
Two-point-one-second pause.
“May I see what you have written on your T-shirt, Cassie?”
Two-point-nine-second pause.
“Sure,” she replies.
She opens her jacket.
“Huh. Didjoo write this yourself?” he asks.
“Yep.”
“Interesting.”
Two-point-six second pause.
“Well, nice meeting you,” Troy says.
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Twelve minutes and nineteen seconds later, as a man screechingly attempts to convince someone he refers to as “you” to copulate with him (as heard in the white, cisgender male, Massachusettsan rock singer Billy Squier’s 1984 single “Rock Me Tonite,” which peaked at number fifteen on the Billboard Hot 100), Cassie finishes her beer. Should she order another one? Ehhh.
Should she sit in this dump all night? Ehhhhhhh.
As she wends her way through the hipnoid crowd, toward the exit, she wonders if she should visit another South Side bar or three to continue drinking. She could get at least slightly blitzed. That would make her foolhardy enough to embrace, truly, the Riot Grrrl lifestyle (short of actually listening to Riot Grrrl songs) by visiting a tattoo shop and having herself inked for the first time, just one tattoo for starters, though what should—
Something smashes into her right elbow, that joint loudly cracking. She stumbles three steps sideways and two steps backwards and starts feeling pain, a dull throb that within milliseconds escalates into something more unignorable, barging into every nerve throughout her Grrrlish figure. Her right arm now stuck at a forty-five-degree angle, cradled by her left arm, she looks around and sees Troy. He holds a wooden cricket bat in both hands.
“No more white man culture?” he shouts.
“Wait, Troy, I—”
Two white men and a white woman rush toward him as he takes another swing.
■
A week later, her right arm encased from elbow to wrist in a lime-green plaster cast (the doctor let her choose the color), Cassie receives an unexpected package: a 22-ounce (623.69-gram) clear plastic jar of Hatchley Organics® Tri-Color [as in red, white, and black] Gourmet Quinoa: US $14.48, plus US $21.40 for USPS® (United States Postal Service) Express Mail® Second-Day Delivery. After removing the jar, she finds, at the bottom of the packing box, a note written on both sides in longhand with a Mont Descamps® Heirloom® pen, black ink, medium point, on a notepad page, 5″ by 7″ (12.7 centimeters by 17.78 centimeters), white paper, whose obverse (in the lower-right corner, taking up almost one-sixth of the page) features a backgroundless, full-color, head-and-shoulders image (composited from various photographic elements and subsequently heavily digitally modified two years earlier by Tina Kaine, a 35-year-old, white, cisgender, female, underpaid [due to sexual bias among her immediate supervisors, all white cisgender men] graphic designer at the notepad’s manufacturer, ZSW Brands, in Dayton, Ohio) of a medium-brown Labrador Retriever, black Ray-Ban®-style sunglasses, red Gentleman Caller®-style dress shirt (with popped collar), grinning straight ahead at—
Cassie,
I chose this stationery to give you a laugh. You can use a laugh, right?
And I chose the accompanying gift to keep you healthy. Yes, I know you can find quinoa in Pittsburgh, but I wanted to give you a genuine Midwestern present.
And I want to say that what happened at that bar last week doesn’t negate everything about you. I mean you still remain yourself. You still remain a quinoa fan, and a smart and funny and empathetic person.
I love you. I know I don’t say this often enough, but I do. I love you, my only daughter, and I always will.
If you need anything, please let me know. And please get better as quickly as possible.
Reed
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 