$19.80

Buying sushi tonight, the bill comes to $19.80, and the nice guy at the register laughs “1980! — that was a good year!”
“Yeah!” I sez. “Yeah.” And I hand him my credit card.
“You had hair down to your ass!” he says to me, “I bet.” And this gives me pause. Where exactly did that come from? Down to my ass?
“No, I had big puffy hair,” I correct him. “My hair doesn’t grow down, it grows sort of out and up. Like Art Garfunkel.” And I show him what I mean with my hands, using the universal gestures for “big” and “puffy.”
“Oh,” he says. I think he may be a little sad now, around the edges. But he picks himself back up pretty fast. “You wore high heel shoes!” he says.
And I say, “No, no I didn’t.
“We all did!” he says.
“No,” I say, a little more firmly. “I was 13. I had braces.” I don’t tell him this, because I don’t want to bum him out, but I’m pretty sure I was wearing wallabies back then, which are almost the exact opposite of high heels.
“Oh,” he says, and hands me my card back with a receipt to sign.
He’s tried so hard to turn me into some sort of heavy metal call girl, back in 1980. Like maybe one of the secondary prostitutes in Risky Business. But he’s failed. He can’t change the past.

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