Hang Up Stoop-y, Stoop-y Hang Up

Leaving work, I drag my hung-over ass down to King Street for something to eat. I shuffle toward Mekong, a Vietnamese joint on the corner of King and 6th, and I pass Arrojo Studio, Nick “Hairdresser-to-the-Stars” Arrojo’s salon.

Then I stroll by a jittery white dude in his twenties. He’s hunched over on a stoop two doors down, talking animatedly on his cell phone. In blue jeans and a black buttoned-down shirt, the guy also sports a mullet. A charcoal-colored number with a few bedheady spikes, but you can’t fool me—a mullet’s a mullet.

And now his panicked whisper is audible, drawing me out of my daze. Suddenly, he shuts up and darts his finger in the air as if he’s addressing the caller in person as opposed to on the phone.

“Just so you know,” he shouts, “what I do when I leave the salon is no business of yours!”

At first I think he’s talking to me (he isn’t) and then I wonder what he did, well, when he left the salon. Blow off spin class? Drink pomegranate juice right from the bottle? Reveal the winner of Project: Runway to a friend who had TiVo’d it?

I reach Mekong and then something else dawns on me: who the hell works at a salon and has a mullet?

Tim Coleman covers the street beat for Trainjotting