"Paul Di Filippo - Lennon Spex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Copyright ┬й 1992 by Paul Di Filippo, All rights reserved. First appeared in Amazing
Stories, July 1992. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993
Award anthology only.




Lennon Spex

Paul Di Filippo

I am walking down lower Broadway, not far from Canal Jeans, when I see the
weirdest peddler dude.
Now, when you consider that the wide sidewalk is jammed with enterprising
urban riffraffтАФAfricans with their carved monkeywood animals; Farrakhanized
Black Muslims with their oils and incense; young white punks with their
hand-screened semi-obscene T-shirts; sleazy old white guys with their weasel-skin
Gucci bags and smeary Hermes scarves; Vietnamese with their earrings and
pantyhose and pirated tapesтАФand when you also realize that I, Zildjian, am totally
inured to this spectacle through long habituation, then you realize that this guy must
be incredibly weird.
Except he isn't. Weird, that is. Not bizarre. I guess it's more that he's
incongruous, like.
He appears to be a Zen monk. Japanese or Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese, it's
hard to figure. His head is shaven, he wears a golden robe and straw sandals, and he
looks serener than a Park Avenue matron after her first Valium of the day. His age
could be anywhere from a year short of a legal drink to a year over early retirement.
The monk is apparently selling secondhand prescription eyeglasses. He has a
TV tray with a meager selection neatly arrayed thereon. I see no handy-dandy
lens-grinding equipment, so I assume there is no customizing. This gives new
meaning to the term "cut-rate ripoff."
I stop in front of the monk. He bows. I am forced to bow back.
Uncomfortable, I fall to examining his stock.
Tucked away behind the assorted catseye, filigreed, tortoise-shell old lady spex
lies one special pair of glasses, their stems neatly folded like ballerina legs, as
incongruous among their companions as the monk among his.
I pick these glasses up and examine them.
They are a pair of simple gold wire-rims with transparent, perfectly circular
lenses. The stems extend from the middle of the outer circumference on each lens;
the bridge is higher, about two-thirds of the way up along the inside. The spectacles
feature no adornments.
Suddenly, I realize that these are what we would have called, more years ago
than I care to ponder, "Lennon glasses." First popularized by Beatle John in the Sgt.
Pepper album photos, later shown shattered on a posthumous jacket, they remain
forever associated with his image, though he was to switch in later years to various
aviator-style frames, undoubtedly seeking to harmonize his face with Yoko's in
marital solidarity.
I do not suffer from near- nor far-sightedness; I have no intention of buying the
frames and replacing the lenses with polarized ones, since I believe in the utility of
unmediated sunlight. Yet something compels me to ask if I can try them on.