SAN NARCISO, Calif. -- Ten years ago, nobody in San Narciso would have given Hart Garrity a second thought. He relocated to the North Viaduct area of the county from Venice Beach in the mid-1980s to make a new start. Garrity admits that in his wilder days, he was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, coke-snorting, motorcycle-riding, heavily tattooed rebel whose arrest record contained more information about his life than his resume. But today, much to his chagrin, Garrity has become a local folk hero for the counter-culture youth of Bennington Vale. And he wants it to stop.

“I came here to be left alone,” Garrity said, “not for a bunch of spoiled yuppies to idolize me or make fun of me -- I can’t tell which it is, but I’m getting goddamn sick and tired of being called a ‘hipster douche bag’ every time I leave the house.”

Understanding the Hipster Culture
Janus Heuchler, director of San Narciso’s Poeslaw Institute for Social Research and Development (PISRAD), said that Garrity’s otherwise unconventional dress and apathetic attitude, authentic as they may be to him, are the characteristics that hipster teens are associating with.

“Everything about a hipster is excruciatingly constructed to create the appearance that they don’t care. Their image is predicated on irony, on taking the authenticity of times past and stripping it down to its most inauthentic incarnation. They are almost always well-to-do white kids, but they perfect a sloppy, poor, vintage look, even though it’s carefully crafted. They drive beat up cars, they drink cheap beer, they make t-shirts with random quotes from films nobody has ever heard of. They wear anachronistic attire. You’ll see cowboy hats with hoodies, fedoras with baseball jerseys, trucker caps with dress shirts -- every item collected to ensure that many eras of fashion are represented while never corresponding. As ‘assassins of cool’ they think of themselves as cooler than the rest of mainstream America. Perhaps the biggest irony is how much they care about not caring. And that’s probably why most people think of them as douche bags.”

When Art Imitates Life and Then Destroys It
Ironically, traits that in times past would have alienated Garrity from this white collar community have now cemented his reputation as an indie hero.

“They yell all sorts of things at me,” Garrity explained. “Scenester, hipster, cronkite, jerry, juicer, you name it. And I’ve gotta listen to this crap from a pack of wussies with names like Brooklyn or Hugo or Lennon. But the more I shut down or tell ‘em to piss off, the more they latch on to me. If I took a dump on their lawns right now, these kids would congratulate me for it and compare me to GG Allin. Why the hell do they know who GG Allin was? But they do. I saw a kid the other day with a GG Allin bobblehead on his dash. I met GG once. He would’ve raped these kids and peed on their faces. They have no idea. What happened to role models like Bobby Kennedy and Elvis and Jackie Robinson?”

Garrity, currently employed as a truck driver, admits that he never thought much about his lack of fashion sense or disinterest in socializing with his neighbors until recently.

“I try to keep to myself. Don’t care about politics or world events, for the most part. And I’ve never had much money,” Garrity said. “I wear what’s around, or what I can find at Salvation Army. So, I’ve got old jeans that are a little tight for me, a bunch of bowling shirts from the 50s, my trucker caps, a couple of Stetsons, you know? I drive a piece of crap Dart. I drink Old Milwaukee, ‘cause I can afford it. I smoke cigarettes from Mexico that taste like donkey s--t for the same reason. And I really don’t give a tinker’s damn about anyone in Bennington Vale. They can all go straight to Hell, far as I’m concerned. But all these things about me, on top of the ugly strippers I hook up with, seem to make me more popular.”

But Garrity claims that most of the unwanted attention he receives comes from the fact that he is covered in original Ed Hardy tattoos that he got in the 1960s while pushing drugs and “slumming around Laguna.”

“Part of me used to regret all this ink,” Garrity sighs, sweeping one colorful hand across his frame. “It wasn’t for art’s sake back then, it was just something to do for shock value. And chicks seemed to dig it. But now I really regret it. These idiots don’t even know who Ed Hardy is. They keep talking about some fancy French lady named Audigier. And when I figure out what the hell that means, someone’s going to get his ass kicked. Well, not really. I’m telling you, even if I did, way things are in this damn town, the mayor’d probably give me a [expletive deleted] award. Seems the only way to fly under the radar here would be to start wearing Dockers, talking like Glenn Beck, and beating up homos and blacks with a bible under my arm. But I’m the ‘douche bag.’”

Garrity said he plans to retain the services of an attorney to discuss the possibility of suing the entire county for defamation and emotional distress.

(c) 2011. All stories are works of satire and parody.