Tragically Hip

They wore pre-Goth clothes, were confused by hair care products, and hung out in the Gilman coffee shop. They were pretty pleased they weren’t in Iowa, but not completely satisfied about Baltimore. They were the first-born tragically hip. That’s what we called them.

Our little group of middle school geniuses neatly unwrapped and restacked the words of Borges, Barthelme, Auden under the guidance of one of them — some wooly twenty-three-ish guy trying to choose how to spend his stipend. Options were a semester in Paris or a first baby with a newlywed wife.

I always knew I could be cool, despite Bible study and handbell choir. Out past the Beltway, spawning ground for Spiro Agnew, Pam Shriver, and Michael Phelps, we were unwittingly trendy. Dad wore a conical Viet hat and no shirt when he mowed the lawn. The neighbor kids told us how cool that was.

Older brother bought Janis Joplin’s “Pearl” for our first record player. Baby sister did him one better, chose a disk by CCR. “Down on the Corner.” She was eight. Thirty-plus years later, she found out she was a lesbian after he gave up doing gay porn. No ordinary sibling rivalries in this family.

Our parents, unbelievably Republican, used to go see a schoolteacher singing in clubs and coffee houses. That was Roberta Flack, right? Yeah, you wouldn’t know it to look at us pink Euro-mongrel-Americans in hand-me-down clothes. We were way cooler than the Partridge family or that Brady bunch.

Around the corner from the coffee shop was a restroom. A small hole tooled through the partition, just big enough for a fisheye lens that was never installed. I did some writing in there over the years. Just passing the time in the tearoom, waiting. But I never hooked up with any of the grad students. No grody writers trying to look cool. No, siree! That’s not how it’s done. That’s what made them tragically hip.

Bear Kosik as a writer follows being a political scientist, lawyer, and student success specialist. His fiction, poetry, photos, and essays have appeared in forty publications. Bear has won awards for his screenplays, novels, plays, poetry, and song lyrics. Ten of his plays have premiered in NYC.