The F Word

I think I just got gay-bashed.

Strike that, I definitely just got gay-bashed.

I was coming out of the hospital, happy to be outside after 5 hours of seeing patients, enjoying my $1 mango Icee, when I saw a couple of co-workers coming up the street, promptly threw them a sassy look as I bounded across the cross-walk, and that's when it happened:

"Faggot."

From the towtruck I'd just passed in the cross-walk. Before I knew it, the truck had slithered down the street, leaving my bold assailant faceless.

The good news is that this is the first gay-bashing I've received - in this city or elsewhere - in a good two years. The other good news is that it was a verbal insult and not a brick, or a baseball bat, or a snowball studded with broken glass, or a flaming bag of dog feces.

The bad news is that I've gotten so used to living in this giant insulated bubble of a metropolis that it took a good two seconds for my pillowed brain to even register what had just happened - just long enough for my homophobe to make his anonymous getaway and escape the fiery verbal wrath I surely would have dealt him after first blinding him with my artificially sweetened frozen treat and carefully kicking his towtruck door with the rubber part of my already-scuffed leather dress-up shoes. Or any other number of imagined retaliations with the same likelihood of leaving my imagination as that Janet Jackson "All Night (Don't Stop)" sidewalk dance routine I've been choreographing on my walks home from the subway.

Although my Gwen Stefani "What You Waiting For?" routine did make a small but successful showing during yesterday's brief downpour as I clutched my shoulder bag and leapt over puddles, racing through the rain to make it home in time for my Energize yoga class.

God, maybe I really am a faggot.