Look at my wide-brimmed black felt hat. Look at my leather boots. Look at my distressed suede vest, and my watch fob and chain. Look at my large yet immaculately groomed beard. By now it must be very clear to you, as you watch me squint menacingly over this glass canning jar filled with piping-hot herbal tea, that I am definitely a bad and scary outlaw from the eighteen-seventies.
"Wouldn't them fancy duds be all caked up with dirt and blood and setch, what with all the ridin' and ropin' and rustlin' and train robbin' and tanglin' with lawmen lookin' to cetch you, dead or alive?" you might ask.
Well, just shut your dad-burned trap and look a little closer—see that? It's a beet-tzatziki stain on my artfully rumpled denim shirt, hard won during a gruelling brunch at Five Leaves. Yep, nearly one whole hour we had to wait for that table, me and my pal Dylan, who is also an outlaw from the eighteen-seventies and who kind of knows Kurt Vile.
And look—just look—at the frayed cuffs of my dungarees. It took many long hours to fray these cuffs in an authentic manner, and many long minutes to look up YouTube videos on how to fray them so very authentically.
You may not know this, but a lot of us outlaws from the eighteen-seventies made our bones at Vassar or Wesleyan, four-year, unstructured liberal-arts trials by fire that have left us hardened to the world. Yessir, us outlaws from the eighteen-seventies have borne witness to student performance art and film screenings with tortured themes and unnecessary nudity that would make your hair turn white, they sure as hellfire would. So you'd do well to keep that in mind next time one of us outlaws from the eighteen-seventies is rude to you while serving you your matcha latte at your local coffee saloon.
Sorry, shop—coffee shop. Ian, my manager, told me to stop calling it a saloon, that flea-bitten, yellow-bellied skunk.
Anyhow, here are some other things you probably don't know about us outlaws from the eighteen-seventies: a lot of us take banjo lessons with a guy who lives illegally inside an empty water tower on top of a building on Elizabeth Street. Many of us outlaws from the eighteen-seventies are partway through pilots about the millennial experience in New York that we think would play well on FX or HBO. And, sadly, most of us outlaws from the eighteen-seventies are still a little embarrassed by how into chillwave we got a few years ago, back before we became outlaws from the eighteen-seventies.
Ian still likes chillwave, that lily-livered, no-good mangy mongrel. Fuck you, Ian.
But I'm sad to say that the sun may be setting on the era of outlaws from the eighteen-seventies. The more we see of this changing world, the harder it is to envision a place in it for us and our rough-and-tumble ways. In fact, just yesterday I saw a guy on the G train wearing overalls—an ironworker from the nineteen-twenties, is my guess—and he looked really, really cool.
And so, by the grace of God, we outlaws from the eighteen-seventies must be movin' along—maybe to, like, a French motorcycle guy from the nineteen-sixties.
Oui.
