Imma Check Dat Shit Out

Apr 22, 2010

Not that you'd be able to tell from a little image posted above, but I bought a new camera the other day. After running a few errands, I took a stroll to play around with it.

While focusing on some graffiti outside a Williamsburg boutique, a young guy, about 25 or so, in the middle of loading up a work van with tools and supplies, stopped what he was doing and came over to watch me. He had on a pair of heavy denim work pants slung low around his waist, over which he wore an oversized red T-shirt with something silkscreened on it in white ink -- perhaps the logo of the company he was working for, though I didn't get a good look. A face mask dangled around his neck. Judging from how impossibly clean everything was, he must've been just starting his workday. "Whatchoo takin' a pitchur of?" he asked.

"That thing," I said, pointing to a cartoonish robot-like figure graffitied on the wall, across which someone had written the words "butt sex."

"Heh, yeah, that's some funny shit, right?" the guy said. "Butt sex. It's funny some of the shit you see."

'Yeah."

"How much one of dem things cost?"

"What, a camera?"

"Yeh."

"How much do you want to spend?"

"One like that, though, how much one a dem things cost?"

I assumed by "one like that," he meant an SLR rather than a point and shoot, but I wasn't sure what to tell him. It was like asking how much a car costs. You can spend five hundred dollars on a used clunker, or a million bucks on a Ferrari Enzo. Of course, if you don't even have your driver's license yet, it doesn't make much sense to spend a lot of money on a car, especially for a guy who works for his money. "About four or five hundred bucks on the cheap end," I said.

"LIke that?" he said.

"Maybe not this one exactly," I said, "But similar."

"How much was dat?"

"This one?" I said, holding my brand new camera just a little bit tighter. "This camera in particular?"

"Yeah, yeah, dat one."

I didn't want to tell him, but than again, I didn't want his imagination to run wild thinking I was dangling a ten thousand dollar jewel around my neck. "Somewhere in the middle," I said.

"Where d'you get dem tings?"

"Cameras? I don't know, a million places."

"Where'd you get dat one?"

"B&H in Manhattan. They have everything. A bunch on display, too, so you can play with them a little."

"Okay, Imma check dat out. How much you say dat one was?"

"I didn't."

"Haha, okay, thanks, man. B&H, imma check dat shit out."