Now that I wear a pubic hair coat, teenage boys no longer push ahead of me to board the bus. Instead, they feign gentlemanlike conduct while stifling giggles and ogling until they think I'm out of earshot. When I step aboard, white men in trench coats and skinny women struggling with bulky briefcases while teetering on "business pumps" shuffle to the back well before the bus driver's sixteen warnings to do so. They look both frightened and angry when they see my coat coming. They stomp off to the back, the very back, past even the back door, THE BACK.

The bus drops me off in front of the Fullerton el stop, where I catch the Ravenswood train to the Loop, a train sometimes called The Yuppie Roller Coaster. Once, before I bought my pubic hair coat, I was walking through the turnstile under the huffy, espressoed breath of a woman behind me. I stuck in my transit card and held my hand over the slot to catch it on the return while simultaneously pushing through the turnstile. I felt plastic dig into my hand as she tried to insert her card before mine popped out. The turnstile stuck, dug into my stomach, then her briefcase knocked me in the back. I had grabbed an old, cashed-out card, and nearly been disemboweled because of it.

When the train pulls up to the platform, I'm often right in front of the door, which means that I am right in front of everybody rushing the door, terrified that the train is going to leave without them. Now in my pubic hair coat, I become an impromptu conductor. The scaredy-cats do not push or budge. They wait at least six inches behind me, in a single-file line, allowing passengers to get off the train unbothered. No one got left behind before the coat, and no one gets left behind now.