One morning I wore my pubic hair coat to a local coffeehouse. Its one good pocket was filled with change and I had planned on drinking coffee all day. After ordering my first cup, I wanted to reward the barrista who was nice, had no attitude, and didn't announce my drink in a loud voice he loved to hear himself use. I pulled out a handful of coins, paid him, and dropped the rest into the funky, misshapen mug already holding a few greenbacks. But along with the coins came some sprinkles, a tuft really, of black coat hair. Black, pubic, coat hair. It fell to the side of the mug, behind a thick section of glass, which made it look like a gigantic writhing wad.

People didn't know what to make of it. They handed over bills and took their change clumsily, jamming it into their pockets while trying not to look. Coins fell to the floor, abandoned by customers stumbling toward the end of the line, seemingly memorizing the steps required to make their drinks, as though absentmindedly scheming to purchase their own damn espresso machines and start making it for themselves. They weren't sickos or pornographers. "Awww, for chrissakes!" a man said, turning away. The customers kept their eyes on the floor when they walked out, not even noticing the damp, fuzzy coat hanging over the chair next to me.

In my apartment building, the old ladies who once screeched at me, the scowling youngster who "can't even crush cardboard boxes properly," have warmed up to me. They remember this coat. It was the 1940s: first marriages, beautiful children, new cars. New coats.

Young women want nothing to do with the coat, and form protective circles around their boyfriends. I was recently at a party, trying to join the conversations of people I didn't know, when I heard a group of men and women discussing a movie I had seen earlier that week, a movie about sex. I thought I would break the ice by mentioning my favorite scene, where a couple had sex on a blanket in the driveway in the middle of an afternoon pool party, encircled by a group of friends who, as a newspaper photo caption would say, looked on. I laughed as I recalled it. The men laughed, too. The women did not. Everyone looked at my coat.