ABOUT NEW YORK; Street Fashion, Stress Or Maybe Self-Mockery (Published 1992) (2024)

ON the M train in Brooklyn last week the Old Guy stared at a young man who was unselfconsciously sucking on a pacifier while nodding in hip-hop rhythm to sounds from his Walkman. When the youth, who was old enough to shave, noticed the Old Guy looking at him, he smiled back but did not remove the nipple. Two days later the Old Guy saw a young mother pushing a stroller down 92d Street at Broadway. Her child had a pacifier in her mouth and so did the mother.

The Old Guy didn't get it. He realized, of course, that the pacifiers were yet another affectation churned up by the yeasty mix of street culture and commerce, but young adults with teething rings were a pretty far and frightening cry from baseball caps worn backward and pre-slashed jeans. What did they mean?

Mystified, the Old Guy asked a group of young people hanging out around the Frederick Douglass Houses on Columbus Avenue about the pacifiers and what they signified. "They're nice, they're butter," said one girl, using a slang expression for what in earlier ages had been slick, neat, cool, hip, fly. She had a silver plastic pacifier hanging around her neck. "Everybody has one," said her girlfriend, adding, "you can bring them to school so long as you don't suck on them." She said that in fact she and her friends just wore them.

Nearby at the La Orquieda Candy Store on Amsterdam at 105th Street, the owner showed a number of models. Unlike the baby pacifiers that inspired them, they were not made of soft rubber but of hard plastic in bright colors including chartreuse and fuchsia. The pacifiers, costing a dollar or two, are also sold at rap concerts and on some subway routes peddlers hawk them from car to car.

The pacifiers are not yet, and indeed may never become a genuine, raging, full-fledged, unavoidable fad like reversed peak caps. Indeed, they may end up as an ephemeral blip on the Zeitgeist charts with only the half-life of a Batman T-shirt, but clerks in a number of stores said that as of this week sales were still on the upswing.

A 16-year-old boy named Danny Carballo who had been playing an electronic game in La Orquieda said, "I don't wear them but my girlfriends got them. Some boys have them but mostly it's girls. I don't know why. Maybe they're desperate."

Desperate for what, asked the Old Guy.

"Desperate for everything," said Danny.

His friend, Sandro Avilla, said the first time he noticed an adult with a pacifier was in the film "Boyz N the Hood," where one male character prominently displayed and sucked on one. Danny volunteered that April O'Neil also "had one of them when she was younger." For the Old Guy's benefit he identified April O'Neil as "the reporter who goes around with the Ninja turtles."

The conversations were somewhat helpful but the Old Guy was still mystified. Why would anyone invest time and money to make brightly colored pacifiers to sell to people who had teethed long ago? What did these entrepreneurs know that led them to realize that there was a whole new pacifier market out there ready to be exploited? Could it be, the Old Guy wondered, that there was some kind of sardonic comment involved, as if the pacifiers were a way of saying "treat us like children, we'll act like children." Or, could young adults be using the pacifiers to proclaim nonbelligerency, perhaps signaling something like "Look, I'm pacified, I'm peaceful, I'm harmless."

On reflection these explanations did not seem very convincing. It was time to seek expert opinion.

"I think what we have here is something very basic," said Dr. John M. Ross, a psychoanalyst and teacher at Cornell Medical College who has studied and written about adolescents and young adults. "In a way it's the logical extension of the Walkman, only what is taking place is not just shutting out sounds of life but the direct expulsion of the entire adult world. Probably there is some irony in terms of the subcultures involved. People often express a need and make fun of it as a defense. That's what these young people are doing -- expressing real needs and yearnings for dependency while seemingly making a joke."

Dr. Ross said that in the film "Boyz N the Hood" a tough youth in a sometimes violent, macho culture used the pacifier to reveal himself as "a dependent little baby." This image, he said, has resonance on city streets. Dr. Ross also observed that shocking as the sight of a grown person with a pacifier was, there was something fundamental and even honest about it.

"It's not really ambiguous is it? Just pure oral gratification."

The Old Guy thought it over. Wasn't a pacifier better than smoking cigarettes, drinking whisky, gorging on potato chips? He told himself he should try to be more tolerant.