ODE TO THE PINK COWBOY HAT

Quinn Carver Johnson

Hendrix College

& in the summer of 1986, “I Wanna Be a Cowboy” was No. 12 on the charts

& the music video featured a man, a best of the bad type, buck naked except his hat, smoking a blunt in the bath

& MTV hated the video— they said it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll— but the song was a smash hit so they had no choice

& that’s how it found me two decades later: a teenager discovering the last remnants of VHS tapes in their room

as the cartoon thought bubble begins to expand, learning that a fantasy looks like a naked cowboy in his bathtub

& that was the summer of 2006 but in the summer of 1986 Boys Don’t Cry released their only major hit song

& during that same summer, & that summer only, Bob Orton wore a pink hat when he came to the ring alongside the adorable one or when visiting Adrian Adonis

in the Flower Shop

& it’s telling that Lemmy Kilmister plays a spaghetti western cowboy in the video for “I Wanna Be a Cowboy” & I watched those old westerns in the boxes of VHS tapes

& it’s telling that in those films the hero wears the white hat, rides into town on a white stallion to gun down the villain beneath the midnight black brim

& I don’t need to tell you what it means that “Cowboy” Bob Orton came to the ring in a pink hat, paired with Adonis’s lace & eye shadow

& I don’t need to tell you who the villain of the story was or who was gunned down when Rodd Piper decided that a town wasn’t big enough for two men

but what I need to tell you is I can make a town or a home big enough for two men

& if you’re going to be a cowboy then I wanna be a cowboy, too & I want to wear the pink hat.