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Once in a while, my Mom would like to take my sister and me to downtown Chicago for a day about the loop. Usually this meant going to a few stores, a museum of some kind (usually the Art Institute), then meet up with my Dad after he got off of work to go eat at Uno's Pizza or some other restaurant.

I was in my early teen years on the day of this particular visit, and at that time I always had a Walkman on me to play some tape of common rock songs which I probably would just as soon have heard on the radio at some point had I simply tuned to a station.

It was early in the morning, so the first leg of our day's trip commenced with us going to the collection of stores at 900 North Michigan Avenue; we arrived before the stores were fully opened so at this point the most we could do was walk around and peruse whatever window displays the stores had established. The entrance to 900 North immediately presents you with a series of escalators which take you up a floor and has a waterfall cascading down the middle. Having already been there once and because I always liked to go ahead of the pack when I was somewhere familiar (and probably because I liked to take in what small moments of temporary freedom as I could at that point), I raced up the escalator and left my Mom and sister behind. I reached the top and went to study the inside of some toy store while having the Walkman blare music into my ears.

I like to think that it's because I had my Walkman on that I wasn't paying attention to things going on around me. While peering into the store, a man suddenly came to my side. He was an older man of probably 50 or 60, wore glasses, a fedora, and a long light gray overcoat. I'm pretty sure he had common business attire on otherwise but I can't specifically recall anything else now. I mostly remember him looking like a usual office-worker type of person, as opposed to a vagrant or something else. He tapped me on the shoulder, perhaps with a bit of force as to turn my body towards him - he didn't grab me - and he got my attention. He looked at me with a smile and told me these exact words:

"If it walks like a jag-off, and talks like a jag-off, it's probably a jag-off!"

He then let out a peal of laughter and walked away, proceeding to exit the building. I stood prostrate and watched him leave. On the way to the escalator, he walked past my Mom and my sister as they finally arrived to the floor and saw me standing there. My Mom asked me what I was looking at and I told her what had just happened. The three of us stared with some perplexity towards the escalator for a moment before we proceeded to go about the rest of the day as originally planned.

Was that guy a jag-off? Did he just encounter a jag-off? Was he implying that I was a jag-off? I have no idea. What probably most makes the incident stand out in my mind is that he used the specific word "jag-off"; not "homo", not "faggot", not "queer", but "jag-off". I didn't get it then and I likely never will.