My father taught me the finer points of people watching when I was in my late pre-teen years, those strange years from age 10 to 12 where young boys are truly not yet men but nevertheless we start showing signs of what we will eventually become. For me, I was preternaturally aware, too conscious to be really a boy but still naive and blissfully unaware of the dominant, painful superabundance of sexuality. I could understand myself and could see the moral nature of others but too much was still hidden, and in many ways I’m still that young man. Despite being aware of the physical cravings of being human, I’m still caught in that unformed body but superaware mind that made me such a perfect student for my father as we travelled around Maine and the east coast.
The first time I really remember him teaching me the bright colorful arts of people watching, we were on our way back from a business meeting that he brought me on for some reason down east, I think in Rockland or Rockport – two separate towns, but Rockland has the ferry terminal and the fish processing plant and thus is a bit working class, or was thirty five years ago; Rockport just had lovely scenery and old farmhouses and thus was probably a bit more stuck up and definitely more Protestant; my guess is Rockport veered Trump, while Rockland was solidly Hilary. Draw your own conclusions, but I don’t remember lingering in either place. My father had his meeting, I read a book – probably a few books – in a poorly furnished waiting room, and then we headed back towards Portland and home. On the way, though, we stopped at Moody’s, a popular diner about an hour and a half from Portland, and had a late supper. I don’t remember what we had for the meal proper but over the pie, my dad noticed a table a few booths down which consisted of two local police officers and a Maine state trooper, the trooper being obvious from his large wide straight brimmed trooper hat, his three-inch fascist black patent leather belt, and the diagonal leather stripe over his shoulder.
“I wonder what they’re talking about,” he said. And Dad quickly began spinning a tale about what they were likely talking about – something about pulling over drunk drivers and speeding moms, something benign and silly and pointless. I started giggling and adding my own thoughts over the pie – I know I had blueberry, I always had blueberry pie at Moody’s – and after a few minutes the trooper came over, said hello to each of us, and let me wear his hat. It was far too large for me but it didn’t matter; I was in heaven. Maine state troopers were the closest things to the archangels that I would encounter in my youth, and wearing one’s hat was akin to Gabriel letting you blow his horn.
On subsequent trips – including one very fun trip to Washington DC for a convention – my father would take me to old dark wooded restaurants, and truck stops, and airport lounges, and hotel lobbies, and everywhere he’d point at some person, or couple, or group of people, and say “what do you think they are talking about” or “why do you think they are here” or something similar. As I got used to the drill, I got better at thinking about what people might be actually there for – not predictively, of course, but creatively, coming up with better and more interesting reasons for why, say, an older man and a younger woman were bickering at a table across the aisle, or why a man looked so angry while he was writing in a journal, or why a family was so studiously disinterested in one another. My father always had better stories – he still does – but it wasn’t about coming up with something better than him: it was about practicing the art of inhabiting another person’s body and situation, in a place of transit, in a place that all of us would soon, and happily, abandon.
Tonight I was killing time at a restaurant across the street from Sea-Tac Airport, having spent a lovely weekend with my son and having worked all day on phone and laptop for the job in Texas. I’ll increasingly just work on phone and laptop: the Texas people have acknowledged that I have no desire to live in south Texas, at all, and have granted me permission – more than that – to work from Maine, so phone and laptop will increasingly be my office. The restaurant is a bit of a throwback to the early 70s, with high-backed leather swivel chairs around the counter and deep mahogany booths in an otherwise nondescript ten story office block housing mostly the small local offices of foreign flag carriers and somewhat dodgy import-export specialty firms. I had a salad and the Hangtown Fry, a West Coast classic consisting of oysters, bacon, onions, and eggs, whipped into a scramble, with toast. I nursed a drink and next to me sat a couple in their late 20s, she was maybe a bit younger.
He was dressed, I guess in his best, in a clean and recently severely folded black T-shirt advertising some sort of music festival. He was pale, with reddish hair, the type of guy who doesn’t have freckles but can only burn, not tan, and he was overweight in the pudgy way of videogame afficiandos, pudgy not from overeating but from eating normally and not moving enough. He ordered a Sprite. He found it difficult to smile or show emotion. I kept thinking “gamer” but waited.
She was a bit overweight but nonetheless very attractive, with dark hair tightly braided and then wrapped up into a kind of bunnish do, wearing a lacy black blouse that was a kind of ideal mix of transparent and opaque, in that it wasn’t see-through at all, but the laciness of it made you imagine it maybe was, and that added to the allure of her stark white but almond-shaped eyes. She ordered tap water. Then the guy said they’d have a calamari starter and she looked at him oddly, and he said she’d like it. Then he ordered bacon and eggs, eggs medium, and she ordered the buttermilk chicken salad. The waiter looked at them for a second, first him, then her, and thanked them and went to put in the order.
I looked more closely at the guy as the two of them settled into awkwardly looking at their place settings, not talking at all. He had a lousy beard – what the hell has happened to this country that beards now seem de rigueur – and I now noticed the tattoos on his arms, Gothic lettering that I couldn’t decipher wrapped around some kind of Celtic cross or sword-like thing, lacing up his arm until disappearing under his sleeve. Then I looked at her, noticed how she didn’t really want to be there but she kept flashing a smile, kept flashing interest in him to him, kept reassuring him with her glance and her demeanor and her body that she wanted to be there, was enjoying being with him, even though it was clearly an act. Only someone who wanted to be deceived, who needed to believe in the act, would fall for it, and it wasn’t entirely clear he wanted to be deceived but then he wasn’t checking his phone, he was nervous and fumbling, he was trying to figure out what to do before the food came.
The waiter came with a refill of water for her and the guy ordered another Sprite, and the waiter, sensing the awkwardness, told both of them that the calamari would be out in less than a minute. He caught my eye and asked if I needed anything and I made something up – “could I get some more cocktail sauce” – and I think the waiter knew I was just making time. All of us were uneasy.
I shouldn’t say that.
The woman was uneasy; as a black woman with a pale white, possible ex-convict white guy, clearly either (charitably) on a first Tinder date or more likely on not so much a date as the first part of transactional evening, she wasn’t sure what was to come and she was trying to find her way. The man was uneasy; he had probably “ordered” a woman on the website or via the back page of a free newspaper and he wasn’t suave about it, this was either new to him or he was aware of the feebleness of being in this situation, and he was struggling. The waiter, clearly not unaccustomed to dealing with these situations in the only decent restaurant on the cheap hotel strip across the street from a large airport, didn’t want to dwell on the situation and wanted it over quickly. I wasn’t sure what my role was in this little drama and while, as a student of my father’s, was interested in the human drama, was also slightly too involved for comfort.
But the core relationship – the pale pudgy man and the buxom young woman – was comfortable with itself. Whatever it was – first date, transactional, future slasher film fodder, or just heartbreakingly awkward time kill – was appropriate in and of itself. It was unfolding on its own terms, and somehow – despite crossed racial boundaries and the amazing inability of either person to maintain more than four sentences of conversation at a stretch over the course of an hour – it was all it needed to be.
I came up with a dozen different potential narrative, potential answers to Dad’s old questions. But much stranger, much more challenging, was to watch the non-conversation that emerged. They had their calamari – she had never had calamari before but seemed to enjoy it, and both were stymied when they asked the waiter what the white sauce was and he said “it’s aoili”, which required explanation and even after that, the idea of a garlicky mayonnaise didn’t quite register. Then the meals came quickly and they ate in silence, but a couple of times looked at one another and smiled and made those eye gestures indicating “this is pretty good” or “gee, this is better than I expected”. He ordered more Sprite, she stuck to ice water.
I ate my Hangtown fry and read the news on my phone until, about ten minutes after I finished the eggs, I realized one of the oysters was, er, not good. I removed myself to the gents in short order and when I emerged again, ten minutes later, quite a bit paler, they were gone.
I don’t imagine they registered me, but I wonder what they would have said about the guy sitting next to them, reading, checking his phone, eating an omlette and then hurrying off. Single diners don’t make for stories that are quite as interesting, I’ve found, but then again, who could come up with the tale that got me there, across the street from the airport, on a rainy and dark Monday night? Why do you think I was there?