Anything Like You

I fell asleep in a chair at my desk at work yesterday.  Exhausted.  Luckily, almost everyone had gone.  I woke in a haze, went about the offices and got caught up in some long conversations with the few remaining people so that I didn't leave work until seven or so.  Something is wrong with me, I thought.  It is Friday night and here I am.  I had turned down an invitation for drinks earlier.  I was too tired, and worse, did not desire company.

Driving home in the fresh evening air after the rains, I began to revive.  I stopped to buy coffee and whiskey (the two stores are next to one another) and then thought of sushi.  It was too hot to sit out, so I went to the little bar, my back to the room which is O.K. when the place is empty but disconcerting when the room is full.  I thought of people looking at the awkward posture of a solitary man eating alone on a Friday night.  What would you make of such a man, I wonder.  Would you think he was anybody like you?

I steal that line from Richard Ford's "Rock Springs."  It is the story's last line, and it has stuck with me since I first read it.  He is describing a petty criminal whose life has gone bad as he peers into the cars parked in the lot of a Holiday Inn-type hotel looking for one to steal.  What do you do when you are dumb and the Fates outwit you?  It is all there.

And so I dumbly ate my meal, the waiters and waitresses coming by to say hello.  One fellow,  a new waiter, said hello to me by name.  I have only spoken with him once and it was at least a month ago.  I was sitting on the veranda alone on a slow, mid-week night, and he struck up a conversation.  My Moleskine notebook and pen lay on the table as I drank my Ichiban, tired as usual, thinking about why I was tired and alone, as usual.

"Are you a writer," he asked?

I scrunched up my face in that self-effacing way we have when we don't want to deny what we are about to deny.

"Aren't we all," I said like what is supposed to pass for a clever fellow in a bad romantic movie set in an era that you really love.  The embarrassment passed through me like a butter knife immediately.  He turned out to be a really sweet, smart kid, a college student majoring in engineering who would rather be involved in the arts.

"I just saw a movie," he said, "about writers and artists. . . 'Midnight in Paris.'  Did you see it?"

He knew much and was intrigued by Luis Buneul.  He came back several times that slow night to chat.  Still. . . who remembers someone's name?  I am terrible at that, even with people I am supposed to know socially.  Or used to.

Finished with dinner, I went to the grocery store to buy things that I could not remember once I was there, grabbing instead random items that somehow appealed to me.  And home, I struggled to get everything into the house and put away.  Off with the clothes, into the other, and a big, deep scotch to kill anything that was living in the flesh of the deep red tuna.  The couch.  The television.  Darkness.

I woke at nine with the unfinished scotch in hand and managed somehow to go to bed.

It is terrible, no?  This life?

It is better than many.  It is better than most.  And that is what bothers me.  I must do something about it. Not my life only, for I am a baby to complain.  But the people who make me think my life is bad are making other people's even worse.  And if I don't fight them, who will?  Who can?  These opulent "evil-doers" must not be allowed to continue unchallenged, even on my tiny front.

And that is the bucket of snakes in my head right now that makes me unsocial and keeps me alone.  It is not some hatred of people but some guilty love of them.  If I allow them to shut my mouth so that my lot will be both better and worse, what will they do to the fellow who brings the sushi, the one who might become an engineer with a soul?  If I can't remember their names, at least I can shout about them.

I am trying to figure it out as I'm always trying to figure things out in my own befuddled way.

And I wonder.  If you saw me sitting at the bar alone in some awkward posture, would you think that I was anything like you?