Who They Imagine I Am

Short of stature, small in talent, reserved and reticent, over-dressed in blazer and black sweater, ambiguously ethnic and generally without flourish or flair, I somehow have a strange way of causing others to admire and imitate my habits. A barback asked after my brand of white v-neck, and the next week turned up in Polo, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was because I have no money that I buy discount three-packs to get by for the summer—they go easily with my one threadbare blazer. The German PhD students I sometimes play pool with, who I call the Germans, have taken to ordering my drink, which they call “the Copperman,” and I gather that they don’t understand that I drink Monolopowa and soda with a lime because the potato vodka is the best I can afford, cheap here by some accident of tariff or supply, not because there is some magic in the drink—it is simple and clean and tastes like citrus, and it isn’t sweet, but they would do better to buy microbrew or any of a dozen better drinks than the one I fall back on to keep from drinking myself broke. The old, bright, solitary machinist who once was a regular at the bar I went to when I was a graduate student regularly writes me cryptic Facebook messages at late hours, asking me odd questions about William Blake and punctuation and the inevitability of despair. The Contractor I often hang out with at the bars, loudspoken and brazenly skirtchasing, for some bizarre reason asked after the make and material of my one scarf, as if there was anything stylish in burgundy and cotton blend, and as he makes a lot of money and buys only designer I cannot really conceive of what it is he seeks to know. The best bar pool player in town insisted I was his first choice in forming a pool league team, and that too makes no sense: he is far, far better than I am, both accurate and possessing of cue control, while I dally with a little English and play best the less hard I try. All of them seem to think that I possess some quality they wish to acquire by proximity or imitation. And though I am more self-aware than Singer, the mute of Carson McCuller’s great novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” whose attentive silence was construed as comprehension of and compassion concerning the secret longing of others, I have the sense that my own odd accommodations to this town I don’t belong in has caused some similar misconceptions.

People mistake my constant standing as a sign of vigor and energy, not understanding that sitting for more than an hour like a normal person makes my back hurt. They mistake my solitary habits in this town my close friends have all moved from for self-possession, a fundamentally insular confidence they wish to acquire, when in fact I am mostly lonely, and encounter those people out in public venues I have come to in order to be near to others. They mistake my reluctance to try to take home young girls from the bar for decency and honor, not understanding that I am as lustful as the next fellow, but stay away from hot and 21 in the spirit of self-preservation: experience has taught me that I will apparently forego all sense for a beautiful woman, and surely I don’t need to deal with such immaturity all over again. They mistake my general kindness for some larger virtue I surely do not possess at all—I have my weaknesses, and god knows, my regrets. I have my shameful secrets, no worse than those that all of us harbor, but surely no better. Yet despite the truth, it seems that others require me to possess some ineffable merit, to be inhumanely excellent, and that expectation has become a burden also: more people I may finally disappoint. I do not want to be the end of their faith anymore than I want to be the repository of their hopes and secret longings, but I fear I am both—for they seek me out, too, to reveal what they want and need, and because it is my nature to find the flat bottom of narrative, so it is that I know that the contractor takes home the young girls with the platinum hair and fake breasts because his heart was broken by a woman he made a house for, and so now he looks for sex where there is no risk of falling in love. I know that the barback was cheated on by his last girlfriend, and that now he lacks the courage to really go after the women he wants, so that he spends his late nights perusing the internet’s endless queue of porn until he passes out and wakes feeling sad and ashamed. I know that one German is secretly OCD and will not come to the bar on weekends when he might actually meet a woman because the bar does not have a bathroom that locks and he cannot piss when anyone else is in the room, and so he has gone a year single. I know that the other German is secretly a little in love with a friend who has a boyfriend, that once years ago they kissed and he is filled with guilt and lust every time he sees the girl and her boyfriend, just as he is filled with guilt and dread every time the young girl he dated in Germany texts him about their love, which is not love but devotion, which he knows is unreciprocal but allows to persist because it is comforting to think that there is at least one person in the world who holds him dear. I know that the pool player has never really thrown off his origins in trailer park and small stature, at the bottom of it finally still a scared boy who was endlessly backed into corners, and much of what he struggles with is his tendency to self-sabotage, him willfully forcing out more proof of his inadequacy when in fact he is a good man. I know that the machinist, who is in his forties and looks older from hard living, went to Reed for a year, where he took up mastery of pool at the college bar and failed out in a year despite having a genius level IQ, and I know that he falls in love with every female bartender who is kind to him, knowing full well that they are nice only because it is in their interest but unable to keep himself from wishing, from wanting to be touched by a woman, which he hasn’t been in years. What I know is—too much. Or too little, and not enough, to misparaphrase Vallejo.

Bearing all those stories, and having all of these sad men look to me for inspiration and answers, I do not know what to do, and so I say only what I can.

“Have another Copperman,” I tell the Germans. “And go talk to that girl.”

“Buy cashmere, and for fuck’s sake, call a cab,” I tell the Contractor.

“Talk to my friend the ballerina, and be your best self,” I tell the pool player.

“Blake has no answers, but asks the right questions,” I tell the bar regular, knowing that there is little else I can say.

One day soon, I will leave these people, and they will all be alright. That is what I tell myself, anyway--- that they will be fine.

That we all will.