And when I go out into the world, it's far less draining to talk to those who don't know me, to those who don't have any expectations. I don't know whether it's latent charisma or, more likely, the relative social isolation of the past couple years that has made people more talkative around me over the past couple of years. To meet the myriad weirdos of the public sphere – there are basically no stakes. As the teenage-boy fantasy movie I saw like 10 times put it, single-serving friends. They can be saintly and sweethearted. They can be absolute cunts. Sometimes they buy me drinks, not necessarily with the intention of boning me down (those that wish to bone me down, I'm leaving out of this brief musing). Sometimes they buy me drinks because it makes me more obligated to listen to their bullshit. Regardless, I walk away from the situation, to be forgotten by the parties in question in a matter of days.
So let this be a compendium of sorts, with the caveat that it's mostly going to be the gloomier of these myriad weirdos – it's much less interesting to talk about the kind, friendly, wholly ordinary people, or the simply boring people, or even the majority of the cruel and ignorant, who are simply cruel and ignorant, and about whom that's about all there is to say. But if David Foster Wallace took the diseased strains of the human ego and turned it into something both bitterly real and empathetic in his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, then these are my hideous interviews with men in briefs.
Case No. 1:
He, in theory, knows at least some of the same people I do, and he seems several years older than me. At first, the chat is pleasant. It seems we share similar taste in wine and movies, and he seems to fall into one of the most universal categories – a good dude. And yet as the evening continues, I can see him starting to crumble a bit, he starts throwing out phrases like “everyone says I'm an asshole,” and I'm not sure if this is typical Northern European self-deprecation, or whether he is admitting the fact that he is an asshole, or an asshole with a persecution complex who finds other people's interpretation of their asshole behavior to be evidence of their interlocutors' stupidity, and I have to wonder whether or not I should vacate the premises. I slowly sidle away, talking to someone else, until he mutters something a little too loudly to not be noticed, a little too softly to not be audible over the soundsystem, before going back to frowning into his old fashioned. What was it that he muttered? Was it that he felt slighted in some way? Did he feel the world's opinion of him was confirmed? Was this more on the evidence pile? And in my bitter moments, am I any fucking better?
Case No. 2:
He's a tourist here, but a regular tourist – we get them a lot in this part of the world, people for whom Thailand is the standard escape. Many are retirees looking to get a bit of sunshine before returning to higher latitudes, many are the standard sex tourists, a remarkably high number are various flavors of queer people from various countries who enjoy being able to publicly show affection without fear of state-sanctioned violence, and some are a bit cagier in their reasoning. This man is one of them. He's in his fifties, with the muscled-running-to-fat look of aging athletes. I should have known he would start making political points with me, to which I responded as I normally do – state my position, point out why I believe what I do, and push back as appropriate. Of course, he was a Tory, which is to be expected, and pivoted to a different subject the minute that a counter-argument was presented and contradicting himself often enough. And of course he talked about how glad he was we could have a “civil discussion,” and more or less sucked his own dick talking about how civil he was being. I would have left earlier, but the edibles were kicking in and it was raining out. But the more he talked, the more he mentioned his boyhood as the son of an English schoolmaster, I started to feel a bit bad. I imagined a childhood of Protestant morals, in which athletic prowess and high test scores as a child and financial success as an adult had long since become stand-ins for any kind of divine grace, in which law and order had substituted for righteous justice. The jowly middle-class product of a childhood of gray meat and caning. I used to have to listen to The Smiths and read Philip Larkin to encounter this sort of personality.
Case No. 3:
He invites me over for a drink, with a very uniquely Israeli sort of enthusiasm, asking me for advice on writing. I try my best to offer a few succinct pointers, but he's not having it, demanding more, and in exchange he promises me he can teach me how to get any girl I want. I hadn't heard that particular line in a while. It turns out he's in the porn industry, and he's more or less exactly how I imagine an Israeli pornographer to be – someone who's 50 and still seems pretty into hookers, molly, and trance music. He is perplexed as to why I cannot recommend a preferred bordelle.
Case No. 4:
He is a small Thai man of indeterminate age – definitely over 30, but could be anywhere between there and 60, although context clues suggest an age around 40. He's been at some event, and is moderately shitfaced, and strikes up a conversation about cocktails with me – I am, as always, happy to discuss my passion for the Angel Face, the Last Word, and all those other concoctions that conjure up lost worlds in my mind, but he's more focused on a perceived exclusivity. Unfortunately, he claims to know my boss – not my actual boss, but one of the top partners. He points out that whenever he goes to New York, he stays with a friend on Park Avenue. “You've got money too, I know” he says with a smile, as if that's true, and as if that's supposed to be a compliment, a recognition that we can look down on the plebs together. It's a reminder that in this part of the world, the elites make no attempts to humanize their image. There's no Bill Gates proudly driving a Subaru, no Mark Zuckerberg handing out grilled cheese sandwiches at Burning Man. There is only the man with tobacco-stained teeth showing off his skrilla (and god help me, I just looked up how to spell “skrilla,” because it occurs to me I've never actually heard that word written down). I politely decline a night of clubbing with him. On a Sunday.
And what sticks out about all of these cases is the way in which they reflect my own particular failures – the misanthrope, the self-righteous grandstander, the nihilistic sensualist, the endless consumer. And that in and of itself could constitute a whole set of other failures – the allure of fatalism, a difficulty to self-forgive, and a dreadful terror at the thought that destiny might be real.
I would say it sounds pompous if I quote Hermann Hesse, but fuck it, let's go: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” – Hermann Hesse, Demian
There but for the grace of god, go I, I think. Maybe you would think you go too.
I try my best to find the wounded heart – the logic that leads these people to where they were, and it's not hard to identify the lines of environment and nation and religion and history, of upbringing and inputs, of the infinitely complex contours of the human mind. And you have to wonder, could they have turned out any different? Could any of us?
A moment of terror that passed the other day: at lunchtime, I see an man of maybe 80 or 85 shuffling down Silom Road with a walker – he looks exhausted, you can almost feel him squinting through his sunglasses against the glaring midday tropical sun. About my height, dressed not too differently from me. And with the same fucking tattoo in the same fucking place.
I move past, my heart racing, I look back, my elderly doppelganger walking away from me, and I look in the mirrored window of an office tower. Exhaustion on my face. The image of the city reflected and distorted behind me.
