Fictitious Idiots
Everyone is entertained but then they go home gnawing on their thumbs.
Summer in some city. The bar was open to the street and the heat came in along with the flies. The table needed a wipe but nobody bothered. The beer was good and cold and the men were already talking things up before the sun had properly gone down. I’m just a number these days. An aged and greyed out form. I’m across the room. They talked loudly and with certainty about things they had most likely never done. Maybe just a game. An illusion. A power play. Words filling the gaps in time. A few beers make the stories flow easy. I can tell what’s going down.
There are many such men in the world. They are brave in the telling. They have fought with boxers that were never in the ring and caught fish that were never in the river. They have written books that no one has read and fought in battles that were fought by other men. They have loved and lost, but not lost much. They are not bad men, mostly. They are only foolish but they do not know it. You can see them and hear them every day. The first sentence from their lips usually gives them away. A humble sounding brag.
They won’t ask you any questions. They’re afraid that you might just top them with you’re easily located truth. You’re too quitely spoken. You possess a stillness. They can’t quite read your eyes because they refuse to meet them. Missing out on the people skills. No desire or ability to read the room. So they throw in every little thing that they can. It’s over your way like a stray missile. The game of the low man. Not everyone is equipped to be a master of the human condition.
They speak about the things they say happened to them. Wonderful and odd.
But none of them have done very much so you stay entertained by you’re own quiet bluff. You listen to them and you let them talk. It is good practice for a listener. Material might come your way. They need to hold the floor. Sit back but lean forward. As if you’re a believer.
One man says he once sailed through a storm that would have broken a battleship in half. He says the mast was gone and the sail torn like some T-shirt in a dog fight. The coastguard talked him home. He made it. Yet the boat sits tied up at the harbour and it has never been farther than the two bridges. He couldn’t follow the instructions on a pizza box.
Another man says he understands war and conflict because he has read many books about them. He’s watched movies and documentaries too. He speaks of courage and of fear and of command. Spur of the moment decision making. He’s excited by the danger. He’s an “expert”. But he has never heard that first volley come in overhead or seen the way a man looks when he knows he will not get up again.
They speak well and they speak often. They tell you how they “really told” people or called them out. They could be lawyers in another life. They say they welcome debate. They think that minds can be changed, but they can’t change their own. The bar room grows full of their voices and the truth grows thin in the air. They might have a fully formed theory but it never quite arrives. Everyone is entertained but then they go home gnawing on their thumbs.
I listen to these men because they are useful. They puff out their chests. They fake authority and depth. They are the raw material of stories. You take the way they boast and the way they sit and remember. That queer way they look at a woman when they think she is watching. How they high five and back slap. The things they pretend to like. I judge but I don’t condemn. I capture. You take their vanity and their foolishness and you put it on the page. Down there on the page. In the early morning ink.
Then they become real. A reality that throws a bucket of ice water over them.
That is the strange part of it. In life they are shadows made of talk. On paper they can become something else. Pencil thin but characters. Blind men looking for the light switch. Fictitious idiots that might carry a story for you. Concentrate and they’ll give you the next line.
The trick is to listen long enough to know the value of those stray converstions, set within the moments of accidental literary inspiration, that are just floating out there.