There’s really no answer but “Fine.” I mean, there is, but I’m guessing she won’t want to hear it. Or would she?
Her: So how was your trip in?
You: Well, I was originally going to fly, but then this tiger offered to carry me very gently in her mouth. I said OK, but you know what? She wasn’t gentle at all. One of her teeth pierced my small intestine, so now, on top of everything else, I have to shit in a bag every day for the rest of my life!
Her: Well, that is just awesome. We’re all so glad you made it.
After the desk clerk hands you your key, the bellman will grab your suitcase and ask, “So where are you coming in from today?” Like everyone else at the hotel, he doesn’t really listen to your answer. His words are just a hook to hang a tip on. You could say you’re from a town ten miles down the road or from another dimension. Either way, you get the same response: “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”
I object to these questions, not because they’re personal but because they’re not. “Instead of asking how my trip in was, why not ask…I don’t know…if I have a godson?” I said to a desk clerk not long ago.
She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “All right, do you have a godson?”
“I do,” I said. “He’s eight years old and is named Tommy. How about you? Do you have any godchildren?”
“No,” the woman told me. “I have not had that pleasure.”
She smiled like someone who’d learned to do so in a book, and I realized that if I wanted to make contact I needed to dig a little deeper. “He has cancer,” I said.
The desk clerk put her hand over her heart. “Oh, poor thing!”
“That’s OK,” I sighed. “I’m sure that within a year or two someone else will ask me to be a godfather.”
It wasn’t true that Tommy had cancer. I just wanted to get a rise out of her, to feel some kind of pulse. I knew that the young woman had a life. She’d gone to school somewhere. She had friends. I didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.” I think of it as a switch that turns someone from a profession to a person, and it works both ways. “I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.
Go to a restaurant anywhere in the United States, and three minutes after your food is delivered, your server will return to the table, asking, “How’s that Southeastern Lard Pocket?” Once, in Kansas City, this was amended to “How’s that Southeastern Lard Pocket tasting for you?” As if the lard pocket had the tongue instead of me.
“Mmmm,” I said, my mouth full the way it always is when the server returns.
“Awesome,” I was told. “I hope you’re saving some room for dessert.” This, with the chuckle that means “Wouldn’t it be funny if what I just said was funny?”
The following morning you’ll wander to the hotel breakfast room and tell the hostess that there is only one in your party. She’ll pick up a menu and lead you to your table, asking, “And how is your day going so far?”
“You mean the last twelve minutes?” you’ll ask. “OK, I guess.”
And she’ll say, “Awesome.”
If you’ve come directly downstairs, this might be the first time since last night that you’ve heard this word. That doesn’t make it refreshing. Rather, it’s like being in Alaska and getting bitten by your first blackfly of the day. I am going to be bleeding by sunset, you’ll think.
More often than not, your breakfast room will have a TV in it, tuned to a twenty-four-hour cable-news network. Sometimes you’ll see two TVs or more. At a place I stayed at in Kentucky one year, there were eight. After I ordered, the waitress went around with her remote and activated each one, making me think of a lamplighter, if lamps were instruments of torture rather than things that make it easier for you to see how old and tired-looking you’ve gotten. “People like it,” she said when I asked if it was really necessary at six o’clock in the morning.
You hear this a lot in America, especially when you’re complaining about televisions, or loud music, or, more common still, television and loud music together in the same room. “People like it.”
“Yes,” I always want to say, “but they’re the wrong people.”
On leaving your hotel, you’ll likely be offered a bottle of water, and urgently, by the fellow who just brought your car around. “You’ll need this for your trip to the airport.”
“I’m actually not walking there,” I always say. “This car is taking me, and I should arrive in no time.”
Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary? I think as I stand behind them with an aspirin dissolving in my mouth, fuming.
Should you wander into a shop during your visit to the United States, you can expect a clerk to ask, “So what are we up to today?” “We,” as if the two of you had made plans you forgot about.
“Oh,” I usually say, already sorry I walked in, “I’m just looking around.”
“Awesome.”
If you purchase something, you’ll be asked at the register what you’re going to do with the rest of your afternoon.
“Umm, I don’t know. Buy more shit?”
My friend Ronnie manages a shoe store, so is fluent in this kind of talk. When we’re out together, she takes over, and effortlessly, while I look on, amazed. “Doing about as well as can be expected,” she says when asked about her health by someone who could not possibly give a fuck. Because she lives in California, Ronnie is on the front lines.
“Did you catch that?” she whispered one afternoon in San Francisco. “That salesman just said, ‘Welcome in.’”
“So?” I asked.
“That’s the latest thing,” she told me. “I’m hearing it everywhere now.”
“Should we add it to the list?”
“Definitely.”
“The list” is a growing collection of words and phrases we’d outlaw if given the power to do so. It includes “awesome,” of course, and “It is what it is,” which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see.
“Isn’t that the state motto of South Dakota?” I said the second or third time I heard it.
Some of my additions to the list were things that Ronnie wasn’t familiar with. “We’re all going to the same place,” for instance. This is what novice fliers in group five say when they get caught trying to board with group two. Sure, we’re all headed to St. Louis. The difference is that some people (me) are going to find room in the overhead bins and others (you) are not.
These same passengers can be counted on to catch my eye and moan, “Hurry up and wait,” when traffic backs up on the Jetway.
I cock my head and look at them with an expression that translates to Why is stuff coming from that hole in your face?
Another word I’ve added to “the list” is “conversation,” as in “We need to have a national conversation about_________.” This is employed by the left to mean “You need to listen to me use the word ‘diversity’ for an hour.” The right employs obnoxious terms as well—“libtard,” “snowflake,” etc.—but because they can be applied to me personally it seems babyish to ban them.
I’ve outlawed “meds,” “bestie,” “bucket list,” “dysfunctional,” “expat,” “cab-sav,” and the verb “do” when used in a restaurant, as in “I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.”
“Ugh,” Ronnie agrees. “Do!—that’s the worst.”
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“My new thing,” I told her, “is to look at the menu and say, ‘I’d like to purchase the veal chop.’”
A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. “My bad,” for example, and “I’ve got your back” and “You go, girlfriend.” They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.
The weak link of my American English for Business Travelers program is the “business” part. It used to be that I could eavesdrop on a conversation and learn that the two men at the next table were doctors, or that one was a massage therapist and the other sold life insurance for cats. Now, though, I have no idea what anyone does, especially if the people I’m listening in on are under forty. I hear the words “integration” and “platform” a lot, but not in any recognizable context.
Theirs are the offices, I imagine, where Kayson rides his scooter down the concrete hallway, passing a warren of workspaces that resemble cages. And no one’s shirt is tucked in. That’s one phrase that won’t be in my English book: “Nice suit.” Twenty years from now they probably won’t be making them anymore. Dressing up will mean wearing the sweatpants without paint on them to your father’s funeral.
My American English for Business Travelers will teach you to recognize the most often repeated words and phrases but hopefully leave room for wonder. I’m constantly surprised and delighted by some of the things I hear while traveling across the United States. I’m thinking of a fellow bus passenger who turned to me as our driver barely missed a pedestrian, saying, “See, he don’t love life.” Of a Memphis panhandler who called as I passed, “Hey, man, why don’t you buy me a Co-Cola?” Of the newsstand cashier who did not suggest I buy a bottle of water but, rather, looked at the price of my Sunday Times and said, “That’s five dollars, baby. You OK widdat?” Or of the pilot who somberly said as he turned off the seat belt sign at the end of a flight, “All rise.”
Now that’s what I’m talking about.
Calypso
The deal with America is that it’s always something. I go twice a year and arrive each time on the heels of a major news story: SARS, anthrax, H1N1. Bedbugs! In the fall of 2014 the story was Ebola, not the thousands who had died of it in Africa but the single person who had it in Dallas. Because there are TVs everywhere one goes—restaurants; hotel lobbies; airports, even, I discovered; doctors’ waiting rooms—and because they’re all tuned to one cable-news network or other, the coverage was inescapable. Every angle was explored, then subsequently beaten to death. When the patient, whose name was Thomas Duncan, died, you’d think he’d taken half the country down with him. A teacher in Maine was sent home because she’d flown to Dallas, not to the hospital where the man had been cared for but just to the city. Schools closed. Hysterical parents were interviewed. “Ebola is here,” we were told by the media, “and it’s coming to get you.”
I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them. What bugged me, I realized, was their flagrant regard for their own lives. It seemed not just overcautious but downright conceited. I mean, why should they live?
“Stay safe,” a Starbucks employee said to me one morning. I was in a hurry to get to my gate, so didn’t stop to ask, “Safe from what?”
I was in the United States for a lecture tour: forty-five cities in forty-seven days. “My God!” people say when they look at my schedule. But it isn’t like real work. The travel can occasionally be taxing, but anyone can turn pages and read out loud. What takes time are the postshow book signings—my fault because I talk too much. “What kind of a name is Draven?” I asked one evening, squinting at the Post-it Note attached to the title page.
“I don’t know exactly,” the woman on the other side of the table said. “He’s a friend of my brother.”
I looked at the name again. “Draven. It sounds like…the past-past tense of ‘drove.’”
In most of the cities on my tour I didn’t know anyone, but here and there I caught up with people. In Winston-Salem it was my sister Lisa. A week later in Omaha I saw my old friend Janet and her twenty-five-year-old son, Jimmy, who is tall and thin and was sporting a long rust-colored beard. Back when we met in the late 1980s, Janet was highlighting the grain in rectangular sheets of plywood. That was her artwork. Now she just leaves the rectangles as they are and has founded something called the Wood Interpretation Society. “Jimmy,” she said, standing in the living room that doubles as her studio, “fetch me my stick.”
Her son handed her a length of bamboo, and she used it to point to her most recent piece. “All right, can you see the snowman?”
I saw nothing, so she gestured to two knots. “His eyes. You can’t see his eyes?”
“Well, OK,” I said. “Sure…a little.”
“And now can you see that he’s talking to an owl?”
“Owls are a dime a dozen in woodgrain,” Jimmy explained.
“That’s true,” his mother said, and she moved on to her next piece of plywood, in which a turtle considered a mountain. “And this is all just found!” she told me. “I honestly haven’t altered a thing!”
Later, over coffee, we got onto the subject of elderly parents. Janet’s mother is eighty-nine and is in excellent physical and mental health. “Unlike my friend Phil’s mother,” she said. “This was a woman who never missed a church service, who was an absolute pillar of her community. Then she got dementia and became a different person.” She poured me more coffee. “The last time Phil saw her, she leaned over in her wheelchair and at the top of her voice said, ‘Hitler wants my pussy.’”
Jimmy stroked his biblike beard. “They say he was quite the ladies’ man.”
“Who even knew that word was in her vocabulary?” Janet asked. “And how had Hitler told her? He’d been dead for fifty years by that point.”
Being with Janet reminded me of how lucky I am. At ninety-two, my father is in great shape. And should that suddenly change for any reason, he probably won’t linger all that long. I’d like to think I inherited his constitution, but in fact I’m more like my mother. Thus I took it seriously when, at the postshow book signing that night in Omaha, a fellow with a noticeable divot in his face pointed to a dark spot beside my left eye, saying, “I’m no doctor, but am ninety percent sure you have skin cancer.”
Four days later I saw a dermatologist in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The spot, he said, was nothing to worry about. Then he used the word “cancer,” albeit with a “pre-” in front of it—“a little precancerous keratosis.” He hit it with some liquid nitrogen, and by the time I left his office it looked like I had a pencil eraser stuck to my face. The following day on the plane, the eraser burst and precancer juice ran like a fat tear down my cheek.
That was the first of several procedures I wound up having over the course of my tour. Funny, but for years I avoided going to any kind of doctor. If it was an emergency, I could be talked into it, but anything else, especially anything preventative, was out of the question. Then my father forced me to get a colonoscopy, and a whole new world opened up. The paperwork is a drag, of course, so many forms that by the time you’re in the examining room you have to add “carpal tunnel” to your already long list of complaints. As far as the doctors themselves go, though, I’ve had a pretty good run. In the summer of 2014, while on vacation at my family’s beach house on the coast of North Carolina, and again at the insistence of my father, I went in for a physical. “All right, then,” the GP said, after taking my blood pressure and looking into my ears, “what do you say you stand up now and I’ll do your front and back.”
It was such a classy, understated way to say, “After grabbing your balls I’d like to stick my finger up your ass.”
The dermatologist was fun to talk to, as was a nurse who gave me a flu shot while I was passing through O’Hare. The only exception I’ve had so far is a surgeon I saw on the c
oast of North Carolina a few days after having my physical. Six years earlier, I had noticed a lump on my right side, just at the base of my rib cage. It was, I later learned, a lipoma, meaning a harmless fatty tumor. It continued to grow for the next several months until it was the size and feel of an unshelled hard-boiled egg. I could have lived with it for the rest of my life, but after spending some time along the canals not far from our beach house, I got a better idea. The surgeon I met with didn’t have much in the way of a personality. That’s not to say he was rude, just perfunctory. He took an ultrasound of my fatty tumor and said that he could remove it the following week.
“Terrific,” I said, “because I want to feed it to a snapping turtle.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not just any snapping turtle,” I continued, as if that was what had given him pause. “There’s one very specific turtle I’m planning to feed it to. He has a big growth on his head.”
“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body,” the surgeon said.
“But it’s my tumor,” I reminded him. “I made it.”
“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body.”
“Well, could I maybe have half to feed to this turtle?”
“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body.”
I left with my tumor intact, thinking, Honestly. What has this country come to?
On tour sometimes, just before the question-and-answer part of the evening, I’ll stand at the podium and run my mouth for a while. I told the story about the tumor onstage in El Paso, Texas, and afterward a woman approached my signing table, saying, “I’ll cut that out of you tonight if you like. And I’ll let you keep it.”