To celebrate our first day of our annual ski trip, my buddies
and I decided to treat ourselves to dinner at an upscale restaurant in part of
the resort’s lodge complex. It felt like a great way to cap off a spectacular
day on the slopes with a group that included a couple of my best friends: a
tall, swarthy intellectual, and a less-tall (yet more-tall than me) and
less-swarthy short-haired Doctor of Philosophy.
As we toasted to our inaugural evening, we noticed that at an
adjacent table, the casino mogul Steve Wynn was celebrating his birthday with
friends. It looked like most of them were old friends, since, other than Steve,
most of them had white hair. He gave a brief speech about how important
friendship was, and in particular the compassion and kindness that comes with
deep personal connections, and we were taken with the apparent genuineness in
his words.
After a few rounds of drinks at altitude, we were getting a
little more light-headed than normal, and the next time the waitress came by to
ask us if we wanted anything, my intellectual friend said to her with gusto “We’d
like another round of stiff drinks,” and then added, “on me!” to our group, and
a few of Steve’s friends stared at us quizzically, perhaps puzzled that things needed
to be paid for.
At the conclusion of our dinner with Steve, we walked over
to the main lodge to decide what to do. The foyer featured an ample seating
area with couches; to the right was a restaurant, and to the left was a bar
with mood lighting. From our vantage point, we could see that the bar was full
of what looked like boisterous people in their 30s and 40s, but once a few of
them came out into the foyer, we realized that the lighting was impeccably done
since despite the heavy plastic surgery, these people that had left were inarguably
a couple of decades older. This made our next move clear: We needed to determine
the ages of the rest of the patrons.
After ordering some drinks and moseying up to a few of the
customers, we had largely confirmed our suspicions. And I noticed that while it was fun
to mingle with these older people, I felt out of my element. But I realized
that this didn’t seem to be the case for the Doctor: He’d begun speaking to one
of the women at the bar, listening intently, and nodding and laughing at the
appropriate times. And he did a lot of that, as she seemed to speak without
pause, gesticulating with eyes wide, giving him little opportunity to say
anything. Since we were nearby and she was interested in pulling more people
into her orbit, the rest of us were introduced.
Of medium height, she was extremely fit and wore a tight
black long-sleeve shirt with rhinestone patterns on it, and she smelled strongly
of sandalwood. Upon introduction, my intellectual friend smiled at her with a skill
that he’d honed over years of selling snake oil, and then looked at me, opened
his eyes wide, and then rolled them, and I smothered a laugh and faked a cough.
My intellectual friend had already judged her unworthy of our Doctor friend.
Sometimes when someone talks, they fill your consciousness
as you’re pulled in by their charisma, or that they’ve got something you really
want to hear about – like that they’ve got the secret to getting rich, or a
deep insight into human nature, or whatever it is they have to say because you
find them attractive enough – and while she had our Doctor’s attention, this
woman didn’t have this effect on the rest of our contingent. However, she made
up for it in spades in sheer volume, expressing her opinion on all things at
length and in detail. There was something about the jazz musicians on stage
that went on for 10 minutes and 25 seconds, ending only when she felt compelled
to go and speak to them and ask if they remembered her from last night, and
then upon her prompt return there was an extended treatise on the value of the
environment that lasted for 17 minutes and 21 seconds, and I thought about how,
in my youth, one of my friends had asked me if there was anything worse than
having a testicle slowly crushed in a vice.
And then, out of nowhere, she said, “And then, last night,
two of these old guys got into a fight over a woman! You see that guy over
there?”, and she nodded in the direction of a booth across the bar, and then
said “That’s one of them. When it was happening, I thought that guy was having
a heart attack, and then you could see that they both were rolling around on
the ground with beet-red faces and veins bulging out of their necks and
foreheads!”
She had stunned us with this revelation: something that was
interesting, and stood on it’s own merits. She continued: “At their age it
seems incredibly dangerous! One of them could have had an aneurysm,” and as I
nodded along, I stole a glance at the booth. Accompanied by two similar-vintage
women, the man was reminiscent of a pinkish Rush Limbaugh. I could see white hair
sprouting from the back of his collar, and I wondered if Rush was also a
silverback.
As we considered this information, a lull had settled over
the conversation, and I felt compelled to interject, “It’s great that they were
able to revive both of them!”, but my companions weren’t listening to me. The
Doctor remained polite in his attention to her, but my intellectual friend,
resisting her pull on our Doctor, had seen an opening and took it. “So…”, he began, and I listened intently. I’d heard
this tone before and I knew there was something interesting coming. And because
he’s a very moral and philosophical person, I was almost certain that it would
be in the one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas debate format.
With feigned casual indifference, he asked, “How old is
that?”, and she said, “Oh, I imagine around sixty,” and my friend, ever so deliberately
and with just the right tone thrust the spear, tipped with the poisonous
question that was on all of our minds: “So how old are you?”
She evaded the question, but he was relentless: “It’s not
like were not all going to die eventually!” To her credit, she was slippery and
left him unsatisfied with something about “our age”. And while they were
engaged in this intellectual thrust-and-parry, I looked in my Doctor friend’s
direction and imagined the romantic feelings towards her that he might be
experiencing, and, unlike my intellectual friend, felt compelled to bring these
to a crescendo; making sure I had the Doctor’s attention, I looked at him and
then at her and then back to him, and as covertly as possible formed a tube
with the fingers and thumb of my left hand and with my right index finger executed
a less intellectual/more physical thrust-and-parry. For his part, the Doctor
gave no acknowledgement of my demonstration and continued to nod and raise his
eyebrows when she spoke.
The balance of power in the conversation had shifted and my intellectual
friend had taken control. “What films have you seen recently?”, he asked her,
and in the shortest response she’d given to this point, she mentioned that
she’d seen “Saving Mr. Banks”, a film about Mary Poppins and Walt Disney, and that it was a moving experience.
She couldn’t have known it at the time, but this hit a nerve
with my intellectual friend, whose wife had converted to Judaism a few times.
“Of course, you know that by paying money to see a film about Walt Disney that
paints him in positive light, you might as well be endorsing Kristallnacht and Hitler
– Disney’s anti-Semitism is well documented. The way that guy rolled out the
red carpet for Leni Riefenstalhl is outrageous!”
When drinking, my intellectual friend frequently employed these
debate skills when protecting his friends, and when people ran into this
buzz-saw of moral rectitude, other members of the conversation sometimes
suffered benign neglect, and I often felt obliged to ensure that they were not
left behind. The Doctor’s expression remained inscrutable but I believed that
he was still taken with the woman, so as the one-sided debate raged, I, looking
in his direction and nodding towards her, formed a circle with my right hand
fingers and thumb and brought them to my mouth and, pressing out my left cheek
with my tongue, mimed fellatio.
Because of his impeccable bedside manner, the Doctor has an
incredible discipline of not betraying his thoughts when he so chooses, and
this was no exception: No amount of generous altruism on my part could alter
his enigmatic expression.
All the while, my intellectual friend continued to score
uncontested debate points: “Hell, maybe we should just unfreeze Walt’s head and
ask the old son of a bitch to deny it!”, and, in a selfless gesture of
compassion, I made a giant arc over my head with both of my hands and again
mimed some finger-lovemaking, but alas, I’d been too obvious and the woman had
seen it, and she gave me a look that could be described as either puzzlement or
horror.
Either way, the look was the signal to move along: From our
contradictory positions and in separate ways, my intellectual friend and I had
done all we could to help our dear Doctor, but there was no more to give as she
had caught me out. I tapped my intellectual friend on the shoulder and said “We
really should be going,” and to her, “It was great to meet you!” and I whisked
him away to the other end of the bar.
