Inner Broseph, Where Art Thou?

My friend and I meet one evening at a seafood place – one of those enormous restaurant/bars with maritime junk hung all over the place in case you forget the theme. Tonight it is thronged and seething, the dank air heavy with excited human congress. The World Series is hollering out of a dozen enormous screens hung about the place, the panicky-sounding, midrange hubbub of the gathered mob an unmediated roar. Meanwhile, whole families are laughing with mouths full, throwing their heads back so that oral cavities become upturned, toothy vessels of sludge. And we’re supposed to eat around all this eating? My friend strolls ahead to our table, unperturbed.

Loudmouth Breugel

The scene is alive with the twenty-something species to whom this loudmouth Breugel is a first home. The carefully unshaven young guys lean with hunched and easy panache over long, glass-littered tables, they jostle and confer and grasp each other. Some are in tight-fitting business suits, neckties half-undone in front of the bathroom mirror, their short, upswept power hair shifted back on their scalps to show grooveless, Shatnernesque foreheads. 

Some of the unsuited celebrants are wearing backward baseball caps, which on a good day are a thorn in my side. A few of the guys are sporting the Squashed Insouciant Beanie, the ubiquitous outlier symbol that crushes and droops a little at the apex, suggesting bohemian disarray. The look doesn’t really speak in this environment because everyone knows real bohemians don’t watch televised sports. 

The baseball game has everyone excited. I mean scarily, phenomenally excited. The young men are jerking their heads around and yelling incoherently every time one of the doughy millionaires onscreen swings a bat or jogs a little across the televised grass. The guys laugh angrily, like Billy Baldwin or Tom Cruise overplaying drunk because some acting coach somewhere told them that a drunk Young Turk looks at his gathered posse and angrily whips his hilarity-contorted face from friend to friend while laughing. “Haw!haw!haw!haw!haw!haw! haw!haw!haw! Oooh, man! Didja see that, man? Haw!haw!haw!haw!haw!haw!” 

Despite my misgivings I find myself wishing I were one of them. As I get older the desire becomes incrementally stronger and, I would suggest, more perverse. Why didn’t God make me a guy who understands the appeal of sport-spectating and occasional boozing and loudness, a regular guy who can lose himself in this tumult and tribe-think and freeing conviviality, dissolving like a drop in the roiling Testosterone Sea?

Down another quantum pathway I would’ve had one of those thick paperbacks of sports statistics on my bedside table next to my State Championship trophy, my walls papered with posters of football pros leaping for the “pigskin.” Instead I sat by my Tensor lamp and pored over the beautifully bound and illustrated hardcover of the complete lyrics of Bernie Taupin, surrounded by my Revell spaceship models and sketch pads and other such you’ll-never-get-to-first-base folderol. So on nights like this, and they are few, I fall into brief fits of a very potent reverie. Looking around in wonder at the backward baseball caps, I almost say aloud, “How did I miss this boat so completely?”

Missed Memos

Three guys at the table next to my friend and I are ordering drinks and being handsome and successful with their shaded jawbones and parted hair and general enviability. Enviability is a state, if not a word. I spy on them in my peripheral vision and occasionally with one of those bold direct glances which, if intercepted, can be quickly reframed as admiration of the exposed duct work and celestially arrayed, desiccated starfish overhead. I turn back to my friend and we continue our conversation. Half an hour later I glance over at the guys at the next table and I gasp. I feel my face getting hot. 

Their dinner has long since arrived. It’s lobster, and these three recent exemplars of mellow male reason and coolness are wearing enormous bibs which fasten snugly around the neck and cascade down and over the knees like the drop cloth on a picnic table. In the center of each bib, right over the solar plexus, is a grinning stylized cartoon lobster. 

I can’t tear my eyes away from these nitwits, and if they’re stupid enough to don gigantic bibs in a mixed gender restaurant, they’re too far gone to notice my staring anyway. Did I not get the memo about the bib thing? I glance around and no one is staring at these vibrant clods.

This is not Robert Pattinson standing around at The Cape in an Alpaca sweater with a hip little bib like a necktie, hoisting a Heineken and laughing at the lobster held aloft in his left hand. This is three grown men made idiotic by their decision to put on enormous castrating bibs. And before my stupefied eyes the waitress starts FLIRTING WITH ONE OF THE BIB GUYS. 

This is the world I can never join, the world I can’t even comprehend. It moved on without me when they were handing out membership cards. While I was timidly romancing the bashful trombone player in marching band, the high school Clairol^© models who couldn’t even see me were just biding their time, waiting for these louche drunks to put on their huge freaking bibs and excite them.

“Check this out,” I whisper urgently to my friend. “These guys are wearing bibs!” My buddy is everything I’m not and knows his way around, writes articles for Oracle, is built like a championship swimmer and takes business trips. He haunts the cocktail lounges of Manhattan when he is called there by his urbane, yacht catalog-perusing corporate masters. He glances over at the drunken flirts in their man-bibs and turns back to me.

“Yeah,” he says. “They ordered lobster.”