A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (4 page)

I have a strange affinity for old men. Not “older men,” the type who are fortyish but still in their prime, men like Mr. Big, who notice that you are stumbling along the sidewalk and stop their limousines to offer you six seasons’ worth of excitement and trying not to fart in bed.

No, not older men—
old men
. I must exude an oddly specific musk, like mothballs and racism.

I guess you could say this is my superpower. I can’t fly or freeze things with my breath (unless I’ve eaten
lots
of garlic), but I can summon elderly men from great distances. For instance, every Monday afternoon for months, I managed to attract visits from an octogenarian named Mr. Oliver.

Mr. Oliver and I met laboring under the same misconception. My high school history teacher had telephoned me and insinuated that Mr. Oliver would “get me on Broadway.” As an aspiring playwright, I thought this sounded amazing! Eagerly I awaited the arrival of this Mr. Oliver, whom I pictured as some kind of old-timey theater magnate, chomping a large cigar. “It ain’t Noël Coward,” he would say, perusing my first script, “but I think it’s the real Tabasco, kid!”

Instead, what I saw when I came down to the lobby of the
Post
was an old man wearing shorts with a Band-Aid over his forehead at a rakish angle. He was carrying a large bag of old newspaper clippings.

“I hear you’re going to get me onto Broadway,” he greeted me.

It took us several meetings to sort out this confusion, and by then it was too late. We had gotten into the habit, and, more important, the lady at the front desk had become convinced that he was my long-lost grandfather and would buzz me immediately whenever he showed up.

“What do I do?” I asked my friends. “How do I get this to stop? Do I just wait until he’s too feeble to travel? That could take years!”

The thing about very old men is no one ever questions them. No one says, “Hey, should he be let into the building?” They just assume that the man in question is your grandfather. When I am old, I intend to use this situation to my advantage.

“My grandson doesn’t like to acknowledge me in public anymore,” I will say, clanking down hallways after celebrities who have piqued my interest.

Mr. Oliver turned out to be quite an accomplished gentleman. A retired lawyer, he had written dozens of plays, one about Hitler (a light comedy entitled “How Much Time Do We Have!?!”), one about a happy housewife who talked some sense into Simone de Beauvoir and another one about how, as far as he can recollect, everyone in his college fraternity was gay but no one thought anything of it at the time.

The basic plot of the Hitler play was as follows. Hitler and Eva Braun managed to escape to South America, after a lot of yelling about his trouble performing in the sack. He blamed Eva for making him feel emasculated. Finally she wanted to go sunbathe topless. Hitler did not want her to. Then someone shot him. Goebbels narrated. Also at one point a number of children were killed onstage?
Tonally, it was all over the place, but I think it was supposed to be a comedy. It was
Springtime for Hitler
but not on purpose.

In fact, the Hitler play, I discovered at Mr. Oliver’s eightieth birthday party, had been a cherished dream for some time. He introduced me to his family. “This is my son,” he told me. “When we did the reading, he was Hitler.”

“Ah,” I said.

“This is my other son,” he added, waving. “He played Goebbels.”

A female friend of his sat down. “And how do you know her?” I asked.

“She was Eva Braun.” He grinned and nodded. “A dead ringer, wouldn’t you say?”

Mr. Oliver insisted on reading his works aloud as we sat at a coffee shop frequented by my work colleagues. “I forget everything after I write it,” he informed me, every time. “And then I look and I think, hey, this guy, he’s pretty good, the guy who wrote this play!” He chuckled, sounding pleased, yet phlegmy.

Another of his plays featured lengthy confrontations between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller and he especially enjoyed performing those (“Now listen to me, Arthur, you just like to have me, Marilyn Monroe, a beautiful shiksa, on your arm, don’t you, Arthur Miller? You like to prove that a skinny nudnik can wind up with a girl like me, Marilyn Monroe!”) as I winced and pretended I had wound up at the table by accident and had no idea who he was. Which was hard to do convincingly, given that we went there every week. It was like
Tuesdays with Morrie
, except that instead of inspirational messages about loving one another and affirming life, I got diatribes about Hitler. There was also the occasional confrontation between Woodrow and Edith Wilson, from his play
Versailles
. (“Edith: Woodrow, don’t lie to me! You had a stroke, didn’t you? When were you planning to tell me? Woodrow: Gaaaaargh.”)

In turn, I told him about what I was working on. “This one’s called
Social Suicide
,” I said. “It’s about a girl who wants to get revenge on all the people in her life by killing herself in the middle of a dinner party.”

“That sounds awful,” Mr. Oliver said. “That’s a downer! Yuck! Yuck!”

“I’m also writing a children’s show in which the Beatles are forest creatures,” I added. (This one actually got produced!)

Mr. Oliver, evidently mistaking this for a joke, gave me a funny look and started laughing.

He kept telling me that he was on the verge of a major production. This seemed improbable. “I got an e-mail from the theater asking for the next stage of the script,” he would tell me. “‘We request the next stage of the script,’ it said.”

“No!” I would gasp. “No, you didn’t!”

Finally, grinning, he would produce a printout of the e-mail. It would say, “We have received your script. Please do not send us anything further unless we request the next stage of the script.”

I kept hoping against hope that this situation would turn into my own personal version of
Tuesdays with Morrie
. Mr. Oliver would become a font of wisdom and start spewing words of inspiration. Instead, he kept creating situations in which I came within inches of mailing people pictures of Hitler. (To wit: He once gave me a picture of Hitler and Eva Braun with “HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE?!?” written on it in large black letters. It got mixed in with some papers I was carrying to mail and had disappeared into an envelope before I realized my mistake. Fortunately I was able to pry it out in time; otherwise this story would be entitled, “How I Got Fired from Everything, Ever.” I had a panicked vision of the recipient opening what she thought was a polite letter from a young journalist, only to discover a totally context-free image of Hitler with
the words HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE?!? scrawled on it in terrifying old-man handwriting. Then I would get an intense, angry call: “What is the meaning of this? Do you think this is some sort of a
joke
? Are you the ZODIAC KILLER?”)

•   •   •

Then again, his were far from the worst plays I had read. There was fierce competition for that title. I was a member of two writing groups. The first one was comprised of professionals who had taken jobs in DC but felt, secretly, that they had a screenplay or a novel lurking and festering deep inside them, somewhat like a tapeworm. We met every two weeks at a fancy downtown office with large glass walls and a buzzer at the door and flags of multiple nations in the hallway. The man who ran the group was a successful published novelist in England only—which seemed like it might resemble having a beautiful girlfriend in Canada only. He had written several novels about the Crusades. His advice was all filtered through this lens, making it somewhat less than universally applicable. “Write the parts you want to write first,” he said. “Like if there’s a big beheading, or an encounter with Richard the Lionheart, definitely write that first, then outline the other parts.”

Evelyn, a former journalist who was working on what she described as “a darkly comic screenplay about a bunch of elderly people who find out that the plane they are on is about to crash, so they decide to have a good time,” emitted a baffled sigh.

Every week the moderator fought with the woman whose office we were using, who insisted that she had worked in the publishing industry and that “sorry, Brian, that’s not how it works.” Sometimes she would just shake her head with a wise, knowing look in her eyes, but mostly she barked, “Nope. Nope. No, Brian. No. That’s wrong. I’m sorry. That’s wrong.”

Fortunately there was wine. We needed it. One of the first writers
to present was a middle-aged Indian gentleman named Anup who had written what he called an “environmental thriller.” The script revolved around a banker whose son was killed in the Amazon. The banker was seized with the desire for vengeance, worked out a couple of times, and suddenly became capable of a Rambo-level expedition into the jungle, where he and a nubile young lady managed to defeat everyone standing in the way of their sweet, sweet vengeance. This could have been fine if it were not for the fact that every few pages there was an X-rated sex scene, complete with throbbing and pounding.

“Anup,” we said, when we gathered to discuss the script. “Um, nice, nice script you got there. Uh. So. Uh. How do I put this: What was up with all the sex?”

Anup’s brow furrowed. “I was worried,” he said, “that the main character was too much of a ‘goody-goody.’ I thought that it would humanize him if he enjoyed rough sex!”

I choked a little on my wine and made eye contact with Tina (Mystery Novel Set in a Ballpark) and Greg (Screenplay, Then Novel, Then Screenplay, Then Novel About the AIDS Crisis). The three of us had formed a drinking group in order to cope with the excesses of the writing group. Greg was nice but was also trying to make several personal catchphrases happen. “I’m pressing my OnStar button!” he would exclaim, at intervals. “Clutching my rosary! I’ve brought my oxygen tank and I need to take a big inhale!” And these were the ones whose company I sought out!

Things kept going downhill. The lady who Knew Publishing handed us her own screenplay. It was nearly three hours long and consisted mainly of voice-overs, accompanied by “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.”

“What IS this?” we asked, as gently as possible.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re already making it in China, so I don’t really need to make edits to it.”

Greg poured himself another glass of wine. “OnStar,” he whispered.

•   •   •

The second group met at a public library. I was the only member of the group who did not have liver spots. The first week I went, the group moderator was tearing into a play about a mysterious man named William Ruske Lancier (Ruske, the author hinted, means “shake,” and “Lancier” means “spear”) who insisted on speaking only in Shakespearean verse, even though he lived in a modern-day apartment complex.

“The thing about this play,” the author explained, as what looked like tears started to form in his eyes, “is really, you have to read it right, with good actors, to get the full flavor of it. If he’d read it better it would have sounded better.”

“Why is he rhyming?” the moderator—grizzled, balding, and peremptory—asked.

“That’s the whole mystery of the play!” the playwright exclaimed.

“You need to make it clear he’s not some kind of dangerous weirdo. He says he met this woman’s son. Okay. So that’s grounds for thinking he’s not a weirdo, you know, he met him, they chatted, he didn’t strip him bare and suck him, so, okay, he can be trusted, you should work from that.”

Strip him bare and suck him, I thought. That’s—that’s an oddly casual way of describing that.

“I’m telling you,” the playwright wheedled, “to understand why he speaks this way, you need to read the whole play. It’s revealed. It makes sense.”

The moderator shook his head. “No. I’m telling you. You have to listen if you want it to be better. Okay, Henry, what do you have?”

What Henry had was a play about St. Augustine of Hippo.

Norbert, whose face looked like a foot, had written a play about
two people on a balcony. “I don’t know what it’s about,” he said. “But if you like it, I can keep on writing and maybe we can figure out what it’s about.”

David was writing a cop thriller. He had, it appeared, been writing it very slowly and painstakingly over the course of decades while technology had completely passed him by.

“Hang on one second,” his character said, “while I feed some more carbon paper into this typewriter. Then you can tell me what you know.”

“We can get him on tape,” another character proposed later. “Just take this pocket cassette recorder and secure it somewhere on Bernie’s person.”

“No can do,” another cop responded. “He’s in the building already. We have no way of communicating with him.”

“When is this set?” the moderator asked.

“The present day,” David said, looking baffled.

•   •   •

Actually, compared to these crews, Mr. Oliver seemed downright normal. He was conviviality itself. One upside of our extended acquaintance was that we figured out that neither of us really wanted to be drinking coffee at four in the afternoon, so we came up with a new system where we went to a bar and drank four beers apiece and agreed with whatever the other person was saying because the music was too loud to hear over. It was much better. We gave up the pretense of wanting to get plays on Broadway and instead I just downed a Sam Adams Seasonal while he told me the things President Obama was doing wrong and brought me his print copy of the
New Yorker
with several unflattering paragraphs about Hillary Clinton circled in ballpoint pen that I ignored as politely as I could.

There’s a kind of relief that comes from hanging out with the
elderly. With them, I no longer needed to pretend that I watched
Boy Meets World
. With people my age, I’d been doing this for years, and it had started to become a strain. “Oh yeah,” I say. “
Boy Meets World
. Loved it. He met the heck out of that world, didn’t he? Topanga! Topanga!” If Wikipedia ever makes an error in its plot recaps, my entire social life will collapse.

I started looking forward to it. “Do you want to come out on Monday?” my other friends would inquire.