The restaurant is called Libertador and they sell meat. Hot grills of meat they’ll drop in the middle of your table, allowing you to be your own chef. I had just finished sharing sixty dollars of steak with a friend and saw him to a cab. My options were simple: (1) venture down the road to one of the man faux-Irish pubs littering New York’s Upper East Side or (2) return to the restaurant’s bar, order a few bottles of the great Argentinian beer Quilmes and shower in the carnivorous aroma.
I chose the latter.
On the television above the bar was a British Premier League football match played earlier in the day between Manchester United and Everton. I had watched the match at home but my eyes nevertheless gravitated north to the 80” Samsung. I’ve always relished the ability to re-watch a sporting event and let my eyes fixate on a particular schematic or position. On this night I could study American goalkeeper Tim Howard. How does he approach attacks from the wings? When does he venture off his line? Where are his eyes once the ball in his hands? How does he position his wall on dead balls strikes from 20, 25, 30 yards?
The man beside me was drinking a glass of red wine. Later I would learn he was drinking an Argentinian Malbec though that did not then nor does it now mean anything to me. He was clearly in his seventies and had a tsunami of silver hair atop his head. He was dressed like a man of importance. The suit was tailored to perfection. The shoes had been polished in the last twenty-four hours. He was not wearing a tie but the tie’s placement in the breast pocket of his coat was designed to let others know it existed. The tie was there! This was a man who wore ties!
He caught me looking up at the screen.
“You like the game?” he asked.
“Love it,” I said. For someone who is well-versed at bar stool dynamics this is a pivotal moment. If you engage the man in actual conversation you may find yourself unable to escape. At worst it can feel like someone has handcuffed you to the taps. Why risk it? Because there is always the possibility the fella to your left is a truly interesting man with a remarkable story to tell. It’s rare but it happens.
SIDE NOTE: You always talk to a woman. And you are willing to endure Himalayan tediousness if she looks at you the right way.
I engaged. I did this partly out of boredom and partly because my girlfriend would not be arriving at the bar for at least another hour.
“My father came over from Ireland and always tried to get me into it,” he said about soccer. “I never took to it.”
“I grew up in a town called Kearny, New Jersey. We’re known as Soccertown, USA. We had four guys on the 1994 World Cup team.” I have probably said those three sentences, in succession, a thousand times in my life. My hometown has at least one thing going for it. That is it.
We started talking about the game in a way I’ve learned men of a certain age like to talk about the game – with an awkward respect. We questioned why it’s not more successful in this country. We debated whether the USA would ever be a serious contender for the World Cup. He brought up the Pele-led Cosmos of the 1970s and how fast the flame burnt out. Older males need to gain respect for younger male before they’ll dig below the surface and allow the conversation to move onto a personal plane. I had earned my stripes. He changed directions.
“What do you do?”
This is a question 98% of the human population knows how to answer. I am in the 2%. I write plays. I write musicals. I write about the Chicago Bears for the Chicago Tribune’s blog network. I work for an organization, Areena, that I’m not quite comfortably sharing the details of with strangers for fear of the individual lifting the concept.
“I write.” Simple. Elegant. I know it will be met with a laugh and a follow-up and I will be able to list the things I write. After the listing and the details conversation I respond in fairness, “What do you do?”
“I was an attorney. I’m retired now.”
Then why the tailored suit? Why the polished suit? What is that damn tie doing in that damn pocket if he’s retired? Was he at a funeral?
“I still like putting the suit on,” he said before I could ask a question. The next ten minutes were a full breakdown of this man’s existence. It may not have been in monologue form but that’s how I remember it. Like the magnificent speech Edmund delivers in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night about his happiest memories at sea. I remember feeling this man was finally delivering a speech he’d been writing in his heart for a half decade.
He spoke with years.
“When I was sixty-five years old I was essentially told it was over. I would still have my office, still have my name on the door, still have a secretary but my career as an attorney was over. Over the next five years my desk grew gradually less crowded. At sixty-six there were 15 stuffed file folders. At sixty-seven there were 10. By seventy there were none. It just ended. It was done. I went into the office for a few more months out of, I don’t know, ceremony? Instinct? If I didn’t go in where the hell would I go? I don’t play golf. I live in Manhattan! Then I stopped going.”
Having spent the better part of the previous six months examining this exact moment in a man’s life, analyzing this exact psychological problem, I was fascinated to hear what he said next.
He said nothing.
“What do you do every day now?” I asked, thinking he’d blow off the question and bring us back around to the soccer pitch.
“I wake up. That’s the big thing.”
I laughed.
“I have breakfast. I read the Times. I have a little workout machine in the apartment…” He trailed off and sipped from his Malbec. I didn’t realize he was re-gassing the tank for a long drive.
“Are you married?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Ah”
“Why?”
“I am married fifty-two years.”
“Wow.”
“She still works as a school teacher. Comes home around 3:30 every day. And we sit there. Then she goes to bed early and I sit there. But she doesn’t drink and she doesn’t like to go out to dinner and she doesn’t like movies or theatre or any of that. She watches television and she goes to bed. So I’ve started going out like this a few times a week. I’m seventy-five and learning how to be a single guy about the town.”
He smiled. He didn’t laugh but he smiled. There’s a line in an old Harry Chapin song, maybe Chapin’s best song, called A Better Place to Be that came to my mind. It is how the song ends:
And the little man, Looked at the empty glass in his hand.
And he smiled a crooked grin, He said, “I, I guess I’m out of gin.
And I know we both have been, so lonely. And if you want me to come with you, then that’s all right with me. ‘Cause I know I’m goin’ nowhere and anywhere’s a better place to be.”
I know the old man didn’t want to go home with me.
It was the final line that came to my mind. “I know I’m goin nowhere and anywhere’s a better to be.” What had happened to my new friend’s life was he woke up one morning with nowhere to go. With nowhere to be. He wasn’t learning to be a single man about town. He was learning to exist in a world where he was no longer REQUIRED to be anything on a daily basis. He was learning to be a human being on its merits.
My girlfriend showed up at the bar a half hour late. I introduced her to my new friend. He finished his glass of Malbec, laid some money on the bar. “Jeff, it was great to meet you, young man. I hope I’ll see you in here again.”
I hear that a lot. Rarely do I believe it. That night I did.
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