I knew a guy who was surprised that people continually got mad at him, got up and moved further away if he sat next to them in a movie theater, looked past him if he were next in line, seemed forever to misunderstand and provoke him. In response, he seemed perpetually angry.
He was in his 60’s but looked much older. He was no longer working, but had spent many years as a character actor in local community theater productions. He had no wife or long-term partner, no children, no remaining family of his own. His skin was slack and puffy, his tarnished gray hair sprouted haphazardly over his domed head. He was overweight and soft, with a pronounced slouch. He wore Buddy Holly glasses – not because they were retro but because he’d had them for decades – over his too-small, closely-set eyes, which seemed to make them smaller. His eyebrows, though bushy, were almost translucent, making it seem as if he didn’t have any. The stubble on his cheeks offset his coffee-stained dentures. His lips were so pale and straight that even when he laughed never seemed to move. His clothes fit poorly, and whatever color they might have once been, were now several shades of dingy ashen gray, long before gray became the new black.
He was becoming hard of hearing. He was frustrated at how hard it was to be understood. He made the mistake we all make, which is to talk louder the next time if we’re unheard. As he got more out of sorts in an interaction, his voice got louder, amplified to an alienating boom. He’d end up shouting and gesticulating wildly, adding yet more signals for people to move away.
He had the unkempt look and jumbled mannerisms of a man who has lived too long without someone to nod approval before walking out the front door, brush crumbs off his shoulders, tell him when his cheeks are rough, tell him a certain shirt doesn’t go with those pants, pester him to go to the barber, remind him to keep his voice down, fuss over and at him. A man who lived too long without someone to love him; without someone for him to love.
His appearance and behaviors were clearly working against him. His pinched and angry face, his neglected and failing body, his tiny black-dot eyes behind his over-large eyeglass frames, his expectation of unpleasant encounters turning into a kind of self-fulfilling paranoid prophecy – he was a perfect character study for a Quentin Tarantino angry misfit, or a Coen brothers’ lunatic loner.
I don’t know how, or why, but at some point I decided to take the risk and tell him how he came across. When I told him that his ever-growing voice made it harder for me to hear him, he was initially confused. He didn’t know he was getting louder. He didn’t know it would come across as off-putting. He and I made an agreement. If his voice got too loud, I’d reach out my hand and slowly lower it, palm down, fingers outstretched. Easy, my hand said. I want to hear you. But the noise distracts and scares me.
I hate telling people when they have spinach in their teeth, or a booger hanging from their nose. I won’t tell anyone if they have bad breath – I can’t figure out how to do it without creating devastation. So I can’t explain how one day I pulled out a mirror that I kept for bad-hair-day maintenance (when I was the perfect doppelganger for Working Girl’s Joan Cusack) and handed it to him. Told him to take a look. Tell me what he saw.
His voice was small, his eyes larger than I’d ever seen them. The face in the mirror shocked him, repulsed him the way it did strangers. But unlike a stranger at a movie theater, he couldn’t move away from himself. He was overwhelmed and saddened. And then it clicked. He began to understand. People didn’t see the real him. They saw this image, this shell of who he was. They didn’t see the decency, the loneliness, the guy in search of small talk to pass the time. The regular guy who’d led a regular life and gotten older, right on schedule. Just like everyone. Just like the other unlucky-in-love folks who live a life more alone than we ever imagine is possible.
This was the beginning of a small shift for him. He shaved before he went out. He combed the remnants of his hair. He began to talk and watch for my hand. He looked from it to me, back and forth, as he told stories with less and less anger in them, more sadness, more humor.
As I began to know him, I learned what was underneath the anger. He was lonely and misunderstood. He was melancholy in an era when you couldn’t get away from ads for antidepressant medications. But what medication cures melancholy? How much daily exercise is needed to cure a soul’s darkness?
Last I heard, he was still alone. None of his changes had miraculously produced a loving partner, wealth, a winning lottery ticket, handsomeness or youth. He was still old, puffy, paunchy and stooped. His clothes were still faded and grayish, his eyeglasses didn’t become cool. He was still lonely. Yet somehow his age and loneliness fit him better. Less like an itchy, ill-fitting sweater he didn’t want to wear. More like a fact that informed but didn’t define him.
He began whatever the process is that is the opposite of letting oneself go. Reining oneself in? Sucking it in? Sucking it up? What on earth do we do each day that reminds us to hold our heads up high, to do right by ourselves and others? I guess we act as if we have someone who loves us. As if we have someone to love.
what a sweet story!