Take No for an Answer

The place was sparsely populated when we walked in. A few people were playing pool on some of the many tables on the ground floor and a couple of tables were occupied. I frequented the Rialto over the years, it was my favorite place to play pool downtown. That day I  was with a friend of mine and a few of his friends. We settled at the far end of the bar and ordered some drinks and bar food.  

Along with the bar and pool tables, there were many television screens, each one bigger than the last, throughout the place. Each one was on a different channel, all of them playing a different sport. Opposite the bar, almost hidden, was the door that led to the Off-Track Betting room where people bet on horse races from around the country. I’d never been in there. It seemed like an even more desperate place than a pool hall bar. I’d been to a horse track once, years before, with my brother and sister-in-law. I lost a little money and didn’t really enjoy the experience. Movies like The Sting and Let it Ride gave me an unfavorable impression of people who bet on horse races. 

I was not seated long when I heard a woman’s voice behind me. 

“Is this seat taken?” she asked.

I turned around to face her. She was an attractive woman with long, wavy brown hair. She was wearing a blouse and jeans. She looked to be a bit younger than I was, maybe twenty-five. There were at least six empty seats at the bar between me and the next guy, an older man watching the basketball game while he drank. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to sit in the one right next to me. 

“I don’t think so,” I said, not confidently. I turned back to the group I was with. They mostly talked to each other, and I listened. I’ve never been very outgoing, and I come off as shy when meeting people. I think reserved might be a better word to describe myself.

I wasn’t paying too much attention to their conversation when I suddenly heard the young woman again. I didn’t catch what she said, so I turned back around to face her again. I wasn’t sure that she was even talking to me, but she was looking at me.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Do you know what quarter this is?” she asked, referring to the television screen above the bar with the basketball game playing. 

I never had any interest in professional team sports, especially watching them. I’ve never followed any of them and I do not watch them ever. I am quite sure that my father’s biggest disappointment with his children is that both his sons couldn't care less about watching or talking  sports. Any of them. I played soccer and baseball when I was a kid, but I stopped completely when I reached high school. That is when I discovered something much better than sports. Not girls, but role playing games and video games. My brother and our friends spent countless hours inhabiting different fantastical worlds with orcs, goblins, elves, vampires, elven vampires, magic, aliens and other assorted monsters. We would stay up all night exploring dungeons, fighting villains and hoarding treasure. We would take turns running games, but I was nearly exclusively a player, not a Game Master. 

I let her question sink in for a moment, and I looked up at the screen. Someone I would never recognize dribbled the ball past other people I had no interest in while people watched and made noise. I saw no beauty in basketball, or football or soccer. They could never hold my interest.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m not watching it.” Thinking that was the end of the conversation, I turned my back to her again.

“I don’t think Shaw is at his best this year,” she said.

Jesus Christ, I thought. Why are you talking to me? I was certain she’d be able to have a conversation about this inane game with someone else. Couldn’t she see I was not interested? I’ve never understood how people could strike up a conversation with a stranger. Perhaps that’s a function of a bar I’ve never explored. People often start stories with, “I was drinking at this little bar on the coast and this guy was telling me…” I don’t have any of those stories, mainly because I rarely spend more than an hour at a bar and never alone. There must be entire swathes of human existence that I’m not aware of, and bar culture is certainly among them.

“He can do better, don’t you think?” she ventured further. 

“I really don’t know,” I said. Then, I decided to end it. “I don’t follow sports at all.”

I turned away from her again and scooted to the edge of the seat with my back squarely to her. I went back to vaguely listening to friends of my friend talk. The conversation was not much better, but at least they weren't engaging me. We played some pool and I noticed the young woman had moved down the bar and found someone else to talk to. She finally took the hint.

Cancer Cubbies

Since coming back to college, I have made it a point to be more social. I have decided to make an effort to not be so antisocial anymore and talk with classmates, especially when we are forced into groups for some project. I usually stay on topic, not straying to matters of opinion; I have only made so much progress.

On campus there are designated outdoor smoking shelters which are covered to protect people from the rain. The covering seems to defeat the purpose, in my mind at least. The smoke should rise up and not be collected where it can then be breathed in yet again. I suppose second hand smoke matters little to those who have already breathed it in first hand. In these little cancer cubbies, people gather and are compelled to chat while they smoke. I see them while I kill time between classes. I watch as they converse freely with little or no sign of knowing each other outside of their time smoking. They make it look so easy. I briefly consider taking up smoking just to mingle with them. I know they would see right through my charade. My coughing would give me away instantly.

I used to smoke, sort of. When I started, I would sit on the roof of my maternal grandparent’s house with my older cousin and smoke. I must have been thirteen or fourteen years old. I’m not sure I ever did it properly, though. I never felt the mythical “buzz” smokers talk about. I was quite wiry in my youth, and cigarettes certainly never calmed me down.

A few years later I aided a friend in his decision to quit by helping him smoke his last pack with him. It’s really a nasty habit: stained fingers, teeth and ceilings; if you are fool enough to smoke indoors. And the smell; the awful reek of burnt tar and nicotine that moves one to move away from the person who created the stench. Then there is the whole lung situation. There must be something to it because millions of people smoke. The fact that they are dropping like flies, year after year, does not seem to curb the number of people who pick it up.

In my life, I have only bought one pack of cigarettes, and it wasn’t for me. When I was in high school, a friend discovered I was eighteen and asked me to buy her pack. She was seventeen and cute; I didn’t want to disappoint her. Since it was her money, I suppose I did not truly buy them. I was a middle-man between her and the tightly packed convenience store she drove me to. I had never been inside and I had to pretend I knew what I was talking about when I asked for the pack of cigarettes. For some reason I was nervous. Thankfully, her brand was not one of the ultra-effeminate ones with words like slim, misty, or vogue in the title. It was awkward enough without that added inconvenience in that small, conservative town I found myself living at the time.

When I was younger, we would visit family in Georgia. While we were there, my brother and I would get our hair cut at the salon where my aunt worked. She would offer to cut my hair in the latest fashions of the rural south, which tended to be rat-tails, mullets, or something semi-permed. I would look at my cousins’ hair and opt for just a trim.

My aunt would chat with my mother while she brought sharp instruments close to my scalp repeatedly; all the while a cigarette hung from her lips. Occasionally the cigarette would rest between her fingers as she combed my hair, snipping away with the other hand. On one such occasion she let too much time pass between flicking the ashes and the “cherry” dropped on my neck, burning my young, tender flesh. After that incident, I objected to her cutting my hair altogether, but I was always trumped by her and my mother’s insistence.

As the rain begins to fall back in Portland, the students smoking under the shelter take no notice. I briefly think how unfair it is that smokers get a shelter from the rain while outside. I think non-smokers should have somewhere to go as well. Then I remember, we do. I stand up and walk back inside.