Imagine That

I remember the thrill each time we played, the excitement of it. I was nervous that we make it as good as the last time. I also remember my dad teaching me to skip rocks, and the pride in his voice, the joy he took at sharing this whimsical but precise skill. These were times to be cherished; tangible evidence of something incredibly flattering, that my parents seemed to not only love me in some abstract way, but actively enjoy spending time with me. At the time, theirs were the only opinions that mattered, and the pleasure I saw on their faces just filled me up. I needed nothing else.

My mom and I would chose our table for its view of the others. I don’t remember ordering food, but maybe I nibbled at some overpriced pastry or she sipped at a coffee as we spoke. We would – at least, I remember that I would – take pains to not turn in obvious ways, to not give away where we were looking. Our conversation wouldn’t be whispered, just politely quiet, easily lost in the wash of sound any public place provides.

It was a team sport. She’d pick someone, pluck him out of his anonymity, and the first thing to do was take several moments to simply sit, watching, waiting for inspiration. We would glance, not stare. There – the balding man in the yellow shirt, with the large bag, here on the left – see who I’m talking about? This was our canvas. It was best not to force it. Take him in without looking for something specific. Let it happen on its own.

Then we started telling the story. We were kind and knowing. Anyone could see his dour silence, the uneasy eyes, the nervous way he stirred his cold coffee. We knew, we understood like no one else, the circumstances hidden just outside of the frame. Do you think he’s waiting for his sister? We sketched roughly at first, thinking out loud, shooting each other down. No, no, he’s clearly been stood up. Look at the way he’s slouching. But some stories aren’t worth telling, are cheap or too obvious. We preferred unlikely and devilishly specific to probable, prudent and boringly vague.

The meat of our story came from one person. After the rough drafts one of us would realize that we had it – that perfect mixture of plausibility and bold fiction – and it told itself. Like the real story would be, were we to ever learn it, ours was unexpected in interesting and believable ways. Like the real story, it was detailed and unique. This man knows very little English, my mom would begin. (She always knew how to hook you. Also, she liked her stories to involve foreigners.) Guri. From Albania. He is in this country because his brother promised to get him a job, but it hasn’t worked out yet, he’s been strung along and he’s beginning to doubt his decision to come here at all. His brother told him to get out of the apartment and enjoy the city’s museums, so he came here, but he hasn’t been able to enjoy any of the art and he can’t get his mind off home.

What we had at this point could be called a foundation, but functioned more like a slip ‘n’ slide: the rest of the story poured out, flowing from the character we’d created. We talked over each other. The detail one of us created immediately showed up in an angle the other had planned. This courtyard reminds him of a place he used to love to go, back home – to go with a woman! He’s thinking of her – he’s missing her, that’s why he regrets coming here – he used to share coffee with her, and it’s too sad to drink it on his own – he’s looking at the other couples here and feeling how lonely – the coffee is no good compared with what he drank in his country. Ahuh. Yeah. Pause. The coffee was disappointing, and it reminded him of a time he went out for coffee with this woman he loves back where he could understand the language, where he felt at home. My mom would smile, and I would smile, and I would be so proud, and feel so happy.

Ah! She would say, when I filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. I would encourage her most inspired moments: yeah. Yeah. We would sit quietly again, armed with secret knowledge. It was maudlin, it had pathos, it involved foreigners. Watching this man now, we would see Guri, the Albanian lonely heart. It was like a movie we had written coming to life. A moment would pass at it’s own pace. Then: what do you think is in the bag?

My mom started the game. I don’t remember the first time, how she brought it up. I don’t remember it needing an explanation; it was self-evidently an awesome way to pass an afternoon. Was this something she had done with friends, curious college buddies in love with New York City, turned on by the endless possibilities embodied in the countless strangers they passed every day? We always played in the courtyard at the Museum of Modern Art, so for me the excitement of being in the city combined with the excitement of Important Culture, and of being alone with my mom, and of creating something. Where did she play with her friends? Why there? Or was the game silent and internal until I came along, one of those well practiced but wholly private exercises, like the imaginary interviews I give to Terri Gross? Do you get to say out loud to your kid the things you’ve kept from fellow adults?

I picture my mom, young, no children, no husband, a crowd surrounding her on the subway platform. There are no iPods and no earbuds. People’s chosen distractions each reveal something about them: The Wall Street Journal instead of the Times, a romance novel mainstay instead of the latest literary star. Say my mom was without anything that day. She’s bored, and hot, the station air stiff and still. She notices that the man next to her is reading the Post, the editorial page, and the fragment of the headline she can make out suggests that there’s a good chance this is not a man she would agree with about almost anything. He reminds her of someone she knew once, but it’s hard to pin down. She notices his watch, which has a few visible scratches and a very worn leather band, and then his shoes. Without meaning to, she’s staring at the cuff of his pants, which has been folded over at one point. She knows the way her father dresses, the way his closet smells, the way he hangs his suspenders. She imagines this man’s closet must look different. Maybe he lives alone, and gets dressed half asleep, resenting the new day, thinking only of the first cup of coffee. She checks his face, around his eyes. He doesn’t look poorly rested at all, just very patient, very calm. Erase erase erase. Start again.

There’s no clear line between observation and speculation, just as there’s no clear line dividing a mental habit from a formalized activity. The rules write themselves. Passing people on the sidewalk, sitting in restaurants, noticing the couple, not particularly agitated but not particularly happy, over by the bar – the stories my mom comes up with get more intricate, more courageous. They are funny. They are terribly tragic. The only clear line is the one she crosses when she shares the game with me. It’s the first time she’s told any of the stories out loud.

As with all our stories, this is most likely not true, not even a little. As with all our stories, that doesn’t matter. Not even a little. The act of writing false biographies for our fellow MOMA patrons helped us remember how much is unseen, unexpected, how much is unknowable about the people around us. It also let us have fun at others’ expense. It was an act of willful creation, wholly ours, and our pleasure was as much in the invention as in the observation and pseudo-scientific deduction. If it made for a better story we’d happily suspension our disbelief.

As with all our stories, the way I imagine my mom coming to this storytelling is about me more than any external reality. The subway curiosity is my own. The concealment of daily mental rituals is my own. The dramatic, energetic inner voice, the rapt inner audience, even the memories of a watch scratch and a closet smell are mine. My mom taught me how to write fiction. How to love writing fiction.

The curiosity, the attentive observation, the awe and the gratitude may all have found their way into me some way or another. New York City seems to leave me no other choice. But fiction is different. For that, I have to thank my mom, and those balmy afternoons we spent surrounded by boring, inscrutable sculpture and blank, intriguing human canvases.

To Google

She identifies herself as a photographer for the New York Times and asks my name, so I give it to her, carefully spelling the whole unique business of it, already wondering how the potential caption will affect my Google results. If this sounds odd, or vain, or both, it is, but it’s been on my mind for good reason. I refocus. She’s in town for the summer, a student from Tennessee. She is cute as a button. How would one go about getting a stranger’s number? I’m convinced that never actually happens outside of sitcoms. I am talking and talking, grateful for something to do besides waiting for the day to end. She’s smiling. She’s not walking away. If she’s humoring me, she’s really good at it. I try to guess what percentage of her work is chatting people up to get their names for a caption. I imagine a skilled photographer who due to a tragic inability to get strangers to spell their names for him is completely unable to make a living. The young woman in front of me will not have that problem. I watch her get turned down a few times; people think she’s trying to sell them something, or maybe suggesting they get involved in one of those unwelcome, interactive political or artistic projects people are always trying to pull off on city streets. It’s not her fault. She’s lovely; I can see her smile from here. If that’s acting, she’s missed her calling.

Having a singularly Google-able name has to be counted as a blessing. My privileged position is in no danger of being eroded, because the thing is just so damn unwieldy and ever so very unlikely. It’s all mine. Others have to worry about the relative fame of the serial killer, grumpy pundit, and television psychic with whom they share a name, but that will never be my problem. Instead, if you search for what’s on my birth certificate, you get exactly and entirely results having to do with me. This, I am learning, can be its own challenge.

For a long time, searching for my name returned this anarchist list serve I signed up for before I could legally drive. A cousin once virtually caught me, long after the 2000 election had come and gone, passionately arguing for the election of Ralph Nader. (I may need to explain, here, that these are not political positions that I currently hold. They are nowhere near political positions I currently hold; they seem like bad jokes, cringe-worthy, nonsensical. I contend that before the Internet many later revered men were, at the age of fourteen, similarly ridiculous. They just burned the stuff.) Most recently, as I applied to jobs left and right, I was unaware that the name on top of the resumes I was sending out returned a Digg profile cheerfully displaying, as my one and only “favorite,” an article called “I Smoke Pot, And I Like It.” When I became aware of this page just this week, it had been viewed forty-three times.

I Smoke Pot And I Like It was written by Will Wilkinson, a Research Fellow with the Cato Institute. After getting his B.A. from the University of Northern Iowa, receiving an M.A. from Northern Illinois University, being a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, and working for The Institute of Humane Studies and The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, he became editor of Cato’s web magazine, contributor to The Economist’s economics blog, and host of a show on Bloggingheads TV. He presents himself, in the postage stamp picture accompanying his writing in The Economist, Reason, Forbes, or on his excellent blog The Fly Bottle, in a suit jacket and tie, with that 1950s, “charming simpleton” hair part running across his head. Click the link to see what I mean. The article is a desperately needed argument for sanity in the government’s drug policy. Wilkinsons’s sober cost benefit analysis of the issue is, to the best of my knowledge, universally shared among economics departments and intelligent people everywhere. His position was advocated with particular power by the great Milton Friedman, he of the Nobel Prize, beginning decades ago. It was without embarrassment or uncertainty that I endorsed this essay, fully understanding the moral urgency of the violence, fear, misery and death that our current laws needlessly cause. I took the page down immediately.

I’m not someone who has taken naturally to managing my online identity. I’m supposed to be crafting a compelling argument for myself (be my friend! hire me! date me, why don’t you!) out of photos on Facebook, music on MySpace, incessant tweets and status updates and announcements of interesting vacation plans. I haven’t had the heart. Instead I’m almost entirely passive: there are one hundred and seventy-five pictures of me on Facebook, and I have not uploaded a single one.

I’d like accomplishments before I tout them. I’d like to have a better idea of what I’m selling before I market myself. I’d like to have a well defined aim before I start censoring what turns up when people try to find me. At this point, after being surprised by the existence, and then the prominence, of I Smoke Pot under my name, I feel like I can’t afford to wait. Out of a desire for basic presentability, a brush your teeth and shower kind of decency, I want my Google hits to be palatable to any conceivable interested party. An employer, say. A relative. A teacher I had in high school. I believe in the legalization of drugs, I really do. I’ll gladly have that conversation with any reasonable and interested person I know. It’s just that “I Smoke Pot and I Like It” is not what I want making my first impressions for me. If this is the first sentence you read about me, there’s a good chance it will also be the last, forget looking at the essay. Not only does this seem to say “I use drugs and feel the need to be loud about it,” which is not true, but also, crucially, that “I believe this is the most important fact for you to know about me.” Trust me. There are a hundred things I’d rather we start with than my man crush on Will Wilkinson and my thoughts on drug legislation.

My weight, for example. The only other thing of substance that gets drawn out of the interwebs when you call out my name, after my Facebook page, my damning Digg account, and the suck-up essay on AmeriCorps I wrote for an internship when I was fifteen, is a blog post from a guy I went to high school with. Like everyone else I went to high school with, he’s clearly gone and done awesome things while I wasn’t looking, and now keeps a blog chronicling his travels all over the world. One day, who knows why, writing from some distant continent he decided to share a memory from a certain high school history class. The teacher couldn’t see this kid, lucky him, because he was “completely blocked out from her view” by my “hulking body.”

There are a lot of ways to take this. First, most obviously, it’s really funny. I liked this guy. I remember him as a thoroughly friendly kid most well known for achievements on the soccer field, so discovering that he now writes earnest, personal narratives on his travel blog is great. To be included, however peripherally, is kind of neat. To discover that I am included only for blocking someones eye line, well, I just had to laugh. Then I thought about the gray sweatshirt I used to wear at all times, pulling down from the front pockets, hiding myself, lumbering through the halls. That qualifies as hulking, surely. Or hulking could refer to my body type, my broad shoulders that a few people have complimented over the years. I’m not a small person, certainly, which can make me feel safe, and at times even proud. I’ve never really wanted to trade in the wide shoulders for weaker, less substantial versions.

But who am I kidding? Clearly I am sitting there in everyone’s memories a fat slob, a lump of a thing, counted on to be wide enough to duck behind so the teacher doesn’t call on you. I am a throwaway joke, strangely named to be sure, but not worth mentioning anything further about. What this clearly means, I patiently inform myself, is that you are an embarrassment.

It’s curious, my former classmate’s decision to use my full name in this story fragment, where everyone else is identified only by their first. Maybe embarrassing me was his goal. Surely he’s aware of, and has considered at length, the fragile nature of my Google results. There’s a chance it has something to do with there being another character who shares my first name, up in the first paragraph… but I guess we’ll never know. Whatever the reason, it drove the point home: my name is so distinctive that I can easily control what it’s linked to, or just as easily can let it be determined for me, by accident, by chance, in weird and unpleasant ways.

I’ll get over “hulking.” I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, been eating right, been doing yoga, and today, that beautiful Times photographer left with my number. So it’s not just in sitcoms. It didn’t happen easily, of course. She walks over for the third time, draws out our goodbyes, patiently waits out my various unsuccessful attempts to steer the conversation towards naturally exchanging information. We shake hands, twice. The moment hangs. She’s still here, we’re still talking, and if I don’t take this chance now I’ll never forgive myself. Sometimes being passive is just wildly inappropriate. I have this opportunity to make a choice, to make an impression. Finally, I step up.