Eavesdropping as a Calling

Walla Walla, Washington, as it turns out, is pretty dead on summer weekdays. Kelly and I made the trip at our daughter’s suggestion, and, being gastropubed out, dialed in Mexican food near me.

We chose the restaurant based on the fact that it adjoined an antique store. It was hard to tell what kind of business used to be in the building, but the layout felt odd. One entrance presents you with two doors.

The antique store was to the right, essentially a big open room with fluorescent lights and aisles and aisles of Pacific Northwest junk and treasures. To the left, the deep brick-colored carpet and line of booths beyond showed the way to the restaurant.

I’m no gourmand, but writing about beer I developed a wariness about restaurants that don’t have beer on tap. If you’re a Mexican restaurant worried about beer going stale, it’s going to make me a little more nervous about your food.

We occupied one of the 50 or so tables in the restaurant. No one occupied the others, save a Mexican couple day drinking in the back corner. The woman was big and loud, animated, aggressive, and confident. The man was small and skinny, sun-baked, and wiry from work. He was a jack of all trades, as we’d come to discover.

We nursed our bottled Modello Negros and braced ourselves for a long wait for mediocre food when the woman (I’ll call her “Gloria”) piped up. She was berating/encouraging “Victor” into opening a restaurant. He’d been going through the specs with her when they pinged my radar, explaining how he could put the money together for the lease, and what the lease would include.

It sounded too shady to me, like Victor was going to get screwed over for free renovation work, but Gloria interrupted him with advice about things that would be cool to have in a restaurant. I don’t think she had his best interests at heart.

She uh-uhned the pros and cons of Victor’s potential restaurant on her fingers while her shoulder-length, wavy black hair followed half a beat behind when she shook her head for extra emphasis, ticking off points on her pointer and middle fingers.

I’m an unapologetic eavesdropper. No, I guess “enthusiastic eavesdropper” is better because I start a lot of sentences with, “I’m sorry for eavesdropping, but …”

Whether you call it nosiness or natural curiosity, depending on how offensive you think eavesdropping is, it’s also integral to the way I engage with the world. Especially in a situation of potential endless boredom, listening in is just more engaging and surprising than scrolling.

For the first few minutes, I was pretty sure that, if they weren’t a couple, he was pursuing her, possibly with an eye on getting some money for his restaurant. This seemed outlandish because Gloria was clearly no investor, but he was almost obsequious. They didn’t seem like just regular friends to me, is the point. He was angling and she was venting.

My Spanish is nonexistent, so it was tough to listen in as Gloria dipped between languages unconsciously for a while before slipping into full English only filling her pauses by holding “pero,” while she searched for the next word, the English equivalent of “but, so …”

Gloria was running out of restaurant encouragement, so I stopped listening for a while and waved a chip in the direction of the stewed tomatoes that represented the salsa

An older couple materialized to me right, but they spoke in hushed tones. Kelly and I chatted a bit, but we had been in a car together for somewhere north of 40 hours of driving on our trip West and (as I’ve come to understand) sometimes people need a break from me.

“And so then I told him, you know? I told him as soon as you sleep with your wife again, we’re over!”

The Second Draft

Although I kind of held out hope that they were a couple, Gloria’s outburst convinced me to pay closer attention and revise my working story. I thought that maybe this was a first date and suggested as much to Kelly who also had started listening. She assured me the skinny guy was gay, which was inconvenient for my hypothesis.

Gloria detailed her romantic history before falling in with this married man. She’d been in love, once, truly in real love, but he had died of welding poisoning (the internet says there’s a disease called Siderosis (Welder’s Lungs), but welders also get regular lung cancer and COPD).

She didn’t seem old enough to have had a true love die of a chronic disease, not that she would lie about it, but even before I looked up the diseases I thought it was a little tragic, someone in their 20s or 30s succumbing to an industrial ailment.

With the new man, the married one, she was ready to stand her ground and demand respect. The boyfriend, you see, couldn’t afford to move out of his wife’s house given his immigration status. That was the line he kept using, that he needed to stay or get deported, but she had been over to the house and he wasn’t sleeping on the couch like he said he was. Gloria reiterated her ultimatum.

“I told him as soon as you sleep with your wife again, me and you? We’re over,” she said. “You don’t want to be with me, you just want the papers.”

It was almost as if she were talking to herself, hashing out an argument she was planning rather than one she already had.

Victor turned the conversation back to his restaurant while she ate and didn’t elaborate on her love life again before they paid and left.

Aliens

Victor told her he had to redo the roof in addition to remodeling the entire inside in trade for his lease. As he talked about the little-at-a-time approach to restaurant work I saw this restaurant in a whole new light. The canned chicken in Kelly’s quesadilla conjured for me a subculture of people taking over restaurants with sweat equity. That story possibility alone was worth the $40 for lunch.

Watching Gloria and Victor stirred in me a low-grade sadness. I know it’s reductionist, but they were a Steinbeck novel tableau, dripping with tragic dramatic irony.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) imagine how they got into their shoes, let alone what it would be like to wear them, which drives me into stereotype land. Still, the pathetic dreaming, ignorant of any reality and powered by a desire blind both the consequences and facts of their situations, is a place we’ve all been.

Certainly, I’ve been there at the gates of doom with nothing to do but pretend. Although it’s a subtle difference, hoping against hope is better than raging against reality. My father once told me that the only things I get mad at are things I can’t possibly change. He was teasing me at the time, but in recent years I’ve taken it as a compliment. There’s no point raging about things you can change.

From that perspective, I flatter myself that I have more in common with Victor, gamely seeing through the fool’s errand he’s duped himself into taking. I’m rooting for him. Gloria, on the other hand, should probably just see that guy for who he is and move along. That’s what I would have told her had she been talking to me.

Which she wasn’t.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

Sunday Addendum: Sorry this is late, I scheduled it for 6:30 p.m. (whoops!) That’s the third time that’s happened to me this week (or last week I guess).

So I read a great comic this week, and got the wrong joke out of it.

Here’s the comic

If you go to the comments you’ll see the ensuing conversation, but the short version is I had never seen Twin Peaks (which has something about Huckleberry shakes, and the author had never seen a Huckleberry milkshake in the wild. They’re a Washington tourist trap staple. Maybe now we know why, but more research is needed.

Point is, it’s a great comic.

Also, (and again) there’s so much more on this platform than my bloviating. A lot of you haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but let me entice you by letting you know there’s cool stuff like this all over.

Funeral Pride

I’m sharing some of my Pride-related funeral service podcasts this month, both for Pride Month and because I discovered they hold interest beyond the funeral business. Here’s the one I shared this week:

Hang tough! Here comes summer.

TR