A couple of years ago just about every guy I saw was wearing a yellow “LiveStrong” bracelet to promote awareness of testicular cancer and, I suppose, to show compassion. Those strips of embossed rubber were worn by waiters, teachers, mid-level state bureaucrats, college kids working at Ben & Jerry’s, insurance agents, under-age skate punks trying to buy beer, retired executives, boys, men, gentlemen and dudes of all description. I remember seeing one poke out from the starched cuff of my banker’s shirt sleeve. It was heartwarming – the man might have seemed automated but here was tangible proof that he either knew how to care, or he wanted everyone to know he knew he ought to care. It’s so hard to tell which when caring is expressed through a fashion trend.
Trends, by definition, have an up and a down side. The once ubiquitous yellow bands are pretty scarce these days. I noticed a website advertising them at 25% off. When fashion fades, does concern wane? Can it be that some people are such bargain hunters that they won’t pay full price for anything, including a donation to cancer research?
One of the guys I used to work with, Peter, never took his band off. I guarantee you it had nothing to do with looking cool; he was the kind of guy who didn’t give a rat’s ass what others thought of him. It’s not that he was a slob, or unkempt in any way, he just needed adult Garanimals to take the pressure off picking out clothes. Charcoal grey and brown do not go together, something even I know but he could never grasp, not at the time he worked in our office, anyway. He left town for the fashionable east coast about a year ago and, I had imagined, upgraded his wardrobe, rising beyond the Lands’ End comfort of the Midwest. I was wrong about that. Wearing a grey v-neck sweater with tan corduroys he unexpectedly stopped by the office late in the afternoon the day before Thanksgiving. Man oh man, was I glad to see him. Being the last one in an otherwise empty office the day before a holiday is more depressing than spending New Year’s Eve in a hotel room for one in Waco. Without cable. Well, that’s taking it a bit far, but you get my point. I was not only glad to see him, but grateful for the excuse to pack up and head to the Tiki Bar.
Yes, I work in a building with a Tiki Bar. We’ve also got a seafood restaurant on the first floor and a coffee shop next door, making our office ripe for a sitcom. All we’d need to do is add a little drama and some witty dialogue. And characters. We’d need more interesting, better-looking characters with perpetual sexual tension to make annoyingly bad decisions and propel the plot round and round, week after week in the same exasperating loop.
But of course, our office is nothing like tv. We don’t live in a land of existential epiphanies, preposterous pranks and perfect skin. We just show up for work day after day in our ordinary clothes and sale rack shoes. It could be argued that we could all use a make-over and a little plastic surgery, hell I know I wouldn’t turn it down (How did those worry lines become carved into my forehead? Who strapped those hams to the undersides of my arms?), but I won’t speak for the rest of the staff, even though I kind of just did. If any of you guys are reading, please know that I’m not talking about you, but the others.
As for drama, there’s not much, not that you can see, anyway; no temper tantrums, no secret trysts (unless they are really secret), no catty remarks, no explosions -- nothing to really draw attention. Ennui is quiet. Like most of white-collar America, we look forward to lunch, get pissed off when the copy machine doesn’t work, suspect our co-workers mock us behind our backs, and hoard office supplies. About the only plotlines we could scrape together would involve a bogarted stapler, a bungled copy machine toner replacement job, a misunderstanding about a happy hour venue and a controversial blog entry. Although most of the programs on tv are so vapid that even plants get bored I still don’t think we’d make the grade, not even for a mid-season pilot. Exploits in excel spreadsheets would not keep America in front of the widescreen. Unless the remote is lost.
In real life, the Tiki Bar has plastic palm trees, fake parrots (the big gaudy ones, nothing as classy as a dusky headed conure), a bamboo bar and a long list of fruity rum drinks with names like The Jimmy Buffet, Tommy’s Tsunami and Penzance Punch. What it doesn’t have is a coat rack. I once suggested to the owner that he get one and was told, “No coat racks in Tahiti. No coat racks in my bar. That’s how I keep it real.” I love that guy – no insincerity and cheap beer for the faithful. Who needs a coat rack?
Peter and I got a beer and a barstool, letting our coats slide to the floor. As he lifted his pint, I noticed he was still wearing the LiveStrong band. “So what’s with the bracelet? You haven’t taken that thing off for two years.” “Hey,” he said, with feigned indifference, “wearing is caring.” After a few seconds he cocked his head to the side and said, “brother.” We drank for a few minutes in silence. “How’s your mom?” he asked me. “She’s a tough old bird – too stubborn to let it get her.” It was a practiced line meant to show that I wasn’t afraid of the shitty cancer that attacked her body. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t fooled.
If this were tv you’d see me and Peter playing shuffle board and high fiving each other for even the smallest accomplishment. You’d hear a voice over, one of us saying something poignant about that moment of connection, about how some of us wear a bracelet, others run races and have a t-shirt to show for it and some of us just push it down deep until it becomes a hard dark kernel inside, shoved so far down it comes out of our feet as toenails. The last lines of the show would explain how joking and laughing and drinking up the night served a purpose -- how it felt good to know we’re not alone; that we’re not bad people even though we both emotionally stutter, never saying what we mean to people we love; and that although we privately rage against the cruelty of cancer we have no idea what to do with that anger.
Oh yea, and of course, Happy Holidays.
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