The Visible Man (19 page)

The problem, of course, is that people aren’t natural when they stay in hotels. It’s not a realistic depiction of life. The ability to just drop towels on the floor changes the way people view themselves. It causes everyone to act like they’re rich. Plus, most people staying in hotels are only in town for business, so they just sit around and look at the Internet all night. They lie on top of the covers and watch HBO. You can usually tell what social class a hotel guest comes from by how long they stay in the shower and how much they appreciate the mattress. If they’re staying in a hotel alone,
men inevitably masturbate,
¹⁰
but women only do so half the time. That might sound reductionist and overstated, but my data is irrefutable.

The other downside to working hotels, of course, is the inescapable likelihood of ending up in a room with two people instead of one. That’s when you
really
see people who aren’t acting like themselves. When it’s a couple on vacation, you can tell a lot about their relationship within the first ten minutes of arrival: If they almost have sex as soon as they enter the room, there’s a 95 percent chance they’ll have sex later that night; if they just unload their luggage and leave for dinner, they probably won’t have sex all weekend. To be honest, I didn’t learn much from studying hotel patrons. It was kind of like trying to study the natural behavior of African elephants by visiting a zoo in Portland.

However, I do recall one episode that happened at a Radisson, right here in town. It wasn’t an intentional discovery and it didn’t fulfill my original goal, but it was a good day. I don’t know if you’ve even been inside the Radisson on Cesar,
¹¹
Vicky, because … well, why would you go to a hotel in the city where you already live? But there’s a TGI Friday’s on the ground floor. I saw this serious forty-something woman eating there, all by herself on a Friday afternoon. She didn’t look like she was thanking God for anything. My assumption, of course, was she was staying at the Radisson. And there was something brittle about her I appreciated: It looked like she was unpleasant on purpose. She wore an earth-tone pantsuit and never looked away from the newspaper, even while smearing her chicken fingers with honey mustard. All business, all the time. I decided she’d be my subject for the night; I was drawn to her severity. She seemed like she wouldn’t have the patience to become a different person, even when she wasn’t at home. I waited for her to pay the bill, and I noticed she didn’t charge the food to
her room. In fact, she paid cash, which meant she wasn’t even on an expense account. That was my first clue that something was afoot.

She leaves the TGI Friday’s and walks up to the next level. The mezzanine. The mezzanine? The mezzanine. She enters a conference room. The door is propped open, so I follow. There are maybe ten other people in the room. At first I think, “Goddammit. I’ve walked into a fucking business conference.” But everybody there seems too unalike, and one of these people is clearly a teenager. They all nod hello, but nobody says anyone else’s name and nobody shakes hands. About five minutes after five o’clock, they close the door and start talking. For a split second, I’m certain I’m at an AA meeting, which is only slightly better than a business meeting. But nobody talks about being drunk or wanting a drink or regretting things they’ve lost through drunkenness. These stories are more oblique.

“As you all know, I’ve been a Little League coach for the past three summers,” one man began. He looked like a person from a Nabisco commercial: a good-to-great-looking guy. No facial hair. Nice shirt, no tie. Monotone voice. I don’t want to stereotype, but I remember thinking he looked like somebody who used to go to Jimmy Buffett concerts, but only during college. He looked like the kind of guy who traded his SUV for a Saab the same day gas prices went above two dollars a gallon. He looked like the type who hated Obama for completely nonracist reasons.

“My players are all five and six years old,” he continued. “It’s a ‘coach-pitch’ league. What this means is that—as their coach—I pitch to my own players. The opposing coach pitches to his own players when they’re up to bat. We used to have the little guys hit off a tee, but the league decided that this format was better for their development. Basically, the idea is that—as their coach—I know which kids are good and which kids are bad, and I can challenge or assist them accordingly. We want every kid to know how it feels to get a hit, but we also want them to learn how competition works. That’s the concept. It’s a good concept, maybe.

“So, we’re playing a game this last Wednesday afternoon. It’s tight. Our games are five innings long, and we’re behind nine to seven in the bottom of the fifth. Two outs, top of the order. This kid named Tommy is our lead-off batter. Tommy is a wonderful kid—quiet, polite. Plays second base. Looks like Justin Bieber, so all the older kids give him shit. I lob him a fat one, and he whacks a single. Nice. Great. I’m happy for Tommy. The next batter is his friend Matt. Matt’s a snot, but funny as hell. Reads
Batman
during practice, or whoever the new Batman is supposed to be now. Talks a lot. Talks all the time. Talks about things no one cares about, like some book his grandfather gave him about Vietnam. I love Mattie. Matt already thinks he’s interesting. I basically give him the same fat pitch, and
bang
. Another single. So now Tommy’s on second and Mattie’s on first. It’s getting exciting, you know? This is about as tense as a baseball game between kindergarteners can be. The third batter is Cory. Now, the only thing I really know about Cory’s life is that his mom is way too attractive to be forty. But Cory’s a good player, at least for his age, so I challenge him some. I throw the ball with a little velocity, because I know he can handle it. He pops it straight up, so it looks like the game’s over. But the third baseman—remember, these are six-year-olds—totally misplays the ball. It hits him on the top of the head. So now Tommy’s at third, Matt’s on second, and Cory’s on first. Bases loaded. The sacks are juiced. It’s a real game. All the parents are suddenly interested. I can tell, because they’ve stopped checking their cell phones.

“Now, our clean-up hitter is Toby. Toby is almost seven, but he looks like he’s ten. He’s far and away the best player on our team. We probably should have moved him up to a higher division. I have no doubt he’ll be some kind of star by the time he’s sixteen. You can already tell he’s a jock by the way he walks. But, you know, right now, he’s still six. He acts like a six-year-old, even though he’s tall and thick and coordinated. And here he is, with the chance to be a six-year-old hero. Here’s Toby, in prime position to win the game and be the king of the postgame McDonald’s trip. And I want this to happen. In my mind, I want Toby to hit a goddamn grand slam,
because he’d remember that forever, or at least until junior high. I’m his coach. My responsibility is his development. But something always stops me from
feeling
this way, even if my mind tells me otherwise. I remembered when I was in high school, when I pitched in the state playoffs. Everyone expected me to close games down, because I was the closer. I was the Mariano Rivera of the Class B San Antonio Catholic League. That’s who I was, and that’s still how I feel. I know I’m not the same person I was in high school, but sometimes I am. And at that moment—just like always—I quit caring about the economic growth of my insurance dealership or my wonderful wife or my own goddamn kids. I just want to be me. So when I saw Toby digging his stupid little size-five cleats into the dirt, it pissed me off. Fuck that kid. Fuck him. There was no way Toby was going to do this. There’s just no way. Time to close the door.

“I lace the first pitch on the inside corner of the plate. Good cheese. I can still bring it. Strike one. Our sixty-pound catcher almost fell backward when it hit his glove. I can tell it kind of scares Toby, which must have been my goal? Next, I throw a breaking ball that runs outside, but he chases it for strike two. I mean, what does Toby know about breaking pitches? I’m sure he can’t even spell the word
breaking
. I waste my third pitch high and away, but then I blow off his doors with a split-finger fastball, right down the gullet. The bat never even gets off his shoulder. Strike three. Game over. I get the save against a child on my own team. I’m a monster.

“Later, I tell Toby that he shouldn’t have chased strike two, that he needs to be more patient at the plate, but that—next time—I’m sure he’ll come through and be the big hero. I let him have extra McNuggets—everyone else got six, but I let Toby have ten. To be honest, he seemed totally okay with what happened. Unchanged. But I felt awful. I felt the way I always do, whenever this happens.”

As the Nabisco man finishes his story, I see other people around the table nodding. They all relate to this, somehow. A long-haired man starts yammering; he tells a story about how his wife recently composed a song on the piano, and he goes on and on about how the song was so beautiful. Much better than anything he’d ever
written for his own band. Far more sophisticated and nuanced than anything he’d ever created himself. He’s clearly proud of his wife. But his wife will never know how proud he was, because he refused to tell her. Instead, he told his wife it is “kind of okay” and that it seemed like something off a late Wings album that Linda McCartney might have co-written. Again, everyone around the table nodded away. The teenage girl spoke third. She said she recently got a 97 on a trigonometry test, but that two other girls in the class got a 100 because they showed their work and she did not. This made her hate the other two students. She could not believe they were being rewarded for doing things on paper that she could do in her head. As a result, she logged onto Facebook under a fake identity and claimed these two girls were lesbians and that she saw them kissing after a National Honor Society meeting. She wanted to ruin their lives and stop them from getting into Rice. She said she felt guilty about this, but not really.

It turns out I had stumbled into a support group for people with “competition disorder,” a disorder I had never previously considered. Every person’s anecdote expressed an overwhelming sense of helpless entrapment—they all wanted to know how it felt not to obsess over winning. They talked about how they couldn’t stop watering and mowing their lawns. They talked about their need to drive faster than the flow of traffic and how they always ruin Christmas by overreacting to minor rules infractions during games of Apples to Apples. The woman I spotted in the TGI Friday’s spoke last. She worked for a commodities broker and made $400,000 a year. Her salary meant nothing to her. “I don’t like spending money,” she said. “I only like watching it accrue.” She had no husband and no children. Her social life revolved around her co-workers, all of whom she despised.

“They’re so unmotivated,” she said. “They smile at me, so I smile back. They ask me to lunch and sometimes I go. I need food like anyone else. They talk about how much things cost and about how their dogs act like cats and about which of our co-workers they suspect are sexist or racist or sympathetic to Elisabeth Hasselbeck,
and they all try to convince me to visit their nondenominational churches. It’s funny that somebody else mentioned Facebook … two years ago, they all told me I needed to join Facebook. They said it was ridiculous that I’d never joined, particularly since my divorce. ‘This is just how it is now,’ they said. I told them I was too old for that shit. But they kept
insisting
how great it was, how it was no longer just for college kids, how it was this underrated crowd-sourcing resource, how it wasn’t what I imagined, how it was this wonderful diversion and this important business tool. So I surrendered. I joined Facebook. And you know what? It turns out the only reason they wanted me to join was so they could show me pictures of their children without having to ask if I was interested in seeing them. This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It’s designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent.

“I suppose I don’t mind chatting at the office. It’s painless. I just repeat whatever they’ve already said with different words, and that’s usually enough to satisfy their curiosity. They count that as conversation. They’re naturally satisfied. I listen to their stories and look for weaknesses. I plot against them. They probably know I’m plotting, but they don’t mind. They don’t even have the tenacity to think I’m a bitch. They don’t care if they lose. Honestly, they don’t. They just go home and upload more baby pictures. It’s crazy. It’s so crazy. This is the life I’m supposed to envy? No way. No fucking way. I want to tell them this. I want to say it to their face. Which, I realize, is unnecessary. It’s not their fault, I suppose. They can’t help being satisfied with who they are. And it’s not like my life is anything to brag about. You know what I do most nights? I watch
There Will Be Blood
in my bedroom. Not the whole movie. Just the middle part. The part where the oilman is talking to his fake brother by the fire and says, ‘
I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed
.’ I watch that scene over and over and over again. It’s track five on the DVD. It feels so good to watch. I like watching it so much that it scares me. I know this is pathetic, but I wish that oilman was my coworker. I wish he was in my life. I want to live in a world where
that guy
is normal. I want to sleep with
that guy
. That’s who I envy. And
that’s why I’m such a mess. That’s why I’m here. I know it’s wrong to feel like this, even though this is how I want to feel.”