I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  After a couple of minutes, the hostess—the Customer Seating Manager—came up to me and said in a level tone, “I see you’ve seated yourself.”

  “Yup,” I replied proudly. “Dressed myself too.”

  “Didn’t you see the sign?” She tilted her head at a big sign that said “Please Wait to Be Seated.”

  I have been in this café about 150 times. I have seen the sign from every angle but supine.

  “Oh!” I said innocently, and then: “Gosh, I didn’t notice it.”

  She sighed. “Well, the server in this section is very busy, so you may have to wait a while for her to get to you.”

  There was no other customer within fifty feet, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I had disregarded a posted notice and would have to serve a small sentence in purgatory in consequence.

  It would be entirely wrong to say that Americans love rules any more than it would be correct to say that the British love queuing. These things are done not with enthusiasm or affection but out of a more or less instinctive recognition that these are useful ways of helping to achieve and maintain a civilized and orderly society.

  Generally this is a very good thing. There are times, I have to say, when a little Teutonic order wouldn’t go amiss in England—for instance, when people take two spaces in a parking lot because they can’t be bothered to park correctly (the one offense for which, if I may speak freely here, I would support capital punishment).

  Sometimes, however, the American devotion to order goes too far. Our local public swimming pool, for example, has twenty-seven written rules—twenty-seven!—of which my favorite is “One Bounce Per Dive on Diving Board.” And they’re enforced.

  What is frustrating is that it seldom matters whether these rules make any sense or not. A year or so ago, as a way of dealing with the increased threat of terrorism, America’s airlines began requiring passengers to present photographic identification when checking in for a flight. The first I heard of this was when I showed up to catch a plane at an airport 120 miles from my home.

  “I need to see some picture ID,” said the clerk, who had the charm and boundless motivation you would expect to find in someone whose primary employment perk is a nylon tie.

  “Really? I don’t think I have any,” I said and began patting my pockets, as if that would make a difference, and then pulling cards from my wallet. I had all kinds of identification—library card, credit cards, social security card, health insurance card, airline ticket—all with my name on them, but nothing with a picture. Finally, at the back of the wallet I found an old Iowa driver’s license that I had forgotten I even had.

  “This is expired,” he sniffed.

  “Then I won’t ask to drive the plane,” I replied.

  “Anyway, it’s fifteen years old. I need something more up to date.”

  I sighed and rooted through my belongings. Finally it occurred to me that I was carrying one of my books with my picture on the jacket. I handed it to him proudly and with some relief.

  He looked at the book and then hard at me and then at a printed list. “That’s not on our list of Permissible Visual Cognitive Imagings,” he said, or something similarly vacuous.

  “I’m sure it isn’t, but it’s still me. It couldn’t be more me.” I lowered my voice and leaned closer to him. “Are you seriously suggesting that I had this book specially printed so I could sneak on to a flight to Buffalo?”

  He stared hard at me for another minute, then called in for consultation another clerk. They conferred and summoned a third party. Eventually we ended up with a crowd scene involving three check-in clerks, their supervisor, the supervisor’s surpervisor, two baggage handlers, several inquisitive bystanders straining to get a better view, and a guy selling jewelry out of an aluminum case. My flight was due to take off in minutes and froth was starting to form at the corners of my mouth. “What is the point of all this anyway?” I said to the head supervisor. “Why do you need a picture ID?”

  “FAA rule,” he said, staring unhappily at my book, my invalid driver’s license, and the list of permissible photo options.

  “But why is it the rule? Do you honestly believe that you are going to thwart a terrorist by requiring him to show you a laminated photograph of himself? Do you think a person who could plan and execute a sophisticated hijacking or other illegal airborne event would be unable to contrive some form of convincing artificial identification? Has it occurred to you that it might be more productive, vis-à-vis terrorism, if you employed someone who was actually awake, and perhaps with an IQ above that of a small mollusk, to monitor the TV screens on your X-ray machines?” I may not have said all this in exactly those words, but that was the drift of my sentiment.

  But the requirement, you see, is not simply to identify yourself but to identify yourself in a way that precisely matches a written instruction.

  Anyway, I changed tack and begged. I promised never again to turn up at an airport without adequate ID. I took on an attitude of complete contrition. I don’t suppose anyone has ever shown such earnest, remorseful desire to be allowed to proceed to Buffalo.

  Eventually, with reluctance, the supervisor nodded at the clerk and told him to check me in, but he warned me not to try anything as slippery as this again and then departed with his colleagues.

  The check-in clerk issued me a boarding pass and I started toward the gate, then turned back, and in a low, confidential tone shared with him a helpful afterthought.

  “There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube,” I said. “Think about it.”

  People sometimes ask me, “What is the difference between baseball and cricket?”

  The answer is simple. Both are games of great skill involving balls and bats but with this crucial difference: Baseball is exciting, and when you go home at the end of the day you know who won.

  I’m joking, of course. Cricket is a wonderful sport, full of deliciously scattered micromoments of real action. If a doctor ever instructs me to take a complete rest and not get overexcited, I shall become a fan at once. In the meantime, my heart belongs to baseball.

  It’s what I grew up with, what I played as a boy, and that of course is vital to any meangingful appreciation of a sport. I had this brought home to me many years ago in England when I went out on a soccer ground with a couple of English friends to knock a ball around.

  I had watched soccer on television and thought I had a fair idea of what was required, so when one of them lofted a ball in my direction, I decided to flick it casually into the net with my head, the way I had seen Kevin Keegan do it on TV. I thought that it would be like heading a beachball—that there would be a gentle, airy ponk sound and that the ball would lightly leave my brow and drift in a pleasing arc into the net. But of course it was like heading a bowling ball. I have never felt anything so startlingly not like I expected it to feel. I walked around for four hours on wobbly legs with a big red circle and the word “MITRE” imprinted on my forehead and vowed never again to do anything so foolish and painful.

  I bring this up here because the World Series has just started, and I want you to know why I am very excited about it. The World Series, I should perhaps explain, is the annual baseball contest between the champion of the American League and the champion of the National League.

  Actually, that’s not quite true because they changed the system some years ago. The trouble with the old way of doing things was that it involved only two teams. Now, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out that if you could somehow contrive to include more teams there would be a lot more money in the thing.

  So each league divided itself into three divisions of four or five teams each. So now the World Series is not a contest between the two best teams in baseball—at least not necessarily—but rather between the winners of a series of playoff games involving the Western, Eastern, and Central divisional champions of each league, plus (and this was particuarly inspired, I think) a pair of “wild card” teams that didn’t win
anything at all.

  It is all immensely complicated, but essentially it means that practically every team in baseball except the Chicago Cubs gets a chance to go to the World Series.

  The Chicago Cubs don’t get to go because they never manage to qualify even under a system as magnificently accommodating as this. Often they almost qualify, and sometimes they are in such a commanding position that you cannot believe they won’t qualify, but always in the end they doggedly manage to come up short. Whatever it takes—losing seventeen games in a row, letting easy balls go through their legs, crashing comically into each other in the outfield—you can be certain the Cubs will manage it.

  They have been doing this, reliably and efficiently, for over half a century. They haven’t been in a World Series since 1945. Stalin had good years more recently than that. This heartwarming annual failure by the Cubs is almost the only thing in baseball that hasn’t changed in my lifetime, and I appreciate that very much.

  It’s not easy being a baseball fan because baseball fans are a hopelessly sentimental bunch, and there is no room for sentiment in something as wildly lucrative as an American sport. For anyone from outside America, one of the most remarkable aspects of American sports is how casually franchises abandon their loyal fans and move to a new city. In English soccer, it would be unthinkable for, say, Manchester United to move to London or Everton to find a new home in Portsmouth, or anyone to go anywhere really, but here that sort of thing happens all the time, sometimes more than once. The Braves began life in Boston, then moved to Milwaukee, then moved to Atlanta. The A’s started in Philadelphia, then switched to Kansas City, then pushed on to Oakland.

  Meanwhile, the Major Leagues have repeatedly expanded to where they have reached the point where it is deucedly hard, for me at any rate, to keep track of it all. Of the thirty teams in Major League baseball, just eleven are where they were when I was a kid. There are teams out there now that I know nothing about. Without looking at the standings, I couldn’t tell you whether the Arizona Diamondbacks are in the National League or the American League. That’s a terrifying confession for someone who loves the game.

  Even when teams stay put, they don’t actually stay put. I mean by this that they are constantly tearing down old stadiums to build new ones. Call me eccentric, call me fastidious, but I truly believe that baseball should only be watched in an old stadium. It used to be that every big American city had a venerable ballpark. Generally these were dank and creaky, but they had character. You would get splinters from the seats, the soles of your shoes would congeal to the floor from all the years of sticky stuff that had been spilled during exciting moments, and your view would inevitably be obscured by a cast-iron column supporting the roof. But that was all part of the glory.

  Only four of these old parks are left, and two of them— Yankee Stadium in New York and Fenway Park in Boston— are under threat. I won’t say that Fenway’s relative nearness was the decisive consideration in our settling in New Hampshire, but it was certainly a factor. Now the owners want to tear it down and build a new stadium.

  In fairness it must be said that the new ballparks of the 1990s, as opposed to the multipurpose arenas built in the previous thirty years, do strive to keep the character and intimacy of the old ballparks—sometimes even improve on them—but they have one inescapable, irremediable flaw. They are new. They have no history, no connection with a glorious and continuous past. No matter how scrupulous a new Fenway they build, it won’t be the place where Ted Williams batted. It won’t make your feet stick. It won’t echo in the same way. It won’t smell funny. It won’t be Fenway.

  I keep saying that I won’t go to the new park when they finally raze Fenway, but I know I’m lying because I am hopelessly addicted to the game. All of which increases my almost boundless respect and admiration for the hapless Chicago Cubs. To their credit, the Cubs have never threatened to leave Chicago and continue to play at Wrigley Field. They even still play mostly day games—the way God intended baseball to be played. A day game at Wrigley Field is one of the great American experiences.

  And here’s the problem. Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can’t go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.

  You see what I mean when I say that it is not easy being a baseball fan?

  The other day I called my computer helpline, because I needed to be made to feel ignorant by someone much younger than me, and the boyish-sounding person who answered told me he required the serial number on my computer before he could deal with me.

  “And where do I find that?” I asked warily.

  “It’s on the bottom of the CPU functional dysequilibrium unit,” he said, or words of a similarly confounding nature.

  This, you see, is why I don’t call my computer helpline very often. We haven’t been talking four seconds and already I can feel a riptide of ignorance and shame pulling me out into the icy depths of Humiliation Bay. Any minute now, I know with a sense of doom, he’s going to ask me how much RAM I have.

  “Is that anywhere near the TV-screen thingy?” I ask helplessly.

  “Depends. Is your model the Z-40LX Multimedia HPii or the ZX46/2Y Chromium B-BOP?”

  And so it goes. The upshot is that the serial number for my computer is engraved on a little metal plate on the bottom of the main control box—the one with the CD drawer that is kind of fun to open and shut. Now call me an idealistic fool, but if I were going to put an identifying number on every computer I sold and then require people to regurgitate that number each time they wanted to communicate with me, I don’t believe I would put it in a place that required the user to move furniture and get the help of a neighbor each time he wished to consult it. However, that is not my point.

  My model number was something like CQ124765900-03312-DiP/22/4. So here is my point: Why? Why does my computer need a number of such breathtaking complexity? If every neutrino in the universe, every particle of matter between here and the farthest wisp of receding Big Bang gas somehow acquired a computer from this company there would still be plenty of spare numbers under such a system.

  Intrigued, I began to look at all the numbers in my life, and nearly every one of them was absurdly excessive. My Visa card number, for instance, has thirteen digits. That’s enough for almost two trillion potential customers. Who are they trying to kid? My Budget Rent-a-Car card has no fewer than seventeen digits. Even my local video store appears to have 1.9 billion customers on its rolls (which may explain why L.A. Confidential is always out).

  The most impressive by far is my Blue Cross/Blue Shield medical card, which not only identifies me as No. YGH475907018 00 but also as a member of Group 02368. Presumably, then, each group has a person in it with the same number as mine. You can almost imagine us having reunions.

  Now all this is a long way of getting around to the main point of this discussion, which is that one of the great, great improvements in American life in the last twenty years is the advent of phone numbers that any fool can remember.

  A long time ago people realized that you could remember numbers more easily if you relied on the letters rather than the numbers. In my hometown of Des Moines, for instance, if you wanted to call time, the official number was 244-5646, which of course no one could handily recall. But if you dialed BIG JOHN you got the same number, and everybody could remember BIG JOHN (except, curiously, my mother, who was a bit hazy on the Christian name part, and so generally ended up asking the time of complete strangers whom she had just woken, but that’s another story).

  Now, of course, every business has a 1-800 number— 1-800-FLY TWA or 244-GET PIZZA or whatever. Not many changes in the past two decades have made life immeasurably better for simple folk like me, but this unquestionably has.

  Now here is my big idea. I think we should all have one number for everything. Mine naturally would be 1-800-BILL. This number would do for everything—it would make my phone ring, it would appear on m
y checks and credit cards, it would adorn my passport, it would get me a video.

  Of course, it would mean rewriting a lot of computer programs, but I’m sure it could be done. I intend to take it up with my own computer company, just as soon as I can get at that serial number again.

  I have very happy hair. No matter how serene and composed the rest of me is, no matter how grave and formal the situation, my hair is always having a party. In any group photograph you can spot me at once because I am the person at the back whose hair seems to be listening, in some private way, to a disco album called “Dance Craze ’97.”

  Every few months, with a sense of foreboding, I take this hair of mine uptown to the barbershop and allow one of the men there to amuse himself with it for a bit. I don’t know why, but going to the barber always brings out the wimp in me. There is something about being enshrouded in a cape and having my glasses taken away, then being set about the head with sharp cutting tools, that leaves me feeling helpless and insecure.

  I mean, there you are, armless and squinting, and some guy you don’t know is doing serious, almost certainly regrettable, things to the top of your head. I must have had 250 haircuts in my life by now, and if there is one thing I have learned it is that a barber will give you the haircut he wants to give you and there is not a thing you can do about it. So the whole experience is filled with trauma for me. This is particularly so as I always get the barber I was hoping not to get—usually the new guy they call “Thumbs.” I especially dread the moment when he sits you in the chair and the two of you stare together at the hopeless catastrophe that is the top of your head, and he says, in a worryingly eager way, “So what would you like me to do with this?”