Making People Talk

by Barry M Farber

  It beats the military salute, Japanese bowing, the Chinese kowtow, the handing over of a sword, the kissing of a ring, the prostrate touching of a forehead at someone’s feet, and the defeated male wolfs deliberate exposure of his bare neck so the winner can bite him there and finish him off (an invitation that the victorious wolf, by the way, being subhuman, always refuses!).

  Asking someone for advice says, “After hearing even these’-’ few minutes of your expertise in the subject we’ve been discussing, I hereby choose to forfeit my human right of trying to catch up, one-up, impress you, or surpass you, and instead use these valuable minutes in your company as your student in the hope and conviction that such a posture may very well illuminate my darkness, solve my problem, lift my life.”

  Such a request makes it hard to look at a watch, yawn, ‘ walk away, glance over his shoulder to see if anyone more interesting is available on the other side—or even want to. The requester of advice has dramatically shifted his mode of the moment from contender to supplicant. The one the request is addressed to, therefore, automatically shifts from guest-at-large, free to mind his own business, over to. “fire chief,” suddenly obliged to slide down the polished brass pole in his hastily donned jumpsuit and rush his knowledge and talents to where they’re obviously needed—in fact, more than needed; actually called for.

  Glue binds scraps of paper. Staples bind documents. Rivets bind steel girders. One of the fixatives that binds people closer together is shared experience. You meet people on the club car traveling from New York to Philadelphia who are so nice, easy, interesting, fascinating that you’re sorry you’re not going to be together all the way to New Orleans. The rest of the passengers, the ones you didn’t talk to, are nothing but anonymous blobs of biology.

  If Norman Gillis ever calls me, he can count on me bending—maybe even breaking—my schedule to get together and do whatever within reason I can do for him, because we once tried to hitchhike together from Greensboro to Wilson, North Carolina, for a high school football game, made it as far as twenty-five miles past Raleigh, got no farther, and wound up in my first and only instance of ‘ ‘double’ ’ hitchhiking; Norman and I stood on opposite sides of the highway waving at cars going in both directions, hoping one would stop headed for either Greensboro or Wilson. In that latter case, we would then hope to find a ride to Greensboro with somebody driving home after the game. At that point, we would both have gotten into whichever car stopped first!

  Sure, it was a long time ago, but it was good for a lot of talk and a lot of laughs. I remain bound to Norman Gillis in a way I am not bound to the 340 other people on the same plane to Rome.

  (Who wants to arrive in Rome with 340 new “friends”? Most of us would rather have six or eight hours of unbroken privacy. Of that ample passenger list, you have the chance on a normal flight to “break silence” with, maybe, six: the person on your right, your left, the one who’s hat you help secure in the overhead compartment, the one you warn you’re about to recline your seat, the one you think you met in Zagreb. You may go a dozen or more flights without trying to talk to a single one. If that’s your choice, if you’re not tortured with thoughts of all the advantages you’re sacrificing by choosing privacy, then by all means keep your protective seal unperforated. Freedom of speech includes freedom not to start, or encourage, a conversation!)

  The starting of a productive conversation, one that will turn biological blobs into Norman Gillises for you, resembles the starting of a cheap motorboat engine. You’ve seen the man in the lake, standing at the back of his boat, bracing his foot against the stemboard to get better purchase for a pull, then jerking the ignition cord as hard as he can in hopes of getting that mechanical purr that tells him he’s in action. It doesn’t come easily. At first he gets only a few bup-bup-bups, a few sputters of decreasing intensity.

  Then, suddenly, he connects and gets the high hum of the going engine, whereupon he can smile and relax.

  Asking for advice is one of the best ways to jerk anybody’s ignition cord.

  The skilled hosts and hostesses can, of course, handle social difficulties better than the unskilled. The most skilled, however, wouldn’t be much better than the least skilled at handling, say, a guest who walked in naked!

  There’s a moment almost as torturous at parties that makes everybody seem naked. It’s when the host or hostess “presents” you to another guest and, with eye at high twinkle and enthusiasm equal to drums and trumpets, tells you this stranger she’s suggesting you get friendly with is “big in real estate.”

  At that moment you’ve got to score a knockout to break even.

  Nobody’s ever written a “History of Embarrassment,” but that particular kind of embarrassment is relatively new to the world. Once upon a time, there were no people you didn’t already know. The demographics of the tribe, the clan, the village, the shtetl, were known to one and all. The arrival of “the stranger,” was a major moment—covered, incidentally, in the official behavior code of every major religion.

  One result of the Industrial Revolution is that nobody knows who anybody is anymore. And a result of the “Me” revolution is that nobody gives a damn.

  Whoever says to you, “This is Harold. He’s big in real estate” seldom realizes the fix he’s putting you in. What he’s really saying is, “You may not be athletic, or if you are, you may not be in the mood at the moment, but regardless, here’s a vine, buddy. Swing on it!”

  Most of us can’t do much better than phony up a quick smile and sayK‘‘Uh huh. Real estate. Good. Good!”

  That’s where the “Kemersville” ploy comes to the rescue. My younger brother, Jerry, always wished he’d had my “first-son” advantage of choosing not to go into our father’s business: selling women’s suits, slacks, Bermuda shorts, etc., through all the little towns in North and South Carolina. I chose the softer communicative arts, which was fine, because Daddy had another son to carry on our family’s merchant tradition stretching back to czarist Russia.

  One day I asked Jerry how in the world he managed to maintain his enthusiasm while pursuing a livelihood that our New World educations had made us think of as a kind of professional Siberia.

  “It’s easy,” Jerry said. “You pull into town. You park in front of Mr. Epstein’s store. You get your sample cases out of the back. Mr. Epstein sees you and comes out of the store to greet you. When you see him, you put the sample cases down, throw back your shoulders, take a deep breath, and say,4 ‘Man, it’s great to be back in Kemersville apain!”

  If, when you’re introduced to Harold the real estate man, you don’t do “Kemersville,” if you blunder on ahead and do what comes naturally, you’ll find it tough going. We can all hear it now.

  “Oh, really!” “Real estate!” “Uh, what kind of real estate?” “How did you get into real estate?” “How long have you been in real estate?” “Real estate’s a pretty lucrative thing, I hear.”

  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer conversationally, too. Arranged marriages frequently work. You are now trapped in an arranged conversation!

  Harold’s having a rough time because it’s painfully obvious you didn’t book this act, you don’t want this conversation, you’re bringing nothing to it, it’s going nowhere. You, too,

  are having a rough time because you didn’t ask for this conversation, you know you’re doing badly, and you resent doing badly in a game you didn’t want to get into in the first place. Every general knows volunteers fight better than draftees. With the outlay of one little burst of energy, however, you can turn that naked moment around and make that conversation rich. Just reenlist as a volunteer and do “Kemersville!” Imagine you’re really a handsome prince who got hexed by an evil witch many years ago and was forced to be a frog for a year, two years, a century—for as much time as it took until you happened to meet a real estate man. Imagine that every strand of your life is firmly gripped, snugly secured, and woven into a beautiful tapestry, except one: Up to now, you
’ve never known anybody in real estate you could confide in, talk to like a friend.

  The “Kemersville” line in your case goes something like,~”-» “Real estate? How great! It hasn’t been twenty-four hours I since I was wondering about something in real estate I’ll bet Iyou know all about!”

  All you need- do now is arrange to wonder retroactively about something he’ll know all about.

  Think. Is anything there automatically?

  “Is it true they don’t make them like they used to anymore?” “Are banks still red-lining poor neighborhoods?” “How are those rentals moving in the high rises?” “How long can landlords sustain those low levels of occupancy before they’re sorry they started the development in the first place?” “Are the celebrities of real estate you read about in all the papers really the biggest, or just the best publicized?” “Do you think real-architecture will ever come back?”

  No more bup-bup-bup for you. That engine is humming! You’ve gotten that engine hummimg nicely on a fuel called Elicitation of Expertise, a mighty fuel indeed, but a pallid cousin to the dynamite stuff called Advice!

  Sometimes it’s fum to play around with Elicitation of Expertise for a while before you go for Advice. If you’re too quick to say. “Oh, you’re in real estate, huh, Maybe you can help me with a problem,” he may conclude you’re nothing hut another opportunist looking around for a free lunch. When you do move in for Advice, let it be a subtle shifting of gears of the conversation, a kind of border crossing between conversation L and relationship. Women with striking good looks in the business world tell us they’re turned off when a man seems too ready to do too much for them too soon after they’ve met. That man can’t possibly be reacting to anything but her appearance. If, however, his overt eagerness and concern begin only after , die’s had a chance to demonstrate some wisdom and talent. that’s different. Then that same woman is going to think, “Here’s a man who remained disturbingly cool through the initial onslaught of my knockout good looks, and ran into difficulty containing his enthusiasm for me only after I recited stock-earnings ratios over the last four quarters for the top five companies in his field. In short, a man worth knowing.”

  Let Harold suppose, not “Here’s someone hard up for free real estate advice,” but rather, “Here’s someone wise enough to grasp my wisdom in an admirably short period of time.” No drug on earth has such swift and visible effect as your injection of “Maybe you can help me with a little advice.” Or “Would you mind being my consultant here for a few seconds?” Or, “I’ve been looking for somebody as knowledgeable as you to advise me.” Or, “Do you mind my taking advantage of your expertise for a few minutes?”

  No matter how you phrase it, Harold will hear, “I need your help.” That is supremely flattering. Harold will like that.

  “I’d be interested in your opinion on country real estate. Do you think it’s a good buy right now?”

  Former secretaries of state get fees of something like twenty thousand dollars to stand up before groups with names something like the Foreign Policy Association and tell of all the marvelous things that happened when their advice was followed, and all the diplomatic catastrophes that resulted when it was not. They love it.

  Nothing like that has ever been offered to Harold. Your plea for advice was as close as he ever gets. And he loves it! The comparison with narcotics is not idle. Musicians in particular, during the years when drugs were perceived as more naughty than disastrous, told of “zipping and tripping” while high through musical riffs that were cumbersome and difficult in the flat-footed waking state. Without injecting, ingesting, or inhaling anything—legal or illegal—you will get that same feeling as the “talk” takes off and what you’ve grown to dread as “forced party conversation” soars with a sincere interest and energy.

  The old song “Whistle a Happy Tune” told us, “You can be as brave as you make believe you are.”

  I doubt that. I can guarantee, however, that you can be as interested as you make believe you are, even when Harold, a little breathless at the pleasure of your recognition, pinwheels deeper and deeper into eminent domain and second mortgages!

  Your decision to go for Advice should never be based on a person’s status, only on his demonstrated wisdom over aT least some conversation. Learning that the stranger is a lawyer^ and popping a question about a legal matter affecting you is not » an ingenious and effective friend-making tool. It makes you the lowest insect on his windshield. (Even lower, of course, if. he’s a doctor!)

  It’s best to stick to Elicitation of Expertise with lawyers and doctors. Ask the lawyer how he views recent Supreme Court rulings, the jury system, the process of filling vacancies on the federal bench. Let him know how much you’d appreciate hearing him explain—in that clear, simple style of his—

  the reasons for the exclusionary laws they’re constantly debating on Sunday-morning TV. You may be about to include another lawyer on your “committee.” Don’t blow it all in the early moments by asking him if he thinks you’ve got a good chance to collect from the parent company of the restaurant that served you a hamburger with something in it that chipped your tooth.

  Ask the doctor, by all means, about the changing role of the AMA since the days of old bulldozing Dr. Morris Fishbein, how American medicine stacks up technologically against Russian and Chinese medicine, how American medical distribution compares with the “socialized” systems of Scandinavia, Holland, Germany, and England; whether telethons actually fight disease, whom he admires most in the research field at the moment, and in history; if he’s ever witnessed a medical “miracle,” whether nutrition may be overrated, how he feels about jogging when the temperature’s over seventy and the jogger’s over fifty.

  If you want a lifetime of free medical advice from your new doctor “friend,” don’t use that first flush of acquaintanceship to ask him if he thinks your family doctor, whose bills you pay, is an idiot for making you mix Butazolidin with allopurinol when you feel the first touch of gout hit your big toe.

  God may have given us the game of golf just to teach us that often what “feels” natural and harmonious is wrong, even disastrous. I could summarize one and only golf lesson in two words: “Pervert nature!” Everything I did instinctively with that golf club was wrong—stance, grip, swing, and looking up to see what happened to the ball. That lesson never did help me learn to play golf; but it did teach me some philosophy and a little theology instead.

  Let’s say you’re a young lawyer and you meet a judge at the party. Chances are you will make as many natural and instinctive mistakes with that opportunity as I did with that golf stick. I can see you now, holding yourself high, keeping your facade polished, trying not to look too flustered or impressed, trying to radiate the impression that it takes more than mere judge to derail you. s64are quite at home, your demeanor suggests, enjoying fellowship on an equal footing with the judge. After all, are you not two soldiers of the law enjoying a moment of co-congeniality? “The judge and I. Nice team.”

  Certainly, you’ll never be disbarred for acting equal to a judge at a party. The Constitution guarantees you that right. You probably feel your “swing” with the judge is as natural as I felt mine was with that golf club. (Could I be exaggerating the perversion of the good golf swing? Are you really supposed to keep your left elbow stiff?)

  Glory will wait patiently until you try the unnatural swing with the judge; until you approach him and say something like, “Your Honor, I have a feeling approaching reverence for judges. I think that’s why I went to law school. I don’t want to put you to anything that resembles work at a party, but without even taking time to think, could you tell me what mistakes most new lawyers make when they’re trying a case in court?”

  Cloying? An obvious attempt to curry favor?

  You’re overruled!

  It doesn’t matter how obviously your attempt seeks to curry favor so long as it curries

  Reflect upon all the comments from others you can r
emember that succeeded in currying your favor. Was the motive of any one of the people making those comments hostile? Was any one of them out to annoy you? Was any one of those comments calculated to insult or incense you?

  Of course not.

  They were all designed to please you, weren’t they? And they succeeded, didn’t they? Why do you feel you alone will be treated shabbily by those whose favor you seek to win by good, clean, honest, effective currying?

  Put yourself in the judge’s position. Here you make it to the upper reaches of your profession. True, there are reaches on top of reaches. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is in a higher “reach” than a traffic court judge in Valdosta, Georgia. But they’re both judges. Neither is a “plain old attorney” anymore.

  “Judge” is an electric word, like senator, congressman, general, admiral, bishop, countess, dame, and dozens of other titles. Whoever bears something electric enjoys electrifying, at least a little bit, at least once in a while. Nobody suggests they’re megalomaniacs ready to throw tantrums the instant one of us hears their title and fails to kneel and bum dried sassafras root at their feet. It just gets awfully boring having made it to the rank of judge, for instance, and having the entire world do nothing but show how cool, ready-for-it, and unimpressed they can be.

  “What are the mistakes beginning trial lawyers make in the courtroom?”

  Is that too much of a salute for you?

  That question has everything. It’s a good question. Any judge asked that question will likely bristle with the kind of .good answers and anecdotes that engross and entertain even the bystanders of the conversation. That question puts the judge right where most of us want to be: in the very spotlight we inwardly feel our work has legitimately earned- What small’ boy running to school does not fantasize himself on a football field racing for one game-winning touchdown after another? And who of us beyond the school-running age does not fantasize camera crews positioning mikes and cameras at our lips to capture our extraordinarily rich commentary^ and advice when headlines break along news fronts we happen to know something about?