You're Doing Great!

by Tom Papa

  HAVE YOU EVER BEEN NEXT TO A GROWN MAN WHO WAS CRYING ON A PLANE AND WHEN YOU LOOKED OVER HIS SHOULDER YOU REALIZED HE WAS WATCHING SPIDER-MAN? I HAVE …

  PLEASE LOWER YOUR VOLUME

  Some of the greatest moments in life are the smallest. Little moments like pushing open an old wooden door on a cool morning and settling into a peaceful coffee shop just after it opens. These welcoming yet tranquil moments are important. They allow us to quietly participate in, and enjoy, the world.

  But these moments are becoming more and more rare because rude, inconsiderate people are ruining them.

  I’m sitting in a hotel lounge where they serve breakfast. It’s a beautiful space in New York with a mix of comfortable couches with low tables. Soft music bathes everyone as they speak in hushed tones, coming to life, creating, engaging, and beginning the day. It’s grown-up, elegant, and down-to-earth. It was just ruined.

  It was ruined by the same people who are ruining everything, everywhere I go. On flights, subways, movie theaters, ball games, anyplace where people gather together, people are showing up with their smartphones and iPads and turning their volume on full blast. They have no regard for anyone but themselves. They don’t think for a second that they are being loud, that they aren’t the only people in the room. They must be stopped.

  This family just sat down across from me and they are a loud, disgusting noise show. The dad has an iPad—no earbuds. The younger kid has a phone the size of a frisbee—no earbuds. They are yapping away at each other, playing their devices on full volume, and they don’t think this is a problem. They don’t think this is bad manners. They have no regard for the man sitting across from them in silence, typing away, obviously trying to concentrate on something and writing a mean essay about them.

  What the hell?

  Look, we are human beings. When we show up we make noise. We talk, laugh, and chew. All natural. All forgivable. What is not natural is walking in with an electronic device and playing your annoying video like it’s The Avengers on IMAX. You might as well walk in with a drum kit and start playing the cymbals. Why not unpack a tuba and put a screaming hawk on your shoulder? Why not just open your mouth and start screaming?

  If you engage in this behavior, you are destroying the world. That is not an exaggeration. You are assaulting everyone around in a vile, upsetting manner. And if you don’t stop, I am going to be forced to punch you in your face and stomp on all of your devices.

  Does it occur to you for one moment that the rest of us are not interested in watching something right now? Do you notice that no one else is doing this? That you are the only one? Don’t you get it? Well, now you do, so please stop it.

  I have work to do. That’s why I came here.

  Even worse than the monsters watching YouTube videos of MMA fights and blaring Taylor Swift are the dingbats who are using FaceTime without earbuds. Talking to their friend from somewhere else, on speaker! Now I’ve got two inconsiderate clueless nimrods in my face. I want to kill them all. This happens frequently in airports, which are already drowning in Wolf Blitzer’s nonstop blathering blaring from TVs every four feet or so.

  There’s no way to retaliate. If I crank up the volume on my computer, they won’t notice because they’re engulfed in noise. They love noise. They are noisemakers.

  I hate them so much.

  Mostly the parents. The parents are training their horrible offspring to be just as loud and self-centered as they are. And where does that leave me? It leaves me scowling across the way, having my book be devoured by these horrible people.

  No one is telling them it’s wrong. It’s a tough spot to put us in. It takes guts to tell someone else how to act, especially in our culture where arrogance is ruling the day. Fueled by politics and social media, the loud and rude are really having a moment. It’s as if they are putting their bad behavior on display just daring someone to say something. Well, it may be buried in a book, but I’m telling you to tone it down.

  To use good behavior and consider other people takes work. It takes effort. It’s not easy. It’s much easier to let it all hang out rather than excuse yourself and go someplace out of earshot, away from other people to do whatever it is you have to do. But that’s an act of kindness.

  Maybe they’re just unaware. Maybe we need a teacher to stand up and yell at them. Or a law. I guess we are going to need a law. There was probably a time when people were peeing all over the place, right in front of everybody else. And some cranky guy trying to write his book had enough and started talking to other people and they came together and decided if one more person pees in front of everybody, they’re going to jail.

  Maybe all this constant blasting us with entertainment is affecting everyone’s hearing. My uncle can’t hear at all, and every time he comes over he wakes everyone up because he can’t hear the TV unless it’s on eleven. Maybe that’s it. Maybe we have a country of people who are hard of hearing.

  I had to download an ambient sound app on my phone to drown out all the chaos going on around me. How sick is this? I’m trying to cut out other people’s noise by creating my own noise. They make it seem appealing. Ocean waves, wind chimes, babbling brook. There’s even an app that tells you boring stories in dulcet tones until you pass out. My wife downloaded one, then put her head on the pillow and Matthew McConaughey started telling her a tale. Far from comforted, she shot right up out of bed and started laughing herself awake.

  I have noise-canceling headphones. I have earplugs. Nothing really works. That’s what it’s come down to. I need to create more noise, my own noise, to drown out the other guy’s noise. But it’s still all noise. More and more noise.

  In olden times all you had to do was take a walk up a hill away from the town to find some silence. It just doesn’t exist anymore. I bet there are monks on silent retreat in a cave right now talking to their friends on FaceTime and blasting Kendrick Lamar.

  The family across from me finally got the check. They are going to pay. They are going to leave. I’m so happy. Now, let’s see who replaces them. This is how I live now, on the lookout for another rude interloper.

  Recently, I stopped into a lovely country diner on my way to meet up with my daughters. I figured I would sit at a table and write for a bit in this quaint, homey place, where the entire staff looked like they could easily be your grandmother. It felt good to be doing my work, surrounded by soft-spoken Sunday-morning New Englanders.

  Until it was ruined by an awful band of “dad rockers” who decided to crank their amps up to make sure that everyone within a twenty-block radius could hear their covers of Hootie & the Blowfish.

  I left before the chorus.

  When I’m in New York I go to Kenn’s Broome Street Bar. It’s a place that’s been there since the 1800s. It’s got a small kitchen with two cooks who crank out some of the best bar food I’ve ever had. There’s a great, long wooden bar with a little bit of every patron in the grain of the wood. A stained-glass portrait of a Renaissance boy hangs between the bottles and seems to be smiling at the good time he sees.

  It’s a great setting any time of year. I’ve sat in there in the middle of snowstorms and watched as the city was transformed into a wonderland. I’ve sat there in the open windows during perfect spring days watching the traffic make its way to the Holland Tunnel and rejoiced that I had a beer in my hand instead of a steering wheel.

  There are locals who have lived there for years at a time and tourists who instantly feel like they belong. There’s a small TV in the corner that seems to play the Yankee game year-round, with the sound off. I love it there.

  But they have made a horrible mistake. They installed a new electronic iPad-looking wall jukebox. It blasts music like a weapon nullifying the great conversations that this bar cultivates. If you look around while some horrible heavy metal is blaring from the speakers, you see all these people shaking their heads, with a hand up to their ear straining to hear at least a part of what their friend is trying to say.

&nb
sp; I have two strategies when I go in there now. I spend whatever I have to in order to take control of the music and play nothing but Louis Armstrong, Bob Marley, and Ella Fitzgerald over and over and over.

  My second strategy is to stand with a drink in my hand, pretending to be looking for music. When there’s a beat between songs, I reach behind it and unplug the jukebox. The conversation picks up, the laughter fills the space, and no one notices a thing. Everything returns back to normal, and even the boy etched in the stained glass seems to smile a little broader, grateful that he can go back to quietly eavesdropping on us all.

  MORE THAN JUST A GAME

  If you’re looking for a fun way to enjoy time with your family, try playing a board game. If you are looking for a way to reveal the darkest side of human nature, try playing a board game with my family.

  It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s who you play with. And if you play with my family—more specifically, my wife—you better come prepared. Scrabble is her game of choice, but what you are entering is a complex psychological maze that even if you escape will change you forever.

  She wins most of the time. I think she cheats.

  This is a woman who is normally sweet and nurturing. She is loyal and trustworthy. But she quickly abandons all of that when the game gets pulled from the shelf. It begins with the mention of the word “Scrabble.” Like a prizefighter getting ready in the locker room, she starts to pace back and forth. She boils some tea. She picks her chair. And she sizes up the competition.

  And who is the competition? Her husband, her children, and her in-laws. Maybe a young niece or unsuspecting nephew. They may have been family a minute ago, but now they are the enemy. And they will be destroyed. This is an intense attitude for a game. The very phrase “play a game” means nothing to her. We all come to the table with some popcorn, a Diet Coke, and maybe some nighttime candy. We are there to play. We are naïve. We are going to get hurt.

  It’s hard to explain, but she seems to change physically. She sits higher. She grows taller. She seems to turn up all of her senses. She sees better, hears more, and smells fear. Her eyes change into the eyes of a hawk. They somehow get smaller but become clearer and create a sense that she may not have a soul.

  She always keeps score. Cheaters always do. We’ll be settling in at the table, joking around, and like a schoolteacher reining in a class of unruly fourth-graders, she taps her pencil on the board and asks for our names as if she is meeting us for the first time. As we tell her our names, she snickers and writes them down.

  “I’ll go first!” my eight-year-old niece cries out.

  “Wrong. Those aren’t the rules,” says my wife, correcting her with a quick rundown of how things are going to go. “We each pick a letter. Closest to ‘A’ goes first and we go clockwise from there. Got it?”

  My niece is fighting back tears.

  This seems like a fair, routine way to establish the playing order, but to my wife it is the first chance for victory. She usually picks an “A” or something very close to it, probably a tile that she stashed in her pocket when we were getting snacks. And while she won’t pump her fists at this point, she will mutter under her breath a firm and audible, “Yes. Nice one, Nadal.” When she’s winning she calls herself Nadal.

  There’s something about the way she picks the letters out of the red velvet Scrabble bag that creates a mocking sound. Somehow the click-clack of wooden tiles hitting each other creates a sort of Morse code that is delivering the message to all of us that we’re doomed. I also think that she’s giving us all the finger. This can’t be seen through the bag. I never asked her about it. But I can feel it.

  Once she’s picked her seven letters, she never just passes the bag, she tosses it on the board in the same way an angry customer puts the money on the counter to make the cashier pick it up. It’s not a big move, but it’s a move meant to intimidate us. Like a boxer tapping gloves at the beginning of a fight just a little too hard to let his opponent know he’s already started beating your brains in.

  “I go first, which means I go over the center star for a double word score,” she says. “Right. Off. The. Bat.”

  We all exchange looks. Her popularity is waning.

  Every house has its own rules. Little decisions that were made by the family about the fuzzy details that maybe aren’t so spelled out in the rulebook. If the house decided early on that we are going counterclockwise, then that’s the way it’s going to go. No need to pull out the rulebook. We’re all friends here.

  “It says right here, in the official rules, that we go clockwise.” My niece gets up to leave. We beg her to stay.

  After my wife puts down her first word, records her score, takes the next letters, and gives us all the finger, it’s my turn to go. It’s casual. We’re just getting started. I like to take my time and look for a funny word to get things going. Until my wife takes out the plastic hourglass and bangs it down on the table.

  “Hey. I’m going, I’m going.”

  “Yeah, you are,” she says, pointing at the timer.

  There’s a casual house rule that we flip the hourglass only when someone is taking a really long time and we need to help move things along. My wife’s rule is that it gets flipped on whoever’s turn it is besides hers.

  “What? You can turn it on me. It’s in the rules.”

  I come up with a three-letter word with lame letters, something like “too.” She laughs and writes down a three.

  It’s my niece’s turn. She’s eight. She has a limited vocabulary. She could use some help. My mother leans in. My wife corrects her with a loud fake cough. That’s not going to happen on my wife’s watch. My niece puts down a word, probably misspelled.

  “I challenge.”

  “What?”

  “That’s not a word. Pick it up or I challenge.” My niece, not used to being directly challenged by an adult, slowly takes back her tiles.

  Now, to say that my wife is the only one with strange behavior is not fair. She definitely instigates and stirs things up, but over the course of the game everyone’s bad behavior is revealed. It’s like playing a game with a family of Incredible Hulks.

  Everyone is driven by rage to the point that an uncontrollable ID flares up.

  My mother comes for a good time, ends up confused, and gets angry when everyone grows impatient. My father doesn’t like games at all but after being made to play by his wife is now physically poking everyone and has grabbed the hourglass and will now be controlling it and trying to tap the sand down faster in order to “get this shit over with.”

  My brother-in-law is drinking Scotch like it’s water and has forgotten how to spell, all while my wife is tossing out words like a robot that has been programmed to use nothing but triple word scores. She knows the game better than anyone.

  She understands that Scrabble is not just a fun word game where everyone takes their turn and comes up with creative words. If you are playing to win, there is a lot of strategy involved mostly around landing on or blocking the coveted spaces on the board.

  As my niece puts out her pieces she’s heckled by Cynthia: “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you can, but you’re setting Jerry up with a triple word.”

  “So?”

  “So?! So you don’t know what he has. I think he has a ‘Z’ and if you just hand him a triple word score, he’ll take the lead.”

  My niece lowers her gaze at the board, but I can see that she’s doing some math of her own. She’s thinking, “So what if Jerry takes the lead? Who’s he taking the lead from?”

  “You can still take it back,” urges Cynthia.

  “Nope. I’m good.”

  My wife glares at her. It turns out that Jerry does have something. He’s frantically rearranging his tiles and looking right at that triple word space. He’s practically drooling his Scotch on the board. My wife is irate but my niece is not fazed at all, happily munching on a gummy worm with
out a care in the world. She seems to be winning in her own way already.

  While Jerry is Scotch drunk, he’s not so inebriated that he can’t come up with “zoo” on a triple word score, which he did and it gave him like a zillion points.

  Cynthia slams the table.

  Jerry tries to stand up in victory but is too drunk to realize this isn’t the end of the game. Cynthia is not done. Not by a long shot. Jerry staggers back down and burps.

  This game becomes excruciatingly slow near the end. It’s my turn again and that’s when things really get ugly.

  My wife takes the hourglass back from my father and slams it on the table, eyeballing me the whole time.

  “What did I do?”

  “It’s in the rules.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be so aggressive about it,” I add.

  I don’t know if it was because I was tired or that I didn’t like being bullied, but I felt something had to be said.

  “You know what’s also in the rules? That it’s illegal to look at someone else’s letters.”

  “I didn’t look at anyone’s letters.”

  “How did you know Jerry had a ‘Z’?”

  “I did have a ‘Z’!” Jerry exclaimed.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “I’m not saying, I’m asking. How did you know?”

  “Because I pay attention.”

  “To a drunk guy’s letters when he isn’t looking?” Jerry burps again and passes out.

  “You’re running out of time.”

  Here’s where things got really ugly. There are certain words that are technically words but in my board game opinion aren’t real words. Two-letter affairs that give the player the ability to spell a word with a “Q” without a “U.” Words like Qi, Ze, and Jo. I don’t like the use of these words, I can never remember what they are, but I know she uses them, so I guess and put one out.