The Genius of the Crowd

In winters he wears the same long jacket that flickers like film. He just happens to be the biggest operator in any time and any universe. Just past twenty and standing in a firm six-foot-two frame, he’s in the prime of his life. An aspiring (always aspiring) playwright, director, don, wolf, honcho, commander, chief, captain, he spends his Thursday evenings in New York City bars ordering wine and speaking to the women who pass by. With gall, he calls them over to pitch movie ideas and characters that only they could play. Full of oversaturated flattery, he tells them that their red hair has got just the right feeling. Apparently, it’s not flirting if it’s business. And, despite the few who’ve had the hand-eye to land a firm palm on his cheek, he never fears their response. He’s just talking. Talking to hear the words. Talking to make the fake idea real. Every so often, one will sit with him, have a glass of white to his red, and indulge in his lacquered words about screenplay potential. I’ve not figured it out yet, but he has a particular guile-induced charm. Maybe it’s the smile or the gold-framed glasses or the tooth chipped just right. But some women do. They sit down with him, much like I do. Enamored just for a moment with the image of his world. I’m a member of the club and I feel like a fucking fool.

This place of his is vivid, approaching varicose, with perceived Beauty. He wakes up and the birds recite Keats. At night when you or I see nothing, he watches the dark wind revolve in the endless sky like billowing smoke. He’ll call you the next morning and ask if you’d seen it too, but he’ll know you hadn’t. When one can handle language in the way he does, everything is rendered ethereal. The table he sits at, the chair he sits in, can all gracefully disintegrate with the closing of his eyes and relentless, unabashed poeticism.

Alongside his hard, neat brightness everything fades into the surety that he knows everything. In a way, his world seems less real. Perhaps that is why I find myself jealous of him. He has what is needed to render the world perfectly his own.

Months ago we ate late dinner at a nearby diner. It was a cold night. The sky was purple and the clouds were combed nicely. The restaurant was empty and smelled of something strong but unnamed. He sat with his legs crossed and stared straight through me with big eyes thinking of something large. I ordered coffee. It seemed the most sensible thing a person could do to sit with a drink in hand. I do not remember what he ordered, but as I left I recall his plate having been clean.

He asked how I was and if I’d been talking to any women. I had not, and he was saddened to hear the words aloud.

“A shame. You must be busy thinking of other things.” He spoke as though he’d already practiced these tumbling words—as though he were reading them out of a book written by a man with gray hair. A man with gray hair whose life has only just been enlivened by the effortless sway of Leaves of Grass.

“The weather stays mostly the same,” I told him, trying to match his lyricism.

“Loneliness is a creative despair! Have you been writing?” he responded jocularly.

“Only when instructed.”

“Consider this instruction. Life is content and I encourage you to capitalize on it. Write what you see and feel and once you have, allow me to read it. I would love to use some of your lines if you write good ones.”

I figured he was right in saying that life was content, but he only believed it so while under the pretense that life was content for his use. My lines were to be his if he approved of them; my world would be scaled to his judgment and then to his use.

I am young and being with him makes me feel alone. He’s a Whitman, and I a Bukowski. I feel that I need the time to get something done, something impressive, but I know little of what to finish. Through the lack of attachment to words, my thoughts do little more than sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then swallow themselves; I forget them almost immediately. When you speak with him, the tongue in your mouth becomes thick, warm, sour felt. In these moments, you define yourself in terms of his aestheticisms of “Everything is beautiful when you look at it with love” and “The price of creation is never too high.” It’s all an over-correction and yet your lack of passion is shamed by his presence; your lack of love feels onerous and you give him everything he asks for and get little else in response.

Conversation continued about things he was feeling that I wasn’t. I asked him out of politeness whom he had been talking to and he mentioned those women in the street-side bar. I wasn’t to meet any of them, but he would offer me their voices. To their knowledge or not, he records their conversations. He offered me his justification as he had written it in his notebook of afflatus—“I remember someone’s voice better than their face.” He then played for me these one-sided podcasts titled by his immediate impressions: American Vera Lynn, the Park Ave Woman, Rapunzel, and so on—so cheapening. He spoke of them with reverence and tried to convince me that each and every one of them had briefly fallen in love with him. For whatever reason he cared to invent, these women were worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them. They were suddenly artistic themselves and he, artistic for loving them. He held proudly the ability of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love from modest eyecontacts with a passerby. It’s miraculous and tiresome. I envy him, although perhaps I shouldn’t.

We split the check and he paid with evenly stacked coins. I left the diner deafened by his words of ambition. Suddenly, he wasn’t anything at all. I had a bellyache, and the trees I walked under seemed less than trees and more like everything else.

He sees the magic, but I only see him.