Overheard : Mind Your P’s and Queues
It was right before the eyes, but after the lips--you remember, and I got that horrible infection--and thank God I did--the insurance covered that.”
“It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I don’t want to love you. . . .”
“I don’t have the heart to tell him, but he’s never going to get promoted. I just wish he’d break up with me and then I could tell him. . . .”
It would be so nice if these bon mots were from the new Nora Ephron project, stray snippets wisely delegated to the cutting room floor. Or if they were tatters of conversation that accidentally caught in my hair at, say, the gynecologist’s or an intimate dinner party.
But, point in fact, these are the real utterances of real people with whom I have no relationship, save that at a certain point we were standing in the same line. And they were talking. Loudly. Clearly. Distinctly. And, frankly, they were telling me a lot more than I wanted to know.
Now, I’m not talking the line for the ladies loo, which has an intimacy status somewhere between the dressing room at Loehmann’s and a psychoanalyst’s couch. I’m talking queues at, in order of appearance, the sales counter at the Banana Republic in the Beverly Center, the Lucky in Los Feliz and the Wells Fargo off the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.
One of the more wonderful/hateful things about L.A. is that it is a land where there is one big boundary--the country ends here, after all--and very few little ones. We wear white shoes before Memorial Day, ignore RSVP requests, continue torebuild homes in Malibu and generally disregard the rules of society and nature.One of which is the difference between private and public.
This doesn’t happen in the urban centers of the East, where land is scarce and such rules are sacrosanct. When one can expect to come into direct physical contact with 7,345 people during the morning commute alone, privacy is a bit more appreciated. Also, your average East Coast line-stander is far too preoccupied ensuring, with homicidal vigilance, that no one cuts in to be talking about anything except how goddamn slow this goddamn line is moving.
Out here everything is much more temperate. You drive with your friend to the post office or the DMV, and then you get in line, and life is sweet, and it doesn’t occur to you to discontinue your analysis of each other’s deepest emotional/sexual/financial issues. As if the Bell Jar syndrome were a handy social device one can summon at will.
So let me clear this up right now: When you leave your house or get out of your car, you are no longer in your house or car. We can hear you. I can hear you. Yeah, you with the prostate problem, you with the mother issues, you with the wayward husband. And, frankly, I don’t need all this information piling up in my soul. I know most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, so let’s lead lives of quiet desperation. Because I can’t listen to all of this pain and confusion without wanting to reach out with comfort and advice to succor and soothe. And I am simply in no position to help ‘cause I got my own problems. Like I was sayingto my girlfriend in line at the Nuart . . .
