Talking to Strangers

I’ve been off work for a couple of months traveling and have come to miss a lot of things about the job. Most of all I miss that point when you become almost too comfortable with your customers, allowing them to hang around long after you’ve locked the doors (though you’re not meant to).

I often think of the banter, and of the weird guys who try to touch your feet and the ones you become you become attached to simply because they’re so socially inept that there’s really nowhere else for them to go; nowhere that’s used to their strangeness.

There are those too that mistake kindness for interest. I’d had one patron walk me home one evening, thinking all the while that he was a little strange but harmless. It was a few days later that I looked up while cooking and nearly knocked a hot pan onto me because he was out the window staring at me. All of this was further compounded by the chocolate-covered cherry bombs that he eventually left on my doorstep. They were homemade and dipped and drizzled in white and milk chocolate, and as I chucked them over an abandoned bridge with my then boyfriend I could never figure out if he’d meant it as a threat or gift. Perhaps it was meant to be a bit of both.

Months later the bomb builder somehow got wind of my need for vitamin injections and had gotten his friend to teach him how to give needles. The effort might’ve seemed sweet if he hadn’t been dressed in a Jolly Green Giant Costume (it was Halloween) that he’d followed me to my car in the dark while wearing, tapping on the window of my driver’s side and scaring the life out of me.

I’d told this story to one of the bartenders that I often closed the bar with and she’d laughed aloud. “You think that’s bad?” she’d said to me, “I had a patron sneak in once and leave a gift for me on my pillow. I was living with my parents at the time and they hadn’t seen a thing despite being home the whole time.”

Still, it was at the bar that I found roommates and landlords and used bicycles, as if it were a sort of classified service in itself. I have always liked the way a couple of drinks leads people to perhaps open up in a way that they normally wouldn’t, handing you their keys and asking if you could house-sit for them the following week, and that if you’re going to throw a party at their place you best be cautious about drug use, because there’s a supreme court judge right over the fence.

It’s almost as if a couple of glasses of wine dissolves some of those degrees of separation, liquor and dim pot lights can make you feel like you really know somebody, even if it’s just from the terrible things their ex wives have said about them. You feel like you know them enough to sit down with them, listen to their upcoming vacation plans and suddenly find yourself with the code to their security system and detailed instructions for feeding their pet crammed onto the piece of paper twisted up in your palm.