Look at the Teeth · PlainTextPoetry

My grandfather, dying, with maybe a day left in him, asked me to lean in close and how was I supposed to say no? When I put my ear right up to the dry papery whisper of him, he said Don’t trust any of them. Not even the nice ones. Especially not the nice ones. And then he died. Not right that second, that would be too clean, but soon enough. He was, for whatever it’s worth, the single kindest person I have ever known.

I think about that a lot. Probably more than is healthy. I think about it, specifically, every single time I look another human in the eye.

Me: People suck.

Also me: People are doing their best.

Me: They will cry real actual tears at your wedding and then fuck your spouse at the afterparty, in the coat room, badly. They will coach your kid’s soccer team for free and short you four hundred bucks on a handshake deal and pretend like it never happened. They will text thinking of you during the exact same week they decide to quietly stop being your friend. They will read David Foster Wallace and create nauseating instagram posts about gratitude. They will rob you blind with one hand and jerk your dick with the other.

Also me: Most people, most of the time, are just trying to get through the day without losing their shit and banging their head against the steering wheel in a strip mall parking lot.

Me: Same fucking people. That’s the part you’re skipping over. Same people.

Me: Consider Steve. Steve had a mother who packed his little lunch with little napkin notes that said I love you my sweet boy until he was thirteen goddamn years old. Steve was undoubtedly loved. Steve was loved correctly and on schedule. Steve had every chance a human being can be issued. And then Steve grew up and fucked his best friend’s pregnant wife in his best friend’s actual bed and showed up to the kid’s baptism four months later and held the baby up over his head like the scene from Lion King. Steve sleeps fine, great even, dreamlessly. Steve has, you’ll notice, very good teeth. And this is the whole thing, whenever a person unsettles you and you can’t quite work out why, go and look at the teeth, the teeth always know… and Steve’s are perfect.

Also me: Ok well take Marcus. Marcus drove six hours through a blizzard, in a 2003 Camry with a check-engine light that had been on for years, to sit next to me in a hospital waiting room while a very tired doctor explained, slowly, what the letters D-N-R stood for. Marcus did not say one single smartass thing the entire night. Marcus brought a tupperware of cold spaghetti because it was the only thing he had in the fridge. Marcus is what people are.

Me: Marcus also fucked his wife’s sister.

Also me: …

Me: …

Also me: The spaghetti was surprisingly delicious.

Sometimes (usually late, usually when I have no business being awake) I get to thinking that a person is actually a collage. That a person is every other person who has ever touched them, layered up sloppily over the decades, most of the originals long dead and gone. You shake a man’s hand and you are also, whether either of you likes it or not, shaking the hand of his father, and his first girlfriend, and the priest who made him feel weird at age nine, and the coach who left him on the bench to play his own kid instead, and the mother who, for reasons entirely unknown, could not bring herself to hold him while he cried. Every gesture you make is a quotation. Nobody (and I do mean nobody) has an original move.

So when you stand there and quietly ask yourself, is this one good or is this one rotten, what you are actually asking, underneath, is who got to them first. And the answer, every single time, is somebody you will never meet. Somebody already dead, sometimes. Somebody who was, themselves, just a sloppy collage of even older, deader people. Echoes inside of echoes inside of echoes, the entire way down, and the very first sound, the original kindness, the original cruelty, whatever actually kicked the whole thing off, happened so unbelievably long ago that there is not one living soul left who remembers it. You cannot trace it back. You can only feel it, faint, the way the walls of a very old house hum with the tune of so many lives.

Me: So what the fuck are we supposed to do with that.

Also me: I don’t know.

Me: …wait, that was my line.

Also me: I know.

Me: Look at any tribe. The yoga people, the crossfit people, the bible study, the people who exist purely to be against the bible study, the sobers, the drunks, the tweakers, the parents, the DINKs, the vegans, the raw meat idiots, your group chats, my group chats. Every single group, when you actually sit down and do the census, comes out to roughly the same thing: a bunch of people secretly pretending to like each other. The math never once comes out different.

Also me: Some groups are also everyone clearing their entire Saturday to show up for a kid’s fifth birthday.

Me: Nobody actually wants to be at a five-year-old’s birthday party. We go out of obligation and the fear of being the only one that didn’t. And the guy who brought the chips and hummus is over by the snack table watching his buddy’s wife bend down to grab more juice boxes, fantasizing.

Also me: …

Me: …maybe. Maybe sometimes hummus is just hummus.

Also me: Maybe sometimes you’re the hummus guy.

Me: Me?

Also me: Yeah.

Me: Go to a funeral. Seriously, go to one, sit in the back, and just watch what human beings get up to at a funeral. Watch a man weep with some real tears at the open casket, the shoulders going and the sniffling and everything, and then watch him walk directly over to the catering table and ask, in a low confidential voice, whether he might take a few of the leftover sandwiches home. Watch a brother subtly check his stock portfolio during the eulogy. Watch a widow deliver the single most beautiful and devastating speech anyone in that room has ever heard about a man she’d been actively planning to leave for the past ten months. Watch a cousin take a selfie with the body, perhaps. Watch the crematorium guy, bless him, get visibly bored. Watch the priest (who has done eleven of these this month and has a twelfth in two hours) not even really bother to pretend he’s in the room with the rest of us. We are, if nothing else, gloriously adaptable.

Also me: Or…and it’s the same exact funeral, mind you, the same flat fluorescent light…watch a total stranger quietly come apart at the seams over a person they never even met, simply because some small thing, like the particular way the sun is hitting the casket, reminded them of somebody they loved and lost and had not let themselves think about in fifteen years. Watch a grown son finally, finally! after all of it, forgive his dead father from the third pew. Watch a small child who has no earthly idea what is going on ask a single question so unfathomably kind and so stupid and so accidentally true that every adult in the vicinity exhales.

Me: All in the same room.

Also me: All in the same hour.

Me: All in the same person, sometimes.

Also me: Now you’re getting it.

I had a friend group, years back. A good one, at least on paper. And we talked an absolutely staggering quantity of shit about every single other person in it. We’d splinter off into little side-factions to do it, two and three at a time, in cars, in text threads, in the far corner of the very party the shit-talking was about. No exceptions and absolutely no mercy. I laughed every time, because, of course, the jokes were good. I’m not a stupid man, so I was perfectly aware that the second I wasn’t around, I became the main course. We all knew it. We all knew that we all knew it. And we kept showing up anyway, for years, hugging each other hello, hugging each other goodbye, saying love you, brother, and the horrifying part, the part I cannot get past, is that we meant it. We meant every word. And we also fully meant the shit we talked.

People can mean both. That’s why every greeting card ever written feels so goddamn hollow.

In the sixth grade I helped a small pack of boys throw rocks at a kid named Daniel. I’d like to be precise about my exact role here, because precision is more or less the only thing I have left to offer Daniel at this point: I did not physically throw a single rock. I just stood there, in the dust, and I laughed, and the laughing was its own kind of throwing. Daniel had a stutter and a single mom who was plainly doing her absolute best. Daniel had, two or three years prior, been my friend. We even had a couple sleepovers. And I have not thought about Daniel one time in roughly twenty years, and yet right now, tonight, writing this, I can see his face with a clarity that is frankly unwelcome, like he’s wandered onto my street and is hovering outside my window, watching me type.

Daniel is forty-something now, somewhere out there, living an entire life I will never know the first thing about. And Daniel has, statistically, almost certainly been cruel to somebody himself by now. That’s not meant as an insult, that’s just the actuarial table of being a person. And Daniel will, one day, in all likelihood, be somebody’s grandfather, dying in some bed, whispering his own little wisdom to some grandchild, who will carry it off and eventually whisper it to theirs.

The chain is unbreakable. The chain is the whole thing.

I’m sorry, Daniel.

That doesn’t fix it.

A man on the subway, last winter, looked directly at me for a genuinely uncomfortable length of time, probably thirty seconds, maybe longer, no blinking that I could detect, and for reasons I still cannot explain to you or to myself, I looked right back, and I did not look away. He was not angry. He was not smiling. He was not, as far as I could tell, anything at all. He was simply looking at me, carefully, the way you’d study the fine print on something you were about to sign.

When he got off at his stop, he nodded at me. Once, slight. Almost nothing.

I think about that man a whole lot.

I cannot tell you what he saw. I cannot tell you what I saw either. But for thirty uninterrupted seconds another human being looked straight at me and did not flinch, and I did not flinch back at him, and if you have ever actually tried to do that with another person you know how close to impossible it is, and I will never see that man again, not ever, not once, for the entire remaining duration of my life. And somehow that’s fine, that’s genuinely fine, because it already happened, and a thing that happened cannot un-happen.

That’s the other thing about people. Sometimes they’re sitting right across from you on the train, and then they’re just gone forever.

Also me: The thing that actually scares you isn’t that people might be bad. You made your peace with that a long time ago. You also aren’t scared that people might be good, which I suppose would be the clever thing for me to say right now (and contrary to popular belief, I do very much care about being clever). No, the thing that scares you is that you can never tell which one is about to come out. Not even from yourself. Especially not from yourself. You genuinely do not know which version of you is about to walk into the next room.

Me: …

Also me: That’s why you keep asking me about it.

Me: …

Also me: Well I don’t have any fucking answers, buddy.

I think about him every time somebody is being too nice.

I think about him every time I catch myself being cruel.

He was the kindest person I knew, I think?

I have my doubts and you’ll not separate me from them.