Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual NO MORE MR. NICE GUY When I moved to Wash- ington in the late 1980s, I was without a job; I saved face by calling myself a "freelancer." And I had few friends; I found the next-best thing...
...This was obviously a misimpression, I thought, since we'd never exchanged a single word, harsh or otherwise...
...a 40-ish woman who'd written scholarly articles on Proust but been denied tenure around 1978 (she blamed—"hic...
...Proust said of Ratface "He's a Vietnam vet," she intended it to speak volumes...
...It had become not just his nickname but his name, and it was the kind of name you can carry only if you're never in civilized company...
...But he clearly wanted something, so I walked down the bar to figure out what...
...His eyes were gleaming, almost as if he were challenging me to a fight...
...But this was like choosing a horse at the county fair who turns out to be Secretariat...
...Well, sorry, I thought you were . . . em . . . trying to get my attention...
...My conclusion: The kind of person who tries to convince a violent psycho that he himself is a "nice guy" is not going to be a good guide to the present situation...
...It has risen into memory in the last three weeks, of course, only because of the attacks on the World Trade Center...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...How he had picked up that moniker was not exactly shrouded in mystery...
...On the other, it's considerably more varied and fascinating than people tend to grant...
...You couldn't tell what he was saying, but it had a lot of f-sounds in it...
...The American instinct for niceness, if not exactly gone, is no longer sufficient as a guiding principle...
...Our knee-jerk American response is to be nice, to search for some explanation of the hijackers' actions at the moral level...
...Em . . . ," I began, "I'd hate to think I'd done anything to upset you...
...I never went back to the Blockhouse, and that's the end of the story...
...Like most Americans, I'm out of my depth...
...Ratface" wasn't one of those behind-the-back slurs...
...They say excessive thirst affects all types—"from jail to Yale," and all that...
...He was, plain and simple, a psychopath...
...At 10 or so most weeknights, I'd walk down to the Blockhouse...
...He looked afraid that the beer would dash out the front door if he relaxed his guard...
...Back then, every other movie concerned someone with horrible memories of Vietnam who comes home, hallucinates, and shoots up a shopping mall...
...A dozen years later I can still remember the sight of his bared, stained teeth as he spit out at me, "Ah hate nice guys...
...Proust when I got the sense that Ratface had awakened...
...His lips were constantly moving in a sputtering, angry whisper...
...Under today's circumstances, such "explanations" are rela-tivistic, cowardly, and obscene...
...Each of us, I imagine, is trying to come up with something in his own experience that would allow him to place this catastrophe under the rubric of the understandable...
...Now his lips were pursed tight...
...sexism, but claimed to find substitute teaching "more rewarding"), and a guy who'd drunk his way from being number three at a multinational corporation to being a "consultant" (a job description that, for him, served the same end that "freelancer" did for me...
...He actually answered to it...
...Hey what...
...There was no way to ignore his anger...
...This was said in the spitting vengeful tones he usually saved for addressing his beer...
...And then there was Ratface...
...It was merely another name for remoteness from evil...
...In the weeks before their stories got stale, they were all of them, each in his own way, delightful company...
...He always sat alone and ordered the cheapest draft beer...
...Ratface was around 45 and came from Appalachia...
...It's a trivial episode in my life...
...But it turns out to have been as overrated as our dearest European friends warned us it was...
...Really, I'm a nice guy and—" As if that's what mattered...
...Except when drinking, he'd stare directly into the suds, his eyes in a vicious squint...
...To the rest of us, he spoke only once an hour or so, always to interject something terrifying...
...Unless you know a lot about Jonestown or Auschwitz, you won't find it...
...When Mrs...
...The Blockhouse was a temple of dedicated, rock-bottom, end-of-the-line dipsomania...
...The best I can do is dredge up a seconds-long confrontation that took place in the distant past, in a joint where dysfunction was the very merchandise...
...Lawyer and Mr...
...The Blockhouse regulars included a lawyer who had once argued cases before the Supreme Court ("but I hated the routine . . . 'nother scotch...
...In short, most everybody there used to be someone really interesting...
...The world will miss it as much as we do...
...I found the next-best thing in bars...
...Thirty feet down the bar, he was staring at me...
...It's Ratface's world now...
...One night I was talking with Mrs...
...It was a quality we always treasured in ourselves...
...Hey," I said, with a friendly smile...
...So on the one hand hanging around in bars is akin to mental illness...
...I chose the place because it happened to be on the corner...
...If Mr...
...Consultant were discussing how Senator Whosis was on TV the other night, Ratface would snap his head up from the rim of his glass and say . . . very . . . slowly . . . "Sinnator Whosis bloangs in a shaller grave...
...Whadduf ah woz...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 4
