A year or so ago, I took my eldest son, Graeme, to a Frank Turner concert. He started out straight up punk, with the band Million Dead, then moved to a sort of folk punk sound and has, more or less with England Keep My Bones, moved to folk or pop, though with the same raw honesty and simple song structures I, at least, associate with punk.
This is an important detail to this story because the incident I'm about to relate happened on the way home from that concert. Our throats were raw, we were slightly we from the sort of drizzly rain that Boston seems to specialize in during early summer, and we were both kind of ... open. I've talked before about his latest album, Be More Kind, but it's basically a love letter to humanity, a centrist's plea for us to maybe stop being jerks to each other for a bit and see how that works out. After two and a half hours of that man performing and chatting with his audience like we were all long-lost friends and lovers, I was looking at people with a different eye.
One of the things I really like about going to Boston is, not everyone's from New Hampshire. Let me explain.
I love New Hampshire. I have lived her for twenty years and, God willing, I will die here, however there's a sameness to the place, especially in our bucolic little rural town. There are perhaps a dozen different phenotypes for the various human features, and eventually you see all of them combined in all of the ways you can reasonable expect them to be and you're sort of done. One face sort of blurs into the next after a bit, or it can if you're lazy.
Boston doesn't let you be lazy. You have people from a dozen different small towns dressed up like a city all packed into the same place, and there's just a stunning variety of humanity.
So, on the subway back to the train station, I took them in. An Asian woman with brilliant purple nails, reading a weathered copy of Asimov's Foundation, her nails periodically dipping into the contents of the burrito laying across her lap. A gaggle of sixteen-something girls, ohmygodding over life, the universe and everything. An older couple, both with their backs to me, their heads nodding against each other, his voice a velvet baritone, hers a husky alto. A gigantic man with a muscle shirt advertising a gym, protein shake in hand, glaring around, not like he's looking for a fight, but rather like he's ready for a fight if it presents itself.
The writer part of my brain is fascinated by this man. His bare arms are just a landscape of muscle, ridges and definition in places where I'm pretty sure I don't even have tissue, with a howling dog high on his right bicep, the dark green of the ink somehow popping out against the brown-olive of his skin. The bag of his shoulder clanks when the train moves and clearly contains some weights, but he doesn't seem to have to even sway to accommodate the shift in weight. He's holding the protein shake in his right hand and I can see calluses on his knuckles, most notably on the middle finger.
Who is he? A mob hoodlum? Amateur MMA fighter? Pro MMA fighter? He could be. We hit a bump and his protein shake falls out of his hand and he catches it before it hits the ground, those giant muscles flexing and bending almost faster than my eye can follow.
We stop. The older couple leaves. I never actually saw their faces, so I'm going to continue to pretend that they really were Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, immortals who ran away from Hollywood and the mess of their lives to spend their days in obscurity in Boston. The gaggle leaves as well, along with much of the energy of the subway car, and I again reflect on how, "Youth is wasted on the young," is only something that can be said by a cynic, because they seem to be taking full advantage of it.
A few others come on, including a woman about half the size of my new gym-attending pugilist friend, who immediately walks over to him, ranting about how stressful her day was at work. His face immediately softens and I can tell that the only person in the world for him right then is her. A man offers him a seat, but she declines, instead using her boyfriend as an anchor as she continues to vent about the pettiness of office politics and a particular co-worker who's really working her last nerve.
Her ranting rises and falls in pitch and speed, and when it gets faster, I can easily pick up some distinct traits of a Chicano accent. She also runs her one free hand through her dark curly hair constantly and emphasizes her speech with a whole lot of intentional comic impressions of her co-workers, although I get the feeling that her impression of Sherida might border on the racist. Still, Sherida sounds like a real pill, so, hey, no judgement from me.
It takes two more stops for her to get to the end of it, and it's only two more stops from there that my son and I need to exit and some part of me feels the need to fast forward their conversation because I want to know how this ends, darn it. Thankfully, gym guy doesn't let me down.
"That sucks, babe. When we get home, I'll give you a shoulder rub with them scented oils." His voice is far higher pitched than I expected it to be and he pronounces "oils" very oddly, saying it as though the letter "i" doesn't modify its sound at all. Her reaction startles him: she punches him, hard, in the shoulder he's using to hold his gym bag, hard enough that it makes him do what the rickety subway tracks couldn't - he has to sway to keep control of it.
"Stop it," she says, firmly. "You're smarter than that, and you know it. They're 'essential oils,' and you showed me to them. Why do you do this? Why do you hide yourself behind this meathead body you've made yourself. You're so smart! You could ..." She doesn't finish. The day has spent the last bit of her energy and she all but collapses onto him, in an image I've seen before. When the one you love is the source of your pain, sometimes you still fall on them for solace. And he gives it to her, wrapping a massive arm around her torso and holding her close, the howling dog facing out at the world.
His face is fallen, realizing that his woman's hurt and he was a cause of some of that pain, but his tat still sends a clear message: if anyone else wants to hurt her, you come through me first.
Our stop is next. Graeme and I step out and head home, and I ponder that situation on the drive back as he dozes in the passenger seat. I think about the frankly kind of vile assumptions I made about my gym friend, and what that means to the stories that I tell. I mean, that's pretty much my thing: I'm a storyteller, and because I'm a human storyteller, I do embellish and add details here and there because I can't know everything, and my mind fills in the gaps, often without me even being entirely aware that it's doing so.
If I only told stories my own benefit, that would be one thing, but I don't. I share these stories with my kids, with my friends, and some times with larger audiences. I wrote plays and skits for my church, and some of those end up on video, so my audience, theoretically, everyone. That means that even if the stories I tell aren't important, I still have a responsibility to make sure that the stories I tell have some kind of value, and that if people can't trust that every detail of the story is 100% accurate, then at least that the story serves some kind of purpose.
