Phone Man Talkathon

Phone Man Talkathon

I noticed, mainly because I was around people – strangers during my days of traveling, that conversation patterns in the States are vastly different from those in China.

In China, conversation is ‘you’ centered. People ask how you are, what you like, what you don’t like and they are constantly worried if you are happy, comfortable, hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, lost, confused or any state of being they might be able to do something to remedy. Most times, whether you want them to or not.

In America I find that is not so much the case. By this I don’t mean my loved ones – the targets of my visits but the ones who barely know each other, on the bus. The ones with whom I shared a brief slice of time and space. People that we will commingle with varying degrees of intimacy and then never see each other again.

Like it or not, riding a Greyhound bus is an intimate experience. You share space with people you don’t know and have never seen, and whose personal hygiene habits and health status may or may not be questionable. You announce your need to perform bodily functions at every rest stop, be it eating, slaking thirst, relieving yourself, smoking a cigarette or just stretching. And while the wheels churn ever onward you end up sleeping in close quarters with up to 54 strangers.

A lot of people ride the Big Grey Dog due to some significant emotional event. They lost their job or they are going to their new job. They are going to visit family or they are moving closer to family (or away from family). They are running away from a troubled love life or a dangerous situation. In most cases, the travelers are staking everything they have on their destination, sometimes mourning what they left behind, if they have anything to leave behind. Everything they own is in the cargo hold under that bus, blowing past mile markers with insensate ignorance. And the passengers, in an effort to leave their mark on this voyage they are taking, ignore the scenery outside in favor of impressing themselves upon their seatmate.

Somewhere between California and Texas is when this realization hit me. I had no choice but to come to it because the two people in front of me were conversing so loudly of their life experiences I could not help but be made aware. Each sentence started with ‘Well I…’ or ‘My (aunt/uncle/mother/brother/child…’ or ‘My whole thing is…’ or ‘Me and my …’. They soon got so fervent about exchanging information and stories that they were literally interrupting one another to relate a bigger, larger, more dramatic or more traumatic experience than the other had endured. It was like listening to a verbal version of the card game Hearts, in which this trumps that, that is higher than the other and the Queen of Spades has the highest value. They carried on like that for several miles, several hours and several legions of stories that would surely provide scriptwriters of Montel, Jerry and Judge Judy combined with fodder for years worth of shows.

For the rest of the journey I vowed to pay attention to this phenomenon, to see if theirs was an isolated case of ‘Trump This’ or if it was in fact one of the spices that lent bus traveling flavor.

I was not disappointed. In El Paso I had to change buses and found myself on a coach with 53 other strangers, among them the M.C. of the Phone Man Talkathon.

This man stood probably 6’6”, judging by his frame that loomed over my 6’ tall skeleton. He would be described as ‘pear-shaped’ rather than ‘athletic’, with most of his weight in his hips and thighs rather than his shoulders or around his abdomen. He was either in the process of girthing out, or losing said girth, most likely the latter judging by the flabbiness of his extra weight. In spite of his height, his shoulders slumped, physically mirroring the perpetual hangdog expression on his face. He wore a soft cast with boot on his left leg. That and his size caused him to have to sit halfway into the aisle. Space is not a generous commodity for those much bigger than I am on a Greyhound, or on any other means of mass transit. I felt for the poor man. But only for that reason.

From the moment he boarded the bus in Odessa, TX until just a few minutes before he got off in Fort Worth, he was constantly talking on the phone. He had a BlueTooth in his left ear and his cellphone in his hand. Whenever the signal dropped – because that area is sort of no-man’s land, just on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, he would simply consult his handset, call up another number (or perhaps the same number) and continue talking. Whoever was on the other end of the line did not have to worry about keeping up with the conversation because there was no conversation. My fellow passenger kept up a running line of prattle the entire time, stopping to listen only once or twice.

From his running monologue I learned that he was President or CEO of some limited liability corporation and he was going to have to let one of his current partners go. He reported that he had lost a sizable sum of money and conveyed that he did not wish to repeat the experience. He moved his office from a public suite, presumably downtown, to his home. His management style seemed to be ‘coaching/mentoring’ rather than authoritarian, and that fit with the sports jersey and basketball shorts he was wearing. I gleaned this detail because, amid personal experiences he was relaying he gave instructions for what his listener should do and he responded in a supportive rather than domineering manner to what his conversant said. Apparently the listener questioned him for that was the only time he stopped talking, but then resumed, answering the presumed query before launching once again into his ‘Me, me, me, I, I, I’ pattern of speech.

Now I’m two for two: the conversants who played ‘Trump This’ so loud I could hear their assertions without having to strain at all, and Phone Man Talkathon M.C. who yapped for 323 miles. Put my new awareness of this phenomenon with the memory of the times people just gushed their troubles out, whether I asked to hear or not and I detected a pattern. This manifestation was prevalent on every bus I rode and at every depot I lolled around in. Being as I am writing this entry retrospectively, I can relate to you that my experiences on the bus reveal that people all across America just want a chance to talk about themselves.

In Dallas, a man accosted me and, for some reason stated that I looked expensive. He was a balding man, shabbily dressed in a filthy, navy blue suit coat over a mauve colored polo shirt and questionably colored slacks, and shod in open toed sandals. His features had a Middle Eastern cast but his complexion indicated more of a Southerly origin, perhaps Africa. He stood maybe 5’10” and carried himself ramrod straight. His speech patterns belied his appearance: he sounded like he might have roots in the Northeastern part of America. His carriage, diction and choice of clothing, albeit filthy indicated that, at one time he might have come from money himself. I still wonder why he felt the need to assert that I looked expensive, and how he even came to that conclusion.

Another woman standing nearby heard his comment and we turned to one another with equal parts of bemusement and question on our faces. I expressed the idea that the man made the comment out of some strange desire to buy me, to which she laughed and shared that she had nearly been molested on her last bus ride. She then went into great detail about her near molestation. I have to admit it was a frightening tale she told but… what about me looking expensive? What did that have to do with her being molested?

I, I, I, me, me, me. It seems that people everywhere want and need an audience. Could that be why YouTube is such a phenomenon? Does that have anything to do with Andy Warhol’s prophecy that everyone is allotted 15 minutes of fame? Are all of these people just looking for their 15 minutes, settling for any audience they can find? Or are they looking for personal validation when relating such details of their lives?

And what about yours truly? Isn’t blogging all about I, I, I, and me, me, me? By the very nature of blogging, that is exactly what I’m doing here. I’m talking to you about MY experiences and what I have done. Am I any different than any of these characters I’ve met during my travels?