Conversation One: Sausage, Regrets and Resolution

“Are you having a mid-life crisis?” Stephanie asks me.

“No,” I say. I take a sip of coffee and add a cascade of sugar. “Maybe.”

 “Aren’t you still about five years away from forty? That’s when guys usually go through their ‘things’, right?”

“Their ‘things’?”

“Mid-life bullshit,” she says, “or so I hear.”

“I don’t know.” Another sip. “I don’t think it’s technically a crisis. And it’s definitely not bullshit. It gets me really depressed.”

She looks around for a waitress. “I need maple syrup.”

“For what?” I ask. “You didn’t order pancakes.”

“So what?”

“Or waffles.  Or French toast. Or anything for which you’d need maple syrup.”

“It’s for my sausage. I can’t eat sausage without maple syrup.”

“Who the hell puts maple syrup on sausage?”

“I do. I’m betting you don’t. What difference does it make? It’s my sausage.” She signals a waitress and gets what she wants. Carefully she arranges the food on her plate so that everything that’s not sausage is off to the side, then pours a liberal amount of syrup over the links. She unfolds her napkin and places it on her lap. Everything squared away nicely, she takes a deep breath. “OK, I’m listening.”

“Well, it’s complicated,” I say. “I guess I am kind of taking stock of my life and not finding much to celebrate. Yesterday was my thirty-fifth birthday.”

“Naturally, you didn’t tell me.” She sings: “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you—”

“Do we have to do this?”

“Oh, I’m afraid we must,” she says, then finishes the song.

I take a few bites of my omelette. Bacon and cheese. Cholesterolicide. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m thirty-five now.”

“You mentioned that. So?”
”So, when you hit thirty-five—a day, sweetheart, that isn’t too far away—you let me know how you feel.”

“Let me guess. You spent your birthday depressed and miserable, crying about your misspent youth.”

“No, I didn’t. I pretty much spent it like any other day.”

“How typically boring of you. You didn’t go out? Have a party?”

I give her a look.

“Look who I’m talking to. Of course you didn’t have a party. Did someone at least bake you a cake?”

“No.”

“I would have baked you a cake. OK, I probably would have bought you a cake. But it’s the thought that counts. You really didn’t do anything special?”

I finish my coffee and signal for a refill. “Well, most of the day was pretty routine. I didn’t go to work, though. I never work on my birthday.” She nods in approval. “Anyway, about nine o’clock at night I pour myself a generous glass of single-malt Irish whiskey—the last of the stuff I got in Ireland—and I take my last Monte Cristo I brought back from the Dominican Republic, and I walk outside.”

“Depressing,” Stephanie says, finishing her sausage.

I ignore her. "I sit on the wall in front of my building. It’s freezing outside. My street’s dark and deserted, just me and the stars. I take a sip of the whiskey and put the glass in the snow to chill it, get my cigar going and take a nice, long puff and blow it out slow. And then, it hits me: I’m thirty-five.”

Stephanie stares at me with a complete lack of sympathy. The waitress warms up my coffee and clears our plates away. “Thirty-five isn’t old,” she says.

“Are you kidding? Thirty-five was once an impossible age. I remember when my parents were thirty-five. I was ten. Now they’re sixty. I wonder how it all went by so fast. I guess last night I realized that I probably have fewer years ahead of me than I do behind. With my lifestyle, it will be a miracle if I reach seventy.”

“Cheerful thought. So do something about it. Eating like this isn’t helping, that’s for sure.”

I shrug.

“Does life seem worthwhile to you?” Stephanie asks.

“That’s a hell of a question.”

“I want to know.”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s all got a point to it, somehow. Better than the alternative, anyway.”

 “Maybe you just haven’t realized how lucky you are. You just told me you celebrated your birthday with Irish whiskey and Cuban cigars, both of which you purchased on trips you took last year.”

“You have a point.”

“What excites you?”

I blink. “Excuse me?”
”What excites you?”

“I’ve always been fond of black fishnet stockings, personally.”

“Not really what I was talking about, but interesting, anyway. Maybe if you felt like you were doing something worthwhile, you’d be more invested in your life.”

“Maybe.”

“Why aren’t you writing? You should be writing. I’ve been telling you that for years now.”

“I guess I don’t have as much to say as I thought I did.”

Stephanie hauls her enormous bag up from the floor and deposits it on the table with an audible thump. She reaches in and retrieves her money purse. “Well,” she says, “we both know that’s bullshit. Breakfast is on me, birthday boy.”

“Not necessary,” I say, but she’s already waving her card at the waitress.

“Look, I know what you’re saying. I get it. If I want to be a writer, I need to write.”

She pulls her bag into her lap and stares at me like I just crawled out of the desert on my hands and knees and asked for a peanut-butter sandwich. In Stephanie’s world, I don’t make sense. “So why don’t you?” she says.

I stare into my coffee cup for a while. She waits.

“You know the St. James?” I ask.

“You mean The Down Under?”

“Used to be The Down Under. Now it’s the St. James Irish Pub. Or so they claim. They think that because they have Guinness and Harp on draft they can call themselves an Irish pub, but I’ve been to many an Irish pub and they’re a joke.”

“You’re the authority. So why did you go there, then?”

“Because they have Guinness and Harp on draft. Can I finish my story now?”

“What the hell does this have to do with anything?”

“A few months back,” I say, ignoring her, “I was at the St. James. The place was practically empty. Just me and a few other guys, no one talking to each other.”

“Sounds like your kind of place.”

“I’m sitting at a table in the corner—”

“All by yourself, I’m sure.”

“—when I look down and notice my glass is empty. I check my pocket and decide I’ve got enough money for another round, so off to the bar I go. It’s not like they have cocktail waitresses in that place.”

“The Down Under used to.”

“Well, they don’t now. So up at the bar, I order myself another pint. The barman pulls it halfway and we’re both waiting for it to settle, when I notice this guy at the bar next to me looks kind of familiar. It’s that guy who writes the annoying opinion column in the paper. You know—the one where he bitches about everything that’s wrong with the city.” Stephanie nods. “I can’t stand this guy. Not just because his writing sucks, and he writes for a newspaper that has a third-grade reading level. I can’t stand him because even though I agree with a lot of his pithy observations about the city I live in, I know I can write circles around this clown. Yet he’s got a writing job, and I don’t.”

“That’s because you never write anything, stupid.”

“Yeah, well. That’s about to change. Oddly enough, because of something he said.”

She motions for me to get on with it, so I do.

“He’s sitting there reading his own column, the pompous ass, and right next to him, on the bar, is his hat.”

“His hat.”

“His hat. A snap-brim fedora like a private eye would wear. And I’m looking at this hat, and I covet it.”

“Why? Who wears a hat like that nowadays?”

“No one. But one look at that hat and I know I want it.”

“So you’re crazy. I know that already. What does this have to do with you getting off your ass and writing something?”

“So there we are, two strangers in a bar. Only I know who he is, and he doesn’t know me. He catches me looking at him. I smile and say, You know what? I always wanted to wear a hat like that. Know what he says?"

“What?”

“He says, Well, all you have to do is go buy one.”

I finish my coffee.

Stephanie smiles.