An Armchair Warmonger and A Market Warrior

Posted on September 13, 2002 in Encounters

I’d taken two steps into Tully’s when the voice boomed across the room: “Let’s go to war and kick their butts!”

The source of the outburst reposed in one of the vaguely olive overstuffed chairs set up in the corner. He was alone, reading the Orange County Register. The barristes and a thirtyish woman who had the sad eyes of a single cringed at the shout. I was tempted to respond with my own shout: “Let’s not”; but I forebore. Instead of turning the cafe into an outlet of the Jerry Springer Show, I ordered my usual veinte decaf and selected a cranberry-orange muffin from the pastry display; then ambled over to my favored rattan chairs to observe the jingo.

The opportunity to take down a representation of someone who might pick a fight with the air or debate a banshee liberal of his imagining brought my notepad to my lap and my pen to my hand. He disappointed me on that count. He just kept reading the paper, saying nothing. So I took an inventory of the material clothing the man, noting his navy Hawaiian flower shirt, mock tortoiseshell glasses, and the square faced gold watch around his furry arm. He had a belly that pushed out so far that I would not have been surprised to see a second set of eyes scanning the lower part of the page while the ones in his head skimmed the news at the top. Ears pulled long by sixty or more years of living in earth’s gravity drooped off a heavy set head whose brown hair was cut to blocky perfection, tinted with a red primer, and combed in lines that reminded me of a vegetable garden.

When he finished reading about Bush’s war games, he flipped to the other sports page where he caught up on tomorrow’s college football lineups. At last he rose from the comfy chair. Never uttering another word, he waddled off, his apple-round torso boucing along on a pair of black-clothed toothpick legs. A grey chevy took him away.

Not so many minutes later, a younger fellow, one who was more my age, strutted in. He exclaimed “High school football tonight! I’m psyched!” I made my notes about him in the margins where I was trying to compose a rather sickly piece about buckwheat. He told the girls that he’d grown up in New York. “I was twenty years in the military,” he said, flexing his teensy goatee for the girls. His scheme was to build some kind of “entertainment center” for teenagers in the mall kitty corner from the local high school. They brought him his coffee and he was out the door, promising all who could hear that success was his.