TANGENTS

 

“You can't stand there,” he stated.

“Huh?”

“You can't stand by the door. It's against the rules.”

I looked behind me and to the side of where I was standing, looking for a sign or any other indication of this.

I turned back to him, frowning. “There's no sign.”

He frowned back, obviously unaccustomed to anyone questioning his authority. As he did, his black top hat slid slightly off center on his small head. He quickly righted it, as if doing so would make me believe that he was indeed in charge of the situation.

“I know there's no sign. That doesn't mean that you can stand here and smoke. Just because it doesn't exist, doesn't make it so.” Before I could make any religious jokes, he pointed to a spot about fifty feet away. “You can smoke over there…within the circle.”

I looked over to where his doll-like, gloved hand was pointing. It was in the center of the turn-around in the front of the upscale hotel where we were having dinner before a hockey game. The circle was about ten feet across, with a low, brick wall marking the inside of the circular driveway where the affluent dropped their cars for the valets to park, of which our short adversary was one. All of the valet's were dressed in long, black wool coats and black silk top hats as part of their dress code. It was complimented with a red scarf, and with this being December in St. Paul , Minnesota , they were more of a necessity that a fashion statement. The temperature was hovering around ten degrees, and I was trying to set a speed record for smoking before my extremities became solid and fell off, so the last thing I wanted to do was argue with a midget smoke Nazi with a napoleon complex.

So I did what any normal, rational person would do: I flicked my butt into the street, stuck my tongue out at the midget, and went back inside. He said something like, “Hey! You can't do that…” but I was already through the revolving doors, and making my way back to the table.

Sigh. Everyone's got something to bitch about.

Look. I'm seriously not saying that smoking is any way shape or form good for you, but for Christ sake, I'm already standing outside freezing my nuts off—do you have to make it worse?

As I sat down in the luxurious booth, my wife Susan looked at me, crinkled her nose, and said, “Smoky.”

“How can you smell that? I barely got three drags in.” I then proceeded to tell her and our hosts about the smoke Nazi. (We were invited out to this fancy restaurant. You didn't think I could afford this, did you?) The couple that we were with laughed, even though they didn't smoke. Susan, knowing my personality and hating to be embarrassed in public, chided me, and told me to be nice. “He's probably just doing his job.”

“Right, sure he was,” I said, “but you didn't see those beady little eyes. This is probably just his day...err…night job. I can just see him sitting around his little one room apartment, plotting world domination.” I paused, and said, “And then he gets his silk top hat on and comes to work parking cars. There's something inherently evil about this.”

“Sounds like one of your stories,” said one of our friends. “Now that you're writing again, why don't you write about that guy?”

I nodded my head. “Not bad. Valet parking dude attempts world domination. I like it. Gimme your napkin, I gotta write this down.”

“They're cloth napkins,” Susan said. “You can't write it down on that!”

She dug through her purse-of-many-things, and came up with an old envelope. I wrote down the outline in about thirty seconds, and stuck it in my pocket.

It just goes to show you, you never know where the ideas will hit, and you have to take advantage of them.

I didn't write a word for a very long time. Life has a way of…er…sucking the life out of you, and I had to give up some things that I love to get back on track. My writing was one of them. It was the time you see. The creative process, to me anyway, doesn't work on the nine-to-five schedule. I have to strike while the iron is hot, get in the groove, roll downhill or any other lame descriptive, to grab the essence of what I'm doing. Time was as elusive to me as an old man's sock caught in a dryer. You can spin that drum around a hundred times and still not see it.

Happily, the residue of a lot of disasters is just an image in the rear view mirror, and I'm feeling a bit like a character in a Haratio Alger novel, and Ethyl Merman is singing “Everything's Coming Up Roses” on a side-track in my brain.

Not bad, huh?

Thanks for coming back to visit me, dear reader. I might be a little rusty at this—I've been gone awhile. But I promise that we'll get back to that same old smart-ass, irreverent look at life that I hope you've come to enjoy in the past.

We finished dinner, and prepared for the trek across the park to the Xcel Energy Center . Our hosts suggested we walk through the tunnel to get there since it was so cold out, and we agreed.

“I just want to have a quick smoke before we go,” I said. There was talk of hitting the bathrooms, and I wandered outside to light up. My little smoke Nazi was nowhere to be seen, so I sparked up my heater, and took a satisfying drag. A lady in a long wool coat was standing a short distance away smoking a long, narrow cigarette. We smiled at each other, and without saying anything, communicated the folly of our nasty habit. I took another drag, and while I was watching a black limo pull up, the voice rang out:

“Hey! You can't smoke here! You have to get in the circle !”

The woman frowned at the midget, her voice colder than the ice lining the gutters. “Excuse me?”

I pointed to the circle in front of the hotel. “The circle of shame ! That's where all of the smokers are supposed to go.”

The midget actually put his hands on his hips, and squeaked, “That's right! We don't want any of you smokers offending any of our guests!”

She looked at the circle, looked at me, and then glared at the midget, her brows becoming a sharp V. She walked over to the midget, took a long drag off het thin cigarette, blew the smoke in his face, and said, “Look here, you little shit. I don't know who the hell you think you are, but I AM a guest in this hotel, and if you don't stop pissing me off, I'm going to pound you into the ground like a stake.” She then dropped the smoke on the sidewalk in front of him and ground it out with her boot.

“Buh…buh…” he stammered as he watched her walk through the doors, his eyes big and round.

There was an odd silence after that, as if all the traffic in St. Paul had stopped for this special moment. His face was still in shock as he turned to open the car door of the limo that had pulled up. The woman that he helped out was dressed to the nines—the only thing missing was the tiara. The first thing that she said as she got out was, “Pheew. Cigarette smoke. Ish.” She turned to the midget and barked, “Why are you letting people smoke here? What's wrong with you?”

“Buh…buh…” he stammered.

Sigh. Everybody's got something to bitch about.