Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

Come in if you must.

There’s a saying that anyone who wears a necktie is untrustworthy because they start every day by tying a noose around their neck. And don’t get me started on neckties which are just the right size for a garroting, but that’s another story. It’s a little known fact that neckties were invented when a company boss who was waiting for his dresses to come back from the cleaners decided a small strip of fabric would be the ideal way to hide the fact that he was wearing the same suit he’d had on yesterday, and his employees just followed suit. I’m lucky to be in a job where I haven’t had to wear a necktie since the initial interview, but it occurred to me that I start most days by stepping into a small metal box. It doesn’t matter that it’s a small metal box that moves. A lot of people are going to make their final exit in a small metal box that’s moved by a hearse and their pall bearers, and, let’s face it, most elevators aren’t that much bigger. I’m not claustrophobic, but I do get elevator anxiety. It’s not just that they make me think of coffins. I plan to be cremated not because being in a little box bothers me, but because I’ve already made very specific plans about what I’d like done with my mortal remains, and ashes will disperse nicely while a bloated rotting corpse floating down the middle of a mountain lake is likely to freak out the tourists.

I did once meet a woman who had claustrophobia. Or maybe it was just a fear of elevators since that’s what she told me she had. She came into the office where I work sweaty and panting because she’d just ridden the elevator up to my floor and it was too much for her. A friend-not much of a friend, really-had given her the job of delivering a packet to an office in my building. She just couldn’t remember which office. She couldn’t even remember which floor, just that it was higher than the floor where she’d stopped. I’m still not sure why she hadn’t written any of this down. She’d gotten off because mine was the lowest floor that had offices-everything below was the parking garage-so it was the only place where she felt comfortable getting out. I tried to help as best I could. She didn’t know the name of anyone in the place she was trying to get to. I’m not sure she even remembered the name of the friend who sent her on this mission. Since this was before cell phone became more common than neckties I let her borrow the office phone and somehow she got in touch with someone who could help. I think they came to get the packet, and they were smart-they used the stairs.

My own elevator anxiety isn’t anywhere near that level. It’s just more of a general discomfort, and it’s not really elevators themselves that bother me. It’s other people in elevators. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. It’s a little known fact that the full Sartre quote is “Hell is other people in elevators”. Most of the time when it’s me and only one or two other people we all stand around and pretend the others don’t exist, which makes it a little easier but still makes me strangely uncomfortable. Or sometimes people want to chat. And I don’t mind small talk but it seems like the conversation only gets interesting when we get to my floor and I have to end up cutting things short. It’s like the farewells between people being rescued from a sinking ship. Not that I’ve ever been rescued from a sinking ship, but I imagine that’s how it would feel, only more uncomfortable because you’re not being lifted out of the elevator into a helicopter. The worst thing is having to ride the elevator with a huge number of people. Most elevators say the maximum capacity is twenty-three people, but my maximum capacity is about three. Any more than that and the stairs start to look like the best option, but if there’s a big crowd already in the elevator I feel uncomfortable saying, “I’ll take the next one, thanks” because I’m afraid the people already in there will take it personally. And you always get that one big guy with a bad combover who yells, “Come on! I won’t bite!” which just draws attention to how he’s foaming at the mouth. Or if it stops before the floor I’m going to and a bunch of people file in if I step out they might to think I’m some kind of weird racist and they’re going to be in there wondering what I have against Belgians. But I’m not really any more comfortable riding the elevator alone either. What if I fart and then right at the next floor someone gets on? Or maybe there’s something wrong with the building’s plumbing so it seems like I have, and “Boy, I wonder if they’ll ever get the pipes fixed” is not a great conversation starter with a complete stranger. It’s not going to pass muster when they think I’ve passed muster gas.

Also I have this weird habit. You know that funny feeling you get when an elevator comes to a stop and it sort of feels like the bottom has dropped out of your stomach? I really love that and I’ve found that if I jump up in the air right as the elevator is stopping it’s even better. It’s almost a compulsion, but I’ve found that if you’re in an elevator with other people and you suddenly jump up in the air it kind of freaks them out.

There’s a saying that men marry women hoping they won’t change and that women marry men hoping they will. Maybe this is true in some cases, but people are individuals and the only rule that has no exceptions is the rule that there are exceptions to every rule. And we live in an enlightened world where people of the same gender can marry which raises the question, if two men or two women marry who’s expecting whom to change or not change? And it doesn’t always happen, but ideally everybody who gets married goes in with some idea of what to expect. As an old friend of mine once said, “I wouldn’t buy a car without at least taking it for a test drive.” I agreed with her but added that ideally there’d be a lease with an option to buy, and that a cross-country road trip wouldn’t be a bad idea. Besides everybody changes over time. I’m not the same person I was when I was twenty in more ways than I can count, and in spite of barely passing the last math class I ever had when I was twenty I can count pretty high.

I didn’t marry a baseball fan. In fact I wasn’t really a baseball fan myself when I got married. I’d watch baseball once in a while, but my interest really grew over time. Part of it was movies like Pride of the Yankees, which made the history of baseball and some of the personalities interesting to me, and Bull Durham, which made the structure of the game and how the personalities of the players could mesh to bring about a win, a loss, or the best idea for a wedding gift intrigued me. And there are some really cool people, people I admire who had a passion for baseball, like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan. I think they were both Mets fans, but nobody’s perfect. Over time baseball became one of three sports I’d watch. One of the others is soccer, because I played soccer as a kid, and I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, and you can’t get more international than soccer, even if the rest of the world calls it football. We Americans already had a game called “football” where the players throw the ball. With their hands. American football also has no respect for the clock. A football match played anywhere else in the world is ninety minutes. A game of American football is divided into two halves of thirty minutes each but every ten seconds the referees have to stop play to move giant exclamation points down the field to show how many inches one team or the other has advanced, which is why the average game lasts four and a half days, but that’s another story.

The only other sport I watch is billiards. And, yes, that is a sport. It’s shown on the sports channels, and if you think golf is a sport then keep in mind that billiards is just like golf, except it’s indoors and you don’t have to hit the ball nearly as far.

For a long time I didn’t watch baseball very often, but then a few summers ago I started tuning in to games, mainly to see how badly the Chicago Cubs were losing. Honestly I think the Cubs are great and Wrigley Field is a really cool historic monument, and one of these days the Cubs are going to make it to the World Series and half the country is going to be Cubs fans. I’m just trying to score a place close to the front of the line.

I have been known to cheer for other teams too.

I’ve been to games like this. (Source: Wikipedia)

And my wife who had complained that baseball was boring started watching too. And now if there’s a Braves game on we’re tuned in. Actually most of the time she’s tuned in. Sometimes I watch and sometimes I take advantage of the fact that there are a lot of lulls in baseball where not much happens. That’s really one of the cool things about baseball: it’s the athletic equivalent of Dali’s melting clocks. Time in baseball is a fluid concept because as long as one team keeps hitting they keep going and the seventh inning stretch can be over in less time than it takes to watch the deleted scene from Field of Dreams where Ty Cobb comes out of the cornfield just to hit Timothy Busfield in the back of the head with a bat. Sometimes I come in late and have no idea what’s going on.

“What’s the score?”

“Zero to zero.”

“Who’s ahead?”

Sometimes I think I’m a bad influence because I got my wife interested in baseball. Most of the time I don’t mind, but it can make for some interesting conversations when she’s focused on the game and I’m thinking about something less important, like what we should have for dinner.

“Hey, what would you say to a sandwich?”

“SON OF A BITCH!”

At first I was slightly taken aback since the worst thing I’ve ever said to my food was ” Je préfèrerais cruddite” when offered steak au poivre, but then I realized she was talking about a strikeout in the bottom of the sixth.

And then there was the time I was in another part of the room folding laundry and had a mild heart attack when she yelled “DAMMIT CHRIS DON’T SWING AT SHIT IN THE DIRT!”

That was made up for by the time we were at a game and she turned to me and said, “You look like I need another beer.”

And the funny thing is I didn’t even like beer when I met her. It’s incredible how much I’ve changed.

Update: men yelling at the television during sports games reminded me of this. Skip to 2:20 for the relevant moment.