Hotel Habitue 17: Friends
Traveling across the Southeast five days a week with a group of people means it’s impossible to not get to know them. But too often I begin to feel like their personal pro bono psychologist.
It’s not that I don’t give a fuck (that’s only partially true.) It’s just tangling. Whether I want it or not, I’m going to get wrapped up in their marital problems, new CPAP machines, blood pressure issues. Their thirty minute diatribes about how Alabama is really gonna fuck Georgia this year. Their political rants. I once had a coworker get irritated with me because I didn’t have an opinion about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I didn’t sign up for this. It’s not in my job description.
I’m not going out of my way to be a mute during a ten hour car ride with them. But eventually, even if I’m completely silent, they will offer up some unsolicited personal information. There’s talking about the weather or college football, and then there’s sharing with me that they have a kidney stone the size of a fucking pecan, or sharing how he’s having problems getting his wife pregnant, and it’s making them both depressed. She cries with every negative test. I don’t need that burdensome knowledge.
Even if someone, unprompted, tells me how they shit their pants one time, or how much they loathe Donald Trump, the social contract seems to mandate that I provide a response of some kind, otherwise I’m the rude asshole. I try and muster up the minimum acceptable response. The calculation is tiring and I’d often prefer to just pretend to be asleep.
We aren’t firemen or police officers or Marines in Fallujah. The work isn’t especially dangerous. My life is not in anyone else’s hands. The knowledge of their worldviews, 401k contributions, and drinking problems is unneeded.
No one in my traveling group of ten men knows that I write books, that my favorite genre of music is Americana, that I code in my spare time, that my wife and I were trying to have a baby, or who I vote for. I have no desire to share such information with them-but I especially do not want them to have to pretend to give a shit about any of it. I’m trying to do them a favor. I am paid for this favor with stories that make me want to jump out of the car while we barrel down the interstate. This gets kicked into overdrive when I am guilted into drinking beer with them in the parking lot after hours.
A few of them I would very loosely consider friends. But when I inevitably move in a year or so, I would bet my life’s savings they will not keep in touch. It seems reasonable that this is the absolute bare minimum for dragging me into their life to learn about their hemorrhoids or dick problems. I’m a hooker, but for personal issues. We’ll get out of the company car after a week and pretend the conversation never happened-mainly because I’m desperately trying to scrub it from my brain with a brillo pad. We won’t hang out on the weekends. We don’t text each other funny memes. There’s no football group chat. The truck cab is a confession booth that I have been chained to, like those prisoners in Abu Ghraib that were forced to listen to Britney Spears.
I’ll be in an office job somewhere else in a few years waiting for a coworker to tell me about their latest diary entry, unable to shake it off.