Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Late last year, I accepted a dinner invitation from an esteemed writer, someone whose work I admired, someone whom, I knew, lived a reclusive life. Twenty minutes into our sitting down in an exclusive restaurant, I was looking at the red, glowing Exit sign above the entrance door. The dinner was a mistaken social outing.

The entire conversation centered around their life, as if they were selling their importance: their Ivy-league schooling, their friends, their first million dollars, their children’s careers, their summer vacations. Their rodomontade was interminable and crude. I felt like I had been run over by an eighteen-wheeler carrying all of their expressed self-importance and grandiosity. They were the headliner at this dinner, they seemed to say. I was in the presence of greatness, they seemed to say, and I had better know it.

Just when I began to quietly question myself, they must have noticed my drifting gaze floating like a lost balloon. They suddenly asked about me: how was I, what projects am I working on, how are my children? This was fifty minutes after sitting down.

I thought okay, they asked about me; maybe their winded braggadocio was just a moment of lapsed social graces. I’m generous with people’s awkwardness — we all have some. Maybe I was misreading, or maybe they were nervous. Shortly after I started discussing my recently released book of prose, they leapt into talking about their friend who is an influential agent, how I should have sent the manuscript to them, then, all the lost money I would have earned. Unbelievable! They literally mentioned their IQ level and proclaimed they only associate with people with high intelligence quotients.

I was physically tired, and in my exhaustion, I ran a nonstop monologue in my head while they gabbed on: I need to understand this person. I need to practice empathy. When have I, also, practically pleaded for excessive admiration from strangers and recognition of my self-worth? Isn’t writing an attention-seeking activity? Why was I even here? Am I not of interest to this person?

The dinner was not a total waste. Since that evening, I am ever aware of my presence with friends and strangers. I make room in conversations for others; if I am in a group, I steer conversations to the person who feels eclipsed or unseen or hasn’t spoken. But that night, there was no one else to steer towards.

The waiter could not bring enough wine for me to get through that night. The waiter, poor waiter, who the writer mildly berated at one point in a whisper loud enough for her to hear.

Today’s poem could be interpreted as an allegory for narcissistic personalities — how they violently demand our attention, and how we give it.

Voyeur
by Paige Taggart

seems time to rupture, seems time to animate
seems time to flag someone down
to call someone something silly and unintentional
then later have deep regrets and spill out from 
and submerge in roots, grow a tree from 
I just watched a guy riding his bike on his 
back wheel through a red light and down a block
seems like he really knows what he’s doing
seems unlikely that he’d have an accident, seems perfectly
reasonable to think he could even answer his cellphone
(up on one wheel like that) seems he could smoke a spliff
and still flip a trick
I don’t hesitate to make these kind of acute observations
these assumptions 
especially when it is based around a main attraction
even an event
a spontaneous occasion
that says “look at me”

"Voyeur" by Paige Taggart. Originally published in The Bennington Review. Used by permission of the poet.