Verizon Lady

Sometimes you have to look for a bit of crazy to bring into your life, and sometimes it lands in your lap.

There are lots of familiar faces that come through Starbucks in the morning, people who are regulars like me, but who don't typically stay for any length of time. Today, one of them approached me, pointing at my netbook.

"Is that yours?" she asks.

A number of sarcastic comments pop to mind, but they're all too obvious, and besides, that would be rude. So instead, I simply reply in the affirmative.

"Is it Verizon?"

Now there's a question I hadn't expected. Does Verizon make netbooks? I say that no, it's an Asus Eee PC, and in no way affiliated with Verizon.

"Well!" she says, and launches into a sales pitch. Apparently you can get a free netbook with a Verizon Blackberry service plan and it's a great computer and all you have to do is sign a two year commitment but then again everyone has you sign a two year commitment these days and if you have to you can get out of it, but look! You get a computer just like that one you have there, only it's even smaller and it does everything you need a computer for these days like Internet Explorer and email and....

I stared politely at her until she wound down. I had ample opportunity to study her as I did so. She was somewhere in her late forties, perhaps already tipped over into the precipice of the early fifties. She wore a white zip-up hoodie, glasses with heavy black frames brought to a tip at the ends, hair that had been dyed blonde at some point in the prehistoric past, but which now had deep brown roots. She wore black sweatpants as well, but on her feet, fancy strappy sandals with little rhinestone buckles.

So what's her backstory? I figure that it's not only college students who do the walk of shame, but adults plan for it better. Why go home in the dress you wore to the 40+ mixer last night when you can bring along comfy sweatpants? But dammit, she always forgets the shoes. But that's okay, no one will notice if she just stops into Starbucks for a few minutes.

Or maybe she works from home, for Verizon of course, but she has to go out and get her morning coffee. And you know, she'd really prefer to put on comfortable shoes, but she saw these last weekend and just had to get them, and her husband said she'd never wear them, and she said that just showed what he knew, except she really didn't know where she would wear them, but now she had to wear them all over the place just so he would shut up about how she always wasted money on shoes.

She concluded her pitch by saying that she was looking for ten people who were on Verizon to send a text message to a certain number and then she'd save $60 on her bill. I have Verizon, but I kept quiet. I had no interest in participating.

"Enjoy your laptop!" she said as she left, and as a parting shot, "Sorry you had to pay for it!"

"Call of Duty"-Pants Man

So there's this guy who comes into the Starbucks where I write, every morning. He's wearing a burgundy hoodie, a pair of moccasins with white socks, and a pair of fleecy, camouflage pajama shorts emblazoned with the "Call of Duty" logo. He buys four venti coffees and leaves.

Now see, that's the sort of detail I'd like to be able to make up for a story! There are lots of little character-revealing things there. I don't know anything about him other than his appearance (and his unsuccessful attempts to flirt with the staff), but I feel like I could write his entire story. There he sits in his mother's basement, playing computer games and drinking coffee. Once a day, he sallies forth into the world to purchase a the morning's supply of coffee. In the afternoon and evening, he switches to Mountain Dew. He could write essays on the proper way to line up a shot in Call of Duty. He has, and it was well received on the message board where he spends all of his non-gaming time....

I like this exercise. Tomorrow, I'm going to do it again with one of the other regular patrons here.

Story for the Sake of Character

Confession: I'm a political junkie. What could have been a great evening of writing has turned into a CNN marathon.

Reading:

• The Snapper, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

As you can see above, I've started a new book now. It is the second book in the Barrytown Trilogy, a series of novels written about the Rabbitte family, poor, working-class Dubliners. As an American, I can't pretend to understand more than 60% of the references in the series, but I was attracted to it years ago thanks to an excerpt in a collection of Irish humor I got one St. Patrick's Day.

The previous novel in the series, The Commitments, as well as The Snapper, share one trait in common--the clever use of dialogue. The text is written in non-standard English, making full use of profanity, slang, and accents rendered into spelling. And that more than anything makes the characterization come completely alive.

You don't have to understand every word or phrase to understand the story, because the power of the characters drives it along. The Commitments had a simple plot--it centered around a young man named Jimmy Jr., and his quest to form and manage a soul band in Dublin. The Snapper has even less of a plot, in a way. In it, Jimmy's sister Sharon is pregnant, and as of now, she has not yet revealed the name of the father to anyone. We see Sharon dealing with her new situation, and her friends, and siblings, and parents.

In one respect, nothing has really happened. Sharon broke the news about fifty pages ago. But I keep reading not to find out what happens next, but to find out more about the people in the story. In that regard, reading The Snapper is a lot like hanging out with your friends. Sometimes the point is not what you do together, but who you do it with.