Last Friday night, while you were having sex, I was at a banquet for people who like owls.
Yes, I said owls, and yes, it was exactly as you're picturing it in your mind. A one-room community center with plain white walls, a gray concrete floor, no decorations, fold-out tables and chairs, and a smell like a construction crew had just been working, even though the building was finished years ago.
If this owl thing had lasted as long as you lasted while having sex, it wouldn't have been so bad. But it lasted almost three hours, and sadly, The Newspaper™ - which employs me - does not pay me time and a half for spending Friday nights with elderly owl lovers. Though they should.
When I arrived, I scanned the room for open seats and chose one next to an elderly man who I suspected was frightened of young people. If my assumption was correct, I could go the entire night without having to talk to anyone. But I was wrong, reader. Oh dear Lord, how I was wrong. While this man looked feeble, half-blind, and anti-social from afar, as soon as I sat down next to him I became his new best friend.
"Hey! Owls!" he said to me. I smiled politely and turned away. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, "So why are you here?" If I hadn't been on the job, I would have told him I like to have intercourse with owls and was collecting material for my spank bank. But to keep from getting fired, I explained myself and once again turned away. The old man kept talking to me. My back was turned, but he didn't seem to care. At this point, I realized I had no choice but to talk to him. If I didn't, over the course of the evening he would slowly drive me to madness.
The old man's cardigan sweater was the color of urine, and like a leper, his balding head had spots of discoloration. The skin on his hands was gray, and there were so many veins popping out that he looked more like a diagram in a science textbook than a human being. Whenever the man pushed his eyeglasses up, which was roughly once every four seconds, every wrinkle surrounding his eyes was magnified. In the right light, he looked like a muscleless version of "The Thing" from Stan Lee's Fantastic Four comics.
His name was Leonard, and nothing would shut him up. I ate my salad, he talked. I stood in line for the buffet, he talked. I ate my dinner, he talked. I ate my dessert, he talked. The keynote speaker talked, he talked. I was worried that once the banquet was over and I had driven home, Leonard would be there waiting for me, anxious to discuss owls further.
When I was a kid, I saw an episode of "The Twilight Zone" where a lady kept seeing the same hitchhiker everywhere she drove. Eventually she became so frightened that she started trying to run over the hitchhiker. I don't remember how it ended, but I do remember thinking the episode was lame and not the least bit frightening. It wasn't until I met Leonard that I empathized with the woman's desire to run the hitchhiker over.
But soon my fear turned to utter boredom. I told Leonard I was a reporter, and his eyes lit up like a fart near a campfire. My goodness, what a coincidence! He's a writer too, and he's writing a book! A book about an elderly man and a young man who - wait for it - sit in the woods looking for owls. Before I could pick up a knife and slit my wrists, the plot of his book lulled me into a deep coma. When I came to, the only other information I heard was that it was 500 pages long.
He asked me, rhetorically of course, whether I thought a man and boy finding common ground was an interesting story. If he had allowed me to answer, I would have said, "I'm sure NAMBLA will love it."
Thankfully, the banquet was soon over. After a 30-minute drive home, I was relieved to find my apartment empty, with no sign of Leonard waiting to talk about owls. I even checked under the bed, just to make sure.
Oddly enough, it turns out I should have paid more attention to Leonard. When I woke up Saturday morning, I had a question I couldn't answer. This question has been burning in my head ever since.
How the hell did he fill up 500 pages with a plot like that? I can't even write 800 words about the subject in this column, but a 500-page book likely has well over 300,000 words in it.
That's talent, reader. That is friggin' talent.
