In the elevator we all become imbeciles.
If two people fall on each other in an elevator, does it make any sound? No.
Condo living, if you’re lucky, allows you to avoid annoying things, like stairways. On the other hand, if you’re unlucky enough to get stuck in the elevator with someone else, you can’t escape. To speak or not to speak, this is the question.
I work with people and find I’m seldom at a loss for words; how hard is it to bullshit about anything unimportant, including business, sports, sex, politics, the economy, the environment, or the Internet apocalypse, anything? But for some reason, no matter how many times I stand there with people who share the same space (we call ourselves neighbors), the only possible topic of conversation is the one thing we all care the least about: the weather.
Even when I consciously resist it, some gravitational force, some irresistible element, something inherent in my nature takes over and before I realize I hear myself saying those unbelievable words:
Hot out there, huh?
Or, in winter:
Sure is getting cold!
And then we panic, pause and smile nervously at each other for the remainder of the ten-second eternity until one of us escapes the steel cage. And these aren’t strangers, they’re neighbors! Why is it that I can roll with the smiles and frowns and talk smack with just about anyone I encounter: on the streets, in the men’s room (only when appropriate and mutually consented, of course), at concerts or sporting events, even in my godamned dreams, but here, only in the elevator, I become a sweaty, stammering deaf-mute. I find myself wishing for scandalous things, like, say, situational Tourette’s Syndrome. Anything to inspire something approximating small talk.
Thank God for my dog. He is usually with me at these moments, and in his inimitable, honest (and wordless) way, he can defuse several seconds of silent agony. He lets his tail do the talking, and with the absence of agenda or guile, he conveys what humans have spent many millennia unable to imitate.
*Excerpted from my novel Not To Mention a Nice Life, available June 17.
