Musings on a Local Failson

Journal Entry 05/08/2023

05/08/2023, 4:55 PM

While I’m here I better take advantage of the opportunity presenting itself to perform an overbaked but useful writing exercise: writing about someone I see around me. Here we go: I walk into a Chick-fil-a on my way to band practice from work and I see a man working there who surely never thought he’d be working there at his age. A man I recognize. He’s one of the sons of a man who used to attend my childhood church, a “pillar of the community” type, a good man who lived to a good old age. He might still be alive, in fact, though his wife died years ago. I don’t keep up. 

The son in question is in his early forties, a handsome and athletic man, aware of his power and, previously, fairly eaten up with pride about it. Last time I saw him things were going well for him. He had a beautiful (really, a shockingly beautiful) wife, a couple of lovely children, and was coaching football at my high school alongside his older brother, who was the head coach and was the sort of token libertarian conspiracy theorist history teacher, the sort of red blooded American man that likes ot talk about his Cherokee heritage and about how “crazy” he is. But this younger brother messed his cushy gig up. In the first place, I heard from my mother that he and his wife were swingers, which is of course a problem in my native milieu and, I’m inclined to hold, in general. But more importantly than that, unless I’m very much mistaken he lost his job at my high school for the classic: having an affair with a student. Couldn’t keep it in his pants around a willing eighteenish-year-old, I guess. At any rate, he and his wife are now divorced, and rather than building a “pillar-of-the-community” career coaching high school football he’s working on the lowest rung at a fast-food restaurant; “team member,” the name badge reads, the same “rank” as my 21-year-old younger brother who also works at Chick-fil-a. My brother’s girlfriend has more authority than this man, as she’s some sort of manager or supervisor at the Chick-fil-a where she and my brother work (don’t worry, he’s not dating a landwhale manger for pathetic restaurant clout; she’s a cute little Guatemalan adoptee, raised Baptist AKA white). How does it feel, I wonder, to be his age and to have wound up several steps behind, with no one to blame other than yourself? I don’t say that to gloat (though perhaps I feel some ressentiment-fueled schadenfreude, God help me): I wonder how he feels every day, getting up to work a job more suited to a teen or a student than a grown man in the maturity of his strength. Unless he’s really ascended, or has descended to a level of unconsciousness that seems impossible for him to me, the answer can’t be “good.” Yet perhaps he has been humbled enough to do this job in a spirit of humility and peace. Or perhaps he is still as prideful as he’s always been, just unable to express it as clearly as he had in his previous line of work.

Whatever the answer, I couldn’t detect open hostility in our subject’s demeanor. He took my order quite professionally, and made himself busy cleaning up some tables in the slightly showy way of men who’ve gloated about being “driven” and “hardworking” all their lives take on work. I don’t think he recognized me as he took my order. I gave no sign that I recognized him, and we never really knew each other, so I’m sure I retained my anonymity in his eyes. I wonder, though, if he was pretending not to know me as much as I pretended not to know him. Is he ashamed to run across a character from his former life, no matter how peripheral? Does he hope I don’t recognize him out of shame? If I were in a comparable situation, I think I’d feel ashamed every day, and would either have to fight it or find a way to repress it. Maybe that’s how he feels. Or maybe not. Maybe we’re just that different, and I’m doing some “projection.” 

Or maybe he is having a great time at this low-investment-requirement job, appreciating the opportunity to ogle the young PAWG waitress who is bringing everyone their food and the other pretty teenage and teen-adjacent waitresses who work at Chick-fil-a. Maybe he romances one every now and then, who knows? But he seems like a man who cares about status to me, so this is unlikely, though I’m sure he still ogles the PAWG. I know I am.

What’s the takeaway here? An old classic, I suppose: don’t lead your life from the pelvis, especially if you find yourself working in a high school. This is a very important lesson for me now, as I do find myself working in a high school these days. Not that anyone is looking my way, though they should be, and if I was the person I ought to be, they would be. Nonetheless, some of the girls charm me. Maybe one of them, an upperclassman who’s a friend of the teacher I work with, smiles shyly at me and looks down whenever she passes me in the hallway. Maybe I noticed her white sweater and red skirt today, and thought that she looked quite nice. Maybe I know which of the 8th grade girls I teach will grown into great beauties one day. Why not? I am young and my blood is red, and I can see beauty where it is. It is only natural, and I think I’ve become wise enough about the difference between what is natural and what is good to know to resist following the promptings of every desire, unlike the swinger failson whose downfall prompted these thoughts. As if I could ever lead my life with my pelvis anyway! If I tried my life would become some cringeworthy, clichéd act of rebellion. It’s not who I am, and it would not make me happy. It probably didn’t make the failson happy either. I’m sure he wouldn’t have chosen this life, had he known what would happen. Again, maybe he’s happy with the PAWG and the others, but I doubt it. I don’t think that’s what real happiness looks like.