Banter Addict

Let's say, for arguments sake, that a person could be addicted to snappy banter. What might the addict do to quell her craving?

I had plenty of time to think about it after the subway doors closed and the simmering, bubbling conversation I'd been enjoying ground to a halt with the sliding doors' bing-bong. I was pretty sure Penn Station's maintenance crew couldn't give me what I needed, and New Jersey Transit's conductor crowd wasn't worth it's weight in straight answers, much less snappy banter. So I came up with a plan.

After I've put my son to bed, and poured myself half a beer, I'll lower myself onto the floor and set up a Fisher Price bar.

I'll use two overturned beds for the bar, maybe three, and make the bald man with the little curly cue on his forehead the bartender. Then, the one with the black Prince Valiant hard-hair, I'll set in his chair, and I'll put myself nearby but not too close. Must appear elusive.

"What'll you have?" the bartender asks.
"The usual," I answer and spin once around in my yellow plastic chair that molds to me perfectly.
OK, maybe I won't spin around, dumb idea, but I'll sip my cocktail as Hard Hair Guy sidles over. I need a glass of some sort. This'll do: I'll use a teensy Lego gear shift as a stem glass which I can just reach if I slither down onto my stomach. It's at this point that I wish I wasn't the girl with the helmet of yellow plastic Pippy Longstocking braids, so I trade myself in for a Princess Leia pez dispenser. Now we're talking. Taller, leaner, lighter on my foot.

"Hello," Hard-hair says and I tip him forward in his chair ever so slightly towards me.
"Hello yourself," I say with a tall, brunette, pezzy nod in his direction.
"Sorry I'm late," he says with a grin.
"Day late and a dollar short, pal," I say in Carrie Fisher film noir-eze.

The bartender asks Hard-hair what he's having. I rip off a tiny corner of a gently used Kleenex left on the coffee table for him to use as a bar wipe, and find an errant dust-covered dime near a chair leg to use as a coaster. The perspective is off, but it's all I can find within arm's reach and I am not about to get up off the floor. Besides, the over sized coaster thing is all part of this swanky bar's shtick. And I am a swanky, over sized gal.

Hair Guy says, "What's a girl like you-"
I cut him off, "Doing with a face like this?"
"Well, now that you mention it-"
"I just did."
"You might have," he says. "but you didn't answer my question."
"What was the question?" I ask.
"What does it matter?"
"How could it not?" I take another sip.
Then I look at him squarely for the first time and smile ever so slightly. I pause for effect but I'm way too tall. So I turn my self sideways and lay down a bit to get right in his face. My pez head is too big. Big coasters, big head. I suppose that's my shtick, too, but I'm stalling.

I sigh. These four sips of beer are really going to my head.

Banter is just not the same using hard, wooden children to talk to plastic candy dispensers while leaning on my elbows. Not the same as being a live adult sitting up straight, fingernails tapping a thickly varnished bar. Sure, I could do the bantering "for us-- for all of us," as Ingrid said to Humph, but I'd rather go to sleep. So I haul my tired, sorry ass off the ground and up the stairs and will myself to dream of conversations that skip across the water like a smooth, flat stone.

I know they're out there. My sparing partners crop up from time to time for coffee or lunch and we occasionally IM on facebook. They are men and women who, like me, can get giddy from snappy banter when it's taught and brisk the way I used to get giddy jumping double dutch for much longer than I'd ever imagined possible. But then someone has to get going and some door eventually shuts and there is a resonant buzz that floats along side me until it quietly, eventually fades. I feverishly look to the man in the crosswalk, waiting for the go-man signal, wishing we could pick up where I just left off, but something about his brown suit tells me it's not gonna fly.

Every so often I'm pleasantly surprised. A tired, detached postal worker behind the counter asks if she can help who's next. "I'd like a table with a view," I say as I pile my neatly addressed packages onto the counter and get out my credit card. She answers, "All I have is the one near the kitchen," as she weighs them one at a time.
"As long as the food is decent," I say.
"In this place?" and she raises an eyebrow.
"True," I say, "but I come here for the ambiance." And we smile as she asks me if there's anything perishable in my packages.

It's nice to be reminded that snappy banter is out there. Elusive, like Princess Leia, perhaps, but out there.