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Once I went to a New
Year's Eve party in the far northern LA suburbs, where the city cops live to get
away from work, and everyone has the same well-programmed glow. But the people
at the party weren’t cops. They were successful doctors, lawyers, CPAs, and
corporate vice presidents, and these weren’t the circles my wife and I normally
traveled in. We were at the party because I liked model trains, and so did the
host, but that was about all we had in common.
Even so,
people seemed to want to talk about model trains that night. I talked about them
only because people would ask how I knew the host, Bob Saylor, since they hadn’t
met me before, and the only answer I could give was that we both liked model
trains. They would nod knowingly – they knew, it seemed, about Bob and model
trains.
I was
chatting with a husband and wife who'd just bought their dream house, after 20
years hard work on the carefully planned career path. For all this time, the
husband had wanted to have model trains. He couldn't have them in school, of
course -- he had to study. Couldn't have them in college -- no space, and still
had to study. Couldn't have them when he got married -- no money, no space,
there were kids, and he had to put in all his time as an associate.
But now -- he'd made partner. He could buy his dream house.
And in the dream house, there was one
room he could use for whatever he wanted. His kids had their own rooms,
his wife had her own office, he had his own office, there was a rumpus room with
a wet bar and a pool table nobody ever used, and even on top of that, there was
one room he could use for the thing he'd been dreaming of since childhood --
some model trains.
When they moved in, his wife told him she'd changed her mind,
and she was going to use the room for storage.
It was puzzling that night: nobody seemed to be saying
anything against model trains, or actually, model trains for grown men. That was
a dog that wasn’t barking. Looking back, the reason was clear enough: Bob was
the host, he liked model trains, everyone knew it, and they were all being
polite. Even to me. After all, in the time I’ve been an adult, society has
decided that lifestyle choices that used to seem eccentric, immoral, or deviant
are now perfectly OK, although it’s still not all that great for a grown man to
like model trains. In fact, now that news media style sheets have attempted to
extirpate all stereotypical language, it’s still OK to treat adults who like
model trains with a good bit of condescension.
This was probably why the guy didn’t complain when his wife
told him he couldn’t have a room for his trains after all. Down deep inside, he
knew it wasn’t something he should be doing. He was probably grateful to her in
the end.
My parents held the same view on my interest in model trains
as a hobby that they held on left-handedness: it was an unfortunate trait to be
disciplined out of a child. This idea was flawed insofar as they could simply
whack a kid who picked up a fork with the wrong hand,
but it was harder to swat someone just for an interest, and a short-term swat
wasn’t likely to make the long-term interest go away. Nevertheless, they
probably understood, those many years ago, that society’s attitude would never
change about model trains, even if it changed on nearly everything else.
They were right about society but wrong on whether I would
outgrow model trains. Once I got to college, when I was being exposed to the
thought of everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Immanuel Kant, I struggled with
myself, thinking I should "grow up" and abandon the hobby, but I lost that
battle. I still liked model trains, still built them, still collected them. Even when I’d reached adulthood, my
parents shook their heads. They thought I would have been better off taking that
money and saving it toward, say, the down payment on a
house.
What was
peculiar about the New Year’s Eve party was that not only was the host a model
train enthusiast, and not only was I there as a guest because I was a model
train enthusiast, but there was another guy there who had a model train layout.
His name was Bob, too, Bob Dunbar. Bob Dunbar was a partner in a national CPA
firm in downtown LA, which meant that he fit in with everyone else at the party
much better than I did.
Still, at
some point that evening – probably because the party was a bore – the three of
us got together to talk model trains. We stopped short of heading out to Bob
Saylor’s garage to look at his layout – by the standards of the people at the
party, that would, I suppose, have been impolite. But
we talked. The two Bobs lived right around the corner from each other in the
swanky development. “In fact, our houses have the same floor plan,” they told me
proudly. It must have been the top of the line. We talked about getting together
and working on each other’s layouts, which is the kind of thing model railroad
enthusiasts often do.
And in fact,
things fell into place, we agreed to meet at Bob Saylor’s a few Sundays hence,
and when the time came, Bob Dunbar and I showed up and finally got to see what
was in his garage. The three-car garage itself was a peculiar sight to start
with: it was immaculate. There were no stains anywhere on the floor, and in fact
part of it was carpeted. He’d only been able to negotiate the use of one stall
with his wife, he said, and that had been difficult. It meant they had to rotate
which of their expensive cars and SUVs got to sleep indoors. It went without
saying that no model train layout was going to get any farther inside the house
than the garage.
Bob Saylor
had been asking me about how to paint his track. The track you buy from the
model train shops is shiny, which isn’t how real track looks. To make model
track get the rusty, dirty brown look of real track, you have to paint it, and
the easiest way is to use an airbrush. Bob Saylor had an airbrush – the two Bobs
had been buying tools for many years, though most of them were still packed in
their boxes and unused. The airbrush was among them, and he pulled the box in
which it had come from the store out of a metal storage cabinet, we unpacked it,
and got to work.
The top of Bob’s train layout was immaculate, too, just like
the floor of his garage. I think it caused him some distress that I began to
spray rusty brown paint on his shiny track. But then, he’d asked for it. I kept
up my work. Here and there I used an old piece of cardboard to keep the paint
from spraying where it shouldn’t go, and that’s where I noticed something
strange. Once I was finished with the cardboard in a particular spot, I’d put it
down. Straightaway Bob would swoop in, grab it, and put it in the trash. He
really had a problem, I began to realize, with anything lying around loose. He
was a neat freak. I’d get to another part of the layout where I needed to shield
something from the spray, I’d reach for the cardboard,
and suddenly realize Bob had thrown it out. I’d have to put down the airbrush,
go over to the trash can, and pull it out again.
A little later, Bob Dunbar’s sons showed up in Bob Saylor’s
driveway. It wasn’t a long trip, since, you’ll recall, they lived around the
corner. They were something like eight and ten years old, and they kept circling
the driveway on their bicycles.
“Mom’s
having a problem with the computer,” one of them said to their father. “She
wants you to come home.”
“What’s the
problem with the computer?” he asked.
“Mom wants
you to look at it,” they said. “She wants you to come
home.”
Bob Saylor’s
wife poked her nose into the garage at this point, wondering what the noise was
about. Bob Dunbar went out to the driveway to talk to his sons. “That’s Janet
Dunbar,” said Bob Saylor’s wife to the two of us. “She can’t stand to have him
away from the house.” And in fact, Bob Dunbar returned to the garage just long
enough to tell us he’d have to be running along back home.
“Poor Bob,”
said Bob Saylor. “His sons aren’t into model trains.”
“What are
they into?” I asked.
“Not much of
anything, as far as I know,” he answered.
By then, I’d finished painting Bob Saylor’s track, and I was
helping him adjust something else. Every time I’d put the screwdriver down, he’d
snatch it away and put it back in the drawer, which meant that every time I
needed to use the screwdriver again, I’d have to go back to the drawer and look
for it. This was getting old, and I decided it was probably time for me to go
home, too. For that matter, Bob was starting to get a forlorn expression as if
he’d maybe changed his mind and wanted his track shiny again, the way he’d
bought it. I made my excuses and left.
One Saturday a few weeks
later, I got a call from Bob Dunbar out of the blue. Bob, as I said, worked in
downtown LA. Even though he was a partner in the CPA firm, he worked six day
weeks – and long days on top of that. But on Saturdays, he figured it was OK to
play hooky, so he’d come in to the office late, leave early, take long lunches,
take off in the middle of the day. I wasn’t that far from downtown, so he
decided to see if he could take a couple hours off and drop in and look at my
layout. That was fine, so he came by.
In fact, he
started coming by every week or two. It was a good deal for him: as far as I
could tell, his wife maintained his appointment calendar, and the only serious
time he got for himself was on the Saturdays when he could sneak out of the
office, with his wife thinking he was at work, so she wasn’t checking up on him
all the time and trying to get him back home. But since it was Saturday, he was
only sorta-kinda at work, and he was able to get some
time off for model trains, that is, as long as nobody knew what he was up to.
On those Saturdays, he and I got to talking. One point I’m
trying to make here is that handsome is as handsome does: people like the two
Bobs aren’t different in one part of their lives from the way they are in
another. Bob Dunbar was convinced that there was a single way to do things. No
doubt this served him in good stead: he’d made partner in a national CPA firm,
after all. But he was equally convinced that there was a single right way to do
model trains.
A lot of our
talk when he dropped by would be about how the model railroad magazines told
everyone to do things. He was determined to build a layout just like the
magazine editors thought he should, and for that matter like all the
self-appointed experts thought he should. That is, of course, if he could get
enough time away from his wife to build much of anything at all, but we didn’t
go into that. With a mixture of pride and chagrin, he told me that not long
before, he’d taken his older son, the ten-year-old, with him to a model railroad
convention, and he’d managed to corner one of the experts in person, a magazine
editor named Tony Koester. He’d primed the guy with one or two questions, and he
happily basked in the extended, pompous replies. The problem was his
son:
”Dad,” said
the boy, “let’s go.”
“Wait,”
shushed Bob, “I’m listening to this man.”
“Dad,” the
kid replied, loud, “This guy is a dork.”
In fact, the
guy, a prominent figure in the hobby, was a dork. But as far as Bob was
concerned, he was a dork in authority, and consequently worthy of his rapt
attention. Bob held his kid, fidgeting, for another five minutes while he
listened.
When Bob made
his Saturday visits to see my layout, he was drawn to every feature that wasn’t
of the sort then endorsed by the magazine editors. And since he was a partner at
a CPA firm, he felt it was his place to tell everyone, including me, how we
should do things. In this I surely shouldn’t have been surprised: his whole life
had been centered on kissing up to the right people, living in the right town,
driving the right car, wearing the right clothes, eating at the right
restaurant, having the right opinions. His visits began to take the form of
enumerations, things that he was going to do differently from the way I did them
when he really got working on his layout. As yet, that layout was something I’d
never seen.
“I’ve got to
figure out a way to get Bob Saylor down here, too,” he said to me one day. If
pretending to work all day Saturday was a way for Bob Dunbar to get away from
his wife, maybe he could work out a way for the three of us to get together on
that kind of a schedule. The problem, of course, was that we could never meet at
Bob Dunbar’s place, and even Bob Saylor’s place would be a dodgy proposition,
since it was just around the corner from his own home.
But the basic
idea was sound, at least for a while: Bob Saylor was better able to get his wife
to let him off his leash on Saturdays so the two of them could come down and
visit me. Apparently there’d been some discussion between the two of them as
well on all the things I wasn’t doing properly on my layout. Bob Saylor on his
fist visit gave it the same careful scrutiny that Bob Dunbar had, with special
reference to what the magazine editors thought should be correct practice.
“Well,” he finally said, “of course, I guess there’s no such thing as really
doing it wrong, but. . .” It
likely didn’t help that I hadn’t swept the floor before they showed
up.
I’m not
exactly sure why I didn’t just throw both of those guys out right then. It was
doubtless a strange sister of <i>Schadenfreude</i>, some morbid need to see what would happen
next. But Bob Saylor couldn’t stay very long anyhow. “I’ve got to go,” he said
with a guilty look. “My wife says we’ve got to go to a party later this
afternoon. Customers. Can’t get out
of it.” And he took off.
Nevertheless, after that,
we began to get together again periodically in Bob Saylor’s garage, though Bob
Dunbar mostly couldn’t make those sessions. But the chats I had with Bob Saylor
grew more mysterious all the time. There had been, for example, an additional
negotiation with his wife, over and above the use of the one stall in the
three-car garage. “We had to get a new patio to compensate for what I was
spending on my layout,” he told me. He dismissed it – a little too airily in my
way of thinking – as the kind of compromise anyone would have to make over a
hobby.
But this was
a conundrum. Model trains can be expensive, but you spend the money a little at
a time. It’s not like a patio, where you shell out several thousand bucks to the
contractor all at once. And model trains cost money, but then, so do boats, or
golf, or Jack Russell terriers, or football tickets. Not only that, but from
what I could see on the layout, he hadn’t been spending all that much anyhow.
How had a patio suddenly become part of the deal? And judging from the
neighborhood and their late-model luxury cars, it seemed as if the Saylors could afford whatever money they were spending on
model trains, patios, or anything else.
Naturally it
wasn’t a matter I could press, but almost without thinking about it, I began to
look for ways an ordinary model train layout in a garage equaled out to a patio.
The first clue was subtle: that same day, he wanted my advice on a part of the
layout he couldn’t reach. “I can’t throw these switches over here by hand,” he
said. “I should have caught that when I planned it, but I didn’t.”
I looked the
situation over. “You’ll have to operate them remotely,” I suggested. I mentioned
the products I normally used and how I might go about fixing the
problem.
The next time I was over there, everything I’d mentioned had
all been installed. And not just sorta-kinda: insofar
as I’d said anything specific at all, it had been done to the letter. In fact,
what I’d said had been adhered to so strictly that it didn’t work right. When
I’d been giving my suggestions, I hadn’t thought he’d take everything literally
– I expected he’d apply some common sense, and if something didn’t quite fit the
way I’d mentioned, he’d change it so it worked. For that matter, he had both my
phone number and my e-mail address, so if there’d been any questions or
problems, he knew how to get hold of me. But he hadn’t.
There was something else a little odd: he hadn’t tested what
he’d done at all until I came over that day. Normally if you work on something
like that, you get a little bit done, then you test it to be sure it’s right,
and then you go on and do a little more, test it again, and so forth. That
wasn’t how Bob had done it. Somehow it had all been installed, and nothing had
been tested at all. In fact, Bob had clearly been planning to show me how it all
worked when I came over – the fly in the ointment was that it didn’t work after
all, and he didn’t know that, because he’d never tried it
before.
Then all of a sudden it hit me: the only explanation I could
think of was that Bob actually hadn’t done the work. He’d hired someone to come
over and do it. I knew, at least in the abstract, that there were guys who would
do that sort of thing, and I knew there were rich guys who’d hire them, but I’d
never seen something like that in person, and I really never expected to. And
Bob, come to think of it, had never mentioned that this was how things were
getting done. Of course, if he was paying some guy by the hour to work on his
model train layout, it would start to cost like a patio. There was where his
wife got the idea that he was spending so much.
In spite of all the
interferences, there were a couple of days when things went well. They happened
on a short run of get-togethers at my place, when I had a project big enough
that the Bobs could focus on it for a few hours at a time. I was working on some
mountains in my scenery. I’d made up a basic scenic framework out of strips cut
from cardboard boxes, and that was an idea that had been published enough in the
magazines that they could feel comfortable with it – it wasn’t too new or
unusual. The job for the Bobs was to dip paper towels in liquid plaster and then
to drape them, sodden, on the cardboard framework. The whole thing would dry
into a hardened shell.
I was worried
that the Bobs would be squeamish about getting their hands dirty, and I had
latex gloves for them to use if they wanted – but something about the project
appealed to them, and they forswore the gloves so they could feel the plaster on
their hands. They quickly fell into a routine. The whole process was wonderfully
messy, like something from kindergarten, but it was at my place, not theirs, and
they began to enjoy themselves.
Soon enough they forgot to worry about what their wives might
say about the state of their clothes and hair when they got home. There was no
need for precision, and no possibility of it. And they were doing something,
doing it directly, doing it with their own hands and seeing the immediate
results. They began to have their own ideas, good ones, about what the mountain
should look like, and they began to make changes in the framework I’d set up,
following their own instincts based on mountains they knew.
The result, after a couple of those sessions, was better than
I could have expected, and beyond that, better than I could have done by myself.
I was puzzled, though, at what had happened with the Bobs: I’m not sure if
anyone had ever shown them, ever in their lives, how to have real fun like
they’d had. Up to then, as far as I could tell, their parents, their teachers,
their guidance counselors, their coaches, their bosses, their mentors, their
wives had programmed their every moment. They viewed the mere idea of
spontaneous activity, something enjoyed genuinely for its own sake, no matter
how innocuous, with a kind of dread.
Bob Saylor’s
tone changed the next time I talked to him on the phone
about getting together. “Well,” he said, “exactly what are we going to
do?”
“Same as
last time,” I said, “there’s more scenery work.”
“Isn’t there
going to be some kind of structure to these sessions? I mean, what’s the agenda?”
“Same as
last time,” I said. “Why do we need an agenda?” But he sensed the abyss before
him and pulled back. Someone might ask what would be wrong if Bob Saylor has a
little fun with plaster once a month or so: it might even be good for him. But
for someone like Bob to do that, he’d have to make room for it in his schedule,
and to make room, he’d have to make explanations.
“Actually,”
he said, “my wife has something new for me to do.”
“Brittany
and Brianna – my daughters – are 12 and 14 now,” he explained. “We’ve got to
start thinking about getting them into good colleges. My wife thinks girls’
basketball will be the best thing. We’re going to get involved in girls’
basketball and get them athletic scholarships.”
I had a hard
time imagining a financial aid officer approving any kind of scholarship for his
daughters, at least any based on actual need. But the money was the least of it:
girls’ basketball, Bob explained, had no off season, and there were games on
both weeknights and weekends all year round. Not to mention practice. His wife
had gotten him back in the groove, with his complicity, a new plan for his every
waking moment. Girls’ basketball would protect him from the abyss for a good
half dozen years.
But if Bob
Saylor had withdrawn from our little group, that left Bob Dunbar. Early one
week, not long after I’d had my last chat with Bob Saylor, Bob Dunbar called to
see if we could get together at my place the following Saturday. I said we
could, but that Bob Saylor looked like he was going to have permanent scheduling
problems. And in fact, when the day arrived that Bob Dunbar had asked to come
over, he didn’t show. He did, though, call me a day or two
later.
“I guess I
was supposed to come over to your place the other day, right?” he
asked.
“Well, yes,”
I said. “You’d called me about it and set it up.”
“Gee, I’m
sorry. I forgot about it. My wife told me about a party we were supposed to go
to, and I completely forgot that I’d already made arrangements with
you.”
That’s what happens, I didn’t tell him, when you let your
wife run your appointment calendar and don’t tell her everything you’re doing.
And I decided not to say anything about rescheduling. Something in Bob Dunbar’s
tone suggested a little too strongly that I should start to accept this kind of
thing from him. I could be his friend, it seemed to be saying, but I had to
recognize who had the upper hand.
And with that, my little series of get-togethers over model
trains with the two Bobs came to an end. I still named the new mountain they’d
built on my layout
