RERUNS

This idea, this worry that I should really be more careful not to repeat myself in conversation, had, as I remember it, first come to me when an old friend, a man I had not seen since high school, came to town on vacation—my wife and I lived, at that time, in a beach town, though we’d moved there for work and actually didn’t much like the beach (in part, we told each other, because of the kind of the people it brought in; here there were only themed restaurants and bars with endorsements from reality stars my wife and I would not have known were reality stars if not for our phones)—and, over the course of our dinner, had told no fewer than five stories I found I still remembered from twenty years before, down to the (frequently offensive) ways in which he described the people involved. These were, I mean, stories he’d told in high school, the exact same stories, stories that had made us laugh when we’d gathered together in friends’ garages, high or drunk or both. The look on this friend’s girlfriend’s face, in her seat across from me in the booth underneath the plaster shark and the license plates from thirty-two states (I counted; I had time to count)—and, it almost goes without saying, the two televisions playing different college baseball highlights—told me that, though she hadn’t gone to school with us—she had been in elementary school when we were in high school, I would later hear—she had nevertheless heard these stories, too, and so it occurred to me that these were stories told either for my wife’s benefit—a surprise because she was made visibly uneasy by at least one of the stories (one that involved me), and had laughed politely at only one of the others—or else for really no one’s benefit, simply to pass the time. I remember that during the early part of the dinner, before the stories got more embarrassing and even frankly demeaning, I’d felt stuck: I found I couldn’t recall much about the time I’d been friends with this man apart from the stories he was already telling, and so I’d stayed silent, waiting first for the drinks and then for the appetizers, listening to stories I’d heard before and watching the girlfriend watching my old friend telling these stories she’d heard before. I was, I think, trying to find some sign in her face that she might once have been charmed by this man. A few years later, after my wife and I had moved again, this time back to her hometown, I logged into one of my social media accounts to find this man’s face staring at me from an ad. I could not understand what a “podcast for men, by men” would be, nor could I understand how this man, who had at one point in that long-ago dinner called the waitress fat, thereby beginning almost the only prolonged silence I can now remember from that night, had something like 100,000 likes on his podcast’s page. There were, when I clicked on the link, over two hundred episodes archived there—he had recorded his show twice weekly for the past two years—though I discovered, when I looked closer, that he was currently asking listeners to choose their favorite old episodes so that he could repost them, even though, from what I could tell, all of the episodes were already available to listen to at any time. This was, he wrote, just a way of keeping the podcast current for subscribers and fans while he took what he called a “much-needed break,” to rest, he explained, to work on some new stuff.

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