Call Me Charlie

Issue 327

You guys,

As in Greece, I had not made too many friends in Uruguay.

I find that I make snap judgments about people early on. Some of them are small things, that on their own aren’t terrible, but add up as strikes against their character, like the mom who repeatedly, almost comically stormed into conversations and interrupted who was speaking, or the other mom who spoke for forty-five minutes straight at the women’s circle when everyone else only spoke for five. Some things felt more like red flags, like the dad who said he doesn’t learn any of the kids’ names, or once, when George beat an older kid in a game of chess, and the older kid moved George’s pieces to end the game even sooner and left George in tears, and the boy’s mom responded with, “Let’s just call this a practice game.”

As the cohort went on, I wondered about the difference between being judgmental and being discerning. I had one friend, Tina, who I told would make a great politician. She befriended everyone, did not speak unkindly of anyone. Part of me thought I should be more like Tina. Another part of me called bullshit. Her friendliness to everyone could not be completely authentic. So where did that leave me?

And then, coincidentally or cosmically, Sam told me he had an idea to host a game night with the parents. The game was Mafia, a parlour game that had become popular in Silicon Valley—it had been produced into three episodes on YouTube. I watched the first episode, transfixed, and told Sam he definitely had to do it.

On the night of, while our kids were being babysat by Tina’s kids, we sat around the long wooden table at the hub with twelve of us. It was a mix of people I liked and didn’t. I worried about how things would go, and then the game began.

I’d told Sam in the weeks leading up to the game that I just really, really did not want to be Mafia. As a Townsperson, I could be innocent and try to figure out who the Mafia was, but as Mafia, I had to play a game of deception and convince everyone in the group that I was a Townsperson, like them. I flipped over my card for the first game. A Jack. I was Mafia. There were three of us on a team, against the rest of the group.

Sitting across from me was Elisa, one person in the cohort that I did not like. I’d learned early on that she was a writer, and I’d hoped to befriend her, but in our first conversation I did not like the way she spoke to me. It wasn’t much more than a feeling. There was an air of condescension in her voice as she explained to me how dictating works, and when I told her I could never dictate because I needed to physically type to think, she said, “It just takes practice.” Then she hosted a Writing Sprint for a group of us, and when she pressed the timer for us to start, she blasted what sounded like heavy metal music into her headphones and typed aggressively on her keyboard and I could barely think.

Elisa was the first person who confirmed her attendance for Mafia Night and the first person to arrive at the hub that evening. When it was time to deliberate, she was vocal, loud, and opinionated, doling out observations and accusations. This made her an excellent player. Without Elisa at the table the game might have fizzled. She took the whole thing seriously in a way that made me, for a moment, fucking love her. I, too, was vocal, loud, and opinionated, (though a bit more reserved in my role as Mafia so as not to draw attention to myself!) and it was nice to have someone else at the table with a competitive edge. She came to play and she came to win, and in Round 2, when Sam told the Mafia to wake up, I slowly looked up and locked eyes with Elisa. We were in it, together, and it was go-time.

With Elisa on my team I knew we could win, and when we did, we stood and cheered and hugged a real hug, our first of the cohort. All my strikes against her had not disappeared, but there was more to her than just those things. I had not been open to it before then, so I couldn’t see it, but it was there all along.

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Until next week,

Charlie

P.S. If you look forward to reading Call Me Charlie and care to reply to this email with 1-3 sentences about your thoughts on it, I’d be grateful. I’m revamping my website with a few fresh testimonials.