Entry #4: storytelling
Monday, Jan. 26, 2004 - 22:40

A few days ago I sat next to Bill the Bellman on the bus ride down the mountain. Bill the Bellman is an interesting old guy and he talked the whole time. He's a good storyteller - his stories always have a funny punchline and there's always a point to them.

But my adult-onset attention deficit disorder kicked in and the whole way down I was wishing he'd shut up so I could listen to my music.

His stories are long and he talks very quietly and he has stale old man breath and I don't even know why he was telling me these things.

But he's so interesting, and I'm such a silly bastard for not appreciating the experience. Oral history is important, I think, but apparently I only think that in theory rather than in practice.

But here's how interesting Bill the Bellman is:

He was in the Army in the 1950s, and his test scores were so high that they put him in intelligence. D.h., he was a spy. ("D.h.", that's German, something I will harken back to in a moment.) He was involved in the Hungarian revolution. (Did I even know there was a Hungarian revolution? No, I did not.) He made decisions that determined whether thousands of people would live or die, and actually I think he decided that they'd die. That's why he quit, because, through the decisions he made and the information he got for the Army, he killed people.

He knew another Army spy who was stationed in Germany (hence my use of "d.h.") who also decided that a bunch of people would die. This guy recruited Germans to be spies, and a couple of the guys he'd recruited had disappeared, d.h. been found out and killed by the East German government.

D.h. stands for "das heisst" which means sort of like "that is". And i.e. is Latin, and whatever that stands for means the same thing.

The CIA wanted Bill the Bellman to work for them. If Bill the Bellman had worked for the CIA he would have made lots of money. This is the 1950s, James Bond, East Germany, Russia, etc. He told me about security clearance level stuff and other stuff that may or may not have been interesting. But Bill the Bellman decided not to work for the CIA. He said, "No thanks, CIA."

After the Army he worked for Greyhound in their central transit center or something, a fast crazy high-stress busy busy job. Oh, but before that he worked for the Port Authority in their central bus depot, coordinating all the buses in New York city. After that he worked for Greyhound. They transferred him to San Francisco, where he lived in Haight-Ashbury and became a hippie and quit working for Greyhound.

Now he's a bellman in a super swanky hotel on a mountain, and he rides the bus up and down every day and he talks to the person sitting next to him.

He has a very big lower lip. It's very big.