Green beer on St. Patrick's Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Character: Thomas - a Guy at the bar
Character Designation: unwitting informant
You never know when you’ll run into a good character, though a bar is a pretty good place to meet one. After a few beers, people are open and tell you some of the craziest and most personal things. It was St. Patrick’s Day, where else should I be than at the neighborhood pub with a mug full of frothy green beer? The man to my left was dressed in green, I’ll be it a pale sage-green that looked as washed out and used as he did. He was large in every sense of the word. With me standing beside him, and him seated on a stool, we were the same height. His body consumed the space around him and had the feel of corned beef – fatty and amorphic.
The first story he told was of his heroism. Another celebrant had gone down quickly under the wash of booze. Thomas had saved the day, and probably a life or two, by taking the man’s keys. Woven into this story was something about a horse race and a big win. But these were two different stories that Thomas tried to tell at the same time. It made my head whirl after just one sip of green ale.
toilet wc (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Thomas proceeded to tell us about his intestinal difficulties. He started back at the beginning. Yup, all eight years of intestinal problems. All of them described in exquisite detail. One would think that hubby and I should/could/would leave the conversation even if we had to use the dance floor as our excuse to amble on. But no. We were transfixed. It was mesmerizing to hear such intimate details from a man we had only come into contact with moments before.
Besides his bowl irregularities, we discovered that Thomas’s job was “consequences.” He was the guy who watched over the middle school kids held in detention. He loved his job. That and the bar were the two worlds he inhabited. He had no friends. No lovers. Just acquaintances and beer.
If I were to use Thomas as a character, I would focus on his facial expressions. Thomas has an enormous Charlie-Brown-in-a-pumpkin-patch sized head. His hair was grey and brushed straight back like a wave receding from the shore. His eyebrows were recreational. They seemed to do gymnastics like wayward children on his forehead -- leaping and tumbling with no concern for the cadence or subject matter of Thomas’s mouth. His eyes, round as tea-saucers, were water-painted-blue that seemed to have no defined separation from iris to white. They were stippled red and slightly glazed. As Thomas spoke, his eyes would grow in circumference until he became Casper-like and somehow disembodied. Thomas would also emphasize his thoughts by shaking his head, setting his jowls to swaying. Only occasionally did Thomas remove his hands from his beer stein to gesticulate, and then it was with a broad sweep of a tree-limb like arm that reached almost the entire expanse of our side of the bar and made me want to duck for protection.
Added oddity – this man had a degree in nutrition and minored in exercise sciences (or so he says)
I would use this character to let something slip – a key piece of information that Thomas had no idea that he possessed. He’d be regaling the bar with one of his very private and personal stories, when he happened to mention…
