The scene was the Dozens diner, a block or two away from the Denver Art Museum. Jessica and I were having lunch with Brian Terwilliger, who is Jess’s oldest friend (they grew up on the same block in South Windsor, CT).
Brian had ordered a Denver omelette, no mushrooms, because he likes Denver omelettes but hates mushrooms with a passion. Brian does everything with a passion – or an obsession, depending on your perspective – and he was a few minutes late to the diner, that afternoon, because he was meeting with some people in Denver about his aviation documentary, One Six Right, which had just premiered on the Discovery Channel on Christmas Eve.
The omelette was placed before Brian, and, as he’d feared, there were mushrooms in it. He flagged down the waitress, told her he’d asked for no mushrooms, and then, as she was about to walk away, he reminded her that she’d also neglected to bring him the glass of orange juice he’d ordered. He wasn’t rude or demeaning, he was just direct and entirely unselfconscious about asking for what was owed him. It was the manliest thing I’d seen in months.
Seriously. There was something about the mushrooms-OJ double whammy that really impressed me. It also shamed me, because I knew that, in his situation, I would have separated my two requests by at least one standard waitress visit interval (WVI). It would have seemed presumptuous to me, somehow, to ask for so much in one burst.
I used to think it was just that I was humble. And I am, in some good ways. I don’t believe the world owes me more than what it owes anyone else—respect, freedom, dignity, etc. More and more, though, I’ve come to believe that along with the humility there’s also a good helping of self-doubt in my psyche. I don’t ask for the mushroom-less omelette and the OJ because I’m not sure I deserve both of them.
Brian has doubts about many things in his life, but he doesn’t seem to worry about asking the world to pay attention to him . Over the last few years he’s sought, and received, hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing; he’s made an excellent movie; and he’s toured the country promoting it. I don’t know if he’s made any profit yet, but he’s on the verge of it, and he’s now in the catbird’s seat for his next documentary, deciding which investors to accept money from instead of searching for anyone willing to help (though even for this movie, he was unwilling to accept money from anyone who demanded too much control).
There is simply no way that I could have done what he’s done. I’m a writer, in part, both because I don’t like being told what to do and because I don’t like telling other people what to do. I have an easier time taking direction, in truth, than giving it. Brian, by contrast, is so sure of his vision, and so certain of its worthiness, that he has no trouble telling others what to do. He’s a director. (He’s also, and I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so, got some strange man-boy things going on – his apartment in LA is like a boy’s wet dream, all decked out in expensive stereos, big TVs, and an excessive amount of airplane memorabilia, including a propeller lamp that he designed and built himself).
The meal ended with Brian putting his credit card down and insisting on paying for all of us. I had only offered, naturally, to cover our part of the tab. We did the little dance in which we pretend that we’re not going to let him pay, and then he paid. And then we went and looked at some neat art at the Denver Art Museum, including some pieces by my favorite Chinese cynical realist painter, Fang Lijun, whose "Series 2 – Number 2, 1992," can be seen in the upper left corner of the page.
