Overheard Conversations: Be Careful, A Writer Could Be Listening

By Stephen O’Connor

James Joyce was certainly not the first writer whose pockets were full of scraps of paper on which were scrawled bits of conversations. Any writer worth his or her salt is continually listening to other people’s phrases, stories and conversations and taking written or mental notes. Eventually, some of these stories and phrases make their way into books.

Two evenings a week, I teach Advanced English to migrants through Lowell Adult Ed. Before class last week, I overheard (okay, eavesdropped on) a conversation between a Haitian man and a Haitian woman who had just met in the class. Maybe I should apologize, but I was taking down their conversation as they spoke. (In my defense, if they had not wanted me to understand, they would have spoken in Creole).

“Where you are from?” she asked.

“I’m from Gonaives.”

“So you eat Lalo.”

“No, I don’t eat Lalo.”

“What do you mean you don’t eat Lalo? If you are from Gonaives, you eat Lalo.”

“I don’t like Lalo.”

“How can you say you are from Gonaives and you don’t like Lalo? It was your first meal! You prepare it, you cook it, you eat it!”

“It is not an obligation.”

“I don’t believe you are from Gonaives at all. If you are from Jeremie, you eat Tom Tom. If you are from Gonaives, you eat Lalo.”

“All cases have exceptions. This is one.”

“I never hear of any person from Gonaives who does not eat Lalo.”

“I can’t even smell it. When my wife is cooking this, I have to leave the house.”

“Why?”

“I just do not like it. You can be different.”

“You can be different, but you can’t be that different!”

I don’t know if I could ever use this conversation in a story or novel. Probably not. But it interests me because it would be impossible for me to create it out of my own imagination. It’s authentic, and it embodies the personalities of the speakers.

Growing up in Lowell, I’ve met my share of characters. Some of them are gone, but the things that they said to me live on a while yet in my mind and in various books. It would be difficult for me to invent such a question as the late Tom McArdle once hurled as a challenge to the entire bar at the Highland Tap. “Is there somebody in here that I’m supposed to be afraid of?” From his mouth into a story decades later, along with such cryptic phrases of his as, “When you’re dead, you’re deader than you’ll ever be.”

Diners are a good place for literary eavesdropping. In an old copy of The Magus, I find a scrap of paper upon which is scribbled a remark I heard an old gentleman make to a waitress ages ago at the Owl Diner: “They’re ruining everything. The astronauts have screwed the weather all up.” Those sentences illuminates in large measure the speaker’s world view. I think of the line from the old Rod Stewart song, “He’s a horse-drawn man until his dyin’ day.”

Lately, the place where I overhear the most interesting remarks is the coffee shop where I write. The best line I’ve overheard in a long time was, “I was getting drunk with my doctor.” Thereby hangs a tale, I’m sure. But at that point the woman behind the counter turned on the blender, and I never found out what escapades ensued with the drunken man and his drunken doctor.

I amuse myself at times by turning overheard phrases into short whimsical poems:

I’ve heard the didgeridoo
Is difficult to play.
I don’t know,
I’ve never tried.

Sometimes these “found poems” are not whimsical, but tragically suggestive:

I finally got rid of all
Of Mary’s shoes.
Even though they’re size eight,
I don’t want them.

Tragedy can be encapsulated in a few words. Waiting for my turn at the shop of the Portuguese woman who has cut my hair for thirty years, I copy down the seven evocative words I overhear from an aged patron: “She went very fast in the end.”

Last fall, four old women at the coffee shop sat near me playing Scrabble. I transcribed their conversation in poetic form, and I give it to you here as a testament to the courage and resilience of human beings. If I had to give it a name, I would call it: “Brave Old Ladies at the Coffee Shop”

“I have one good eye,” the old lady says, “but I notice it’s getting foggier.”
“I had the shingles,” her friend says.
“If it’s not one thing it’s another,” the third says.
“Like this weekend, I had a pinched nerve in my neck.”
“Joe has Covid. He’s getting over it. Now his wife is fightin’ it.
She has some issues with her..” (inaudible)
“I think I’ll go down to Gail’s house for Thanksgiving.”
“I’m not too sure what I’m doin’,
But I’ll be rattlin’ around somewhere.”
They laugh.

I don’t claim to be a James Joyce, but sometimes young people ask me, “What should I do if I want to be a writer?” I tell them to listen and to observe. And to write down what they see and hear. One of my great regrets is that I didn’t do so more systematically. I’ll never work as a ‘garbage man,’ or a drywaller, or a roofer again, or go fishing for tuna aboard the Bobby Sands, and the words of the men who worked around me grow fainter with the years. You think you’ll remember it all. You won’t. Yes, it’s all part of what made you, but it’s easier to paint a remembered scene if you’ve once made a sketch.

I sometimes think I could go down to Captain John’s in Cupples Square in Lowell and sit at the bar for a year copying down what I hear. The result would be a record of the city of Lowell talking to itself. Alas, as the song says, “There’s so many different worlds,” and that’s especially true in this city. I’d have to spend a year in every ethnic enclave and speak twenty languages. One does what one can.

The other bit of advice I’d give prospective writers is, don’t ever tell your stories or your good lines to other writers, (and watch out for that guy sipping coffee and writing in a notebook at the next table). We are a cutthroat bunch. Your story will end up in another’s book before you can say ‘Jack Kerouac.’

In the meantime, I sit by the window in the coffee shop and listen, even while I work on a novel. This morning, I heard a woman at a table near me tell her friend, “Courage is what you do when you’re scared, isn’t it?” I make a note on a separate page. Thank you, kind stranger. I can use that.