The Smoke

Keeping your mouth shut might turn you into a mythical creature.

Working on a ship, I had a colleague - a slender man in his 50s. He smoked three cigarettes in one sitting, told jokes for which he could get incriminated, sounded like a pig while eating, and wore crocs with socks. Saying he was weird would be like saying that Donald Trump has a bit of money - an understatement.

On merchant ships, the most buzzing place you get is the smoking room. It was a diverse environment of conversationalists who wanted to satiate their ego, have a laugh, get into hot-headed debate on topics of no importance for the sake of it, or simply pass the time. Politics, sports, philosophy, juicy rumors, old-man tales of past achievements, comedy sets - you name it. Half of the people who spent their free time there didn’t even smoke, which might help you understand the room's importance in the lives of seafarers.

Me being the young buck, I often found myself there as well, even though I didn’t smoke. I loved the entertainment.

Back to the ‘socks in crocs’ man. After knowing his habit of smoking three cigs in a row, you are absolutely right to assume he was a regular there. But he wasn't regular in terms of behavior. How’s that? With time you recognize patterns in people: their takes, humor, what makes them angry, what oddities they communicate. You get bored of them as a certain degree of predictability has this side effect. Not with that man.

One day he would say something outrageous, sounding like Andrew Tate. Another day he opens his mouth and sounds like the most diplomatic, liberal person on the planet earth. The third option is complete silence, sitting there in the corner for hours on end, gazing over the room, listening closely to whatever people say, without ever changing his facial expression.

The only thing you could predict about him was his jokes and the way he argued - wicked and direct. He told people what he thought in a very sharp, concise, and direct way.

How was he viewed by the crew? All I saw was fear and mysticism. Nobody knew how to approach him right, didn’t want to argue with him or challenge him in any way. Funnily enough, his entrance into the room would change the way many people talked, without him doing a thing, just sitting there silently - says a lot.

My natural curiosity brought me to him, and at first, he was as rude as it gets - he called me names and told me to fuck off. But I replied in the same manner, and he just laughed. After a couple of days of verbal exchanges that would guarantee a fight in a high-school environment, he started talking to me more often and in a way I hadn’t heard at all. We became buddies and opened up even more as time progressed forward, but that’s not what the story is about.

I got to know him pretty well and learned a lesson of utmost importance. Socks in crocs was a very casual man, without remarkable depth of intelligence, but he had this vital understanding of human nature, especially a group of working men. He purposefully acted randomly to cast a smoke on who he was. Then, when he was silent, everybody thought he was up to something when in reality he just didn’t have anything to say on the topic. He confronted men directly because he knew that’s what they feared, and he wanted a bit of that to make his days on the ship easier. His humor was wicked from childhood.

In reality, he was 5% of what others thought he was, but I'm sure they will never get to know the truth. Each time he finished his act and went out, all you could see in the eyes of others was confusion.

Two crucial lessons I learned from him:

• Talk less, listen more.

• The moment you become predictable is the moment people lose their interest in you, you bore them.