Back in the Reagan era, when I was a college kid working part-time at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, I shared long, dusty shifts with a man named Chris Grossman—a wine salesman whose last name, ironically, matched neither his physical presence nor his temperament. Chris was lanky, six foot four, and moved with the grace of a man perpetually on the verge of tripping over his own limbs. He had a face only a Freudian could love: aquiline nose, dark beard, black-framed glasses smudged with fingerprints, and a mop of dark curly hair that looked like it had lost a long battle with a pillow. A pencil was always tucked behind his ear, as if at any moment he might be called upon to draft blueprints for a submarine.
To customers, Chris was a savant in work shirts with the sleeves rolled just so—half wine whisperer, half philosopher of Zinfandel. He had an uncanny ability to match a Pinot Noir to a personality type, like some sort of boozy Myers-Briggs. The regulars adored him. They trusted his palate, his calm authority, his encyclopedic knowledge of terroir. What they didn’t know—and what I only discovered gradually—was that once he stepped off the floor, he disappeared.
Chris Grossman had no friends. Not one. He was social the way a vending machine is social—polite, efficient, devoid of emotional commitment. Once, during a lull in business, he confided that he’d had a girlfriend, briefly, years ago. He spoke of it as though he’d survived a hostage crisis. The constant negotiation, the emotional bookkeeping—it exhausted him. “I’m too selfish to pretend otherwise,” he said with an eerie clarity. “I’d only make her miserable.” There was something almost noble in his blunt self-awareness, as if he’d spared both himself and others the slow drip of mutual disappointment.
His father, he once told me, had been a brilliant but frostbitten physician, a man incapable of affection. Chris, I think, carried his father’s circuitry—a brain tuned for analysis, not empathy. Still, he wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t even rude. If he hated humanity, he kept it on a low simmer, tucked behind a mild smile and a firm handshake.
We both left Jackson’s in the late ’80s. I moved to the California desert to lecture on writing and lose my illusions in the faculty lounge. Chris stayed local, selling stereos on Shattuck Avenue for places like The Good Guys and Circuit City. He made good money and spent exactly none of it on companionship. No wife, no kids, no pets, not even a ficus. Once a year he drove his Triumph convertible down to Carmel for a vintage car rally, then disappeared back into his cocoon.
I think about him more than I should. Forty years have passed, and still, his silhouette lingers. Why? Maybe because I recognize myself in him. The difference is, I got married—and in doing so, outsourced my social life to someone with actual initiative. My wife arranges our dinners, our vacations, our tenuous grasp on community. She reminds me to be human. And yet, even she knows I’m a recluse at heart. She gently suggests I see more of my friends—or at least have more friends—so she doesn’t have to absorb every neurotic spiral I produce. Fair enough.
I’m 63 now. Chris, if he’s still around, must be pushing seventy. I sometimes wonder how he’s weathered the years, whether the silence that once comforted him has curdled into something more sinister. But I also suspect he made peace with his solitude. He looked at the world, with all its needy, buzzing, soul-sucking demands, and chose the quieter suffering. Not because he was brave or broken, but because he knew himself too well to fake it.
I hope he’s okay. I really do. Solitude, like alcohol, is dose-dependent. For some, it’s a meditative stillness. For others, it’s a slow erosion. I don’t know which side of the line Chris landed on. But wherever he is, I raise a glass to him—alone, perhaps, but not forgotten.
Cinemorphosis 