2007-05-15 - 12:43 a.m.
“Free Advice! Any Topic!” the sign on the table at the Novel Café read.
This is new, I thought to myself. The Novel Café has long been a place where someone can follow their dreams, however wack-a-doo, and here was someone who was clearly pursuing an unusual avocation.
The chap behind the table, a handsome blue eyed, and toothsomely blonde fellow whose white shirt and rust colored jeans gave him the air of a Mormon Missionary, looked every inch the seasoned marketing professional, too. He did not seem immediately insane, as far as I could see. Wholesome.
Yet, every so often the white sleeve of his long sleeve shirt would roll up his wrist slightly, revealing a gigantic blue tribal tattoo snaking up his elbow to his shoulder. So if he was a wholesome fellow, he was one with just enough of a “fin de millennium” edge. Just the sort of fellow you’d want advising you, really. I’d do him -- for sure, given half a chance. But he also was wearing a big glittering wedding ring on one hand.
In any case, it was clear that this was someone who totally exuded trustworthiness, almost as a commodity. Who wouldn’t want to ask him a question or two?
I was with my mother and so we approached the fellow to ask him a question or two.
“Ohhh” my mother burbled. “Are you serious? Are you seriously giving free advice to whoever comes up to you?”
He smiled. “I am. I work as a sort of creative developer most of the day, and then, when I’m free, this is what I do for fun. I love it!”
And what a nice thing to do, I can’t help but think. There are so many worse things to do as a hobby than to hang out in a coffee house and offer advice to people. I quizzed him a little bit about how he came to such an odd trade.
“Well, I live in Sonoma, usually, and I just came down here for the weekend for business. I’ve been doing this for about six months or so – most of the time I’m up at the Urth Café on Main Street.” He looked around for a minute, eyes raking over the bag people crouching in the corner and the barking mad-man sitting at the table in the window. “Completely different atmosphere around here, though.”
Mama flopped right down in the chair next to him, to test out the young fellow.
“We’re thinking of where we’re going on vacation this summer. What is your advice – where should we go? Glacier National Park in Montana, or Lake Louise in Canada?”
The advice man furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. And then he asked a series of questions that honed quite penetratingly in on the various differences in our minds about the two places. “What is the difference in cost?” he asked at one point. “Would you be going with different people if you went to one place or the other?”
It gradually emerged from his quizzing that his instincts were quite good – and he had led us to just the correct choice. You see, if we went to Glacier, we’d have my stepdad along with us. If we went to the other place, he probably wouldn’t come. And so, with a performance of perfect reflexive listening, the Advice Man had guided us to just the right solution to our question.
Thus motivated, I asked the Free Advice guy about My Sputtering Career. I filled him in about how I was in a state of Mid-Life Career Shift. And I asked him whether I should go back to school to get my MA in Library Science or whether I should just get the certificate that would allow me to get a full time job as a clerk. He looked me up and down and sagely noted, “Oh you’d be bored in a month as a clerk. Get the MA and you can write your own ticket in the type of library work you do.”
How clever!
We got to talking, the Advice Man and I, and he turned out to be a really very fascinating gentleman. He told me that most of the questions he got were about relationships – or job trouble. He rolled his eyes slightly on the topic of how many middle aged people came up to him to ask questions about new careers.
My mother mused that it was a sad thing indeed that, with such a resource as a man whom one could ask any kind of advice from, that one could not really think of anything particular to ask. He laughed.
“It’s like walking into a record store and you don’t know what record you’re looking for. You have to know what kind of thing you want.”
It turned out, of course, that this was a sort of an art project – as well as a nice means of meeting passers by in new places. And who wouldn’t want to just come up to some guy who was so felicitously welcoming as to hang out an actual shingle, offering advice to all and sundry?
“It was about a year ago,” he explained, between sips of his hot chocolate. “And I was just walking past this store that sold trophies and awards – you know the kind of place. And the idea just kind of came to me. So I had the plaque printed up… And now I just set it up when I am in a new place.”
He offered me his business card, on which was printed simply the name “Tod Brilliant” and an e-mail address. What a brilliant artist name! I thought to myself.
I instantly ran to my computer and googled him, of course, and learned many interesting things about the fellow, almost none of which had to do with his avocation as an Advice Man. Oh, he hailed from Sonoma, all right – and his first marriage was to a Winery Heiress, with whom he opened a boutique winery dedicated to parallel pursuits of wine tasting, eco-activism, and the game “rock-paper-scissors.” That marriage went bust about two years ago, and he married someone else – a lovely-looking blonde lady with whom he has had a son, who appears over and over again in his “flickr” gallery.
Yet, we had a nasty suspicion about him. I was not able to evade the feeling that this was just some new hustle in an old style game. And while we were talking, this tall, leggy brunette gal approached the table. The Advice Guy’s eyes lit up and he burst into a sincere grin.
“Well, hey there!” the advice guy smiled. “Why, this is the lady whom I met last time I was here. She interviewed me while I was talking to some other guys.”
The brunette girl simpered just a little and her eyes sparkled. “Yeah, I was making a lot of fun of him. How are ya doing, Tod? It’s good to see ya again.”
The advice man blushed – and it was clear that there was some odd chemistry between them. The girl smirked, waved a bit, and walked on. The Advice Guy’s eyes fell, and he looked in his lap for a second. It was the look of a guy who had seen someone he was attracted to and whom had either dissed him or moved on from him. For just a second, we had seen the real him.
After we finished talking with him, we returned to our table. I kept my eye on him, though, fascinated by his outgoing personality and by the fact that he was just so damned nice, even though he had a sort of “performance” character tightly glued to his face so that no real clue of his real personality was able to show through.
After about an hour of Holding Court, the Advice Man put away his little plaque and he went to the second floor of the Novel Café. The last I saw of him, he was chatting away to ANOTHER pretty brunette girl. My advice to him, if I had some? Make plans for his second divorce.
