I Don't Argue Anymore

What a retired dentist from Staten Island taught me about laying the argument down

I have what the literature calls monkey mind, though the phrase flatters the animal. A monkey has somewhere to be. My mind just paces the cage, rattling the bars, working itself up over debts it cannot name.

For most of my life I kept a professional distance from the peace industry. The meditation people, the therapy people, the breathwork people, anyone who could say the word journey without flinching and then produce a card reader. It all had the faint chemical smell of a timeshare presentation, the free lunch you pay for with your afternoon. But Transcendental Meditation kept surfacing in the wrong biographies, which is to say the right ones. Lynch. Scorsese. Seinfeld. Serious men who built serious things and did not strike me as the humming type. When the skeptics start showing up to the seance, you begin to wonder what they know. So I paid and I sat down.

Summit, New Jersey. Three days, eight or ten hours in total, a mantra at the end of it. Ancient Sanskrit, they tell you, and yours alone, and you are never to repeat it aloud. Not to your wife. Not to your confessor. Not to the man who prepares your taxes and already knows the rest. I have kept it now for years. It is the one secret in my possession that has never leaked, curdled, or been used against me, which puts it well ahead of the field.

The room held a decent cross section of the species. A nurse with the flat competence of someone who has seen the inside of the body and was not impressed. A boy who appeared to be running on fumes and spite. A woman who wept on the first day and by the third was laughing at something none of us could hear. It was beautiful the way a Greyhound terminal is beautiful at two in the morning, provided you are not in a hurry and you look long enough. Everyone hauling a whole biography into a folding chair, trying to persuade the brain to shut its mouth for twenty minutes.

But there was one guy.

A retired dentist from Staten Island. Italian, and Italian in the full operatic sense, a man for whom every sentence was a small negotiation he intended to win. The hands were the tell. Wide, patient, expensive hands that had been inside a thousand strangers' mouths and had never once lost their nerve. We talked on the breaks, over the terrible coffee, in the paper cups that go soft before you finish them.

He had done the teeth of the mob. This is not a figure of speech. He had worked on one of the famous ones. Gotti. The men would come in, get seen to, and on the way out attempt to press a hundred dollar bill into his palm, no envelope, no occasion, just the fold of cash and the flat look that came with it. And the dentist learned, quickly, that the bill was not a tip and could not be declined. To refuse it was the insult. To take it was the courtesy. It was a form of respect, and respect, with those men, was not a thing you were permitted to waive. So he took the hundred, said thank you, and cleaned another set of molars in the morning. A complete moral cosmology, self consistent and ruthlessly enforced, humming away beneath the fluorescent lights of a strip mall in Richmond County.

Now, a word about argument. The cleverest people I have known never stop having one. They are correct about everything and content with nothing. Being right is a small cold room, north facing, and they take the lease for life and decline all visitors. Hitchens went on arguing more or less to the last breath, and I loved him for the performance, but I would not have wanted the room next door. There is a vanity buried in it, the compulsion to close the other man out, to keep the final word as though it were currency, as though the ledger would ever balance. It does not. There is no ledger. There is only the pleasure of the kill and the long silence afterward.

Somewhere on the second or third day, one of the strangers asked him the obvious thing. Why TM. Why here. Why now.

And his face did something. You may have seen it once, if you are lucky, on a person you trusted. It is the expression of a man telling the entire truth with nothing riding on whether you accept it. A thousand yard stare, but level, unhurried, drained of drama. He did not look down, which is shame. He did not look up, which is theater. He looked straight out at the middle distance where the truth apparently lives, and he said it without ornament.

"I'm done arguing with people. I don't argue anymore."

That was the whole of it. No parable attached. No moral pinned to the hem. A man who had spent a working life among people who settled disagreements with instruments other than words, who had taken the hundred dollar bills and kept his counsel and outlived the arrangement, had at some point simply set the entire apparatus down on the floor and walked away from it. The scoring. The winning. The endless need to be right at another man's expense. Finished. Not beaten. Finished, which is a different and much rarer thing.

I never learned his surname. I have no idea whether he is still above ground. He would be older now than the man who lives in my head, the one perpetually seated in that chair with the coffee going cold at his elbow. We did not become friends. We shared a room for a matter of hours and then the world, which is greedy, took us both back.

But I came away with the mantra and I came away with the line, and I could not honestly tell you which one I lean on harder.

I'm done arguing with people. I don't argue anymore.

Some days I get most of the way to believing I could mean it.