As a species people bug me, and double- or triple-bug me in crowds. That’s been my mental malfunction for as long as I can remember, back to kindergarten 60+ years ago. Even at 5, other kids were people, and I preferred being alone.
During all my public education, classmates were never really friends, and being with dozens of them at our desks or at recess made me almost physically ill. I don’t remember any ‘normal’ conversations with other kids at school, ever — conversations that weren’t about how weird I was, how I needed my ass kicked, how much protection money I could pay, etc. I don’t even know which came first, the bullying, or my severe fear and discomfort around the other kids, but fear of my peers was a key reason I dropped out of high school.
Happily, such dread and anxiety has rarely been a problem since. By my 20s, I’d figured out that I’m fine in anonymous crowds, at a ball game, a restaurant, or a movie theater. It’s only a crowd where everyone else knows each other that inflames my phobia. That’s why I never go to parties, and always avoided any company’s after-work functions, and my life as a mostly-solitary adult has been OK.
That’s my psychiatric dossier. Being retired and poor, I’m always looking for things that might be interesting and don’t cost much, so a few weeks back, I decided to attend a free concert, and it never occurred to me that a free concert might explode my anxieties.
The band was the Whateverly Brothers, and I’d never heard them, or heard of them. Their kinda clever name appealed to me, and I found a video of their singing, which didn’t make me vomit. They make my kind of music — mild, folksy rock, with well-worked vocal harmonies on catchy, thoughtful songs, so I was off to the Couth Buzzard bookstore, to see the show.
It’s an hour’s bus ride with a transfer, so I’d never been there before, but it would absolutely be my third place if I lived nearby. Everything about the Couth Buzzard (well, except the name) gives off warm, easygoing vibes.
The bookstore is in the front, with both new and used titles. Maybe there’s a tilt toward weird, geeky books, or maybe it’s just me, but most of my browsing time was at the shelves of weird, geeky books. If I’d arrived a little earlier and browsed longer, I’m sure I would’ve found something to buy.
The shop’s middle is a cafe, selling reasonably priced sandwiches, soups, and salads. There’s a long counter, with stools where I knew I’d be comfortable, but with only ten minutes before the show, there wasn’t time for a relaxing meal, and I wasn’t hungry. Instead I spent a few more minutes in the weird, geeky section.
A cozy alcove takes up the farthest third of the store, where perhaps 75 chairs had been set up in half a dozen rows. There were three clumps of two or three people seated among the chairs. A few old white guys were setting up equipment and tuning their guitars — that’s the band, I recognized from the video, though they looked older in person. Older is better, so that’s not a complaint.
I sat in one of the folding metal chairs, softened by a portable cushion from my backpack, and waited for the 7:00 showtime, which was mere minutes away.
Then more people came in. Here’s a grandpa with his wife, and another couple of old coots with their middle-aged children. Next, a few 30-somethings with their toddlers and teenagers. Then more, and it had become a crowd, but unlike over shows, these people weren’t looking for seats and sitting down. They were looking for old friends, and finding them, and standing or sitting and talking to their old friends, and being interrupted by other old friends.
It was straight-up 7:00, people were still coming in, and every dang one of them seemed to be friends with every other dang one of them. A couple of oldsters sat right next to me, and said, “Hey, it’s Ethel and Mike,” to a couple in the next row, who launched into a detailed recap of their vacation in the islands.
I’d taken an aisle seat, and the aisle was now crowded with people standing around and yakking about their dentures, their lawn mowers, their kids, their grandkids, their jobs, their retirements, and their old friends who weren’t there — but then their old friends were there, leading to another round of conversations on top of all the other conversations.
To my relief, the band leader coughed into a mic and said, “Is this thing on?” It was five past the 7:00 showtime, but instead of introducing himself and the band, the guy holding the mic lowered it, and started talking with people in the front and second rows. And it wasn’t strangers’ chit-chat — pleased to meet you, thanks for coming. He knew all these people, and the other guys in the band knew everybody, too. Everybody knew everybody.
This wasn’t a concert, it was a neighborhood get-together, and the entire neighborhood was there. I’m not from the neighborhood, but in every direction good buddies were talking about good buddy stuff.
In my ever-present notebook, I wrote, Am I nervous? and answered my own question: A little, but that was a lie. I was very nervous, anxious for the people to shut up and the band to start playing.
People were still filing in, though. More seats were taken than empty, and people were standing around, talking. I looked over my shoulder to the cafe and bookstore, and what seemed like dozens more people were queued for seats in the alcove/venue. All of them were talking with each other, some of them hollering howdies to people they recognized in the seats. Everyone in North Seattle had come to the Couth Buzzard at 7:00 exactly, and the show was going to be standing-room-only.
Ethel and Mike were still deep in conversation with the people beside me, and other people in Ethel and Mike’s row were laughing over some anecdote shared with someone in the aisle, on the other side of me. An extremely pierced 50-something white man and wife were complaining about Trump to a more moderately-pierced couple in the row behind them. A gay yuppie couple admired a straight couple’s babe-in-arms, “Isn’t he just the sweetest thing,” and I wanted to shout, No, he isn’t.
It was ten minutes past showtime, and I desperately wanted to hear someone pluck a guitar so the crowd would shut up and the show could begin. Which happened, eventually, but first came the worst of all possible moments in a scenario like this:
Ethel and Mike and the two oldsters beside me reached a pause in their otherwise endless conversation, and in that moment of silence all four of them glanced at me, and Mike said, “Hey stranger, you came alone?”
It was a neighborly thing to say. They’d been talking for ten minutes non-stop, while I’d just sat there, so they were trying to include me in their conversation. By my distant understanding of such things, this was a kindness, but my preference is to remain distant, even if we’re sitting together.
“Yup,” I said with a fake, pained smile, “I came alone.”
Mike asked me next, I think, whether I’d seen the Whateverly Brothers before, but midway through his sentence I grabbed my seat cushion and backpack and jacket and left, saying “Excuse me” as I danced plumply through the last of the crowd behind me, and hurrying past the cafe counter and the bookshelves and out onto the safety and silence of Greenwood Avenue.
As the door closed behind me, someone in the band plucked a guitar, the crowd clapped, and the concert was about to get underway.
That’s my scene report from the Couth Buzzard, but none of it’s the Buzzard’s fault. It’s a cool bookstore, probably a great sandwich shop, and with that open space alcove they’re part of the community and committed to it. “Books & community” is their motto, and Couth Buzzard is perfect for book folks, cafe folks, folk music folks, weird and geeky folks, probably even ordinary folks. It would be perfect for me, if I came often enough to overcome my squirming, screeching, screaming discomfort in the crowd.
It’s a long bus ride, though, and my phobia is always with me, so I’ll never be back, but I recommend the Couth Buzzard for everyone who isn’t me.
4/12/2025
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