Mr. Personality
by Robin Hemley
I was working on my annual harassment training in the United O’Hare airport lounge, when I heard some guy across the room chatting up a young woman. She was seated and he was standing up, drink in hand. White guy in his mid-forties. Not sufficiently interested in their conversation to follow it, I just noted the woman’s laughter and the man talking as though he was a stand-up comic.
“That doesn’t play well with conservatives like me,” he said, and I wished I could follow more of the conversation, but I could only hear the loud bits. And then, “Well, I’m a social liberal.”
He and she seemed to be getting along great and I wondered if they were business associates or had just met. Was he trying to pick her up? He seemed remarkably self-assured, and I’m always fascinated by people like that. But eventually, I heard him say goodbye and he left the woman at her table. As soon as he left, her expression went from all smiles to serious, even slightly disturbed. I had a long layover, so I sat there viewing a scene in which an office bully constantly berates a coworker about the poor quality of his work. Was it harassment, the narrator asked, or simply rudeness? While I pondered, the same guy I had observed before was now chatting up two businessmen. From Ohio (they said), one in his fifties and the other in his late thirties or forties. Again, the guy stood by them while they were seated. He seemed to be Mr. Personality with his witty repartee, but I could still only catch snippets. Should I move closer? No, that seemed creepy. The guys were laughing, just as the woman had. I heard him guess what they did for a living. He guessed they were in the health care business, as reps for some kind of health equipment.
The younger man, said, “Wow, you really pegged us. I didn’t know we were so obvious.” I, too thought that was impressive and went back to my quiz. Then a little while later, Mr. Personality said “No, I’m just fucking with you. You can wait until later to beat me up.”
Who says stuff like that? The other guys weren’t laughing now. The older guy said they needed to get work done. The younger guy added that they weren’t really in the health care business. I looked up.
“Forget work,” Mr. Personality said. “All you need to do right now is enjoy your life.” For that moment, my enjoyment of life depended on him not approaching me.
Don’t worry about him,” Mr. Personality said to the younger man. “In a week, he’s going to be new.” That completely got my attention. The older guy sat stiffly in his chair. With as much hostility as a businessman from Ohio can muster, he said, “What do you mean, I’m going to be new in a week?”
Tragically, I had to leave for my plane just then, but I couldn’t get that exchange out of my mind. Mr. Personality, either drunk, unhinged, or both, had faked sanity so well, using the Trojan horse of cheeriness to keep his victims unguarded. The temperature in the room had turned and everyone had gone from best temporary buddies to strangers ready to call security. As for me, I passed the quiz before my plane left the gate. It was a matter of time, not skill. No matter how many times you screw up the answers, you get as many chances as you need until you get it right.
Robin Hemley has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his stories have been widely anthologized. His widely-used writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold over a hundred thousand copies and has been in print for 25 years. His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. His short stories have been featured several times on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and his essays and short stories have appeared in such journals as Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many others. He is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is Inaugural Director of the Polk School of Communications at Long Island University-Brooklyn, Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing, and University Professor. He has had artist residencies at The Bellagio Center at Lake Como, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and others. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction (Specualtivenonfiction.org) and co-founder of Authors at Large with Xu Xi (aalauthors.com). His website is Robinhemley.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Mr. Personality”? I love encounters like this. To me, the not-knowing is more interesting than knowing. The fact that I didn’t learn the outcome of this encounter sits right with me. I love ambiguity because most of life is not knowing and trying to construct narratives from the fragments we overhear or are given. I’m actually phobic about people like “Mr. Personality.” My older sister was diagnosed as schizophrenic and my life with her when I was a teen definitely traumatized me, though it’s taken me many years to understand and come to terms with this. For this reason, I am terrified of anyone like Mr. Personality while also being fascinated by them. I’m interested in the disruptions that someone like him causes in the fragile fabric of normalcy while at the same time being terrified of the consequences of meeting up with him. I imagine that’s because I see in myself too clearly a reflection of him and my sister in myself.
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