Something that I think could improve interpersonal relations in this world is if we all worked a little harder on The Lateness Thing. There are people — you know them, I know them — who never seem to show up anywhere at anything remotely resembling "on time." And I don't mean they're five minutes late or ten minutes late. I mean they're hours late…and with no call to alert you to their tardiness.
Back before we all had cell phones, I could be forgiving about the "no call." If you were racing to get to wherever you were supposed to be by a certain time, it would only make you even later to pull off the road and find a pay phone to call and say, "I'm sorry, I'm running behind." Now that almost all of us can all call or text from wherever we are, I get more bothered about "no call."
But there are also people — you know them, I'm one of them — who I think are too impatient with lateness. We're usually very prompt and we have trouble understanding why everyone isn't. We attribute all sorts of character flaws and unseemly motives to lateness. I did once have a lady friend who intentionally kept everyone waiting as a kind of power game: "I don't wait for you, you wait for me."
She believed, via a thought process I didn't really understand — that arriving well after everyone else established her status as the most important person in the room. It also enabled her to "make an entrance."
I also knew one guy who was always late and felt it was your fault for expecting him, when he said he'd be there by 6, to expect him to be there by 6. It was like, "Oh, you know me. I'm always late. Why in the world would you expect me to arrive when I said I was going to arrive?" It was, to him, kind of a charming habit, almost a trademark. He also had a few Sovereign Citizen tendencies like believing speed limits didn't apply to him and he could travel between any two countries without a passport.
In past essays on this topic on this site, I've ranted about how annoying it is to miss airline flights or the first 10-15 minutes of a show. And that will never stop being annoying but my attitude on this has evolved. It's skewing more towards, "Well, that's just how some people are." I wish they weren't that way. Most of them wish they weren't that way. But some people just have a strange relationship with this thing called "time."
And some people just go through life with an anxiety about all the next steps in life we take each day. I'm thinking now about a lady I dated years ago who with one exception was just about as perfect as anyone whose standards in men were low enough for me to qualify as a boy friend. The exception was that she was late for every single date, every single appointment, every single moment when she had to do something at an appointed time. It wasn't just when she was with me or supposed to be with me. It was airline flights, doctor visits, jury duty…once, she showed up at a Surprise Party for her best friend forty minutes after everyone else had yelled "Surprise!" for her best friend.
I tried (sweetly, I thought) explaining what she was doing to me and others around her with her constant lateness. Didn't help. I tried explaining (also sweetly) what she was doing to herself by missing flights, not being able to use tickets she'd purchased for events that required timely arrival…even job auditions. She lost one job she really, really wanted by showing up three hours late for an interview.
It didn't even work to tell her we had to be someplace at 7:00 when the real time was 8:00. We'd somehow still get there at 8:20…or later. She would get herself ready to go and at the time we agreed I'd pick her up, she probably could have been out the door. Still, there was always this underlying trepidation, trying to delay the inevitable moment when she would appear in public. She had to spend another forty minutes making microscopic improvements on her makeup.
And in the last few years when I've thought about current friends who do this kind of thing, I've started equating it with the most impossible, hard-to-believe example of performance anxiety I've ever witnessed…
I've written here before about a short period of my life — late teenage years — when I was sometimes trespassing around the NBC Studios in Burbank. I'd often find my way into Tonight Show tapings when Johnny Carson, then based in New York, brought his show out here. That man making his entrance to deliver his monologue was one of the most thrilling Show Biz moments I ever got to witness in person. It had to do with his history and how important he'd become to so many of our lives, and it had a lot to do with that incredible-when-you-were-there-to-hear-them-live band.
One minute before tape rolled, I'd be where I usually stood, which was among all the production people off to the side of the set. If I acted like I belonged there, people just assumed I belonged there…or more often, didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to me. Today, you have be patted-down, strip-searched, cross-checked on computer and in possession of three forms of I.D. to get where I got in 1970 by just walking by the guards with a friendly wave.
Ed McMahon would be doing the audience warm-up, warming-up an audience that needed no warming-up whatsoever. They came in, ready and eager to clap themselves silly and to laugh at every single thing Mr. Carson said and did. You could feel how excited everyone was to be there. Ed would make a joke where it sounded like he was about to announce that there was a guest host that night and a chill of tension swept through that stage…quickly replaced by a huge laugh and exhale when Ed revealed that Johnny was there.
I already knew Johnny was there. From where I stood, I could catch a glimpse of him making his walk from the make-up room to the position backstage from which he'd make his entrance. He looked handsome and well-dressed…and petrified.
That's right: Johnny Carson, who'd done this eight jillion times before, always to a huge welcome, looked terrified at stepping out on that stage in front of them. Like there was a good chance they wouldn't love him the way they always had and always would.
He did not make that walk alone. His director, Bobby Quinn, was with him, telling him everything would be fine, it would all work. Someone told me Quinn often told Johnny dirty jokes to distract him and get him laughing and "up." Usually, the director of a show would be in the booth, running things from there but at that moment, the Assistant Director was in his chair, calling the shots. Quinn was needed to hold the star's hands and shove that star out onto the stage at the proper moment. Then and only then, Bobby Quinn could run up to the booth and take over the command.
This was not the way it was with everyone who hosted that show. I was there once when Bob Newhart guest-hosted and saw no visible anxiety at all. No need to have the director play nursemaid. Years later, I saw Jay Leno do it and again, not a jitter, not a shiver, not a twitch. He joked with people on his way to the stage…the exact same person he'd be twenty seconds later when he was out in front of the cameras and America.
But Johnny Carson, walking that same walk, looked like he was on his way to appear before a firing squad because…well, that's just how some people are.
Once Johnny got out there and received that huge, inevitable ovation, he was fine…just as when we got to the show or the party of whatever it was, this lady friend of mine was fine. I saw her untense the same way, if you were there on Stage 1 at NBC, you could see Johnny untense. It's not a perfect analogy because Johnny, of course, was never late making that entrance. But I think my date just had a problem looking in the mirror and declaring herself ready to be seen by others. The lateness was just her way of stalling.
Johnny couldn't stall. He knew that no matter how frightened he was, he had to walk through those parti-colored curtains two seconds after Ed said, "Herrrre's….Johnny!"
I talked to that lady recently — our first contact in more than twenty years. She wrote me on Facebook to say hello and ask me how Comic-Con had gone. Our "relationship" since we broke up has consisted wholly of her reading this blog and at one point, she came across one of my older posts about people in my life being late. She figured I was talking about her…and I was but not only her. What I'm telling you about her was true of others I've known and folks I know today.
Her message led to a phone conversation in which she let me know that since she got married and had kids, she's gotten a lot better at being on time for things. She apologized for all the problems she'd caused me through what she called "avoidable lateness." She defined that as "the times I could have been on time and I wasn't." I apologized to her for not being more understanding and for sometimes confusing "unavoidable lateness" with the avoidable kind. I really did think at times she was doing it on purpose.
She told me on that call, "I have a daughter now. In three more years, she'll be the same age I was when we dated." The daughter is starting to take after Mom back in her never-on-time-for-anything days. Mom doesn't like what she's seeing but having been there/done that, she at least understands where it comes from. I'm going to try real hard to always look at it that way.