Whenever prompted, I provided my new address, followed by a forceful pronunciation of ATT-LANT-TAH. I said it this way to the movers, the insurance agent, and the post office until I heard my friend Lisa, an Atlantan herself, say, “Ahlannuh,” in one-and-a-half syllables.
We were catching up over drinks at a sandwich shop called Victory. Being new to the area, I asked her to pick the place and was a bit taken aback when she suggested it. I envisioned a Subway restaurant with a liquor license, but I was pleasantly proved wrong. It was a lively establishment with a smattering of booths and tables anchored by a busy bar. Two women with murals of ink tattooed on their arms bounced from table to table, taking orders and delivering mason jars of colorful drinks. Our beverages had just been delivered, mine a Victory Libre cleverly served in a glass Coke bottle, and hers a whiskey-coke slushy that made me wish I had a tolerance for Jack Daniels. Lisa, a writer, an amateur sailor, and a roller derby girl, could easily drink me under the table, so I was fairly certain that a few sips of her slushy weren’t enough to cause her to slur.
“Say it again,” I demanded.
“What? Ahlannuh?”
I had gone through this song and dance in Los Angeles already, running around town mispronouncing everything from street names to neighborhoods. I wasn’t about to make that mistake again, so I asked Lisa to listen and correct my pronunciation as I rattled off every landmark I could possibly remember from my guidebooks. She stopped me at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
“Everything is pronounced the same,” she said, waving her hand. “There are only three or four names that might be confusing.”
For those, she provided solutions apt to my maturity level. She explained that the first syllable in Piedmont Park is pee because you may need to do that in the bushes. The city of Decatur is pronounced ‘dick hater’ due to the prevalence of lesbians. Krog Market is not pronounced like Kroger Supermarket, but instead, it rhymes with hog because you go there to pig out. She said to resist the urge to pronounce anything in Spanish. Ponce ends in a silent ‘e’ like the word pounce. When Atlantans want you to pronounce the ‘e’, they add a ‘y’ to the spelling as evidenced in the name of a neighborhood called, Poncey-Highland.
I thanked her wholeheartedly for the lesson.
We were nearly done with our respective drinks when I asked the inevitable question former smokers raise when they’re out drinking and reminiscing: Do you have? and then put two fingers up to my lips because uttering the word cigarette is too disgusting.
She didn’t have any, but I wasn’t too disappointed. It was a long shot. I mean, who smokes anymore?
“Let’s go outside and see if anyone has an extra cigarette,” she said, already standing.
Her plan sounded ludicrous. In Los Angeles, the closest smoker you’d find was in Nevada.
“Should we tell our waitress that we’ll be right back?” I asked, certain that I was going to get hip-checked by present-day Rosie the Riveter for walking out on my tab.
Lisa waved me off again.
Miraculously, we found not one but several smokers of the nicotine type.
“I hate to ask,” Lisa announced, and before she finished her question, a young woman with sunglasses propped on her head heeded the call.
“Camels okay?” she said, holding open her pack for Lisa to pilfer.
“Do you need one too?” she asked me.
“Oh, no, thank you,” I said, falling over myself. “We’ll share,” I suggested humbly.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, holding out her box for me.
“I’ve got Parliaments, if you prefer,” a man’s voice boomed from the corner.
I gasped. That was my brand. And like a child being lured into the back of a van, I walked right over to him.
I was really out here bumming cigarettes like it was the late nineties.
His cigarette hung from his lips precariously over his lengthy beard as he lit mine. Before I could say thank you, I was somehow swept into a conversation. Sure, smoking is a social activity where chit-chat is exchanged between participants. Someone mentions the weather, and the other person replies in agreement. Then, the replier is compelled to say something else to not make the person who initiated the conversation feel bad about breaking the ice. You know, your standard, textbook small talk. But this was not that. If anything, this was big talk.
“Y’all know these two parking lots have different prices, and they’re right across from each other, right?” he said.
“Yeah. That lot is a rip-off,” Lisa said.
“Seriously? That’s where I parked.”
“That’s the most expensive lot in all of Decatur,” he said, pronouncing it the way a lesbian would.
“She just moved here,” Lisa said in defense of my ignorance.
“Well, that’s a tough first lesson to learn,” he said before taking a drag.
“Where’d you move here from?” asked the Camel smoker.
“L.A.,” I said, thinking that would suffice, but all it did was spark up a conversation about me that didn’t really include me.
Guy with the Parliaments: “It’s so expensive out there…”
Girl with the Camels: “And so many people are moving over here…”
Guy with the Parliaments talking about me when I’m standing right there: “She’s probably with the movie business…”
Girl with the Camels: “Did you rent or buy a place? Well, it doesn’t matter, really. It’s really driving prices up…”
The door of the establishment flung open, and our waitress appeared. Oh, here we go, I thought, bracing for the tackle.
“Another round?” she hollered.
Lisa and I responded in the affirmative.
“Should I buy these people drinks,” I said, pointing at our cigarette benefactors.
“No, that’s creepy,” she said.
That’s creepy? These people knew more about my life in two minutes than my blood relatives had in three decades. I shrugged my shoulders and took slow, methodical drags, enjoying what remained of my taboo habit and making note of the lessons learned.
There were other curiosities that Lisa left out in my orientation. For example, Atlanta’s elevator problem. I suppose it wasn’t a purposeful omission but one that has to be experienced. The first time it happened to me, I was sharing an elevator with a group of overly polite men who, upon the doors parting to reveal our floor, turned into adorable toy soldiers. They performed a choreographed about-face to allow me to egress, even though I was standing in the back corner. I didn’t understand what was happening until one of the men extended his hand outward to usher me out.
“Oh, gosh, thank you,” I gushed like a fourth runner-up at a beauty pageant.
Half a dozen more of these exhibitions of impractical chivalry later, and I was ready to lobby for gender-neutral elevators. I got into a few ‘you first, no you first’ bouts and when my outfits bordered on androgynous, it created a lot of consternation. I could see the machinations behind their eyes. They were horrified to offend me but more scared to dishonor their mothers, who made them promise to always let the lady go first. More than once, I missed my exit because men couldn’t create a pathway fast enough to beat out the doors. I started to add an extra five minutes to my commute if I knew the location of my appointment was taller than a two-story building. An effort that meant nothing, as time is arbitrary here. Another interesting aberration.
Every city has its own tempo and Atlanta’s hovers in the realm of Jazzy Muzak. Citizens butterfly around like a lovely alto sax solo without urgency to make it to where they need to be. Why would they? Dinner can be ordered at 3 a.m. and breakfast at 3 p.m. You can watch exotic dancers perform in darkened rooms when it’s broad daylight outside and play carnival games under the stars on the roof of the old Sears building.
There are only two things, and two things alone, that you can count on being on time. The first is 5 o’clock rush hour, and the second is lesbian kickball games. Equally intense, both feature moments of elevated frustration, immense fear and tons of drama, but neither is ever tardy.
When I realized this phenomenon, I made an effort to be late to social gatherings, but as hard as I tried, I was always the first to arrive. On one particular evening, our group had 7:15 p.m. reservations at a Midtown Mexican restaurant called Zocalo. Restaurant is generous. It’s really an open deck shack without doors or windows that looks like it was transported directly from the sands of Acapulco onto the pavement of Piedmont Avenue. I arrived twenty minutes late, and even the hostess was surprised to see me.
“We don’t have your table ready just yet,” the hostess said, looking down at a sheet of paper.
“No worries,” I said, completely worried. “I’ll be at the bar.”
“Ok, I’ll come get you when it’s ready,” she said, fully knowing she wasn’t going to remember to get me.
This was not an ideal situation because it was a busy bar, and in order to keep my seat, I was going to have to order and re-order until my friends arrived. There’s nothing more unpleasant than being the first one of the group to get drunk, especially when there’s no group. I didn’t want to be out of sync with everyone else because I hit the pre-game too hard, so I decided my stop-gap measure to avoid this problem was to order beer. I figured I could have one or two and still maintain my composure.
I sipped slowly and lifted my gaze to people-watch. The demographics of the patrons skewed more than a decade younger than me. They were so beautiful, without laugh lines or wrinkled foreheads. Drinking salted-brimmed margaritas and baskets upon baskets of chips and salsa without worry of acid reflux. To be twenty-something again. I would be doing shots of marinara sauce and snorting lines of collagen in the bathroom.
“Hey Mari!” I heard a man’s voice say.
I searched the room, but no one was looking in my direction. If someone said ‘Mari’ in a crowded Miami bar, 17 women would activate like a Sims character, but hearing it in Atlanta was remarkable. Not to mention pronounced correctly. None of this Maury bullshit that I had to contend with in Los Angeles. It was a proper Mari with a rolled R. Through the cluster of people squeezed into this tiny space. I saw a man embracing the presumed Mari. She was petite with long, dark brown hair. Latina, from what I can see. My bartender and her black lipstick snapped me out of my rubbernecking.
“Another one?” she asked. I smiled nervously and looked at my phone riddled with texts that claimed things like ‘almost there’ and ‘in the Uber’ and ‘traffic is bad’.
“Yes, please,” I answered.
While she fished out my second beer, I once again turned my attention to my namesake to see a smartly dressed young woman with short, blondish hair trying to get Mari’s attention.
“Hi! I’m sorry to interrupt. I hope you don’t think this is weird. Is your name Mari?”
I gasped in ecstasy at the thought this was going to be one of those ‘that’s my man you’re with’ situations. I turned back to grin at the bartender as she placed the bottle on a coaster and went right back to eavesdropping.
“Yeah,” Mari answered cautiously.
I positioned myself to get a better view of this soon-to-be dinner and a show.
“This is crazy. My name is Mari, too,” the second Mari said excitedly.
I nearly spit out my beer.
“Wait. How do you spell it?” the first Mari asked the other.
“M-A-R-I” answered number two.
“Oh my God, me too!” They both squealed.
Was I being punked? I looked around for hidden cameras.
“I heard someone say my name,” number two continued, “And I looked up to see your friend, but I was like, I don’t know that guy!”
“This is my friend Brian,” number one said, now bringing in the guy that sparked this Abbott and Costello routine.
I sat fascinated. As members of their respective parties arrived, they repeated their meet-cute story; all the while,
I sat quietly, debating whether or not to say something.
“I’m over here waiting for you to get here, and I heard someone say my name, but it wasn’t you,” Mari said to a friend who had just arrived. And then the first Mari added, “It’s spelled the same and everything,” to the person listening.
After the third rendition, I was done being an observer. I mean, how could I not insert myself into this story? I drowned the voice telling me to stay out of it with a few more gulps and then took the plunge.
“You guys are not going to believe this,” I yelled across the bar. “My name is Mari too.”
From the commotion we caused, the diners in the main room must have thought someone dumped a bag full of hundred-dollar bills on the bar. We clustered together in one corner, and, like good Atlantans, we engaged in “big talk.”
One of the Maris shared that she was adopted, the other one invited us to do bumps in the bathroom, and I confessed that when someone calls me Maria, I fantasize about murdering them. You know, casual.
Somewhere between the first and second tequila shots, it dawned on me that, well, that I was very drunk, but most importantly that the reason Atlantans chat so much wasn’t that they’re extra talkative, but it’s that they’re bored from waiting for their friends to show. Maybe those smokers back at Victory were so happy to share their cigarettes and their opinions because they had mistakenly arrived too early.
“Where are your friends?” Mari number two asked me, with her arm around my neck.
“I think they are stuck in an elevator going after you, no after you.”
The Maris knew exactly what I meant, and I had never been more seen.
Mari de Armas was the first of her family not to hail from the island of Cuba. She is a content strategist for a glitzy client list of cruise lines and hotels and blogs at ALittleCubanGoesALongWay.com. She holds a Bachelor’s in English and resides near Washington, DC, with her wife.
THE CITY KEY 