My husband and I share a lot of laughs. We laugh about how the dogs talk to me—in his voice, of course—with an air of pretension. We laugh about our looks, pulling the skin of our cheeks back until the corners of our eyes meet the canals of our ears, in impromptu facelifts. And every so often, we laugh about the man in the trench coat.
The man in the trench coat isn’t a real man. He’s a fictitious character my husband invented years ago. I was struggling to write a personal essay, unable to figure out how to move forward. I decided to talk to my husband—himself no stranger to the creative process—to see if he had any suggestions. This is like asking a server at a restaurant to recommend the most expensive dish on the menu. He didn’t hesitate.
“Have a man in a trench coat jump out from the shadows!” This, he reasoned, would add some much-needed tension. Not to mention, it would take the story in a whole new direction.
He was kidding, of course. You can’t just throw a guy in a trench coat into a story willy-nilly to make things interesting. He has to arrive there organically, and have some reason for being there.
In the mid-1980s, there was a TV show called Amazing Stories. In one episode, called “The Mission,” the crew of a B-17 bomber realizes their landing gear has malfunctioned. Just as they think all is lost, an amazing thing happens: giant cartoon wheels suddenly sprout from the underside of the bomber. It lands safely.
It was a ridiculous solution and one for which director Stephen Spielberg was roundly criticized. There had been no suggestion of a cartoon element before the wheels appeared. The audience had no reason to think such a resolution might be possible. It was a magical solution to a real-ish world problem the writers of the script could not figure out how to solve within the confines of the script itself.
In real life, the man in the trench coat takes many forms. It might be the baby that is conceived to resolve problems in a marriage, the job change that is undertaken when a career overhaul is in order, the Amazon purchases that are made (or entire cake or case of alcohol that is consumed) when loneliness ought to be addressed.
We’ve all brought in a man in a trench coat to save the day at some point in our life. I once moved in with a guy so as not to have to break up with him. I once bought a pickup truck from my father’s therapist because I thought it held the keys to his psyche. The man in the trench coat can be a hiccup or a car wreck, but he’s always brought in as a solution and he always ends up a diversion.
But he isn’t useful across the board. For example, when we are trying to decide whether to order dinner from Stir or Totto, we can’t just say, “What would the man in the trench coat do?” This is because he’s a fictitious representation of an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem. He is not a tie-breaker, a fortune teller, or a life coach.
Similarly, just as you don’t bring a gun to a knife fight (or vice versa) you don’t bring a man in a trench coat to a job that needs a man in a pea coat, or a woman in a workout suit. Lesson being, if you’re going to invoke him, know his limitations and abilities. Be clear about what you are trying to avoid, and about the turmoil you are hoping to incur. Immediately after I bought the therapist’s truck, I looked in the glove compartment and found not the keys to my father’s psyche but an automotive maintenance schedule, which took me no closer to knowing him, and pushed the grieving process out by years. It was one of my finest moments of forestalling.
Most recently, the man in the trench coat brought me a load of grief about a job layoff that turned out to be a gift. With more time has come better focus, greater ambition, and a renewed sense of purpose, not just around my writing, but around my life in general. These are not small things, and I’m just glad the man in the trench coat packed up when he did and moved on. I’m sure he’ll be back—coat billowing, ready to make a mess of things—but for now, it’s just me and my regular diversions.