Three Hours for a Blouse, 

Five Minutes for a Hat

After two months of nonstop work, I finally had a few days off. Naturally, my wife dragged me downtown to Pacific Centre because there was a “huge sale” that apparently could not wait.

I was exhausted, but if I was going down, I was going down with swagger. “So what are we buying? Anything under a million bucks, it’s on me today!”

She gave me a surprised look. I almost never come along to the mall. Her car was in the shop and she’d asked me for a ride, so she’d probably figured I would drop her at the door and disappear.

My wife thinks I hate shopping. Not true. What I don’t understand is the time. If you need something, you buy it. If you don’t, you go home. A grown adult picking up thirty items, twisting in front of a mirror, and putting everything back where it came from is still one of life’s great mysteries to me, right up there with crop circles.

That day she needed fall clothes and I needed a hat. Simple, I figured. Of course, in a marriage, “simple” is usually the last word you say before the trouble starts.

She headed into Holt Renfrew. I wasn’t dragged in by the collar, but close. For the first twenty minutes, I was an excellent husband.

She pulled a blouse off the rack. “How’s this?”

“Oh, nice.”

Then another. “This one?”

“Looks good.”

Then a third. “Isn’t this color too bright?”

“Yep.”

“Your answers keep getting shorter, you know. You’re not even looking.”

I had actually been thinking about a work thing I had to deal with tomorrow. But the second I heard her, I snapped to attention and studied the blouse like it was a legal document. “No, no. It really brings out your face.”

She spun around and marched into the fitting room with three of them. A few minutes later she stepped out in the first one.

“Good?”

“Great!”

“Really?”

“Killer.”

She smiled a little and turned to the mirror. Front. Sideways. Over the shoulder. Front again. I couldn’t tell whether she was checking the blouse or reviewing her entire life.

“Doesn’t it look kind of baggy?”

I didn’t answer right away. There are questions a man must never answer on reflex.

“Hmm, not really...”

“Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right what? Is it baggy or not?”

And here we go.

“No, not baggy at all. Not even a little. Ma’am.”

She shot me a look and went back to the mirror. “You paused before you answered. Did you know that?”

Marriage, it turns out, is an institution where you’re held accountable even for a brief silence.

She disappeared into the fitting room again and came out in the second one. “Well?”

“Way better than the last one!”

Her face froze. “I liked the last one better.”

I swallowed. “Right, right. Actually, you’re right, the first one was better. That’s the one.”

“Are you kidding me? Are you even looking?”

I tried to compare the two in my head. The problem was, I couldn’t remember what the first one looked like.

“Look, they both have their pros and cons.”

It was the most cowardly phrase I ever learned from my old office days, and also the safest place a person can stand.

My relentless wife went back in and came out in a third. “And this one?”

“Wow, crazy good! Why didn’t you wear this one first?”

She glared at me again. “This is the first one.”

I slid my eyes away and checked my watch. Fifty-seven minutes in that one store.

Even married couples have levels of courtesy. The first twenty minutes is love. Forty is consideration. Past an hour, it’s spiritual training.

In the end she bought nothing from that store.

“Let’s look around a little more.”

“A little more?”

I followed her out with a hiccup coming on. She hadn’t lost hope, and she had stamina to spare. I started to wonder what she’d been eating behind my back. Every time she spotted clothes in a new store, her eyes lit up. Every time we changed stores, I aged by the minute.

Then the mall suddenly came into focus. Why were there so many sofas and chairs? I’d never noticed. And then it hit me: they were rescue stations for husbands. I sank into one and looked around. There were plenty of guys like me, all wearing the same face. One had five shopping bags at his feet and was sighing at nothing, all desire for life long gone. Across from him sat a man muttering to himself, half out of his mind. Two seats down, an older gentleman was staring at his phone. The screen was off.

Around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, I carefully ventured, “At this point, couldn’t we just buy something? Anything?”

“You think I’m playing here? I’m trying to find the right one.”

“I mean, if something looks kind of right...”

“I’m looking for the one that looks kind of right!”

By the three-hour mark, we were in the last store, Club Monaco. She held up a piece. “How’s this?”

By then every piece of clothing in the world looked identical to me. “Good.”

“Good? Nothing you call ‘good’ has ever been good.”

“What do you want from me?”

She hung it back up and glanced over her shoulder, wistful. “Did you really look at it?”

“I looked.”

“What color was it?”

“Beige.”

“It was gray.”

“Grayish beige.”

“There’s no such color.”

Then she stopped dead and snapped at me. Honestly, I got it. She was worn out too. “If you don’t want to buy me clothes, just say so. Why do you keep sighing?”

“When did I sigh?”

“You’ve been doing it all afternoon.”

“It’s called breathing.”

“Why do you have to breathe so rudely?”

After that, we didn’t look at each other or say a word. Cold war. And then, walking past a men’s accessories shop, I spotted a baseball cap that looked good. I went in, picked it up, tried it on. I liked what I saw in the mirror. I went straight to the register.

“I’ll take this.”

My wife, who had followed me in, was stunned. “That’s it? You’re not going to look at anything else?”

“What else is there to look at?”

“There are other colors. Other styles.”

“If you like it, you buy it,” I said flatly. “What’s so hard about shopping?”

I expected a comeback. Instead she went quiet, a little deflated. And I thought: oh no.

When a supersonic bullet hits you, you hear the shot only after you’ve gone down. The bullet outruns its own sound. Words work the same way. We say something without thinking, and only later do we hear it, and regret it. I hadn’t meant it as a dig. But that’s exactly what it was. I couldn’t stop thinking about her awkward face and her silence. Would I get through dinner tonight? I should have just played it cool and joked around, like always.

She had spent three hours and bought nothing. I had spent five minutes and bought a hat. Walking to the parking lot, we were stiff and silent again. Truthfully, I wasn’t in a great mood either. I was the one who’d been dragged around for three hours until my jaw hurt, and somehow I felt like the guilty one. Apologizing felt unfair, but just going home like this felt like the whole day was ruined. I think most men know that feeling. I pulled my new cap down low as I walked.

We could see our car up ahead when she said, “Wait.”

I braced myself. Round one. Then, of course, the hiccups came back.

But she stepped behind me and touched my cap, gently. She peeled off the price tag that was still stuck to it. “Were you really going to walk around with this on?” Then she came around to the front and adjusted the brim. “But you know what? This one, you picked well.”

“...?”

“You must be hungry.”

Her soft voice was nothing like what I’d expected, and something in my chest swelled.

“Yeah, I’m starving.” (And just like that, I switched to baby mode.)

“Of course you are. I dragged you around for three hours. There’s a nice Italian place on East 6th. Poor thing, you earned it. Let’s get something good tonight.”

“Can we get it to go? I’m so wiped, I just want to eat at home.”

“Aww, you poor baby. I could give your bottom a little pat.”

Like always, we were laughing and joking again as if nothing had happened. The clothes my wife spent three hours picking never made it home. The hat I picked in five minutes did.

But on the drive she straightened that hat twice more. Once at a red light, and once more when she got back into the car holding our dinner.

To this day I don’t understand how she can spend three hours choosing a single blouse. And I’m pretty sure she’ll never understand how I buy a hat in five minutes.

Looking back, we’ve gone through most of our marriage like this, not quite understanding each other. Sometimes we walk at different speeds. Sometimes we stop at the strangest places, in opposite directions. Sometimes one of us got angry, convinced the other wasn’t being considerate. And still, in the end, we come home laughing. Maybe that’s just what marriage is. One of us picks the hat, and the other, whether either of us notices or not, fixes it every time it goes crooked.

The older I get, the more I think a married couple is like two trees. Above ground, they look like two separate trees. But deep underground, where nobody can see, the roots are tangled up tight, holding each other up.

So what if we still bicker over small stuff? After everything we’ve walked through together, all those years of lowering ourselves to lift the other up and being each other’s support, what is there to regret?

I’m parked at the curb now, looking in the rearview mirror. She’s coming down the street with the food bag held to her chest, smiling. Behind her, the evening sky is going gold over downtown, and even the name on the sign, Giusti, sounds sweet.

© 2026. Gun Choi. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, design imitation, or concept reproduction is strictly prohibited.

 The Old Table

Not long after we got married, we bought a table. Or really, we picked the thing that looked most like a table among the things we could afford. The place had a lot of empty space in it, and our bank account had more. At the furniture store, my wife ran her palm across the surface and asked, "Not bad, right?"

I checked the price tag first. $199.

"Looks great to me."

Back then, our taste and our budget were pretty much the same thing.

It was dark brown, with a wood-grain pattern. I wanted to believe it was real wood, but a few years later a corner chipped and underneath was pressed sawdust. Still, it was heavy, it seated four, and it fit our kitchen exactly. At the time, that was plenty.

For the first few years, that table did more than hold meals. We spread out tax forms on it and punched numbers into a calculator. I took apart a broken toaster on it and ended up breaking it worse. My wife sewed on buttons there, and I sorted bills by date. Before summer vacations we'd unfold a map and circle places much too far away for us to go. And there were all those Sunday mornings when we got up late and did nothing but drink coffee. Looking back, those were the real luxury.

The marks piled up. There's a faint ring from a hot pot set down without a trivet, a stain from a tipped wine glass, and a deep scratch that we still blame on each other.

"You did that."

"Why would I scratch the table?"

"You break things very creatively."

The longer you're married, the more important it gets to keep a suspect around than to find out the truth. The scratch is still there, and the culprit is still at large.

Meanwhile, everything else in the house got replaced. The couch, the bed, the TV. The fridge, twice. Only the table stayed. We talked about replacing it a few times. We looked at pictures online. We went back to the store and ran our hands over the smooth tops. Once I had my card halfway out of my wallet. But every time, we went home and the idea just fizzled. The new ones were nicer, sure. They just didn't feel like ours. Ask me why and I couldn't tell you.

Last winter, I think it was, on a night when the snow was coming down hard, my wife set a pot of soup in the middle of the table. It was just the two of us, and the other two seats were empty. When we were young, I used to complain that four seats was too small. At some point it had become far too big for two people. I picked up my spoon and my eyes landed on the tabletop. All those marks that would've upset me on a new table looked, that night, strangely welcome.

"Somebody's gotten old," my wife said, blowing on her soup.

"Handsomely, I'd say."

"I meant the table."

"So did I."

We both laughed. It wasn't even funny, and we laughed for a long time.

People ask now and then why we hang on to something so beat up. Honestly, we're not sentimental about things. We throw out what we don't use. But there are some days this table won't let go of. The first time we had guests, our friends Jenny and David came up from San Diego. My wife had made shepherd's pie, Caesar salad, and cream pasta, and there was no way it was all going to fit on the table in proper dishes. She just set the pots down in the middle and said, "Tonight, this is the buffet," grinning like she'd planned it all along. The day I lost my job, neither of us ate much. We just sat there, and she reached over and took my hand without a word. Days like that are stacked up in that table. That's why I can't throw it out.

A few weeks ago my wife asked again. "Should we finally replace it?"

One leg wobbles now, and the top doesn't shine anymore, even when I wipe it down. We can afford a new table. We're not the couple checking the price tag first anymore. But what came out of my mouth was, "Let's keep it a little longer."

"Since when are you sentimental?"

"I'm not. I just don't want to assemble a new one."

That was true, too. Just not all of it.

That night we sat across from each other and ate, like always. Under the table, my foot bumped hers. When we were young, that would've been footsie. Now neither of us moved. Two plates of pasta, two glasses of water, and the table holding them up, not moving either. None of the three of us said a word.

Someday the table will leave our house, too. It's furniture, after all. But until then, I don't mind getting old a little longer next to it. It got old before we did, and it's still holding up pretty well.

© 2026. Gun Choi. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, design imitation, or concept reproduction is strictly prohibited.

Tigers vs. Lions: 

The Locker Room Fight I Still Lost

 It all started over something stupid I said in chemistry class, to my buddy who sat in front of me — we'll call him A. We were pretty tight, actually. "Tiger or lion, who wins?" And this idiot wouldn't back down, kept insisting lions were tougher. (Found out later his old school back in Iowa had the Lions as their mascot. Ours were the Tigers. Looking back, that should've been my first clue this was basically a declaration of war.)

"Okay then, cheetah or ostrich — who's faster?" An ostrich? Are you kidding me? What started as harmless lunch-table nonsense somehow turned into a full-blown ideological battle. And that's when I knew. This wasn't something we were going to settle with words.

"Alright, tough guy. Locker room. After gym."

Look, somebody had to teach this kid that tigers were superior, and honestly, I figured I was doing it for the greater good — for his future kids, so this bad information didn't get passed down another generation. It was a burden, sure, but a true friend steps up. (That's real loyalty, that is.)

Gym happened to be next period. Coach Davis usually strolled in about ten minutes late with a gas-station coffee in hand, so five minutes was plenty of time to set this kid straight.

And who was I kidding — I'd been boxing at the Y since middle school and doing taekwondo at that strip-mall dojo wedged between the nail salon and the pizza place. I was built for this. The only wrinkle was B, who'd appointed himself referee without anybody asking him to. (We'll get to him. He turned out to be the real time bomb in this story.)

We squared off outside the shower stalls, and I was grinning like an idiot, way too pleased with myself, when A caught me completely off guard. Landed a one-two combo right on my jaw. Didn't even hurt. I remember thinking, this guy has a death wish, and I was about half a second from returning the favor with interest when things went sideways.

See, I'm a striker. Stand-up fighting is my whole game. What I'd conveniently forgotten was that A had transferred in from Iowa, where — as it turned out — he'd wrestled varsity. The second I cocked back my arm, he shot in low, wrapped around me like an octopus, and had me on the ground before I even registered what was happening.

Doesn't matter how good your right hand is if you're not standing up to throw it. And that wet tile floor might as well have been quicksand.

Then, to make things worse, I cracked my nose on the back of his skull and started bleeding. Everybody knows the rules — first blood, you lose. It's basically playground law, unwritten but ironclad, going back to kindergarten. And mine wasn't just a nosebleed, it was coming out of both sides. No arguing my way out of that one.

"Alright, alright — I'm done." The only loss of my entire fighting career. I was furious about it. But when I got back to class after showering off, something felt off. Turned out, while I'd been at the sink dealing with my nose, B — the guy who'd volunteered to referee a fight nobody asked him to referee — had gotten into his own fight with some other kid.

Completely unrelated to me. And he rearranged this poor kid's face so badly nobody could recognize him. I had no idea B had that in him. When I asked him about it later, he just shrugged: "I didn't even hit him, man. I was just swinging and his face kept getting in the way."

After that day, B became the undisputed toughest kid in our grade overnight, and I dropped to number three. Pretty soon the cafeteria chatter started — turns out I'd always been overrated, apparently. Funny how last week I was supposedly the best fighter in school. Fair-weather friends, every last one of them. ^^

Anyway, back to that day — the school had absolutely no idea what actually happened, and since I was usually the one people assumed was behind anything like this, I got the blame. Over the intercom: "Would [my name] please report to the front office immediately." The entire hallway went "ooooh" as I walked past.

I opened the office door and Mr. Hollis, my homeroom teacher, was already standing there, clearly upset. He taught English and had actually published a small poetry collection with some tiny press — the kind of guy who wore a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows, thin, maybe half my size, deeply sentimental about everything.

But he didn't yell. Didn't slam anything. Just looked me dead in the eye and said, quietly, "I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed." And then he said it again. And again. Probably thirty times, each time with a slightly different emphasis, like he was workshopping a line of poetry. It felt less like getting yelled at and more like being swatted, over and over, with the world's gentlest flyswatter — disappointment, thirty times in a row. I've had football coaches scream in my face, and years later I'd have BUD/S instructors calling me every name in the book, but nothing ever got under my skin quite like that.

Every eye in that office was on me. Even the secretary stopped typing. Some of the people watching were teachers who actually liked me — my guidance counselor, who'd already agreed to write my college recommendation, and my history teacher, who always had my back. Watching their faces shift from surprise to disappointment was somehow worse than anything Mr. Hollis said. That quiet disappointment left a small crack in my seventeen-year-old ego — the kind you get on a brand-new windshield from a rock on the highway. Small, but it never quite goes away.

"This is on you today. Whether you like it or not, you're someone the other kids look up to in this grade. That means you set the tone. You're missing some basic empathy for your classmates. I know you're better than this. That's exactly why I'm so disappointed."

I couldn't believe it. A fight that had absolutely nothing to do with me, and somehow I was the one taking the fall? I wanted to argue my case so badly. But this was peak zero-tolerance era — didn't matter who started it, everybody involved got punished the same. Saying "it wasn't me" in that office was basically a confession. I got a week of detention. Sat in the back corner of the library writing a three-page essay titled "What I Learned From This." Real Breakfast Club energy. And the actual fight I'd actually been in — the locker room one — nobody ever found out about. I got punished for the wrong crime entirely.

That loss stuck with me, though. Bad enough that I ended up taking judo classes at the rec center afterward. And that same stubbornness followed me all the way to a Navy recruiting office after graduation. Nobody pushed me into it — I walked in and signed the papers myself. Most guys who show up ring that bell and quit within the first week. I made it through Hell Week — running the beach with a boat on my head, spending all night freezing in the surf — and I've got that dumb high school locker room fight to thank for it, weirdly enough.

I actually ran into A again years later, right before I moved out west, at a going-away thing some friends threw for me. Guy ended up owning two gas stations off the highway. And of course, the second he had a beer in him, he started retelling the story of how he "took me down" in that locker room like it happened yesterday. I genuinely considered round two. Then I remembered I'm a grown man now and let it go.

For the record — I've since added Brazilian jiu-jitsu to the striking I already had, so if it ever did go to the ground again, I'd be a lot more comfortable down there these days. But honestly, whatever fire we had back then, there's no real animosity left for an old friend, just two guys who used to throw hands over nonsense.

When it was just the two of us, I told him: "Alright, enough. You win, you got me in that locker room, congratulations. How long are you gonna milk that one story? We're grown now — time to stop fighting each other and start fighting the world instead. One-on-one. You and me against everything else."

---

Danny, man. It's been way too long — hope life's treating you right. I hear bits and pieces from the guys every now and then. Hope you and your wife are still doing great. I still think about you driving all night to help me load the U-Haul before I moved out west — that's not something I forget.

Looking back, it went by so fast it's almost unreal. Two idiots who used to throw punches at each other are somehow middle-aged now, somewhere in the third quarter of life. Feels like yesterday we were behind the school sucking honeysuckle and catching crawdads in that creek.

And obviously I remember your finest hour — that brawl in the parking lot after the game against Jefferson. Every pizza place around the school pulled their shutters down, two cop cars showed up, and there you were, front and center, an absolute legend. Not gonna lie, kind of a dumb legend ^^ — but a legend nonetheless.

And honestly, a wrestling transfer kid who was just as good in the classroom as he was on the mat? That's about as likely as Uganda fielding a national ski team. (And yeah, I remember — AP Calc, you got an A.) That's exactly why I respect you as much as I do.

How life shakes out is mostly luck of the draw. But I like to think both of us gave it everything, wherever we ended up. And we both built good families. That's really all that matters in the end.

Stay healthy, man. Turns out that's basically the whole game. Whatever the kids are calling it these days — "grit," I guess — as long as we don't lose that, I think we're beating this thing called life just fine. Your way, my way. The way we always have.

Wishing you nothing but good stuff, brother. Go Tigers! (P.S. Tigers beat lions. Not up for debate.)

© 2026. Gun Choi. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, design imitation, or concept reproduction is strictly prohibited.

The Work Nobody Applauds For

There's a scene in Cinema Paradiso that used to seem like nostalgia to me. An old projectionist named Alfredo splices film by hand in a booth that smells like hot metal, watching the reels the way you'd watch a sleeping child — carefully, like something could go wrong the second you looked away.

I rewatched it last night for the first time in years, and it didn't feel like nostalgia anymore. It felt like a description of my week.

I'm not in a projection booth. I'm in an apartment with three laptops open, a fan that's been running too hot since June, and forty browser tabs that all say something like "LOCATIONS_v4_FINAL_actually_final.xlsx". I'm in pre-production on a film. Nobody outside the industry knows what that word actually means, and to be honest, most people inside it don't talk about it very precisely either. So let me try.

Pre-production is the part of filmmaking that happens before anything you'd recognize as filmmaking. No cameras. No actors in costume. No craft services table. Just a script getting torn apart, sentence by sentence, and reassembled as a schedule, a budget, a floor plan, a shot list, a hundred group chats. It's the part people skip past when they tell the story of how a movie got made — "and then they shot it, and then they edited it" — as if the movie arrived on set already knowing what it wanted to be.

It didn't. Somebody decided. That's the whole job, actually: deciding, over and over, before there's any proof the decision was right.

Scouting a location isn't about finding somewhere pretty. It's standing in an empty room, at 9am on a random Tuesday, trying to picture where the light will fall on an actor who hasn't been cast yet, in a scene that's currently four sentences on a page. Casting isn't about finding someone who can deliver a line. Anyone can deliver a line. You're looking for the one person who can carry a silence — who can stand there saying nothing and make the audience lean forward anyway. A storyboard isn't really a drawing. It's a director trying to edit a scene that doesn't exist yet, using nothing but a pencil and a guess.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is the reason the glamorous part later goes well, or doesn't.

Here's what strikes me most, watching Alfredo now: the danger changed shape, but it didn't go away. His film stock could catch fire. Mine can't — but a hard drive can die, a cloud sync can silently fail for three days before anyone notices, someone can hit "replace" instead of "save as" and take four months of notes down with it. We think of the digital shift as the moment things got safer. In some ways it did. In the ways that matter at 2am, it just changed what you're afraid of.

And there's a specific kind of vertigo that comes with this job, one I don't think gets talked about enough: you are asked to spend real things — money, months, other people's trust, your own sleep — on something that, right now, exists only in your head. A single line in a screenplay, maybe three seconds of screen time, can require a permit, a costume department, forty background actors, and a favor from someone's cousin who knows a guy with a boat. On the page, it's a sentence. In the world, it's a Tuesday that costs eleven thousand dollars.

You get used to this, eventually, the way you get used to anything that used to terrify you. You stop asking is this insane and start asking what do we need by Friday.

But I don't think you're supposed to fully get used to it. I think the discomfort is the point. Cathedrals existed as drawings before anyone stacked a single stone. Every ship that's ever crossed an ocean existed first as a sketch nobody had tested. Someone had to be willing to be wrong, publicly, for a long time, before there was any evidence they were right. That's not a metaphor I'm reaching for to make spreadsheets sound noble. It's just what the job is. You commit before you have proof. You keep committing. Proof, if it comes, comes later — usually much later, usually smaller than you hoped, and usually not in the form you expected.

What nobody tells you is what happens to how you see things, once you've done this long enough. You walk into a room and notice the window before you notice the furniture, because you're already wondering where the light would come from. You meet someone at a party and, without meaning to, start wondering what they're not saying. You see two people sitting together in total silence at a café and some part of your brain starts writing the line of dialogue that's missing. It doesn't turn off. I'm not sure I'd want it to.

And then, eventually, if enough people keep believing in something long enough, it stops being invisible. It becomes an actual movie that actual strangers sit in a dark room to watch. For two hours, it's theirs. They'll laugh, or they won't. They'll forget it by the parking lot, or they'll think about it for years. Either way, when the credits roll and they gather their coats, what they experienced was two hours.

What we experienced was two years. The location we lost the week before shooting. The actor we wanted and couldn't get. The line that tested well on the page and died completely in the room, so we cut it at 1am the night before the read-through. Nobody in the audience will ever know that scene existed. We'll remember it for the rest of our lives.

That's the strange arithmetic of finishing anything worth finishing. It becomes two different things at once — a two-hour object the world can hold, and an entire world only the people who built it will ever carry.

I don't think that's sad, exactly. I think it might be the whole reason to do it.

Right now, tonight, none of that has happened yet. There's no premiere, no audience, no proof this is going to work. There's just a script, a budget I've rewritten four times, and a crew I'm trying to keep believing in something none of us has seen. This is the unglamorous middle Alfredo lived in too — not the fire, not the applause, just the long stretch of showing up for something before anyone else has a reason to.

I used to think preparation was what happened before the real thing. I don't think that anymore. I think it might be the realest part there is.

The tools will keep changing. Faster machines, bigger files, cameras that see more than the human eye can. None of that touches the actual job, which hasn't moved in a hundred years: show up before it's proven. Care about it before anyone's decided it deserves your care. Do the work in the dark, and trust that eventually, somebody turns the lights on.

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© 2026. Gun Choi. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, design imitation, or concept reproduction is strictly prohibited.

내가 분명, 어쩌면, 한 번도 만나지 않았던 남자

- 농담으로 시작한 캐스팅 제안서가 엉뚱한 곳으로 흘러간 이야기 -

먼저 밝혀둘 게 있다.

헐리웃 스타 배우 ‘코너 도일’과 나는 한 번도 만난 적이 없다. 정말 단 한 번도.. 서로 겹치는 친구도 없고, 파티에서 우연히 마주친 적도 없으며, 술집 화장실에서 “어디서 본 것 같은데?” 같은 말을 주고받은 적조차 없다.

 

정확히 말한다면, 우리는 일면식도 없는 완벽히 모르는 사이다. 그런데 말이다. 조금만 들어보시라.

 

나는 코너가 다니던 고등학교에서 두 동네쯤 떨어진 곳에서 자랐다. 그와 나의 고등학교 시기는 정확히 겹친다. 체육관 뒤에서 몰래 담배를 피우고, 가끔 다른 학교 아이들과 쓸데없는 자존심 싸움을 벌이던 시절의 보스턴이었다.

 

그의 옛 인터뷰들을 보면 코너는 우리집에서 내가 걸어 갈 수 있는 동네에 살고 있었다. 거기다 나이도 같다면 이런 기막힌 우연이 어디있겠나. 뭔가 운명적이지 않나? 광활한 우주에서, 그것도 하필 지구에서, 이 넓은 미국에서, 더욱이 보스턴에서 말이다.

 

이런 인연은 흔치않다. 그렇다고 우리가 만났다고 주장하는 건 아니다. 다만 확률이 좀 수상하다.

 

사람이 고등학교를 졸업하고 갑자기 담배를 배우지는 않는다. 그런 못된 습관은 대개 훨씬 일찍 배운다. 그리고 그런 습관에는 장소가 있다. 조명은 어둡고, 판단력은 그보다 더 어두운 곳.

 

마침 내 친구 하나가 코너 학교에 다녀서 나는 그쪽에 자주 들락거렸다. 그리고 아주 솔직하게 고백하자면 우리는 가끔 그 학교 아이들에게 담배를 ‘빌렸다’.

 

물론 여기서 ‘빌렸다’는 말에는 문제가 있다. 보통 빌린다는 말에는 언젠가 돌려주겠다는 뜻이 포함되어 있는데, 우리에게는 그런 계획이 아예 없었기 때문이다.

 

그렇기에 싸움도 자주 났었다. 물론 학생신분으로 바람직한 일은 아니었다. 하지만 그래서 나는 어딘가에서 코너와 한두 번쯤 스쳐 지나갔을 개연성이 매우 높다고 본다.

 

서로 통성명을 못 했을 뿐이지, 어쩌면 그 시절 우리 둘 중 하나가 누군가에게, 또는 서로에게 얻어 맞을까봐 쫓기며 도망가고 있었을 수도 있었을 테니까.

 

아무튼 그 시절 보스턴 어딘가에는 두 아이가 있었다. 엇비슷한 동네. 같은 환경. 서로 누군지도 모른 채 어쩌면 몇 번이나 서로 스쳐 지나갔을 두 남자 아이.

 

그리고 수십 년 뒤, 희안하게도 둘 다 영화판에 들어왔다. 코너는 당당히 카메라 앞에 섰고, 나는 그와 다른 시간대를 지나 같은 업종에서 돈 많은 사람들을 붙잡고 카메라 뒤에 돈 좀 넣어달라고 설득하고 있었다.

 

이게 대체 무슨 확률이며 운명의 장난일까? 오직 신만 알뿐이다. 내가 코너를 좋아하게 된 건 이런 인연을 생각하기 훨씬 전의 일이다.

 

그가 아직 젊은 배우였던 시절, 모두가 어려워하던 감독에게 자기 의견을 굽히지 않는 모습을 본 적이 있었다. 사람들은 그런 배우를 가끔 ‘까다롭다’고 부른다. 나는 그렇게 보지 않았다.

 

자기 생각을 견고히 가지고 촬여 현장에 왔고, 상대가 더 힘센 사람이라는 이유만으로 그 생각의 모서리를 둥글게 깎아버리지 않는 투철한 철학이 있는 사람처럼 보였다.

 

나는 그때 그 점이 마음에 들었다. 지금은 더 마음에 든다. 물론 이런 생각도 해봤다.

고등학교 시절에 어떻게든 코너를 찾아내 친구가 되었으면 얼마나 좋았을까. 그러면 몇십 년 뒤 내가 보내게 될 이 황당한 편지도 훨씬 자연스러웠을 것이다.

 

“코너, 야 임마 오랜만이다. 대본 하나 보낼게 OK?.” 이 얼마나 간단한가.

 

하지만 현실은 그렇지 않았다. 우리는 친구가 아니었다. 아는 사이도 아니었다. 그래서 결국 나는 내가 할 수 있는 가장 정직한 방식으로 접근하는 것 뿐이었다.

 

남들 눈에는 내가 어리석게 보일지 몰라도 난 전혀 부끄럽지 않다. 왜 그 좋은 엄청난 운명적 인연의 관계를 마다하고 굳이?

 

그런데 한 가지는 분명히 해두고 싶다. 세상에 좋은 배우가 코너 하나뿐인 건 아니다.

파치노도 있다. 드니로도 있다. 덴젤도 있다. 잘 부탁하면 디카프리오도 와줄 것 같은 기분이 든다. 그런데 아쉽게도 나는 그들을 만나본적이 없다. 그래서 그냥 기분이 그렇다는 이야기다.

 

다시말해 나에게도 다른 선택지가 있다는 거다. 그래도 첫 번째는 코너였다. 나와 엄청난 인연이 있는 그에게 최우선 기회를 주고 싶었다. 사람은 의리와 배려가 있어야 한다

 

자, 이제 정말 영화 이야기로 넘어가자.

 

나는 몇 년 동안 특수부대 스릴러 한 편을 붙잡고 있었다. 가능하면 실제 장소에서 찍고 싶었다. 그 대본은 내가 몇 번이나 이사를 다니는 동안에도 살아남았고, 하드디스크 두 개가 죽는 동안에도 살아남았고, 셀 수 없이 많은 수정과 퇴짜를 견뎌냈다.

 

심지어 어느 미팅에서는 내 대본을 보고 상대방이 20분 동안 엄청난 열정으로 자기 의견을 늘어놓았는데, 나중에 알고 보니 그는 내 대본이 아닌 다른 작가가 쓴 대본 얘기를 하고 있었다.

 

내 대본은 정말 수없이 많이 거절당했다. 몇 번인지는 세지 않았다. 그래도 중요한건 아직 여전히 살아 있다는 거다. 이게 좋은 징조인지, 아니면 내가 지독하게 고집이 센 인간이라는 증거인지는 잘 모르겠다. 아마 둘 다일지 모른다.

 

나는 코너가 내 대본 첫 페이지도 읽기 전 부터 출연료나 계약 조건 따위을 들이미는 방식으로 그에게 접근하고 싶지 않았다. 그건 서로간의 ‘운명적 인연’에 대한 예의가 아니다. 내가 그를 원하는 이유가 있다면, 그 이유는 내가 설명할 게 아니라 대본이 설명해야 한다고 생각했다.

 

부탁은 단순하다. 한번 읽어봐 달라. 장르가 액션이라서 육체적으로 힘들어 보인다고 미리 걱정하지 않았으면 했다. 얼마나 뛰어야 하는지, 얼마나 넘어져야 하는지, 얼마나 진흙탕을 굴러야 하는지, 얼마나 소리 지르고 고생해야 하는지 그런 것부터 계산하지 않았으면 했다.

 

그냥 캐릭터만 봐 주면 충분하다. 그리고 다 읽고 나서 천천히 판단해달라고.

 

내 작품은 겉으로 보면 꽤 요란한 영화다. 특수부대가 나오고, 인질 사건이 벌어지고, 총격전이 있고, 예고편에 넣으면 그럴듯할 장면도 많다.

 

하지만 나는 그 요란함 밑에 다른 영화 한 편이 숨어 있다고 생각한다. 그리고 다른 배우가 아닌 코너라면 그걸 찾아낼 수 있다는 믿음이 있다. 조금 과한 욕심도 있다.

나중에 기자들이 그에게 이렇게 묻길 바란다. “그 작품은 대체 왜 하신 겁니까?”

 

코너.

생각해보면 우리는 열일곱 살 무렵부터 계속 ‘거의’ 만났는지도 모른다. 물론 이건 어디까지나 내 생각이다. 같은 보스턴의 한 귀퉁이에서 자란 두 남자.

 

같은 시대, 시간을 지나왔고, 비슷한 거리를 걸었으며, 어쩌면 어느날 같은 편의점 계산대 앞에 줄을 섰을 수도 있지않았겠나. 학교 근처에서 어깨를 스쳤을 수도 있다.

아니면 정말 단 한 번도 우린 가까이 있지 않았을 수도 있다.

 

그건 이제 와서 알 방법이 없다. 하지만 한 가지는 안다. 각기 자란 동네에서 출발한 누군가가 노력으로 멋있게 멀리 서 있는 모습을 바라보는 기분.

 

그리고 또 하나도 안다. 25년이 지난 뒤에도 여전히 자기 차례를 기다리며, 대본 한 편씩 붙잡고 역시 멀리 서 있는 나의 기분.

 

이상하게도 나는 자네 코너를 보면 질투보다는 안도감을 느낀다. 정확히 말한다면 일종의 증거 같다. 우리 철없던 고교시절 출발했던 한 사람이, 그 당시 우리 주변의 누구도 상상하지 못했던 곳까지 갈 수 있다는 증거.

 

나는 부디 자네 코너가 내 대본을 꼭 읽기를 바란다. 그런데 편지를 쓰다 보니 내가 원하는 건 그것만이 아니라는 생각도 든다.

 

언젠가 자네와 서로 마주 앉아 위스키를 두 잔 따르고 싶다. 아직 만들지 않은 영화 이야기를 나누며 말이다. 그러다 자연스럽게 옛날 보스턴 이야기를 하는 꿈을 꾼다.

 

“너 혹시 그때 그 학교 앞 편의점 알지?”

“알지.”

“거기 자주 갔어?”

“갔지.”

 

그러다 정말 우리가 같은 장소에 있었던, 그 어느날 하루를 발견할 수 있기를 바란다.

 

어쩌면 네가 내 담배를 빼앗았을 수도 있고, 어쩌면 내가 네 담배를 빼앗았을 수도 있다.

아니면 우리 둘은 서로 근처에서 담배를 피워본 적조차 없고, 내가 지금까지 늘어놓은 이야기가 처음부터 끝까지 완벽한 헛소리일 수도 있다.

 

그것도 괜찮다. 네가 내 작품을 거절해도 나는 아무렇지도 않을 것 같아. 거절쯤이야 나는 이미 꽤 익숙했으니까.

 

하지만 코너. 네가 혹시 지금 이 순간 만약 내 대본을 읽고 있다면, 이제는 그걸 한번 바꿔보고 싶다. 우리가 단 한번도 마주치지 않았을 경우 말이야.

 

어려운 일이 아닐거야. 우리가 전혀 만난적 없더라도 지금이라도 바로 잡을 수 있는지 확인하는 데 채 30분도 걸리지 않을테니까. 우리의 만남이 정작 없었더라도 바꿔보고 싶다. 

좋은 판단 바란다.

 

 

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