Page 49 of The Love Haters

The not-a-big-talker version of Hutch showed up just when I needed him to be the opposite.

The camera—even after I’d messed around for twenty more minutes—did not disappear from his mind. He stayed aware of it constantly, the way you might stay aware of a hungry wolf just outside the light of your campfire.

To seem natural when there’s a camera lens trained on you takes a certain amount of pretending for anyone: pretending it’s not there, or that you don’t care, or that it doesn’t bother you. But Hutch, it turned out, was not great at pretending.

Bynot great, I meanabysmal.

Probably a good thing in real life. But on video?Disaster.

I tried everything I could think of to help him to relax. Jokes, flirting, making crazy noises, laughing too loud at everything he said. I was like a dog photographer with a squeaky toy, I swear.

But Hutch remained painfully monosyllabic.

I won’t suck out your soul with the details of the first hour-plus. It was basically me just asking questions like, “Can you introduce yourself?”

And Hutch robotically saying, “I’m Tom Hutcheson. I’m an aviation survival technician—an AST—for the United States Coast Guard, commonly referred to as a rescue swimmer. I have eight years of service.”

Tone of voice? Body language? Vibes?

All totally unusable.

We’d have to record intros again later.

“Tell me about being in the Coast Guard,” I said.

“There’s not much to tell.”

Okay, that was clearly false. “Something,” I prompted. “Anything.”

So Hutch answered, “There are twenty-six Coast Guard air stations in the United States—including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico—scattered about three hundred miles apart along the coast.”

Oh, god. We were doomed.

He was beautiful but useless.

Honestly. Where was the guy who had mocked me for using the wordchopper? Where was the guy who had just explained to mehow coolness worked?

I wanted to interviewthatguy.

“Tell us about that chopper behind you,” I teased, hoping to provoke him.

But Hutch just replied: “Some air stations run the MH-65 Dolphin and others run the MH-60 Jayhawk. We also deploy fixed-wing aircraft.”

“What’s the most interesting thing you do in your job?” I asked, hoping he might tell a story of a death-defying rescue, or wax rhapsodic about how fun it is to fly in helicopters, or even explain what I’d just learned from the internet: that all swimmers were experts at sewing and they repaired their own gear.

But Hutch just shrugged and said, “Saving lives.”

Most interviews last between two and five hours. Afteran hour and a half, and a snack break, he finally loosened up—a little. I hadn’t wanted to waste any of my good questions on him early, when he was still so stiff, because I knew none of it would be usable later. He could announce a UFO with that body language—or cure cancer, or declare he’d seen a mermaid—and it wouldn’t matter, because theway he was saying itwas dull as hell.

It wasn’t until I ran out of starter questions that things shifted.

Maybe he wasn’tnot-a-talker. Maybe he just wasn’t a small-talker.

Maybe he wasn’t a starter-questions kind of guy.

Or maybe the novelty wore off, or maybe he got used to the camera, or maybe I was just finally asking him something real… but after a hundred minutes, at last, I finally started catching glimpses of the real Hutch.

“I watched a movie about the Coast Guard—” I started.

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