Basic Training

Pistone wrote down a story told by a driver called Sonny. During a heist Sonny was sitting in the car across from the house, engine running, waiting for his guys. There was a church next door. A priest came up to the car, in the mood for a chat. About the weather, about the birds, about the blue sky. As Sonny tells it, he could hardly whack the man, and he couldn’t drive off either. The priest only gave up when the boys were already coming out of the house.

The priest was probably a good man. He just didn’t see that the other fellow had no time. That’s the commonest mistake a beginner makes in conversation, and the one he’s least likely to notice in himself. If a client keeps looking at his watch while you tell him about fishing, you’re not building a relationship. You’re keeping him in a car with the engine running.

The ABCs

Pistone himself grew up in a big city and as a teenager saw the Mafia up close. The rules that came in handy later he lists like an alphabet: keep quiet when you need to, keep out of what isn’t your business, step away when the conversation doesn’t concern you.

Three phrases, and all of them about how not to get in the way. The reward is named too: then they’ll say you’re one of us. Not a word about what to say. Before you learn to talk, you learn not to stand in the road.

A Week Behind the Counter

The Don taught me the same way. When I came to him, he put me on the front counter of the first laundry for a week. There was one condition. With the clients, only “good afternoon,” “thank you” and the price. Everything else, listen.

I was angry for the first two days. On the third I began to hear. The lawyer’s wife was handing in shirts and mentioned in passing that her husband now had lunch at the hotel on the square. A cook was collecting aprons and cursing the new owner. An old woman from the street up the hill brought in one tablecloth a month and every time told us who in the neighbourhood was ill. By Friday I knew more about the district than in the whole year before. And I understood why every morning the Don said hello to the counter girl before he said hello to the manager.

On Saturday the Don asked me what I’d understood. I poured it all out. He nodded. “Now you know how much people talk when you keep quiet.”

Small Talk Is Work

But when there is time, you have to chat. Pistone didn’t find this easy. The guys spent whole days talking rubbish: who got his hair cut where, what shoes cost, why a Cadillac beats a Lincoln. And in the middle of it, as casually as the price of shoes, out would come a contract killing or a bought policeman.

You couldn’t ask them to repeat it. He couldn’t very well, Pistone says, butt in and ask which police chief it was again that could be bought off. He picked up their manner. He hopped from subject to subject like everyone else. And at the most interesting moment he lazily drifted off. The subject would come back by itself. If it didn’t, he’d steer round to it later, in passing.

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar compared chatter to the way monkeys groom each other’s fur. The point isn’t the fleas, it’s that we belong together. Later his group eavesdropped on conversations in cafés and counted: about two-thirds of the time people talk about themselves and people they know. Politics, work and art get what’s left. Chatter is the medium the important things travel in. The man who stands there stony-faced waiting for “business” will hear nothing.

What About

At a first meeting the Don talked about the place. In a restaurant, praise the bread and ask who bakes it. In a hotel, notice the new carpets. People are happy to talk about what’s theirs. You listen and remember.

He had only one prohibition, and I learned it through my own disgrace. When I was young I ran into a hotel manager and congratulated him on his promotion. It hadn’t been announced to him yet. He went pale and spent half an hour trying to find out who’d told me. The Don explained afterwards: “Don’t tell a man what you know about him from anyone but him. He won’t remember the news. He’ll remember that he’s being watched.”

The Spark

The Don’s spark was oil. When he told how the old mill owner tested the olives with his teeth, the cooks fell silent. He didn’t lecture. He showed: the smell, the sound, the hands. Five minutes later a cook wanted to taste an oil he hadn’t heard of the day before. The Don couldn’t talk about the laundries like that. Starch didn’t light him up. So I was the one who haggled with the hotels over the price of washing, and the Don came along to shake hands.

He never tried to fake the spark. Put-on enthusiasm you hear at once, like a wrong note.

And don’t waste your evenings on “brain trainers.” Scientists tested them on thousands of people: puzzles make you better at puzzles. You get better at conversation by having conversations.

The Bottom Line

A beginner doesn’t need much. Keep quiet until you understand where you are. Chat as an equal when people have time, and shut up when they don’t. Talk about his place, not about what you’ve heard about him from others.

And keep the reverse in mind. If the talk around you is easy and friendly, and somebody lazily drifts off at the most interesting moment, take a closer look at him. Maybe he’s done this training too. And if people are happy to keep quiet with you and keep nodding, ask yourself who is listening to whom.