I work in an office filled with cubicles, 8 to 5, five days a week. It’s in downtown Brockton, MA, a pretty tough city. There’s plenty of poverty, homelessness, and social issues to go around. Every day, I commute into the city in my own car, walk through the streets from my assigned parking lot, and enter the $35k+ per year world of cubes. I am wearing dress pants (self-ironed), a Calvin Klein dress shirt (bought during a 25% off sale, also self-ironed), a tie, a pair of shiny black shoes (Payless), a warm coat, and a warmer pair of gloves. I am quite white.
Brockton is predominantly black, particularly this section. It is also one of the roughest sections. In my business casual attire, I daily pass homeless men and women who are clearly malnourished, unclean, and uneducated, though this last trait is admittedly an assumption gathered from the conversations I’ve overheard and their social standing. It’s a stereotype to assume a homeless person is uneducated. It’s also a generalization to expect an educated person to carry on an intelligent conversation.
My point is that I am the complete antithesis of the people who call this section of Brockton their home (so, are they truly homeless, or simply house-less?). Yet there I go, every day, walking among them briefly as I move from one bastion of the middle class (the car) to another (the office). I become very conscious of myself. There is one particular homeless man that, each time he passes me, nods, smiles, and says hello. I’ve heard him speak and seen him enough to realize he has an “imbalance” of some sort, a “disability,” or any other word we “normal” people use to categorize those who are socially and psychologically different. I return each nod, smile, and hello, but I can’t help feeling like an affront to him.
This is probably not the case. I doubt he looks at me and sees any symbolism. He seems to see me as a genuine human being, a co-inhabitor of the world. So, I become an affront to myself, the inner part of myself that recognizes our connection. The outer part of myself recognizes the disconnect that our two social positions have created, and somewhere inside, I am ashamed of living so well.
We have a cafeteria of sorts. It doesn’t serve any food, but it’s an open place to sit and gather with co-workers outside of our little ergonomic cubes and partake in eating, talking, and critiquing. We critique (read: complain about) our current projects, our pay and overtime situation (which really is ridiculous), our superiors, and our co-workers. We lament our confinement to the office and our cubes, made inescapable now that fall is heralding the cold of the coming winter. There are fewer reasons to go outside in the growing cold, and soon enough there will be none.
But our cafeteria has windows, great windows that must be eight feet high and run along an entire thirty-foot length of wall. We see a busy two-lane street, one of our assigned parking lots, a lonesome tree besieged by concrete sidewalk, an abandoned shoe factory, a recently burned-down and torn-out factory, more parking lots, and more old factories. The parking lots and burned building have created an urban crater of sorts, a wasteland within a wasteland. On the literal bright side, this offers a wide expanse of sky to be visible from our cafeteria, a vista that I, at least, cherish.
But on the sidewalks that line either side of the street, they pass. We watch them from our seats as we eat and talk and critique with our ties strung around our necks and our pants so neatly pressed. Some of them are homeless, some seem better off but are still walking through Brockton in the middle of the work day (which makes you start to question the definition of the “work day” and why it is centered around typical middle class schedules). But they are all not us, and none of them seems remotely close to middle class. Of course, we can only judge this based on how they dress themselves.
Which leads me to the case of Lionel the homeless man. He has, for me, taken on a symbolic status. Every day, Lionel wears a suit. He never has a tie, but without fail he wears slacks, a shirt, and a blazer or suit jacket each day that I go to work. Yet, he does not appear to work at all, not during the confines of the normal “work day.” Instead, as we watch him through our great windows and as we pass him on the way to the Dunkin Donuts on the corner, he stands and stares at things, at people, at cars, and at shadows and memories no doubt. He has a severe limp, heaving himself forward as he walks with one leg that just won’t seem to bend.
We wonder about him from the other side of our great windows. We wonder how he got his suits, since he just stands on street corners all day, his only apparent activity being the inevitable and labored rotation to another corner. We wonder why he limps so badly, and why the few times we’ve heard him speak he has only stammered and jabbered incoherently.
We attempt to explain why, to find cause or reason for the way his life has turned out (feeble attempts to create order and structure in a place where it is so tragically and gloriously thrown into chaos). One story is that a charitable dry cleaner donates the suits to him from people who left them (he wears a different one every day of the week). Another is that he stole them. Another is that he is really pretending, and he actually has a home, money, food, clothing, and running water, which is really a horrible thing to accuse a person of if you think about it. We think his limp is from a car accident, mostly because another rumor we’ve heard about him is that he once owned a car but lost it somehow. Some of us think the car was repossessed, that he lost a lot of money in the stock market and had to give everything up except his suits. We all tend to agree that he’s been through terrible hardships. Some of us surmise that maybe that’s why he speaks so strangely, that the ordeals of his life have left him bereft of sanity.
We think this as he passes by our great windows. We create his past and, in doing so, create him. It’s almost like he is our plaything, nothing more than an exercise or game for sections of our minds that have been rendered useless in our little ergonomic cubes. On the other side of that thick glass, he is not real.
And then he looks at us. He looks through the windows, and we realize the act of observation is shared by observer and object, that neither category carries weight as we concurrently inhabit both of them. We look away quickly, chuckle, and remark, “That was awkward.”
Awkward why? It is, no doubt about it. But why? Suddenly, the person we’re judging and narrating and deeming unreal has become very real. There is a human connection in the locking of eyes. I feel awkward because I realize that I am in fact on display. I have been caught observing, and I am rendered naked before him. Whereas before that split second of recognition I was like a god peering through the clouded heavens, now the clouds have been blown away to reveal my seat of judgment. In our fish bowl of a cafeteria, we think that we are the center of observing, constantly looking outward. Suddenly, with that single glance, the order of the world is reversed, and we are now the center of being observed.
Lionel mocks us unintentionally. I find it refreshing. Just by being there, on the street corner, reeking and stammering yet dressing so much better than me, he is a living, breathing joke on the idea of social rank having any relevance or bearing on our humanity. Looking a certain way does not entail being a certain type of person. Respect is given to the person wearing business clothes; disdain or pity is given to the homeless man, who one would never expect to be so dressed. And yet, there’s Lionel, homeless business man.
I love him as a symbol, yet I am aware of his status as a human being. I sympathize with him, and I wish I could empathize. I see him and feel sad yet proud, proud that he seems determined to break down the walls of stereotypes, proud that he has obviously not given up. He looks at us not with defiance or envy. He simply looks at us, observes us, and hopes for understanding.
We are the outsiders, the exotic species imported to the city and put on display. We display ourselves every time we walk from our car to our office, every time we reach for our cell phone or adjust our tie, everytime we pay for a meal. On the one hand, we are like colonists, exerting our social and economic dominance each and every day. Yet on the other hand, we are performers, nothing more than zoo animals or circus attractions, strange evidence of some far away world and far away life that may never be accessible to these people on the streets of Brockton.
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