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justinjohn · 7 years

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Mahogany. 1.15.17

I took the subway this morning with a homeless man.

I know, bizarre. Normally, when the subway doors open, and I walk on and see a person talking loudly to himself (or openly to the rest of the car) with a grocery cart situated next to him piled high with plastic bags, my inclination is to either move all the way to the other end of the car, or to just exit and re-enter through another door altogether. You risk too much: unsavory smells, noise-factor, a possibly terrifying confrontation.

But not at 6 AM this morning, in an otherwise sparsely populated subway car. I sleepily boarded with my luggage on the way to the airport and plopped down a few seats away from him, undecided whether my proximity to him was based on choice or lack of energy.

I strangely found some comfort in the man, dreads piled high on his head, bundled and tied with a plaid men’s flannel, wearing multiple pairs of pants, pontificating openly about something over and over again that sounded almost like chanting. He was, yes, ‘crazy’, but benevolently so. He seemed harmless, just lost in his own world, like I am much of the time, perhaps a little bit more so since he was talking to no one, but doing the same self-reckoning and trying to make some sort of sense out of this irrational world that I also do. His voice, of notable mention, was striking. It was what I can only describe as a rich mahogany wood, handsome, finished and reflective; it was reminiscent of a strong speaker I’ve heard on the radio before, like MLK or Jesse Jackson or something. Perhaps it was the darkness of the morning or the stiff silence of the subway car, but his voice cut through sharply and memorably. It was strong, distinctive, almost soulful, and its prayerful tones, though unsolicited, were in some ways, strangely soothing.

From stop to stop on my hour-long ride into Queens to JFK airport, I watched people walk from the platform and start to enter the car before turning and walking into another, or employing my own trick, stepping into the car and walking to the other end to evade any unwanted affront. I don’t blame them. But as I listened to him chant while casually slurping on what appeared to be Go-gurt packet, I couldn’t help but to think of his life for a minute.

What was he before this all happened? What was his life like? Assuredly he was born into a family that loved him, I imagine, or would at least liked to imagine. It can’t all have been bad, right? Was he from New York? Did he go to college? Did he have brothers and sisters? I didn’t know him, but from my cursory deductions from his voice and harmless affect, I imagined him being a peaceful being, some sort of activist maybe one day thirty years ago somewhere, using that voice to affect change. I imagined that he, at one point, probably had a life of conviction, where perhaps he sang or spoke in church or taught or something that fit with this persona I’d created. I pictured him in his late teens, in some wild 70s patchwork bell-bottom pants sitting on a blanket on a green campus patch somewhere in the summertime, pontificating a little like this morning, but lucidly, cleanly shaven, with beautiful natural hair that wasn’t tied up into a bun with a button-down shirt, and garnering a little following. I wondered when he became crazy- was it sudden, or was it gradual, starting to slowly lose connection with conscious reality and speaking aloud at will and without prompt. I wondered if something happened. I wonder if maybe he was caught up with something he never meant, or maybe did something, which forever he regretted. Or maybe nothing happened at all, such that he never could get ahead.

He didn’t strike me as a drug addict- there was another story there, and while I’ll never know what it was, it saddened me because, well, no one cares. Routinely throughout the day in New York, homeless people beg for money on the subway trains, and I ignore them. If I had been in this very car going anywhere else at any other time of the day, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about him, moving to a farther area of the car, being annoyed as I checked my Instagram that he was taking up the majority of a car with his heap of possessions, questioning what was inside the bags: plastic bottles or some other thing that homeless people collect. But because in that moment I had so little to distract me, I contemplated him.

And I realized.

No one chooses to be homeless. No one dreams of growing up to be living on a subway car. And yet we dismiss this group of people all of the time; chalk them up to being degenerates or people who without proper coping mechanisms, whose deplorable backgrounds had them arriving to this end from the start. And we walk past them or switch subway cars- reducing these people to an ‘inconvenience,’ a hindrance in the way of our busy lives with such great sense of purpose.

If there is one thing I have learned in the past six months after I quit my job, it’s that this way of thinking is a big crock of shit.

There is no ‘destination.’ Life is not an ‘upward path’ with an apex at the top of of which you look over the edge, dangling your happy little legs, and take a deep breath, sighing, “Guess I made it..” That doesn’t exist. Like, if there’s an apex, in the way that life actually exists, I imagine that to be.. death? Like, nothing really fantastic is coming for you after 75, let’s be honest. Like, maybe you get your pension. You’re lucky if you make it through without a life-altering car accident, a divorce, battling cancer at least once, or forming a prescription drug or alcohol habit. If you haven’t, congratulations. You just got lucky. But none of us gets through life unscathed. We all struggle and cope differently. Some afflictions are quieter and more accepted than others: being addicted to work, obsessed with money or sex.

Some people have outlets to deal with their issues: some turn to the gym, some turn to alcohol, some write four-page narratives about life. It just is what it is.

What we see at face value are the ‘results’ of people, what life has dealt them up until that exact moment. We have no ability to surmise someone’s early life experiences other than the value of our own life-survival kit: stereotypes, which sometimes serve us well, and sometimes don’t. There’s nothing we can really do about this; it’s how we are hard-wired, but I suppose the point is this: we don’t become a certain way in a ‘vacuum.’ We are the product of our environment. Of each other. So we should probably take more interest in each others’ welfare.

When we see a drug addict in the street begging for money, ostensibly to buy more drugs: is this fate his/her own shortcoming? What if the person was molested as a child? What if his/her parents abandoned the person? Would you have faired better? We all know what it’s like to need an escape from emotional trauma; some people find refuge in different things. However, because we only see the last slide of the ‘presentation’, so to speak, the person on the street corner begging for change, we just assume he/she can’t cope with their problems like ‘we’ can; they are broken, hopeless. Let me tell you something: no one chooses to be a drug addict. There is always a reason it has gotten to that dire place.

And less: what if someone cheats on a spouse? We demonize them. What if that person’s spouse was cold and unaffectionate for the duration of the marriage? What if that person’s spouse married that person for vanity and that person was stuck in a loveless contract, and finally someone came along, perhaps by mistake, and made him/her feel like something for once in his/her life?

And so it is with this homeless man. I think we all would like to assume he doesn’t want to work. That he’s probably lazy. Smokes a lot of weed. Why? Because that fits in the stereotype of what we’re taught about homeless people.

I think as human beings we forget to understand context. We like rules. Endings. Grouping things. Finished products. We think in terms of black and white, and sometimes, I think people fall victim to circumstance and context. I’m just saying it’s not always so easy.

No one on this planet doesn’t try. There’s no one in this world who isn’t born a tiny, happy baby hoping for the best for themselves and for others from the start, only to be oftentimes struck by the complicated factors of life that can so swiftly either bolster one’s success or thwart one from reaching his/her full potential.

But no one asks to be subjugated or downtrodden. There’s one who says “I give up” without a reason, no one who makes a mistake and continues to spiral because they want to, no one who opts to be ostracized by society. And yet we feel so obliged to judge.

You are not ‘chosen’ as much as I am not, but rather, I think we create these narratives in our lives so we feel meaning. So we don’t feel so aimless. And that is okay. What would life be without purpose, without a job to keep us busy forty to sixty hours a week, without this professional identity, without money or a home? I certainly knew whom I could ask in that moment. Instead, I watched him tether his cart to the subway pole with a piece of fabric and stretch out across the length of three seats and go to sleep.

I think the point is that we are all just trying to survive this life and this world in the best way that we know how. Live our story however it is going to write itself. We are all struggling in some way. Whether it is with finding love or just finding ‘ourselves’, trying to incorporate a new baby or the death of a loved one, seeking to embrace marriage or just one’s own sexuality, deciding where to spend one’s money with no time and/or family, or trying to deciding where to find money.

So, why are we so judgmental? Why are we so selfish? Look, what I’m trying to say is that we are all human and just trying to co-exist. It’s not about focusing always on the future when we have no idea how things will play out. And yet, we literally live in a world where we’ve killed off about 60% of the natural habitat for our own needs, cut health insurance for the poorest sectors of our society, and overlooking the rising temperatures of an already feverishly sick planet. I don’t know. Instead of trying to just get ahead, I wish we could work together more, to understand each other more, for one single mahogany voice to unite us in the silence. It’s a perception thing, I guess. And sometimes we think we have everything so figured out, and in other ways, we have no idea that we need glasses.

Justinthecity.

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