Bean Can
Yesterday I am waiting at the red light next to the empty lot. The lot is fit to hold a handful of cars. In the back of the lot, by Dudley Square, there is a dingy Chinese restaurant. If a tree stands in the forest, or a dingy Chinese restaurant sits empty, does it make a sound when it falls, or even exist? Plastered along this edge of depressive entities sit sign, after sign, after sign—Reserved For Paying Patrons Only—so that the space is magnified as a billboard welcoming you to Boston, The Hub of the Universe. Today the lot is not empty due to the establishment’s business acumen.
“You fucking faggot,” yells a concerned passerby when I turn the corner.
I have been called a faggot on four prior occasions since moving to Boston, but this passerby is the first to add the fucking. Whoever my fifth; sixth if we are counting the third in Central Square, a strapping young lad from undoubtedly good blood with a backwards ball cap who was hanging out the window as five women emerged, hands together, giggling, from the T Station reminding me of my college housemate with her friends before they went out for a Friday night; and I am visiting Regina whom it has been a few moments since I have seen last, and with whom I have a pact to marry if I reach forty and we both are unengaged, when this young lad hanging out the back window of a fine sport utility vehicle yells sluts, you sluts—yesterday’s passerby is the first to afford me the dignity of physical love.
Each previous passerby thought of me just as a victim of the scenery. A deviant misbrush of the artiste at large condemned to wander the earth sniffing at carnal urges in back alleys and dingy dives’ bathrooms. Never, though, to hold the interest of another for eternal serendipity, or even more pertinent to my current libidinal peak; a momentary respite of fleshy relief. This young man paid homage to my game. Since last fall I have been honing my appearance into my vision of masculinity and today someone perceives me to be promiscuous. Man or woman, promiscuity has been the MTV goal of my upbringing. With that fucking qualifier my sixteen year old self is doing flips.
Smiling before realizing what for I am turning into open space. I am comfortable and off edge as the only one here save a yellow streamer and a police officer standing solemnly towards the corner. Continuing through Dudley Square I see streamer after streamer strewn across the street and police officer after police officer standing solemnly in corners. I am sure there has been a shooting.
I move to Boston not for school. This is an important distinction as we discuss my move from Amherst’s—no offense to Boston or Dartmouth or Lowell—flagship university of the Commonwealth. It is interesting to note that while Amherst is the flagship university, affordable and reputable, it is met with dismissive comments such as, “Oh Umass, you must really know how to party.”
To which I respond, “we don’t pay ten dollar covers to buy over-priced under-liquored drinks, so yes, I suppose so.”
Or this gem, always spoken with a deliberate tone reserved for someone of my height who unfortunately has incredible difficulty with comprehension, “Oh Umass, that is a really (pause) nice (pause) school.” Oh yes it is just so nice and cheap. So cheap that I would not be caught dead wearing Umass to the dinner party where one family of inbreeding tries to pawn off their own virtuous daughter—who almost always is having a beautiful summer love affair with the Portuguese pool-boy until mother inevitably finds out, drops her vodka, and in a fit of jealousy over her daughter’s maturing body and the damage that body did to her vagina sixteen years ago fires the pool boy, blames daughter for everything, and daughter ends up having anal sex with father’s partner at next year’s Christmas party—to the other inbred family’s son who, thankfully, changed out of the lacrosse pinnie, but maintained his impenetrable flow.
The worse, though, is when they find out I am an English major. Everyone knows a Billy or a Susie who was an English major and just loved it. I must want to be a teacher, right? Billy or Susie became a teacher and just loves it. Summers off and we’ll always need teachers, right? You will just love it.
Past the police officers and streamers there is a man who works for the MBTA. His pale blue uniform is caked with perspiration below the armpits and along the back. His hands are on top of his head. His mouth is open. He is standing just beyond the Dudley Square bus stop shaking over what I am sure has been a shooting. The past few days have been particularly tough for my neighborhood. First, Sunday night there is a shooting where three women are fatally hit and one is wounded. The same Sunday, only later, there is a shooting where one man is hit fatally and three others are wounded. The mirroring of the instances comes across poetic until the very real chalk outlines are pictured. I park my car in the Chinese restaurant’s empty lot [1] and approach the MBTA employee. He is no longer shaking, but his hands are still atop his head and his jowls are slack. His name is Steven and I recognize him from our late night bus trips—he driving, I riding, both judging; on St Patrick’s Day we worked together to make a young skin head who could not hold his liquor cry over his ex-girlfriend from high school. She had drowned on the sidewalk in a puddle of viscous regurgitation and he must exit promptly to try to resuscitate her through CPR, ESP, AARP, OCD, ADD; by any means necessary.
“How’s it going Steven,” I ask approaching.
“This is sick. You can’t even walk the streets anymore,” Steven is starting to shake again. His light brown hair is matted as cold sweat begins to work its way outwards. I put my arm around him and lead him down to the curb. I can feel the tension in his shoulders. Steven is around thirty. He lives in this neighborhood as well. It is at this moment I realize how little I know about Steven. The only tangible fact I hold is he is originally from ‘deep’ Louisiana and dreams of being a rhythm and blues singer in the mold of Otis Redding or Sam Cooke. We practice “Bring It On Home To Me” and “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” so he will be ready when American Idol comes through. I try to tell him that The Voice is the hippest amateur singing covers program around now, but he is adamant, “American Idol is the dom operandi [2].”
As he sits on the curb his head rests on my shoulder and he is trembling, “it was nasty, it was nasty, oh lord it was so nasty.” I try to comfort him, but I do not know what to say. I do not even know Steven’s last name. Without such rudimentary knowledge how can I begin to comfort the soul of this hefty, traumatized man. I want to lie and say it is okay, or these things happen for a reason, or perhaps some truth such as, better him than us, but I am caught on my rubber necking curiosities.
Sensing this Steven looks ahead and says, “he was slashed up bad. It was nasty.”
I show up to my first day of work a half hour early. Before we proceed any further can we take a moment to appreciate the feat of this. Boston’s public transportation is not set up into centrical rings. In order to get anywhere one is forced first into downtown before splintering outward. This creates an unenviable sprawl to travel against. Myself, I work south of Boston. I drop off a childhood friend who lives in Southie when I first move out here. We have fallen out of touch over the years as he chugs cheap beers while selling insurance and I wax so poetically, but those bonds we forged under blankets late at night in dank basements transcend our modernity and remain captured in our collective memories. As we approach his apartment which has recently been broken into he points to an abandoned football field, “have you ever seen Good Will Hunting [3].”
“I have not.”
“Oh,” he responds trying to hide his disappointment, “that’s where they filmed the football scenes.”
I drive past this field each day on my way to work. Before you drive in and around Boston please realize the city was not planned for cars. This is a horse and buggy region that has grown into a metropolis, but still operates on seventeenth century logistical ideals [4] causing miles of backed up, honking, cursing traffic. The commuters on my path are blessed with multiple chins and unusually strong middle fingers which spring with incredible force at random moments. My fifteen mile drive typically takes forty five minutes. It can be covered in half an hour, but more likely will take an hour and a half.
When I first interview for my job the chief operating officer keeps me waiting for half an hour. I spend this time pacing feeling my stomach turn from yesterday’s beers, cigarettes, and yogurt that may have crossed that threshold towards cottage cheese. When she comes in I turn and shake her hand. Before I sit she is already asking the first question, “what’s your story.”
I should have known at this time that workplace was not one with a conducive workplace environment. Work is work though, and beggars cannot be choosers so I try to sell her on my story as best I can. She, however, seems unimpressed. Her face stays long. Struggling without the support of a nod, laugh, or comment I plod through question after question. In the back of my mind I struggle with the schism of an organization fighting childhood obesity and a chief operating officer who for the past three years waddles with the weight of an expectant mother. The interview approaches its end and she starts to rise pushing me out the door asking, “do you have any questions for me?”
I take this opportunity to ask her to tell me about herself. She is ecstatic. She goes on and on about her favorite subject laughing and gesturing about people I do not know and places I will not go. I smile at her biography laughing when it seems appropriate. At the end she says, “this has been great. We will be talking to you soon.”
Dudley Square is taped off because a man has been stabbed. Steven tries to save him, but he has lost too much blood. As he speaks the victim’s teeth are turning orange as internal bleeding begins to win out. His last words are, “give me some help. I’m getting weak. I’m losing it,” and with one final salvo of blood spitting out he slumps over and dies.
The man make no cries to God. He does not ask for forgiveness, he just flickers for a moment before being extinguished. I imagine Steven holding the man just as futilely as I am holding him. I look down to Steven and can envision his eyes rolling back and his tongue lolling out as death seizes on him. It all seems too close and yet surreal. One of the police officers has abandoned her streamer and is asking Steven to come with her. She needs a statement of the events. He looks to me for guidance. I do not know. As I look to her she sticks her hand out to Steven and says, “Come on. It will be fine.” I help Steven to his feet and watch him as he is led away.
As I drive home, the streamers and police officers and Steven in my rearview, I wonder about my perception of the shooting. There are people walking about by Roxbury Crossing enjoying the vestiges of summer. They each exist in a moment which I will soon leave behind. My shock over finding the victim has been stabbed is not the consequence of the action, but the action itself. Who even stabs anymore [5] when a gun represents the evolution of steel into convenient killing?
“Words were exchanged on a bus, but the incident occurred after the parties had left the bus,” the spokesperson for the MBTA reads from a prepared statement on the stabbing. There is no remorse over the loss of life. These are things that happen here. The victim remains nameless and the MBTA has covered their asses. I wonder if any of this matters.
As I drudge through each day of work I become more and more self-aware. I am a cog in a machine that feeds my bosses’ bankrolls and the grunt work I am doing nourishes the corporations’ consciences. I still come in early, but no one cares. And when I stay late it does not matter because the work I do will not be credited to me. Plus I am on salary so no overtime despite my credible work ethic. I continue coming in early and staying late though, enabling my habit of coming in to work hungover. This is only possible if I work hard for at least three days a week. When I say work hard, I mean maintain my corporate middle man shtick.
I am worse than a salesman. I am a fraud. While my company stays true to their mission of fighting childhood obesity I am serving soft-drink corporations. Yes they are arguably one of the biggest factors for childhood obesity by marketing directly to youth with drinks empowered with enough sugar to knock a diabetic into a coma, but look at their donation. We are all frauds at my company.
As the long weekend approaches the chief operating officer is sitting next to me before a meeting. Our conversational highlight remains that first time she told me about herself. She asks the room if we have any plans for the holiday. We pawns are pawns and our responses are as such; catching up on my missed sleep, working my second job, or nothing because I do not have enough money to do anything and pay for the outrageous costs of living exacerbated by the corruption by all the inbreds running this city [6]. The chief operating officer takes all our pathetic plans in with a curt nod. A beat passes and she begins making eye contact with us. It is at this moment that I first realize her eyes are green. The meeting is not starting as she continues looking to each of us individually pausing for a beat locked into eye contact before moving on silently to the next set of eyes until she rests at last on me.
“What are your plans,” I ask.
“I’m going to the Vineyard,” she says with a flip of hair and now our meeting can start.
When I get home the day of the stabbing I sit on my porch and try to write. The building to my left is blaring music from the nineties and singing along between the familiar bouncing of ping-pong ball against floor and occasional plastic cup. Now they are singing Oasis’s “Wonderwall.” Earlier it was Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” There is certainly a cavalier air to this whole affair. Yes a life was lost, a life I suppose that will remain nameless because it was undoubtedly black and did not attend a private university, finding itself in the wrong part of town to be killed in.
I wonder if these young men [7] are aware of the recent loss of life, its violent departing in spittle of blood without counsel, or if they do not ever venture to that side of the hill. My time here has been spent [8] trying to find something to hold onto. Steven gave me that opportunity [9] with his trembling self in my arms and I let him go without any ability to empathize. As he is led away I am slipping into myself, only myself. I am a fraud living here for caring to connect. I stick out the bottom of my jaw like I have been taught and walk through my apartment making sure the door to my room is closed and locked as I head out the front door, grabbing my keys along the way, and drive west away from my wonderwall.
