On a weekday afternoon, at the beginning of the summer, I witnessed a sudden and small violence that crowded my thoughts in the ensuing months. By small I mean no person was hurt. No sad creature lost its life from hard deprivation. It was an action of complete disregard, and I keep dwelling on it as if it was more important than I know.
I was driving... making my way east on Navarre Avenue in the east side of Toledo. I was nearing Navarre Park next to the Sun Oil Refinery. For many who have driven around this area they know it mostly as a bleak and depressed part of town. Most of the houses were probably built in the Twenties, when plots were narrow and deep, and the houses were all two stories high and five feet apart from each other. Back then immigrants would move into these houses and form neighborhoods and work towards a life. But as time moves on so do their children, and those children spread out from the old neighborhoods into areas further out on the highways. The old neighborhoods became commodities and the houses were converted by the next owners into duplexes for cheap rent. Poor, lower class families moved in. Over time these proud old neighborhoods became surrounded and cut off by industry, ugly highways, and lousy strip malls. It doesn't matter, necessarily, that I'm speaking of an old suburb of Toledo... Everyone in America knows these parts of town. The differences between the east side and some low down part of Philadelphia or Charlotte is only superficial. And the boy I'm to speak of... well everybody knows this boy.
The house is probably about twelve feet above the street with a three foot retaining wall and the sidewalk right on the street. He must have parked in a garage off an alley behind the house and walked around the side to the front. He was probably either seventeen or eighteen years old, and as I approached (in my Prius, to add a bit of irony), he swung his arm out away from his body and cast out into the street a Big Gulp cup filled with soda from some gas station carry out. That's it. This is the act of violence I spoke of. It was as if he was making a dramatic statement, an impertinent gesture, holding out his arm after the throw as if he were Kobe Bryant posing in the process of draining a game winning three pointer. He must have felt my presence as well because as I passed the house and the sad thrown cup he turned back to the west and held his chest out as if he were about to be confronted for this pathetic sabatoge, and he was ready for a fight.
I can tell you my first reaction was shock and disgust. A younger and less civilized Sean Lynott would have pulled his car right into the middle of the road, put it in park, gotten out, picked up the cup, ran up the stairs to his stoop and shoved that cup right in his face, yelling "finish your dinner boy! There are starving people in China!" The problem is, we all know the futility of confronting a kid like that... We know that we would be talking to a brick wall of obstinance, and nothing would be accomplished. So we drive on, filled with angst and hating the world.
After the anger subsided, I thought more about that kid and the way he threw the cup. Always, I question motives, and putting aside my own ego and self righteousness, a whole world of intuition opens up. Contained within that Big Gulp, besides Dr. Pepper, are all of our civilized ideals. The slow descending arc of the tossed garbage is a perfect metaphor of the disdain this kid has for all of your petty theories of economics, environmental degradation, and sense of communal living. The glittering drops of soda are as important as all the great battles of history. Build your monuments to the past, they are nothing to him. No learning, no civilized advances, no technological breakthroughs, no art, no atomic bombs, nothing can penetrate this boy. Everything humanity has built, everything we hold dear, comes tumbling onto the street with an unceremonious... splat. Try to talk sense to Joey. Try to explain to him all the ways he is wrong to throw that cup into the street. All your reasoning, logical though it may be, true and honorable as you are, will be met with three simple words. I. Don't. Care. Joey from the East Side is one of the true outcasts of this world. When the equation doesn't balance, he is the Remainder. We've all seen him before. We've watched him spend what little money he has on cheap Nike rip-off clothes and gregarious NBA caps. We watch him walk into a fast food joint with his high tops untied and his shorts down below his waist. We've seen him get into fights with his dad, get his girlfriend pregnant, fight with her sister, lose jobs, fail at school, and join the army. He abuses weed and shitty beer, he yells offensive gangster rap lyrics in public, he drives like a maniac and gets lousy tattoos. We, who are invested in this world, hate this boy, and his response to that is to create mayhem in his life. He will spend the rest of his shortened life railing against the world.
It's easy to hate Joey. When faced with such a stubborn mule as this my blood gets up. I have been fighting against this kind of rude boy my whole life and he is just one of an entire class of rejects. They trash every part of town they occupy and the rest of us avoid the area like a quarantine. When I look at his neighborhood, I see a kind of grimy squeezed out essence of all the things that are wrong with the world. These boys, they are taught from birth to Want. They are told to look into the store window, to want all the pretty things inside, then left alone to keep wanting without any of the resources necessary to obtain the pretty things, or even to ask why they want the pretty things. This desire for the world of material objects, coupled with an angry home, or an underserved education, creates an alienated beast. He feels no ties to the people around him, indeed they are all more or less combatants. His only goal is to get his. He immediately looks to satisfy his senses because he feels empty inside. Communion with other people would help alleviate his loneliness but he avoids it because he's angry. Eventually he'll lose whatever women he gets in his life, and he'll alternate his time between his job and the bar. This is a true American.
This is a competitive world we inhabit. We are a part of a great race... we strive to be better, bigger, and faster than our competitors, and when we win, we are rewarded. Success is defined by our wealth and power. Truly, it's power that we're after. The lust for power has always justified the means of obtaining it, and once it's obtained, the competition is squeezed out of existence so that the empire can remain. But with all this talk about competition and winners, it's the loser that is forgotten. For every winner there is a trail of losers left behind. And what becomes of them? Do they just disappear? Are we supposed to exile them? Should they just be left to starve by the roadside? They still occupy space. They still exist... they're still human...
When they talk about the poor, when they talk about welfare recipients, when they speak in broad terms about poverty being generational, the wage gap, Capitalism vs. Socialism, lazy shiftless people, American Exceptionalism... when this great war of words reaches a crescendo, East Side Joey stands facing the sun, chest out, middle finger up, asking the question, "what about me?"
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