The Man I Met in Boston

Does objective truth matter as much as humans like to believe? Certainly, having the facts about an occurrence make it somewhat easier to respond, but could it still be the case that we place too much weight on the tiny details of a happening and not enough on the meaningful consequences and subtext for those things taking place? In the relaying of a narrative, is there potentially more to be learned from overarching themes than what a simple list of concurrent events can teach? After all, do our presuppositions and the connotations about situations and the words used to describe those situations overly inform our way of looking at the narratives presented to us, blinding us from the story behind the story?

The summer before I started college, I was working as an intern for a music school in Watertown, Massachusetts. Everyday, my commute from Quincy would take me through Boston, and one particular afternoon after work, I decided to exit the T early and walk around for a while.

The streets of Boston swarm with beggars, but only if you’re looking for them. Usually, you’ll see a few folks who look homeless and one or two may ask you for change during the course of a few hours on the street. If you allow yourself to be caught up in it, though, you’ll see the dirty, broken-hearted faces everywhere, tear stains on suit coats and sweat stains on flowery sundresses and the like. Think about it and every dollar is drug money.

That day I drifted through a crowd of wanderers and tourists. I watched the faces, every one of them wanting. The numbers seemed to swell around food and entertainment, and plenty was to be found if you had something to trade. For a while I followed along as the current swept around me, through shops and past fancy cars. Graveyards saluted the violent heroes of a nation long pretending, and a red brick walkway led me past churches on whose steps the shut-outs sleep at night.

Faneuil Hall is technically private property, though it fades into the rest of the city like just another clown at the carnival. This is where everyone puts on a show, and some of them even perform for the crowd. Somehow, one man, inconspicuous, got through the invisible security of the urban center and lurked in the thinnest of shadows. Everything glowed with an artificial sheen, and yet he was still somehow obscured. I would never have noticed him had the change in my pocket not suddenly become heavier at the sound of his voice.

“You folks got any money?” a voice like sandpaper scratching the bottom of an old bucket asked somewhere behind me.

I turned to see a finely dressed couple, young and beautiful, take flight like startled vultures. What they left behind resembled a disheveled and dusty pile of old clothes and hair with tree trunks for legs. Though the creature was at least eight feet tall, hollow eyes looked up and blinked expressionlessly from behind matted dreadlocks at the pair as they made their escape.

Something inside me must have cracked and out of some ill-considered sense of duty, I dug deep into my jeans and quickly ripped out a few coins. Suddenly I was in the shadow of the behemoth and dropping what little change I had onto the plate-sized slab of muscled leather that appeared from inside a patchy sleeve.

My legs began to turn, starting at the hips, but my hand would not return to me. Without my knowledge, it had reformed itself into a welcoming gesture and reached out toward the afeared. My breath caught in my lungs by this momentary trespass as my small, pale hand was wrapped in three-hundred sixty degrees of a greasy, calloused bear claw.

An unforeseen courage took hold of me and I directed my shaking solely to the friendly and originally unintended gesture. My eyes slowly ascended and my voice somehow found itself. With a slight squeak, I said hello and told him my name. In that instance, it became a “him”.

I think, somehow, he shrunk and I was looking him eye to eye then. Not quite as dirty or unkempt as I had originally thought, Harold (as he told me was his name), slowly began to describe how he had wound up on the streets. I couldn’t look away as his voice rumbled built the story, yet my peripherals caught glimpses of birds picking up scraps of forgotten food from the ground, seagulls and pigeons mostly. He hadn’t been here that long, out on his own, but it wasn’t the first time. It had taken a toll, he told me, but it was his own fault. He had a wife who didn’t like his drinking.

I should’ve pulled back then. A voice in my head began to shame me for giving money to a drunk. Yet just as he was beginning to transform back into the beast, relaying the tales of his abusive husbandry and many mistakes, there was a simultaneous regret and sadness between his words. A tone overtook his voice that was all too familiar. How many times had I looked back upon my life, as comparably short as it was, and felt a similar vein of regret and self-loathing about this or that faulty step along the rough road of life. Here in the midst of consequences, was this man much different than I? Perhaps, probably, practically...sure, but something in me begged to keep listening, to find out the truth.

He told me about all the things he loved— talking with his kids on the phone, reading books, going on walks in the park with his wife in the summer. And then he told me about all the ways in which the world had done him wrong. A veteran who had been lied to and cheated by a government that doesn’t keep their promises and a son-in-law who had never been good enough could never seem to hold onto a job, especially as the economy fell apart, and now the bottle, his one last friend in life, had finally let him down.

“What do I have to live for,” he asked me and then pause, “...‘cept to tell you to do different.”

His eyes seemed to catch fire and his huge hands found my shoulders and shook me lightly.

“Promise me,” he pleaded, “Promise me, kid. Promise me you won’t do like I done. Promise.”

“I...” I simultaneously felt drawn in and repulsed, “I uh...I promise.”

I blinked and there were tears in my eyes. It wasn’t a long blink, but when my eyes opened he had disappeared into the crowd. It was so much denser than it had been only moments before, suddenly full of people, real people, complex and full of life and stories. I was suddenly lost in a place I had been thousands of times, lost in a city of folks who suddenly became not too unlike me.

As I made my way back to the T station, a blurry line drew itself between my tears and the soft summer rain. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the man, Harold.

This is a true story. Did it happen exactly like that? Does it matter?