So, your shift at your minimum wage nine to five has just ended and you’re thinking that instead of spending hours on the train or blowing your little bit of money on a taxi, you’ll just walk home. Great! An opportunity, at last, to truly know the city in which you’ve begun to make your life. Let us see who welcomes you.
If, she thinks, you can call it success to live from one paycheck to the next, the biweekly slip of thermal paper handed her by her masters the only true distinction between her and the miserable parodies clustered around these alleys, hobo bags and bindlestiffs, old cans in crude semblance of top hats.
She looks them over as she goes by, thinking at first that it’s impolite to stare, but then realizing that these people have long stopped caring if they’re looked over. Any look at all carries with it the possibility of a dime or a nickel and is worth enduring for that reason alone. Besides, she only wants to look.
Their numbers are huge, but if one knows what to look for, one can find threads of similarity that tie them together and make them known to one another. Here, for example, is a man carrying a lace parasol. Here is a man wearing not one but three girls sweatshirts in the middle of summer. They’re all dirty, but it’s not from an inherent dirtiness, it’s because they’ve burnt garbage to stay alive.
Here’s another interesting sight: the old man who sits slumped against the wall. Try to see beyond the wall. Just a few feet behind his sweaty back, people are still hanging on, are still getting it done, are still doing business, are still selling their antique engagement rings and cell phones. The game is still going on for them.
In spite of it all, she smiles as she steps to the edge of the sidewalk and throws up her hand in the bell sleeve and hails a taxi to take her off to the ‘better’ parts of the sprawl, away from the awkward reminders of how close she herself is to the edge, the gulf, the chasm which yawns open under the great city.
This isn’t some future dystopia, either. This is your city, and the day is the current day. One can no longer ignore the consequences of the master-slave system under which we all toil. There is relief to be found, but who will look when looking can be enough to land you in the alley? Who will look?