“But if there isn’t anything they really want to do in the Taker world of work, why do they enter it at all? Why do they take jobs that are clearly not meaningful to them or to anyone else?”
“They take them because they have to. Their parents throw them out of the house. They either get jobs or starve.”
“That’s right. But of course in every graduating class there are a few who would just as soon starve. People used to call them tramps or bums or hobos. Nowadays they often characterize themselves as ‘homeless,’ suggesting that they live on the street because they’re forced to, not because they prefer to. They’re runaways, beachcombers, ad hoc hookers and hustlers, muggers, bag ladies, and Dumpster divers. They scrounge a living one way or another. The food may be under lock and key, but they’ve found all the cracks in the strongroom wall. They roll drunks and collect aluminum cans. They panhandle, haunt restaurant garbage cans, and practice petty thievery. It isn’t an easy life, but they’d rather live this way than get a meaningless job and live like the mass of urban poor. This is actually a very large subculture, Julie.”
“Yeah, I recognize it now that you put it this way. I actually know kids who talk about wanting to go live on the street. They talk about going to specific cities where there are already a lot of kids doing it. I think Seattle is one.”
“This phenomenon shades off into the phenomena of juvenile gangs and cults. When these street urchins are organized around charismatic warlords, they’re perceived as gangs. When they’re organized around charismatic gurus, they’re perceived as cults. Children living on the street have a very low life expectancy, and it doesn’t take them long to realize that. They see their friends die in their teens or early twenties, and they know their fate is going to be the same. Even so, they can’t bring themselves to rent some hovel, collect some decent clothes, and try to get some stupid minimum-wage job they hate. Do you see what I’m saying, Julie? Jeffrey is just the upper-class representative of the phenomenon. The lower-class representatives don’t have the privilege of drowning themselves in nice clean lakes in Wisconsin, but what they’re doing comes to the same thing. They’d as soon be dead as join the ranks of ordinary urban paupers, and they generally are soon dead.”
“I see all that,” I told him. “What I don’t see yet is the point you’re making.”
“I haven’t really made a point yet, Julie. I’m drawing your attention to something the people of your culture want to pretend is of no importance, is irrelevant. The story of Jeffrey is terribly sad—but he’s a rarity, isn’t he? You might be concerned if there were thousands of Jeffreys walking into lakes. But young riffraff dying on your streets by the thousands is something you can safely ignore.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“What I’m looking at is something the people of your culture feel sure doesn’t need to be looked at. These are drug addicts, losers, gangsters, trash. The adult attitude toward them is, ‘If they want to live like animals, let them live like animals. If they want to kill themselves off, let them kill themselves off. They’re defectives, sociopaths, and misfits, and we’re well rid of them.’ ”
“Yeah, I’d say that’s how most grown-ups feel about it.”
“They’re in a state of denial, Julie, and what is it they’re denying?”
“They’re denying that these are their children. These are somebody else’s children.”
“That’s right. There is no message for you in a Jeffrey drowning himself in the lake or a Susie dying of an overdose in the gutter. There’s no message for you in the tens of thousands who kill themselves annually, who disappear into the streets, leaving behind nothing but faces on milk cartons. This is no message. This is like static on the radio, something to be ignored, and the more you ignore it, the better the music sounds.”
“Very true. But I’m still groping for your point.”
“No one would think of asking themselves, ‘What do these children need?’ ”
“God no. Who cares what they need?”
“But you can ask yourself that, can’t you? Can you bring yourself to it, Julie? Can you bear it?”
I sat there for a minute, staring at nothing, and suddenly the goddamnedest thing happened: I burst into tears. I exploded into tears. I sat there completely overwhelmed in great, huge racking sobs that wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t go away, until I began to think I’d found my life’s work, to sit in that chair and sob.
When I began to settle down, I stood up, told Ishmael I’d be back in a while, and went out for a walk around the block—around a couple blocks, in fact.
Then I went back and told him I didn’t know how to put it into words.
“You can’t put the emotions into words, Julie. I know that. You put those into sobs, and there are no words equivalent to that. But there are other things you can put into words.”
“Yeah, I suppose that’s true.”
“You had some sort of vision of the devastating loss you share with the young people we’ve been talking about.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know I shared it wit
h them. I didn’t know I shared anything with them.”
“The first day you visited me, you said you’re constantly telling yourself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to get out of here.’ You said this meant ‘Run for your life!’ ”
“Yeah. I guess you could say that’s what I was feeling as I sat here crying. Please! Please let me run for my life! Please let me out of here! Please, let me go! Please don’t keep me penned up here for the rest of my life! I’ve GOTTA run! I can’t STAND this!”
“But these aren’t thoughts you can share with your classmates.”
“These aren’t thoughts I could have shared with myself two weeks ago.”
“You wouldn’t have dared to look at them.”