“I found your bike, laying on its side on the ground.”
“Those bastards,” I said. I never let my bike lay on the ground; I always used my kickstand.
“Yeah, right, the bastards! So I stole the bike back.”
“What? In the middle of the day?”
“Yup. I went and knocked on the door but no one came. So I just took it. I slid it in my glass rack and took off.”
I needed some time to process this before I asked, “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Well, because I never wanted you to think stealing back was the answer and I guess I didn’t want you to feel like the police can never help you.”
Fair enough. Either way, since that day, I’ve been paranoid about my stuff. I don’t feel so bad about losing things as having them exposed. I would rather my belongings be reasonably lost and safe than displayed. When I was a preteen and spent time walking around the city alone, I wore baggy clothing. I stuffed my hair up in a neutral cap but never put my hood up—with it up I can never see my peripherals—unless I felt terribly angsty that day, like I didn’t care if someone snuck up behind me. Don’t leave your stuff out; don’t be a female; don’t wear pastels; don’t fall in love. It was all too painfully vulnerable. Until one day, years into my aged-cheese adolescence, it hit me, while I was lying in bed with my lover.
He was sleeping and I was not. I watched him for a few minutes, closed his jaw when it popped open and stank morning breath burned my eyes. I put my face real close up to his and pretended time had stopped in the moment just before a kiss and we were frozen. And then I got that feeling, like before when I should have been crying but I couldn’t and my eyeballs turned to stone. I realized he wasn’t vulnerable because I did not want to hurt him. I was taking ownership of my vulnerability and forgetting the dependence vulnerability has on external forces. What about trust? If you are trusting, you are vulnerable … but will external forces feel more inclined to hurt you if you trust them? No. Is life about always putting your bike safely in the garage? No.
I don’t typically wear my heart on my sleeve but when others need it, I leave it peeking out from behind the house and let them take it for a week.
It’s easy to get let down by this city and get angry and look at everyone on the street like they might have to fight you, but that just creates more problems. I’m still here because the lessons are complicated and I want more than anything just to learn how to be a good human being, to be vulnerable, and to love.
Day to Day in the Rust Belt
DAVE NEWMAN
A Middle-Aged Student’s Guide to Social Work
JOHN COMES INTO THE MAIN office of the community outreach and says, “I’ve been in fucking jail all fucking week,” then dings the bell sitting on the receptionist’s desk, even though the receptionist is right there, eating a mint and doing a crossword puzzle like she always does on Fridays when she volunteers.
I’m behind a cubicle wall, on the phone with a woman who needs two months’ rental assistance. She talks, then sometimes stops talking to sigh or groan. The desperation in her voice makes her sound like she’s stuck in an alley and the man with a gun in her face is her landlord. I listen. I acknowledge. I take notes. She calms but I’m as distant as a 911 call.
She says, “It just happened,” meaning how she went broke.
I understand broke.
I understand the speed at which it happens.
John says, “Fucking jail.”
He says, “All fucking week.”
I’m new here. This is February. I started my field placement in October. Six months before this, I’d never heard of a field placement. Jobs people worked for experience and college credits—but not money—were called internships. I was too old for an internship. I was too old to be a student getting a master’s degree in social work. In December I turned forty. I had a wife and two kids, whom I loved dearly, whom I seldom saw now that I was a middle-aged student with an unpaid internship and a bunch of random facts on notecards I needed to memorize for a bunch of upcoming tests. A year before this I’d taught writing full-time at a university, an always unstable job doled out in yearly contracts, until I was released with a letter that said, basically, “Nice work, no thanks.” Before that I’d taught classes at another university for part-time wages and without benefits. I’d published one novel. Another novel was about to be published. For years, for decades, I’d built my life around writing and teaching. I wrote because I loved to write and I taught because I loved to teach writing and I needed to make a living and I’d assumed I could make a living from teaching, especially because I worked so hard as a writer when so many of my colleagues did not write or publish at all.
Then, like every other job in America, it was gone.
John says, “Five days in jail, not fucking good.”
Phone on my ear, I lean out from behind my cubicle to make sure it’s John, and it is, I knew it from his voice, part cough, part thirst, the night before and the morning after, rain and sun and snow and leaves, a desperate combination of his vices and the seasons he toughs through to make a living.
