Income Inequality

I am a 19 year old. I am supposed to be poor. I am supposed to live in a one bedroom apartment with two other girls and our sometimes boyfriends. I am meant to work in the sub basement of Filene's as Christmas help, because college and adventure and I can always go home to mom if things get really really bad.

There are lots of us; we are legion, the urban poor youth. It is our rite of passage. We enjoy scrounging our furniture off the streets of the better parts of Beacon Hill on trash days.We relish our trips to the Army-Navy store for peacoats and combat boots that our parents and uncles wore, maybe even into actual combat. Maybe our peers returned from Vietnam wore these khaki mittens. Or maybe it is all surplus as the sign says. It is warm and comfortable and cheap.

We like eating "egg hole" sandwiches and Campbell's tomato soup with Kraft cheddar melted into it. We like getting the end-of-shift produce from the back of the Farmer's Market once a week for salads and omelet stuffing. We like Ripple and Annie Green Springs wine.

There are others whose poverty is not voluntary. These are the ones we call beggers. Whose poverty is poverty, homelessness, job loss, despair and what was not yet called PTSD. One is the man with no legs who scoots around on a little cart, the old woman whose heavy woolen coat drags through the slush on the sidewalk behind her as she walks heavily from door to door. A few tattered souls at the Park St. Station where the redline disgorges passengers each morning and scoops them up again at dusk. They have no homes, the have no names. They hold their cups or sometimes hats out for pedestrians to donate to their cause. In the winter there is stiff competition from the Salvation Army and others with donation boxes and signs that are made by machine, not scribbled in crayon.

Then there is this guy:

He stands outside the entrance to Filene's basement, the one on the corner of Washington St. across from Jordan Marsh. They are the two main department stores in Boston. I see him every evening as I climb the stairs from the second basement to the street. He leans on one crutch, clutched with one gnarled hand, mittenless, so every knuckle shows knobby white. the other arm outstretched supported by a heavy metal brace of some kind. In his outstretched hand he holds a metal cup.

He could be anywhere from his mid forties to mid-seventies. Dirty gray hair covers his face, long strands whipped by the wind, matted beard and mustache obscuring chin and mouth.


The hairy man with the crutch is there all winter. He thrusts out his stiff arm; shoppers drop in coins or sometimes dollar bills; or just pass him by; he never speaks.

Today is Christmas Eve. Filene's basement turns into bedlam. Gail and I give up folding and refolding and just stand behind our counters. People pay us for merchandise or they don't. Security guards dressed as Santas smoke behind pillars and drink from flasks they keep in pockets tucked under their giant beards. Or we imagine they do. We make up stories about them, that they live in a sub-sub basement, in warrens beneath the subway, that they sneak in at night and change all the displays and cavort naked in the aisles. Why not? Regular customers do the same thing.

 

Finally it is time to go home. Gail goes out one door; I go out the other, up two flights of stairs, out of he artificial dark of the second mark-down basement into the natural dark of winter. Snow blowing, fuzzy streetlights, chestnut vendors on the corner by the Park Street Station. And there he is. With his one outstretched arm, his stiff legs, teetering back and forth, his beard and hair staff with snow and dirt, his mouth contorted. He teeters and rocks and clutches his cup, calling in a voice that seems to big for his weak frame, a lone coin rattling in his cup, shoppers becoming shadows in the dim snowy light, drool flying from his reddened lips, he shouts his demands to the deaf ears of Christmas Eves down through the ages: "Give me your money! Give me all your money!"