When I was four years old the nuns came to Sunday School to talk to us about vocations. I thought they meant vacations. Then I became a writer so I'd never have to learn the difference.
Five days before Occupy Harvard put up largely-unoccupied tents in the Yard, I met a man named Troy. I was exiting a Harvard administrative building after an interview with the university’s dining director for a story I was working on. I got turned around on the first floor, and bumped into a 30-something black man in a big, puffy coat, who was being led by an exasperated middle-aged woman. “It’s just around the corner,” she told him. “This young woman can show you out.” “Actually, I’m lost, too,” I said, with a shrug.
After Troy and I made it out of the building, we joked about how it was even harder to get in than it was to get out. “Man, I’m just trying to get a job,” he said. “Maybe that’s why they make it so hard, keeps people like me out.” He did not have a trace of spite or self-pity in his voice. He was a grill cook by trade, if that can be called a trade. He had worked in a Harvard cafe years back, but now no one would take his calls. We discussed this with the ease of old acquaintances who had just bumped into one another in the Square. I asked for his cell phone number. “It’s prepaid,” he said. “I just got it. You can’t be applying for jobs with no phone.” I knew that this meant his minutes were valuable. Still, he did not tell me not to call. I said I could try to help, to put in a word with the man I’d just interviewed, and he didn’t seem to mind that I would make such a boldly empty promise. He was headed to the Pine Street Inn, he said, to see if they had room.
It was the coldest day of the year so far.
The morning after the tents went up, I cried. I had gotten home from work at 11:30 the night before, tired, hungry, annoyed. I could not sleep. I stayed up and mentally worked through every scenario that could potentially arise at my job that would compromise my integrity, like I was writing a living will for my own career. I did not think I had an opinion on Occupy until I had been asked to betray it—to lie about where I worked, to essentially undermine any trust I could build with the occupiers as a representative of the university. I didn’t lie, but after that night I knew I couldn’t stomach another conversation like that with my boss. I knew I couldn’t support the university’s actions, even if I couldn’t protest them, either. I knew I would have to tell this to my boss. It is possible that that is why I cried when I made my morning walk to work the next day, down Washington Street and across the Cambridge/Somerville line to Kirkland, where the sidewalks turn to cobblestone right on cue, and past Memorial Hall and into the Yard, where I knew there would be cops stationed and waiting to check my ID—because I am a coward.
But I don’t think that is the case. If I were a coward, I would have gone around the Yard and up Mass Ave., past the dozens of panhandlers who, years later, don’t make me cry. I would not have walked through the empty quad—whose lack of tourists would only increase the odds I’d lock eyes with someone I knew—with tears streaming down my face. If I were a coward I don’t know if I’d still be walking through the Yard, twice a day, every day, fishing for my ID, cringing each time, reminding myself, “Do not get used to this. This isn’t normal.”
The last time I cried in public I was very embarrassed. I had just found out my friend had died (he would have loved Occupy, more than anyone I’ve ever met), and I started crying right at my desk. I left work half an hour early and cried all the way home, all the way down the street. This time I was not ashamed at all, not even when I bumped into the short man from my office, the one who had said, “Ask them what’s more important, their tents or their financial aid” and (like it was a joke) “Just push the stats on increased socioeconomic diversity—don’t say anything about the campus sexual assault rates that just so happen to have risen along with it.”
Today I called Troy. “I remember you,” he said. “I thought of you because I have another interview today.” He’s still looking for a job.
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