Perspective

Perspective
8/14/08

He showed up like a ghost. I’d already folded up my chair and stubbed my cigarette out on my shoe and there he was with a “hey man.” “Hey man,” it’s something I keep hearing when someone wants something. And like everyone else, the sentence continues with “do you have an extra cigarette?” I have to assess the situation first, and once I realize this kid comes from money I’m pretty sure it’s ok. Plaid board shorts and a white t-shirt, clean haircut and the ruggedly handsome college kid bit. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to murder me.
“I just want to talk to my sister,” that’s what he says right before I run inside and grab a mostly empty box of Camel Lights. I give him a smoke and he asks for a lighter like everyone. It’s a bad habit. Someone has a problem and my knee-jerk reaction is to want to help. I should say “sorry dude,” pack up my chair, go inside and lock the door but I just can’t. Even though I’m almost certain that I have nothing in common with this person, I know that I do. He tells me later, after I ask him if he could do anything with his life, what would he do, he just talks about making tons of money. It doesn’t make sense to me but it makes sense to him. This is someone I would never be able to understand, and he would not be able to understand me, unless we were completely obliterated drunk, which we were. And it was random.
Someone that would never, ever talk to me, and someone that I would never ever talk to unless it was really important. That’s what it was. He kept trying to get me to let him use my computer but I have my limits. I said I didn’t have it. He asked if my roommates had it, which made me realize that it was probably really important, but still I couldn’t let him in. He said he just needed to talk to his sister, but he didn’t have her number and he needed to find it. I just couldn’t let him in though. There was a certain amount that I could offer him (three cigarettes, it ended up being) and that was it. And I could talk.
I could talk. The thing I think about is that when he was saying that his parents were loaded and that they could give him everything, but he wanted to abandon that and be his own person for the military which would put him in the same situation with a different set of rules that would make him equally less of an individual, I called it a Catch-22 and he shrugged it off but later called it a Catch-22. The thing is, I don’t know if he knew what a Catch-22 or just used the term I’d used earlier to describe his situation because it was the most fitting term for it. I don’t even know. He was, and is, a business major.
“If you could do anything in the world, regardless of money,” I ask, “what would you do?”
“I’d have a shit ton of money, a hot wife, and I’d move to a condo in Florida,” he says.
I don’t need to say anything else, he’s majoring in business. He says he wants to go into finance and I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s Finace, with a capital F. Our goals in life are completely different but they must in some way be similar because, as far as I know, we’re both basically the same. We must have started out the same, and had the same opportunities (on a biological level) and it’s only the social aspect that creates this great wall between us. When he talks about money it’s like he’s speaking Chinese.
So I have to reach down to a human level, and that’s all that really matters, ever.
“Dude, here’s how it is. I don’t have rich parents. Wait, what year are you?”
“Gonna be a sophomore.”
“Fuck, god, I feel so old. How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“God. Don’t join the fucking military. Not right now, at least, and I know right now you want to die but seriously, you really need to put things into perspective. Like, you’ve got rich parents right? What do they do?”
“They’re neuroscientists.”
“Really? See, my mom is a nurse and my dad works at the post office. If I need money, they might spot me fifty bucks but that’s about it. You’re set, man. I mean, you say your parents are going to kill you but is that worse than getting shipped to Fallujah and getting shot in the fucking head?”
“They’re not going to kill me, it just sucks. It’s just like, God; I just want to talk to my sister right now. She’s been through this shit.”
“You can talk to her tomorrow, you’ll get this shit figured out I’m sure but like, you need to just live your life man. Your parents will take care of you, and what they’re gonna do to you is gonna be a lot better than being dead. What will they do, cut you off?”
“They won’t cut me off.”
“What are you worrying about, then? Fuck man, I don’t have any money. I have to pay back everything I’ve taken out over the last four years and it’s going to suck but goddamn, I’m not going to go join the Marines. I mean, I have nothing but the utmost respect for those people, but to go and join right now and die for a fucking lie, that’s just bullshit man.”
“Afghanistan I understand, you know, like, they come in and bomb us…”
“Exactly, like, anyone would have done that, but Iraq…”
“It’s bullshit, man. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Don’t go die there, dude. I mean, I don’t even know you, but I don’t want you to die. Wait, what’s your name?”
“Maxim.”
He holds his wobbly hand out and I shake it but it’s weak and limp.
“I’m Ian, and I don’t want you to die. I don’t know you but I know you should probably be alive.”
That was the gist of our conversation, or the most important parts. He told me earlier, before all of this that he got a massive ticket for urinating in public and littering, and after that he was seriously thinking about just joining the Marines and that he had been planning to join the Marines after he graduated, but he wanted to do it right now. Basically, the gist of it is that I told him to shut up and then he went away feeling at the very least a little bit better than when he scared the shit out of me when I was going inside. Hopefully we both learned something. Ultimately, I want him to know that life is not bad, that life is good, something that is amazing and a blessing (I said that verbatim, prefaced with “I’m not a religious person at all but…”). In reward, I realize that everything I complain about is horribly pointless and that I absolutely must live my life the way I know I need to live it. Maybe business majors make sense now. I’m a snob, sure, but I respect that. If your goal in life is to make enough money to have a yacht and a hot Russian wife (verbatim of what he said in a part of the conversation not documented except for right here), all you can do is strive for that and I have no right to try to get you to appreciate art or anything like that because art does not matter to you. And that is ok. The beautiful thing is neither of us understood one another on a base level but it didn’t matter whatsoever. I hope he gets ahold of his sister, and I hope he doesn’t join the military. And I hope that he will not even remember my face, because I’m sure I won’t remember his. And that is for the absolute best.