Dinner with Brian
Certain experiences have a way of granting a new perspective.
This evening, I was heading to the dining hall with my old roommate from Rome, Tim Scovic. It was a year ago this Sunday that we and eighteen others boarded a plane for Italy. Tim and I are just one quarter away from graduation, discussing jobs and grad schools and what the future holds.
As we head towards the cafeteria, I catch the eye of someone leaning up against the wall by the entrance. He looks familiar – there are few people on this campus I haven’t at least nodded at in passing – and he seems to recognize me, but maybe it’s just something in me he’s recognizing. Without thinking much of anything, I throw my hand up in a half wave, and he stops me with a “Hey…”
“You guys have any guest passes or anything?” This catches me off guard, and I give him a second look. He’s my age, and he could easily be a college student. Everything about him has a sort of tired vitality. His tight-curled beard, his plain brown t-shirt, brown pants, and his shoes. His shoes caught my eyes – brown workboots that could have come straight out of the “Boots with Laces” painting by Van Gogh that we’ve been discussing in my Theory class, symbolic of the downtrodden working man. His eyes were penetrating, clear, and wide with hunger and hope. He doesn’t look dirty. A little unkempt, maybe, but better than most students I know.
“Yeah, I just got into Cincinnati today,” he says while shuffling his feet. I realize that it’s not he who’s avoiding eye contact but myself. I figure it’s a lie, but if the guy is hungry enough not only to beg for a meal but to lie about it, he’s probably hungry enough to deserve it. We exchange a handshake and names – “Uh, I’m Brian.”
Tang, ever-vigilant sentinel at the door of Siddall Dining Hall, swipes my card with the same smile as always.
Siddall is set up in a series of stations all over the cafeteria – one for salad, one for pizza, stir fry, et cetera. Tim and I head to the nearest one to the door, and Brian dissolves into the swarm of freshmen. The line for the day’s special is especially slow. Tim and I chatter about the ‘good old days’ of dorms and dining halls, and I catch glimpses of Brian flitting about. I think he made two or three trips by the time Tim and I got our first plate.
We sit down with him in the back room – I guess he felt better being away from any authorities who might rat him out. If someone is really in need, I have no qualms about helping them out, but I get rather upset when they feel they have to lie to me to get it out of me, so I called him out. “This is really your first day in Cincy? You know your way around the dining hall pretty well.”
“I’ve been in a lot of dining halls. Most are a little easier to get into, though.” He starts rattling off the security flaws in various dining halls all over the east coast. DC, Baltimore, North Carolina, and so on. I felt bad about accusing him of lying, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced.
He said he was just in Atlanta, and he followed a friend he met who wanted to head up to Cincinnati for some anti-globalization conference or something. “Oh, you’re an activist?” “Naw, man, this other guy is, he just wanted to see the conference. But man, globalization is evil.” And that’s as far into the subject as he got.
“So you guys drove all the way up here from Atlanta?” Tim asked. No, Brian and his politically conscious friend took a train. Reminiscing about my travels in Europe and New England, I talk warmly about rail as being the only way to travel. He looks at me a little quizzically and brings me back to reality. He is a railroad bum, a living, breathing stowaway on freight trains, and he and his friends accompany all sorts of goods around the country.
I was completely blown away. I had no idea that railroad bums even existed anymore, and visions of hobos with the classic handkerchief-knapsack-on-a-stick flooded my head. While this obviously was a romanticized version of what really goes on, Brian was able to be somewhat poetic about it. “You think about it, you’re on this track with hundreds of tons of metal, just whipping by at like 50 miles an hour, and you have no control. You’re just on there, and you’re going.”
He started talking about various stations all over the country. The one he’d just passed through recently near Lexington amazed him: 40 or so tracks, just a huge field of rail, with trains stopping and going all the time. “How do you know which train to hop?” He replied that sometimes the workers were kind enough to let him know, sometimes he had to figure it out himself, and other times he just guessed and got on. There was an element of pride and bravado as he talked about the excitement of hiding from security, the excitement of sneaking on and off the trains, and the quick friendships he would make, sharing a meal and a few good stories.
Too astounded to say anything important, I asked him how the food was. “Oh, man, I’ve been eating peanut butter on crackers for eight days, this is great.” He bit into a veggie burger and hot sauce poured from the back of it. “Yeah, peanut butter and hot sauce on crackers is great, though.”
He was an expert on hot sauce, recommending what to look for in the ingredients – “no vinegar base, you gotta have some carrot juice or something, and it’s gotta be somethin’ hot, like habañero. The hotter the better.”
As he ate the burger, I noticed his hands for the first time. While the rest of him looked pretty clean, his hands were filthy, coated with a fine black dirt. A nasty sore about the size of a quarter occupied his left palm where it met the wrist. His knuckles were knobs at the joints of his fingers. He had the hands of someone twice his age, and he gesticulated with them wildly to illustrate his conversation.
“It’s great that you guys have veggie burgers. If I go to a cafeteria, I won’t have the meat there if they have veggie burgers. If I find some meat, though, I’ll cook it and eat it no problem.” This confused me: “You mean you’ll eat meat from the dumpster, but the meat in the dining hall isn’t any good?” He explained something about how the meat in the dumpster is still good, but no one would eat it and it’d go bad. The stuff in the dining hall, though, people will eat, so he’ll leave that to everyone and content himself to scavenge the rest. I don’t know if it was based on some sort of altruistic principle, or just some quirky kind of logic, but I let it slide.
Towards the end of the meal, he started turning the conversation towards us – what we’re up to in school and such. Tim and I started complaining about some sort of graduation requirement that was just thrown on us two weeks into our last quarter. We moaned about it a good deal, how outrageous it was for the school to throw a required class our way on such short notice. All the while, though, I notice his waning interest and began to feel foolish. Here we were, talking about something trivial, something that probably won’t even happen, and this poor soul is trying to figure out where he’s going to sleep and where his next meal will come from.
Feeling a little embarrassed, I rearranged the mushrooms in my salad for a little while, not saying anything. After a while, Brian stood up, thanked us for dinner, shook our hands, and headed out.
And that was that.