When The Horror Breaks The Illusion

On Growing Older But Not Up

A picture I took of a statue in Prague in 1994.

When I was 24, I travelled around like a hobo. It was a pre-Internet, living out of a very small backpack, wearing leather pants, sleeping under bridges, in hostels, and by train tracks kind of journey. The narrative at the time was that the Soviet Union had collapsed, the communist nightmare was over, and Russia’s vassal states were getting their first taste of freedom. The threat of nuclear annihilation that I had grown up with was receding.

I found myself in Prague, where I rented a room for a month for very little money. My days were wonderful. I ate apple strudel for breakfast, took long naps, read classic books, ate meaty noodle dishes, and stayed up talking in nightclubs until the morning came. Because I worked during college and was in the Army National Guard, this month was for me what I imagined college to be like for most people: lots of talking, reading, and no job to rush off to or recover from. It was heaven.

There was the feeling that the Czech people were emerging from darkness. There was a bit of excitement in the air. But I did not speak Czech, and I was utterly uneducated about their history or circumstances. I lived as a young man whose meager savings were suddenly worth something, and I mistook my sudden freedom and happiness for a universal upgrade that applied to all those around me as well.

That spell was broken one evening at a restaurant. Somehow I found myself at a table with two young women, my age, who spoke a little English. It was less of a date, and more of an encounter. We were just talking and making friends. They were curious about me as an American and I wanted to know what they were experiencing at such an interesting time. They told me they thought that Western consumerism was akin to Soviet propaganda, but where they knew they were being lied to, we were true believers. It was hard to disagree. I enjoyed the conversation a great deal. When the server came, I ordered a weird dish that had slices of canned pinneapple on pieces of canned ham with melted cheese. It was maybe three or four dollars.

The two girls at the table were astounded. They marveled at the dish. They explained that for them, my dinner cost a month’s wages. I nodded. I suddenly felt the disparatiy between us open up and my appetite waned. I ate my dinner which tasted pretty lousy. I paid for dinner for all of us and we parted ways.

In the mid ‘90s I lived in Manhattan’s East Village. The neighborhood was just waking up from the disaster of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Most lots were empty. Many buildings were abandoned. Apartments that sell for millions of dollars now had traded for a couple thousand dollars just a few years before. But things were changing very quickly.

A brand new apartment building went up on E. 7th St. and Ave. B. The people who moved in there were young and rich. Across the street, a local church distributed food to hungry people. A long line of people waited to recieve bundles of white bread, bruised vegetables, and whatever else the church had managed to procure.

One day, as I was walking by, a well-dressed dude sprang out of the lobby of his fancy new building. It was clear from his jaunty swagger that he was a very recent arrival to the neighborhood. When he saw the crowd gathered across the street, he said, “Oh wow, what’s going on?” He was enchanted. I could tell that he thought there was some kind of block party or local festival happening.

“It’s a bread line,” I said as I walked past. The realization that these celebrants, young and old, were actually tired and impoverished played out on his face in a series of micro-expressions that haunts me. Delight became confusion became surprise became disappointment became sadness became guilt became irritation.

Just like joy can burst into the world in unexpected ways, so can misery take us by surprise. A random choice can become an austentatious show of wealth. An unexpected festival can instantly become a funeral for who we were the moment before we saw the dark reality that we had misunderstood. Sometimes I look for God in the cracks and crevices of life, I long to see the divine hiding in plain sight. And I am rewarded from time to time. But just as often I am ambushed by pain, embarrased by my own naivete, reminded of my relative comfort and ease amidst so much depravation.

There is a shameful dance that guilt and compassion can do with each other. Feeling bad about feeling good can twist and twirl with feeling good about feeling bad. Beneath it all, though, is simple heartbreak.