As I looked up from the story I was reading in the local metro newspaper, I scanned the break room. Looking at all the paralegals, interns and members of staff sitting together, and all the lawyers, who took their lunch at the same time but rarely (for some never) sat with the rest of the staff, I realized that I was not just the only black male, but the only person of any color at all at this firm. Probably the only one whose family hadn’t been in this country for three or more generations.

I knew this would be the case though. I knew what I was signing up for when I interviewed and the leading partner showed me a painting of Boston, pre-skyline, commissioned by his great great something, proudly hanging in the hallway of his firm. I knew that I’d be doing defense work for companies entangled in product liability and toxic torts lawsuits. I knew that meant combing through thousands of pages of medical records belonging to elderly citizens, suffering from lung cancer caused by exposure to the asbestos they dealt with while working in the factories and construction sites owned by the companies I now defended.

I also knew when I interviewed that I had already signed a lease for an apartment, with only enough money to cover the first month, which was already ending. Finally, I knew that being a cog in the wheel meant that it doesn’t matter who does the job, the job will get done. Knowing all this had allowed me to come to terms with my role for the first nine months or so.

The article I read in the metro that day was not the beginning of me no longer being able to ignore with how I felt about my job, but it did accelerate the process. No matter what I thought I knew, some things hit in a deeper place than rationale can reach.

It wasn’t the headline story, but the article I read that day caught my eye because I recognized the man it was about. It feels weird to call him a friend now, but an acquaintance isn’t the right word either. He was a kid I went to high school with, my senior year we had a weird habit of bumping into each other when we’d skip class.

He shot someone a year after I graduated; drug deal gone bad. About three and a half years later he finally got his trial, and I just happened to pick up the next day’s paper. Curse my love for Sudoku.

The sentence, life in prison, not surprising. How the paper portrayed the event was also not surprising, but it was surprisingly upsetting. They mourned the loss of a man who was trying to get his life together, and would have been twenty-five at the time of the trial if his life had not been tragically cut short. They gave a pat on the back to the court for bringing the villain who had murdered him to justice. That pissed me off.

There was (or should I say is, because this story replays itself too often) nothing just about this justice. The man who was murdered would have been twenty-five but Kash (my friend’s all too unoriginal nickname seems fitting for his all too unoriginal situation. Maybe you know a Kash) was twenty-two. Dead or in Jail, we’ve all heard the expression, and there you have it, one man dead and one whose life is effectively over. And this is a good day on the job.

I get it, you do the crime you do the time, and Kash was no angel. But looking up from the metro that day, looking at my co-workers and realizing that some of them had probably read the same story, I knew (felt?) I was the only one there who read it the way I read it.

…..

You (professor) say money is a psychoactive chemical, and dislike it when we make arguments that are more about splitting hairs than getting to the core issue. I’m going to split hairs for a moment. In my metaphor money is the drug, but status (or at least the perceived gain in status) is the dopamine that floods the brain when you take a hit of the green stuff. I think most people want a seat at the table more than they care about the metaphorical food being served.

The scene I illustrated above is but one moment where I realized that the powers at be, the infamous ominous “they”, will never let me, or someone who looks like me, get a seat at that table. Maybe the kiddie table, but not the real one.

And that’s okay to me at least because reading that article I realized that “they” will never understand us anyways. They read that article and like my co-workers (who may look like the they, but are not the they) see something very different from what I see. So why would I want to eat with them. I’d much rather take the food from their table and share it with the hungry.

That perspective may come from a chip on my shoulder, but for better or worse I think it limits my chasing of the high that is status, and maybe that will help me avoid an addiction to the drug, money.

[A picture is worth a thousand words. I had a thousand words to work with but I’m no poet, and I think the picture came out unfocused. I tried to put a bow on what was a stream of consciousness for the sake of a word limit, but I don’t know if there are any real conclusions to be drawn. Just a single perspective, in a single instance.]