Escape From the Nerd herd, Part II

Escape from the Nerd Herd, Part II: Being There

The lobby was a palace of sparkling chandeliers and polished columns; expansive tiled floors and rich mahogany furnishings. I was not fooled. The grandeur of the lobby always promises an opulence that the room rarely delivers. But that matters not, for I would spend just enough time in the hotel to sleep, dress, and attend to personal needs. The adventure was outside, so I unpacked and left the room.

As noted in the introduction, I narrowly escaped the herd. I hid behind a plastic palm and waited. Soon a family came by, so I ducked behind them and slipped out a back door to find a pub with genuine local flavor. These treasures sometimes hide in forgotten strip malls and old neighborhoods, away from the bright lights. They are places the nerd herds never visit - the kind of places that you pass first without noticing.

A couple of warning signs to note: families with teenagers and sunburns, and prom queens at a hostess stand. Should you encounter either, keep looking. Locals do not get sunburns and local teenagers do not appear in public with their families. The place you seek is one where the owner wears an apron and runs things from the floor. Grab a seat and strike up a conversation - you’ve reached your destination.

My hotel sat at the edge of a vibrant downtown island of restored buildings, shops, restaurants and clubs. I wandered for a bit and found a spot that the locals favor tucked behind a hardware store, just outside the restored area. The burger was good and one beer begged another.

A sure way to get to know a place is to become lost, and I have contrived several ways to accomplish the task. They are, in no particular order: arrive during daylight and leave after dark, take a shortcut back, or have a couple of extra beers. On this trip I combined the three and treated myself to an adventure.

I left the restaurant with a buzzing head and stepped into a disorienting world of headlights and street lamps. Night had fallen. My confidence was unshaken, though. I could certainly find the way back - once I decided whether to go left or right. I went right, and like countless times before, slowly started to second-guess the choice of directions. Soon I saw no familiar sites and doubled back, wandered further, then reversed direction again. A few fruitless trips down side streets left me hopelessly lost and well out of the restored section. I found myself in a rundown area of tenements and small industries: auto body shops, machine shops, and warehouses. Though anxious (the buzz had quit me by then), I did not panic. This situation was familiar to me.

"Excuse me … sir... I notice that you be lost."

I spotted a homeless vagrant addressing me from under an awning.

"No." I lied, "I’m just out for a walk."

The man came closer, but avoided eye contact. We both knew this was a prelude to panhandling. He was a black man; large, bearded and shaggy, wearing ragged overalls with no shirt. I recognized several things in his manner based on my experience with the mental illness of someone close to me. He struggled to construct a situation in which he could solicit money, yet still preserve his dignity. Social fear - near panic - played at the corner of his darting eyes; eyes that occasionally flashed with outrage and belligerence at a hostile world. The ravages of drugs, alcohol and mental illness had carved furrows in his face and left dark bags hanging under the yellow irises of his eyes. Years of knowing a disordered personality had taught me that these are secondary effects. Beneath the symptoms lies a fundamental inability to reconcile the real world with the one that lives in their mind – the world the way it should be.

"Uh… hmmm, well … I’m just out here uh … all the time… and I notice things…" His voice began to trail off as he started to lose the thread, but he recovered and continued. "So … I sees you going up and down the street … so’s naturally I think that maybe..."

He shifted unexpectedly. His voice deepened and took on a tone of authority.

"Now for seven dollars at most of these places…" he sweeps a huge powerful hand panoramically down the street, "… you don’t get no more than an appetizer. But I can take that same seven dollars down to Rosa’s and get enough groceries to last a week."

A thought struck me.

"Say, do you know directions to the Belle Grande Hotel?" I asked.

He lit up his eyes and he puffed out his chest.

"Why yes I do", he proclaimed.

He turned like a Shakespearean actor and extended his arm back in the direction I’d just come. I was not only lost, I was getting even further away.

"You just keep going down the street here till it turns, then cross over at the light and go up that street one block."

"Thanks, that’s worth three bucks to me."

I handed him three dollars and he smiled broadly.

We parted and I felt good about the exchange. I needed much more help than I’d realized, and he got a few dollars. More than that, he was able to help, able to contribute something important. His days of pointless wandering and hopelessness offer only rare opportunities for purpose. The look he wore as he watched me go told me that it meant much more to him than the cash.

I’d gone only a half block when the next panhandler struck. She was a wan looking woman, somewhere between twenty and forty, with glassy dark eyes. She’d watched the exchange and smelled blood in the water.

"Excuse me sire, I’m diabetic and I need ten dollars for my medicine money."

I fumbled fast with my wallet, wanting to escape before a whole flock of panhandlers descended. I gave her two bucks and hurried off.

The directions were good and I made it back to my room to watch a little history channel before turning in. As I lay there, waiting for sleep and avoiding suspicious spots on the mattress, it hit me. All those nerds and TSA agents, the travelers and stewardesses that I’d been pitting myself against; they are really no different than me … or the panhandler … or anyone else. Just ordinary people, trying to get by, hoping to do something that matters, and sometimes in need of help. I’d been shutting them all out. I’d been going down the wrong track.

In the morning, our group mingled at a table in the hall outside the conference room. We fortified ourselves with coffee and pastries against a full day’s worth of arid presentations. This was a technical affair, where researchers present the results of their work to stoolies of the corporate sponsors. The presenter typically wanders off into some esoteric jungle by the second or third slide, leaving us bored industry reps tangled in vines of nested complexity. We soon give up and spend the rest of the hour studying carpet patterns or checking e-mails on our Blackberries.

Meanwhile, other academics in the crowd do their best to derail the speaker, and sometimes a chorus of bickering erupts. They argue with each other, and with themselves, about the proper interpretation of their findings. Near the end of the presentation the speaker laments the scarcity of experimental data, cites the imperative for more studies, and then finally, mercifully, closes with a plea for additional funding.

I took a rear seat and inserted earphones for the first presentation. Then I remembered the late night epiphany and removed them. Instead, I actually listened to the presenter’s voice, watched his eyes, and wondered what kind of help he needed.