Cha Lectures 20 - The Invisible Faces of Boston - Introduction

Justin Pickering

My father works at a company called Labor Ready. Their facilities are tucked away outside of major metropolitan areas all over the country. Its function is to provide work to people who would otherwise go unemployed. Within the walls of Labor Ready branch #1831 at 100 Fellsway West in Somerville, Massachusetts, only a stone's throw from the Sullivan Square T stop. Men and women from all walks of life appear at Labor Ready's doorstep. At five o'clock in the morning, the hour of hope and of first light, the opposite hour from Federico Garcia Lorca's fated "five o'clock in the afternoon" where the code of society turns to death and destruction and all hopes and dreams of a table full of food and a home and hearth full of laughter are ironically dashed to bits by the sounding of the same dinner bell; at five o'clock in the morning is where they line up, standing scruntched together on the company's doorstep with their hands nervously choking their wool hats, eyes bloodshot, faces and eyes revealing souls trapped in bodies ten and fifteen years older than their actual tenures here on planet Earth. Most of them are young men. Paul is only 19. Dougie is 35. He looks like he's 60. Once it was overheard that Jose lives in his car.

There is alcohol on their breath, as many have probably just come from a confessional session at the liquor cabinet, or the needle, or the marijuana pipe. Their thick, jackhammer accents distinguish them amongst the overly proud people of the city of the burning dark, situated between the Charles River and the Atlantic Ocean. The shuffle around in meaningless circles like a tai-chi practitioner who has forgotten her exercises or like the little cotton balls caught in the winds of a wintry-blast dust devil that whips sludge and scum off of Route 93 and down into their hearts and minds. The park with its broken swings is covered in iodine at five o'clock in the morning for these people. At least the folks in Lorca's poem got to work their entire day before the bells inside their minds began to ring with arsenic and smoke.