The man in black and me.
(aired on All Things Considered July 2, 2004)

My girlfriend and I were sitting at an outside table at a cafe in Barcelona having afternoon coffee and watching the neighborhood go buy. Across the street, two Americans were trying to get into an apartment, and they were having trouble getting the door open. The man was dressed in black. He was maybe in his 40s. He looked like he could be a musician, a roadie or a guy who owned a small record shop. The woman with him, who we took to be his girlfriend, was a little younger, maybe in her mid-30s. She might have owned a clothing store or taught art at a liberal private school. She was managing the problem of the door, talking to some Spanish guy about it. Her man in black was left to slouch outside, a little defeated, but making an effort to look untroubled.

While we watched, my girlfriend and I kept inventing and refining our theories about these two: what they did for a living, how they met. She was skeptical about the man in black. She said, `I think he goes through a lot of life kind of confused.' I decided that I liked him, and I started defending him. And I reminded her of a song I'd played her that she liked from an Australian band called The Go-Betweens. I was thinking of one of The Go-Betweens guys who spent the band's decade-long hiatus living in Germany, recording solo records. And I was saying, `That guy at the door could be like The Go-Betweens guy. Who knows why he's in Spain in particular, but whatever he's doing, it could be good, something worth doing.'

My girlfriend was still skeptical. So I kept defending the man at the door. I admitted I identified with him. When we were young, my old filmmaking partner and I would talk for hours about how our heroes were people who did things for their own sake, not for the sake of getting ahead. We didn't want to be rich. We wanted to be cool. And not cool like fashion magazines, cool like The Go-Betweens. And I tried to live like that. Yeah, I had a job with benefits, but I also spent hours and hours writing my photocopied zine that never exceeded a distribution of 75. And I'm not proud to say it, but one of the hard parts of coming to medical school many years later was that it felt like selling out. Becoming a doctor means joining a system of authority, of exams, of orders. It's nothing like writing a great song and not caring what the record company thinks.

My girlfriend said I was romanticizing the the guy at the door, imagining a life lived free. She asked me if I'd heard him when he called across the street to explain himself to the waiter at our cafe. I hadn't. She shook her head. `He said, "Los keys don't work."' `Los keys don't work?' I asked. `Los keys don't work,' she said. `He's in his own little world. He's just a guy,' she said. `You're in medical school because you want to be,' she said. `You don't need to imagine being that guy.'
`Oh,' I said. `Hmm.'

I still hope later that evening he sat down and wrote a really great song. But then I was in the hospital a few weeks later--one hour talking to a woman with cancer, the next hour visiting the ICU. And I felt a rush of belonging, a feeling that I was in the right place.

On the subway that night, my stethoscope in my bag, The Go-Betweens in my headphones, I had to admit: these days, doing things on my own terms has meant joining a system, maybe even The System.

copyright 2004 joe wright