Welcome to the Rat Race

There’s a stop on the red line in Boston’s intricate subway network that offers a glimpse of class divide.

“Downtown Crossing” to most is just another rutty station on the T. Exiting the subway car, the smells are the same. It reeks of urine and vomit, old newspapers, damp floors, freezing cold. Homeless sleep off booze on the benches using the Globe as a pillow, commuters are lost in their own world, passing each other without any acknowledgement, tiny white earphones screaming music into their brains. Like all the other underground stops, there are a dozen different ways out. Staircases climb up from the belly of the city and spit you out onto a myriad of corners in the beautiful streets of quaint downtown Boston, leaving you to walk to the block or so to wherever you may be going.

But there’s one that’s different, one that’s reserved. Along the nondescript gray tunnel walls of the subway station, between two MBTA staircases to the real world, there is a gold-rimmed glass door. Only businessmen and women can pass. Or should pass I ought to say; there’s no guard monitoring the situation, just an unwritten rule of respect. Decked out in my suit and perfectly styled hair, I thought I could pass through. Take the more refined transformation from underground into city.

Because that’s exactly what it is – a transformation. A purging process. After being pushed and wrestled, shoved up against perfect (and filthy) strangers in the subways, after experiencing the dreaded morning commute full of frustration and rage, the businessmen and women pass through those doors and enter their world. Corporate class, business-like serenity.

This portal from the subway to street level has no staircase. It has a beautifully cleaned escalator with shiny gold handrails. This portal lacks the muck-covered gray floors. It’s carpeted in a lush maroon oriental design. The walls are not smeared with God-knows-what, they’re aesthetically pleasing in coordinating designs of marble. The escalator leads not into the mean, cold streets of Boston, but instead to the luxurious lobby of one of the city’s finest office buildings.

This is the stop where the white-collar workers file respectably into their offices so they can run the world, leaving the bustling working-class to push and shove until their own demise, on their way to their mediocre-paying jobs where they do the dirty work for the higher-ups.

It reminds me of the all-boys private high school Johnnie’s I once knew, whose favorite taunt during athletic events was, “It’s alright, it’s ok, you’ll all work for us someday!” And they believed it. Of course, I knew even then that they were right. They’d go on to have amazing futures full of opportunities while their public-school rivals would be left to make a life with the options given to them.

It reminds me so much of the Ivy League snots who now have amazing jobs at the top of their company, at the ripe old age of 23. Who will never know what it’s like to work hard and worry that it still might not be enough.

It reminds me of the corporate lawyers and investment bankers, selling their lives to their firms in exchange for so much money they’ll never have any clue how to spend it. I once had a friend who told me banking, especially with real estate, was like playing real-life Monopoly.

Looking around that marble escalator climbing into the heaven of office buildings, I realized that that’s how all of these people think.

These are the prep-school students turned into Ivy League grads. They are the best of the best, graduating at the top of whatever college institution they attended. They are the ones who own our world, who make us the armless plastic toys inserted into tiny pegged cars while playing their giant game of Life.

Dressed in my suit on my way to a skyscraper office building down the street for an interview, I wondered if I too was going to turn myself into a corporate slut.

And then I wondered if that’s such a bad thing?