Check Pockets - Review By Tom Mccarthy

The stage is set. The subway has stopped between Fulton and High street, underneath the East River and the anonymous, tall and black performer steps up from his seat. He’s wearing a Bob Marley T-Shirt and Camo-pants. He breathes in, looking at his feet then at his knees then closing his eyes, nostrils flared, brow focused.

“Check yer pockets,” he says. “Check your pockets. Check yer pockets. Checker pockets check her pockets check your pockets check em check them check them pockets check your pockets check yo pockets check those pockets... Check yo pockets!” And with that the incantation is begun.

No one looks at him for longer than that first stanza. There is an initial spread of fear across the car: What is this performer going to do? Is he mugging us all? Will he single me out? But then the car-residents realize that this is the most honest form of a busking-performance, the name of which is begging. They all look past him then. They pretend that they don’t see him. They pretend that they don’t hear him or smell him or feel the waves of whatever it is (aura/ soul/ obsession/ spirit/ demonic possession) flowing off of him and crank up their “i”-devices or think about what they’re going to have for dinner. He continues despite being proven un-existing in the eyes of those commuters.

“We got rights. We all got rights. I got rights. Don’t I, man?” The man he speaks to is bald and looks Egyptian. His eyes are closed, brows furrowed and he’s grimacing. “It’s in the constitution. It’s constitutional man. I got rights. You got rights. We all got rights, man.”

But his audience is humming something to his audience’s self and his performed plea elicits no reaction because according to its audience, it’s fiction.

A woman starts laughing. This is not part of the plan. The car’s inattention shifts to her shrill and witch-like cackle, but the performer won’t give up that easily, and maybe this is the response he needs it to be, maybe this laughter will foster some pity and maybe he will get to eat today. And eating becomes the topic of his rapping.

“A man’s gotta eat. Will you help me get a bite? I just need a bite. I just need a little bite of food. A man’s gotta eat, and I’m just a man. We all need a bite to eat, don’t we man?”

But the woman keeps laughing, trying to explain her private joke and the inattention shifts back to ignorance of everything, music blares back in their headphones, they salivatingly think about the dinner that’s being prepared for them at home, or that they’ll order at a restaurant uptown, with money that they saved instead of wasting on this anonymous man and his speaking madly.

But who can blame his audience? They’re assaulted with begging multiple times a day and at a certain point they need to tune it out, switch the channel to the music or games on their devices, not think about the problem unless they wish to be driven mad with guilt, or with fantasies of becoming a hero of the poor. And they can’t just pay the beggar. It isn’t that easy to part with earnings which they worked so hard for, to a man who just said some words to them while their subway waited underneath the river. When the train reaches the next stop, he’ll move one car forwards or backwards, to his next venue, and maybe the audience there will be more philanthropic. Tomorrow, the same thing, every day he’ll confront starvation, risking life with words, hoping to beat back the reaper with a bit of poetry.