I was driving around Toronto with my father once, taking pictures for a photo essay I had to do for my grade eleven English class. My photo essay was an exploration of innocence and experience, and Holden Caulfield’s idea of what is real and what is phoney. I was walking along Bloor St taking pictures of the designer stores, when I saw a man with caution tape around him head with flowers sticking out of it. He staggered down the street, and slurred his words as he yelled out, “They tried to make me go to rehab and I said no, no, no.” I tried to adjust my pace, but we ended up at the crosswalk at the same time. He turned to me and said simply, “I’m not actually crazy. I just like terrorizing people.”
“I wouldn’t judge you either way,” I replied. He looked at me, alarmed. I turned and crossed the street without looking back.
The encounter became my thesis for the assignment, as I framed the man as the kind of phoney Holden hated. I said that the man made the people around him believe he was someone other to them, that he put on a show to create discomfort for the families and couples around him. He represents a loss of innocence, I said as a sixteen year old, because he proves than appearances cannot be taken at face value. He also proves that not everyone strives towards an image of civil perfection. Looking back on it now, I think he was forcing an encounter with something that is more real the neat facades of the designer stores. He put on an act to force a human encounter with the ugliness we try to avoid, the ugliness that we can mask and distort, but cannot abolish completely. He stood as a symbol of the real, and aren’t symbols, however natural they seem, simply human projections of abstract values? He forced an encounter that a perfect Yorkville society needed. I stand by what I said as a sixteen year old, that he represents a loss of innocence, but not for the reason that I wrote in my photo essay. He stands for the realization that the truth cannot be easily determined, and that it sometimes takes an encounter with a phoney for us to see reality.
The question that remains unanswered: why was he so alarmed by me?
Song of the Day: Real by Kendrick Lamar
