Burning Bridges Through Kindness
It’s been a busy week for me — just started a temp job down on Market Street. Forty hours of soul anaesthesia for debt relief. It’s necessary, but it’s got in the way of my anthropunk aspirations. Originally, I had hoped to spend my lunch hour every day either hanging out at a Food Not Bombs site down at the Civic Center, or at the public chess boards further down Market Embarcaderoward. I still think that these are good possibilities, but I was just too wiped out by training to do anything really productive, last week. This wasn’t even the exhaustion of excess work; it was the exhaustion of office vacuity.
So today, I set out with my trusty Olympus WS-100 voice recorder (which I didn’t actually expect to use) in search of ‘Bu to feel him out about this project. Could he help me? Did he think it was a good idea?
After looking around the regular places, I didn’t find him, so I wandered down to RadioShack to trade in my WS-100 for a DS-2, which should have better protection against interference — an important quality, given that I’ll likely be conducting most interviews outside in a very windy city. I forgot the packaging for the WS-100, and on the way home passed by a Haight Street record shop, in front of which I found — who else? — Malibu.
We talked a little. Work. His upcoming gig teaching poetry to troubled youth somewhere in Marin. Stuff. He was out of CD’s, and I ended up agreeing to burn him a few. Came back to the house, and watched The Shield and Six Feet Under with Dax while burning CD’s. In the end, I got twenty-six done, and headed back down to Haight to meet ‘Bu.
He was surprised by the number, and seemed touched. ‘I’m just talking hypothetically, here, but if I was to ever get a contract, what power would I have to put people I wanted in jobs?’ ‘I have no idea, ‘Bu. I think it would probably depend on your popularity and on the contract. I don’t know how any of that stuff works.’ He thanked me a number of times, told me he loved me at least three times. Said that what he needed, right now, was people who did things out of the goodness of their hearts.
I feel awkward writing about all of this. I feel like I’m bragging, and I’m not even especially proud of what I did. Even were I not looking into the possibility of doing this ethnography, I would have burned those CD’s — I like him and I like his poetry. But as long as I want something from ‘Bu, I feel a little ashamed being recognised for doing something ‘out of the goodness of my heart.’ And Hell ั I watched TV while doing it. Clearly didn’t take that much effort.
Now that, of course is my moral problem, and shouldn’t affect my work. But here’s the real issue: I don’t know if I can work with ‘Bu if he feels indebted to me. I’ve read discussions, before, of paying one’s informants. I don’t know what I think about that, though, at a glance, it rubs me the wrong way. But that’s different — that’s a clear exchange of information for cash. This is more complicated — the ethics of using as an informant someone who feels a debt seem really shaky to me. It’s too potentially coercive.
We never talked about the project, though the opportunity very nearly presented itself.