The Businessman

Every morning, I pass a life-size sculpture of a businessman. I see him daily as the escalator takes me from the subterranean bowels of the subway onto the main floor of the office building where I work. As I slowly ascend into world of the Eloi, the picture of this businessman loads like a webpage from 1995. First, I see his feet. Then his pants, neatly creased. He is holding a fedora out in his chubby right hand, and slowly his long coat and scarf emerge into view. Then a necktie, then a large, round face that reflects the lights of the Wellington-Street office. He is a bronze, fat, docile man standing on a pedestal, taking in the view and the bustle of the office building. He is The Businessman and I hate him.

He is one of several in a series of sculptures made by William McElchern in the 1980s. When he is not surveying the scene on Wellington, he can be found walking briskly (probably to an important meeting) along King Street, and again walking briskly along St. Claire Avenue (perhaps the first meeting didn’t go so well). He is also standing solitary and weatherworn in Yorkville, where I envision him waiting to meet a friend or a mistress for drinks. I’ve seen him passing another rotund businessman in a sculpture called “The Encounter,” also on King Street, though the two fat men look almost ready to collide. Sometimes I hear the shadow of energetic dance music pumping and I fancy the two men are about to start grinding one another.

The businessman does not have a good-natured face that we would normally call jolly in one so fat. He is not angry, or driven or ambitious. He is aimless and stares up at the lobby; a blank slate upon which we assign our feelings about being here. Some people probably see him and think, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ thinking about the useless mounds of paper that will be pushed around that day, and which will accomplish nothing. Some people will look at this man and see a domineering boss, yelling and shaking his sweaty jowls, extremely unhappy with the quarterly report he just read, while others will see cattle, waiting to be herded into his pen and forced to do menial work. I see him going home at night to a good-natured, buxom German woman who has a glazed ham waiting for him and his two fat kids, Hanzel and Gretel. Sometimes he pines for the receptionist, Mary; sometimes he pines for the other businessman he runs into on King.

I hate him because he is the venerated one who has been cast in bronze and placed on a pedestal, just slightly above the rest of us. This is the idol we are to worship? the golden calf we should all aspire to be? He is not a captain of industry, but represents the average worker, the eponymous businessman, upon whose back the global economy rests. By why is he so fat? Why can’t he look more like Don Draper, or Michael Douglas in Wall Street? Instead, we get a cow staring blankly at the lobby, longingly thinking of Mary, not a thought about little Hanzel and Gretel, or the useless mounds of paper he will push around today.