“We walked all around this big museum. A museum is a place where you can see art or animals. This museum has stuff like Jesus and I saw a statue of somebody cutting a head. I’ve been drawing the statues but I’m not good at drawing lips, and the hands have three fingers instead of five because that’s easier. I probably shouldn’t show you this one because… I don’t want to say it. You can see their… their… their…. BUTTS.”
“I’m just trying to survive. I don’t have any money in the bank. I pick up whatever minimum wage jobs that I can, mainly fast food. At the job program, they tell us that we should never tell an interviewer: ‘I need a job.’ Instead we’re supposed to say: ‘I like customer service.’ That’s true for me though. I do feel good when I’m providing customer service. It helps me not worry about all the other stuff in my life.”
“I felt attracted to other boys when I was four years old, but by the time I hit puberty, it felt like a tractor beam was pulling me toward another person. I didn’t know any other gay people. There was no Internet back then. I had no information about life beyond my neighborhood, church, family, and friends. So I thought I was sick. I considered suicide when I was thirteen. I had the pills measured out and everything. But I picked up a psychology textbook from the library, and it said that all teenage boys go through a phase of sexual exploration. So I thought: ‘It’s just a phase. I can handle a phase.’ I thought as soon as I had a heterosexual encounter, it would all go away. It was a lie, of course. But it got me through my teenage years. And by the time I realized it wasn’t a phase, I’d developed so many other parts of my identity. I’d become good at swimming, running, and playing the cello. I was making good grades. I was even smoking pot. So by the time I finally accepted being gay, my identity was based upon a lot more than my sexuality.”
“I just lost my first tooth. I was at Times Square and I just swished it to the side and it came out and it didn’t even hurt. My cousin Melissa said that that I could write a book about losing my tooth in Times Square. Melissa is also my teacher’s name. I put my tooth under my pillow and I got five dollars and a toothbrush from the tooth fairy. I didn’t see the tooth fairy but my friend Jamie saw it once and said it had wings and a shirt and maybe some pants!”
“I got into a very desperate situation last year. I was under a lot of stress because my dad was in the hospital with a terminal illness. I didn’t have much income, my credit was bad, and I needed a new place to live. So I responded to a listing on Craigslist. And because of my desperation, I ended up living with a hoarder. I was completely despondent. So for the next two days, I walked around New York and asked hundreds of people to say a prayer for me. Or if they didn’t want to pray, I asked them to say something nice to me. Most people just said: ‘God bless you’ or ‘I hope things work out.’ I asked priests, monks, bank tellers, security guards, homeless people, mentally ill people… everyone. I’d say that I approached about 200 people. Then at the end of the two days, a post from a friend popped on my newsfeed. It said: ‘I have an empty room and need someone to move in today.’ So one of those prayers worked. I’m just not sure which one it was.”
“I got evicted from my apartment in the summer of 2011. I was working on commission as a real estate broker, and I hadn’t made a deal in a long time. I had master keys to a bunch of vacant apartments, so I slept in those for a while. But that came to an end when two prospective tenants walked in on me buck-naked at a unit in Harlem. I got out of the shower, and the superintendent was standing there with two African guys. Luckily they didn’t report me. After that I tried sleeping in the office. That worked for a couple years. My colleagues saw me so much that they joked about me sleeping there. They had no idea it was true. But they fired me for good in 2013 and deactivated my entry card. That’s when I started sleeping outside. I bought a gym membership so at least I’d have a place to shower. Last winter was the worst. The cold would get through the sleeping bag and I’d wake up feeling like somebody had hit my hands with a hammer. All night I’d pray for 6 AM because that’s when my gym would open.”
