Jailbreak

 

After I went bust during the last big economic recession, I was forced to undergo severe deprivation, like Americans do in times of war. I didn't have any luxuries to begin with, which meant that I almost immediately lost a lot of weight, and fast, too. I spent a few weeks light-headed and slightly dizzy, especially when my family chose to reenact their rather ritualized behavior called "kicking people who are down" by pretending that my living expenses were the result of laziness (ha!), ineptitude (how?), incompetence (oh, no) or an inability to work, which is, unfortunately for them, not backed up anywhere by any type of actual legal documentation, like, say, my complete work history through Social Security and the IRS. Hard to beat, but true.

As I freefalled expertly into poverty like I always do (because I've compensated for familial inadequacies all of my life), I met the typical lifelong poor who live in the 'hood, and who've never accurately reflected me or my reality. "Everybody's 'crazy' in the hood!", my friend Cotto explained to me, as my so-called expert on ghetto fabulosity, not expecting a "white" girl (uh, oh) like me to come from the projects in Queens (also documented), or having parents from Bed-Stuy and the Bronx. Real but true, as our native stories from around the way. He got angry and aggressive at my "street creds" (like I planned it), tensely inquiring about street names and directions to my parent's so-called neighborhoods that were immediately under suspicion, because he lies almost every time he opens his mouth.

And that's true about critically impoverished project people who are on their 7th or 8th generation of the American Experience; they don't actually solve problems. Other people do that for them! Cotto had an arrogant sense of entitlement about his welfare the same way a wealthy white man expects "his" table to always be ready for him at his favorite restaurant, as part of his price for eating at the establishment. "It's not a law, but that's the way it works in the world, Marie", typically accompanied by a pitying gesture like the sideways head tilt and a condescending tone. Right...I'm the poor muthafucka who doesn't know what time it is. I keep forgetting that!

In truth, after my family forced me into "Public Assistance" by turning their backs on me (I got some MetroCards for hours and hours of waiting and form-filling), I needed a sit-down with Cotto so I could take notes on his lifestyle. It was fascinating. There were unwritten rules about everything that you'd never find in print, which would legitimize an already-shady situation. He had to tell me what time to get there so the lines wouldn't be painful to wait on, and after I did that successfully, he told me I forgot to go to this particular window on this floor to ask for MetroCards because "they're supposed to do that for you!" Huh. Uh, homeboy, nobody told me that. It was so fucking crazy and half-ass that I immediately knew it was designed for him and his mentality.

Nothing made sense about their process. Not one single fucking thing, and I can write books on any subject matter there is. There were secret rules about special windows, lines, locations....it went on and on and on. After his bad Alfredo dinner, I finally told him the truth. "it sounds like this is a full-time job!" He agreed. "Yep. Being on welfare is like having a full-time job, because to get benefits, that's how much time you need. You have to think of it as your job." What the...? A job? But, like, I've been working since I was a minor. Where do healthy brilliant female publishers go? Of course, the answer for me was as simple as the local library (duh), but for unskilled generational poverty on a continual course, I was stumped. I still have no idea how anyone could live within a system as fucked up as that and survive, but as I found out through Cotto, it's made to foil criminals, not law-abiding citizens rocked by changes in the economy as old as the hills, like highly-skilled managers dumped for their pricey salaries.

As I fought the final battles with my disordered family on an empty stomach, I found a temporary cover design gig, then more "Unemployment Benefits" that I paid for in full (like all of my single-girl health plans), then another design gig that was deliberately cut-off to intentionally suck cover designs out of me for catalog season before my six-month kicked in that would give me full health benefits, as they cheated me out of them for the first few months that I worked longer and harder than around me, and then a final round of Unemployment Benefits that I lived off of for months, at my mom's place. Being healthy didn't pay off for me, yet again. But, how to fake being sick? If I had to bend myself into that contorted a shape, I might as well go into the movies and acting! Who can do that? It hurt me to even try to be in a sick world for too long, like one big held-breath underwater.

Into this scary mix of crazy systemic incompetence came the necessary delve into tenement housing and shady subletting situations, like the weird OCD guy with a rental listing service who made me stand behind painted lines and follow his posted instructions written out in his tensely scrawled handwriting from behind a long counter, because he'd been beaten up too many times for taking poor people's money and then giving them bad information. Huh...so, not like my Park Slope real estate agent taking pictures of available brownstones for me to peruse while I corresponded via email in Denver? Uh, no. Not at all like that, or like me. The place on 9th Street that Cotto rocked like it was his personal prison cell gave me the creeps, but I survived. The guy who sometimes lived next to us on the top floor had invented a pseudonym named "Rex", which his friend told him to do if he dared to rent a shady sublet, as another critical piece of "hood rat" info that I didn't know. Ah.

Advice like that also originated from the same bodega that had attracted a drunk and high Cotto like a magnet, where he bought his "loosies" (didn't know that, either), and received such sage wisdom as "Don't let me hear that you actually paid Jose for that place!", which is so illegal, I can't even touch it from this angle. Do your thang, hood rat. What could I say? He wouldn't have listened to me anyway. Our neighbor Rex was deeply saddened and shocked by my "phoneless" state, which he telegraphed to me as this, "Oh, you should let me 'jack' your phone! I worked for a Verizon store." Uh, excuse me? "Yeah! You 'jailbreak' your phone from your carrier so you can get another plan!" Okay...I actually tried looking it up on the Park Slope library's public access computer, but it was so fucking convoluted and fraught with technical difficulties that once again I thought to myself, well, shit; if he can do that, why is he here in a tenement with us, you know?

I'd adjusted to having no phone the good old fashioned way: I used payphones on the corner, and the library's WiFi to access the Internet through my old iPhone. Still do. In time, I bought a cheap drugstore cell-phone, and my mom's broke-ass cousin had to tell us how to do that, too. I simply didn't know you could buy a phone for, like, $10 and then load it with phone minutes. I always paid for all of my expenses. Sure enough, the next time I walked down Fifth Avenue towards the Hispanic neighborhood of Sunset Park, there it was, advertised on a placard in Cotto's special bodega: WE JAILBREAK iPHONES HERE. Great. Yet another piece of criminal knowledge that I didn't want or need. I just wanted to live life for another day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking

"Beats, boy!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones

Like all the other decisions I watched Cotto make on his own, each and every single one of them was the wrong one, just like the other scared kids from Brownsville before him. He was angry and arrogant about his lies, too, preferring instead to say to me that he found "creativity" similar to "lying", because that's what most 'hood heroes do: they puff themselves up beyond average human reason and typical imagination, creating the sense that everyone and everything around them is bullshit, so used to the scammers and liars most project folk also believe themselves excellently to be.

His brush-up with "the real" through me was absolutely horrifying for him. I saw him turn white in shock while I sat on his floor describing my hard-working studio days, and he was a rather dark-skinned male when I knew him. "What you're saying to me is absolutely terrifying to me", as he shook his head slowly back and forth, hamming it up to me over the drinks that I bought for us down the block at a hipster joint, now that I had money again from my design work. Any real welfare queen has great acting chops as part of his/her arsenal that are the ideals of the insane. Cotto tried in vain to convince me that waiting all day in the depressing rooms of Public Assistance was his "job" when he did it full-time, and if I wanted to work it, that's how I had to think about it, too. Uh, excuse me, what...?!

It was so utterly poor in quality and convoluted in its execution, that the few days I did interact with the staff there, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the "social workers" working there were just as crazy as the people who worked them over for a living. It felt like the blurry line that sometimes divides inmates from officers in a prison setting, as time spent together that sometimes created an artificial camaraderie not actually existing between a convict and their supervising warrior. When was the last time you met a timid Samurai?

As soon as I got a job, the "case worker" in her early twenties assigned to me immediately shut the door to all the city programs and services that were supposedly available to someone like me, even though I told her I would still need help as a single working woman living alone in the city. Ever heard of back rent that's due and unpaid bills? She blew aside my concerns, so rare an experience it must have been for her working in a dead zone of Brooklyn that's atypical for our lives there, living in one of the most beautiful boroughs of the world. Case closed! She seemed relieved to have less work to do, though I doubt she'd ever met someone like me before. For all my time spent waiting and shuffling between odd appointments, all I got out of their bloated bureaucratic structures were a few Metrocards for the mass transit trips necessary to reach the wacky appointments made for me by various city agencies, scattered around town in a way that made no sense, especially to an efficient and practical Acadian like me.

Cotto worked the rooms he visited at welfare like he was born to the life, and he was. It was, for him, the perfect fit. He described the one part-time beginner's web job he had (self-described to me as his brief work as a "designer", even though he couldn't draw his way out of a paper bag), and much like his beginner's job in the professional world of cuisine, he felt that this paltry desk job was wayyy beneath him, lacking as it was to his superior sense of self. You see, he told me his employer was "crazy", making him work out of his home as a self-starter in his own business, constantly watching over his shoulder while he did all these banal chores like scan in art every single day, over and over again. It's called being a "Production Assistant", or "Production Designer" in desktop publishing, Cotto!

Much like the other jobs he tried working, he hated every single one of them. What could compete with sitting in a small room playing superhero video games stoned off your ass, day after day? Like a perpetual teenager who never really got a full kickstart in life, he just felt that wasn't made for real life. His juvenile dad (his "best friend" and favorite drinking buddy) had died at the early age of 53 from heart disease, and Cotto told me that he knew he would, too. He already had a disturbing hacking cough. What was left for him to do? He felt that his lazy rolling about the streets had given him all the "life experience" he needed. What could there possibly be for him? It was shocking in its' ineptitude for someone like him: someone who'd never really traveled anywhere or seen anything really good in life. 

He'd partied with a bunch of people who were dead, in various key spots around the city. Wasn't that what I meant? He'd then adopt a quizzical look for show. Sigh....always another tiring con job to front. He could memorize the best subway route he needed to buy weed at Washington Square Park, shocked by the commuter routine I'd adapted to early morning weekday life as it was for me then. But, but...that's too slow! What if he wanted weed quicker? He could get me there in 15 minutes! Of course, his route meant shite to me on the weekends that I had time to explore or run errands around town, because the tracks changed routes for servicing then anyway, but like any of the other real points I shared with him, he'd feign disinterest, suddenly closing his eyes and dozing at the diner table I brought him to in the middle of the day, so we could get breakfast (paid by me, of course) before hitting the laundromat, so I'd have fresh clothes for work during the upcoming week.

As soon as I finished cleaning up the room next to his that was "for rent" by the squatting former super operating in a tenuous situation I hadn't been made fully aware of (seeing as I went to another corner store than the local Nuyroricans living closer to Sunset Park than Park Slope), Cotto soon became paranoid by our change in circumstances. I figured from the cocktail of meds he showed me that he purposefully weaned himself off of them to hurt me with his burgeoning psychosis anew, but by then, I'd handily locked myself into the room I cleaned out with a thick chain through the punched-out doorknob that he'd have to borrow a heavy cutter to undo, and that was labor, man. Not worth it to him, I guess. Besides, I actually paid full market value for the rooms' legal worth, and as such, I wasn't a person of interest to the other 'hood rats in the building, or the people in the neighborhood watching us. I'd be gone soon, anyway, funded by my earnings.

As soon as Cotto got his money from the city for his cheap community college (and I doubted that story, too, but that's life in any ghetto), he cashed it and went on a spending spree, like I knew he would. He told me "they" gave him $30,000 for tuition, books, supplies, food, and rent, but have you ever heard of a two-year CUNY school on Staten Island for that kind of cash? Exactly! One of his stories surrounded this myth that he was a "media major" at school, because he got baked and watched a lot of t.v. shows and movies. Oh....times have sure changed! Must be expensive to study it at school, wink wink. The one paper he showed me was clearly written by the prof with his college study group. It was like a bad essay from a kid attending junior high school. In his make-believe role as a hardworking college kid from the 'hood looking to "make it" on his own finally (like the welfare myth about "a hand-up, and not a 'hand-out'!"), Cotto greatly justified his purchase of a fancy new digital tablet he didn't actually need for his school coursework, because he showed me the curriculum he had.

After that, he felt free to dream aloud on his small twin bed at me as I barely listened, nestled comfortably in his Army/Navy sleeping bag on the floor, ready to drop off to sleep like the hardworking girl without medication that I am, in stark contrast to his rapidly firing mania. That's why he was a coke addict, too! Did I know that? It was always something with him. As he fantasized aloud to me about a future he'd never really wanted to have, he pretended to me that he needed a fancy pair of designer headphones that every single 'hood rat from around the way sported on the trains, colored as they were to match the "kicks" (sneaks) and caps that were trendy then, like every sad pricey item that came before it, perpetrated by the same con artists who charged extra to their home crowd for the distinction of selling their shattered dreams of fame and stardom back to them, in an endlessly parasitic cycle that marks the life of hardened criminals.

After all, the rapper who sold them was from the "mean streets", too, yo! He makes some fresh gear that I just gots to have! It was always this craving for stuff that was barely hidden hidden behind false ideas about an American Dream that most of the cons never genuinely wanted, anyway. They'd be us, if they really wanted our lives to share. I'd known that as well, but like his other reveries, he didn't bear up under the close scrutiny of another native New York kid like him. He just wanted to sell you some "beats" that you missed out on, man! Hey, where were you for that? Huh. He wasn't there for it with you, you know. He just disappeared at the exact right time by lurking creepily in the background, to the murky depths lingering on the edges of any true society where he feels he belongs, happy to catch our petty little crumbs and call them "bad", because that's the way he liked it. Badly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Electronics

Welfare Burger

True punk-rock spirit, as evidenced back in the day. Keep on it, man.

It's hard for our brothers and sisters around the world to tap into our common consciousness, beset as they are in this world by the woes cast upon them through continued war, famine, and injustice. That's why it's so important for us to speak up whenever we encounter wrong, difficult as they may be to do at times, because we often traverse the worst adversities when we are at our loneliest low points in life, but just like that old Christian poem "Footsteps"*, it just seems that way from the outside looking in. It is then when you are carried by The Lord Our G-d, as His Most Faithfully Beleaguered in Faith. As so often happens in my life, outsiders see one reality when in truth, it's the exact opposite of what they presume it to be, and that very deception is what leads them down the wrong path.

I meat a bleary-eyed Ecuadorean the other day on the street while he was waiting for the bus. I'd noticed him from the other side of the street before, because he stared at me like I was levitating across the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, instead of me hatted up and running an errand, sans makeup. In fact, when we crossed paths, I explained to him that I spend zero dollars ($0) on my appearance. But, but...he sputtered, swaying a little on his heels, I'm so pretty! Now that you've gotten to know me better, that sounds funny, right? Like, asking Jesus when he got his last pedicure while he walks around poorly shod in a pair of old worn sandals, but I was charmed by my new friend.

After all, that's what he was raised to believe in. Pretty girl = easy street, just add (+) one man. Done deal! Of course, that's an absurd way to think, because I'm not a prostitute for hire based solely on my looks (not that I mind beauty as a visual artist because it's part of my world) but in many American cultures, beauty is mythologized to such an extent (especially if you're a drunk, divorced, red-eyed Central American grandpa waiting on a cold Northern sidewalk for a public bus that's on slow rollin' country time), that talking to someone like me seems like, how can this be true ?! Oh, it be, brother man. I assure you of that, esse.

You see, when you're out there in the real world, you don't just get a small slice of pie from the same place over and over again (my G-d, the horror of that!), you eat "the whole enchilada" as they say, and that's exactly how me and my crew play this game called life: like it's winning just to be here, because we come across a lot of "walking dead" out there; bombed-out, brain-dead folks just wandering listlessly throughout their days, so unconscious and unplugged from the world as it exists, waiting to die. A nightmare...and so, when we see something we don't like, we say something, because speaking up is an action that leads to other actions, even if at first it's just misguided thoughts (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/06/say-something.html). It's all part of your training.

Most of my peers have already reached the type of early success that puts us in direct proximity to junior staff who need constant mentoring and teaching because we're tradespeople, and giving back to underlings is crafted into our lifestyles. I teach every day that I'm alive, even if it doesn't fit into your misconceptions about relegating learning to some far away classroom staffed by someone else, even though that someone else is probably someone I went to school with, here in New York, and I can also out-teach any day of the week. My creative hierarchies necessitated me into learning many many abilities so well just to stay competitive and on the job, that I can teach you in another language (in your native language, since you can't speak mine), using whatever tools you have handy.

After you do that for many years like we have, you develop a sophisticated routine centered around schooling. And so, when my Coloradan ex-boyfriend decided to take his act on the road by lecturing the Asian liquor store owner down the block from us in our Denver neighborhood, I couldn't have clapped harder for him in appreciation if I tried. It was one of my most favorite characteristics about him: that he used his power and prestige as a high-earning white man in our society to tell people what they avoided hearing through deliberately planned abusive neglect, by feigning continued ignorance about well-known facets of our American lives. On one such afternoon, I guess Kent had enough of the hypocritical bullshit, because he told me that he finally told the Korean owner what was up, and I was enraptured.

Kent liked to buy some booze to put into his little biker backpack that they make just for riders to squeeze liquid into their mouths during a ride (yeah, not the best use of it, but you don't know his full story and it is massively bad), so he could meander around town on the many bike paths that line the area in an inter-connected web that's the envy of older cities, though the common practice of compulsive over-exercise to cover up a serious mental disorder as it is used out west is a whole other article entirely. Suffice to say that he was familiar with the lay of the land, as he'd lived in town for many years, spending his days driving through he streets that he didn't bike, as a Master Electrician with his own junior apprentice to school in the trade.

I guess he figured he'd had enough of the shit show we'd seen play out unfairly in society over the years, because he and I talked about the judicious use of "mixed residential" zoning laws that are the mark of enlightened urban planning in newer cities like Denver, escaping the common traps most older cities succumb to, like the bust-and-boom, up-and-down patterns that characterize the instant ghettos and gentrified private parks with silver key access that define New York City life. We'd seen our native cities go down fast that way, like he had with the council flats in England, and I did with the projects in the city. Urban planning had created instant ghettos that insured encircled and entrapped cycles of poverty that no one could escape from, let alone a terrorized impoverished people who'd descended from the cruel mistreatment of corrupt plantation owners from centuries past.

We had enough, and it was reflected through his band's song titles about injustices that I felt keenly in my life, too. Kent told me back at our place that as he was walking back to the cooler for a cold drink, he couldn't help but razz the wealthy owner into embarrassment. We'd seen him cruise up to his immigrant business in the 'hood with a brand new Benz curbside, strategically placed as it was right across the street from public housing that was clearly demarcated as such with bolted-on plaques across the front row of old brick townhomes, across the street from his ghetto liquor store. Who the fuck did he think he was? What right did he have to come here and pick off the "po' black folk" with instant access to the very poison that killed them and their brains, by walling himself behind a plastic partition like some pussy?

Kent and I had seen him roll up in his fancy car in our urban neighborhood with his clean little prep school boy, all nice and pressed in his fancy private school clothes, but what right did he have to set up shop across the street from the poorest folks in town? Huh? Kent said he just stood there towering over this little guy and his small prep school kid. They played the whole smiling " haha...no speaky engrish" game with him that they'd been taught by the very people they bought the place from, with one very important caveat left unwritten but certainly lived out loud for the whole block to see: American assimilation is possible in one quick generation, you just have to sell out the more beset "minority" beneath you on the totem pole, even though there's no fucking way any Chinese-American can be a fucking minority, when China and the Americas are this fucking big. 

Nice try, though. "Kunta-Kente"**, you're my straight-up superhero, man! Don't ever change, bro, no matter how hard they grind you down. You're beautiful to me, baby. "Papa" this! We did, you know that, right? We really did show that small town what living is all about, be it with this century's immigrants or the very next ones. Still have your passport with your little boy Visa photo? That shit's adorable, kid, even if you did have a rough go of coming and going whilst traveling back and forth from "The Motherland", because someone (ahem, you know who) fluffed your fucking birth date on your kiddie passport, to give you a ride every time you exited and entered the country of your own free will. Who would do that to their kid going into a new country, you know? We do! Don't change a thing, baby. You're perfect just the way G-d made you to be. Amen to you, brother. This one's for you and yours today, baby. We're all red on the inside: http://taylorseafood.co.uk/ and http://www.taylorfoods.co.uk/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=welfare+burger

* http://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Poem.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta_Kinte

Satanic Surfer

Years ago, after a financial downturn I didn't control, circumstances forced me to move from place to place, like a woman with hell on her heels. One place was an old, run-down townhouse in Brooklyn, with the usual suspects: an old white lady landlord living in Long Island who just wanted checks in her mailbox, a Puerto Rican super/building manager turned rogue slumlord through the opportunity that indifference brings, a corrupt bodega owner in "da 'hood" who recommended hard cases to the seedy crash pad, and a desperate network of ex-cons, schizos, and other outsiders (like me), who needed a place to stay immediately, because a hotel was out of the question with no money.

And so I nimbly footed my way through the system, meeting up with a troubled but highly intelligent man while working at the public library. He finally found a room to rent in his "dream" neighborhood, which had quickly become the over-priced hellhole I wanted to escape, but options had run out for me. When my library friend offered to let me crash on his floor in an old Army sleeping bag while I greased the palm of "José" (the building manager who was in the palm of the corner bodega owner), for basic cleaning services to the garbage-filled room next door so I could move into it. 

I had to pay the rent for even that floor space dearly by listening to my new friend rant and rave while he badly juggled school, work, and life on his own, which naturally led him to weaning himself off his anti-psychotics during my time at "Casa Crack Shack", but that's a story for another day. My sick friend does it routinely, and no one ever does a thing for him about it; another hard luck case for social services that are so anti-social, I have no idea what petty bureaucrat thought it up, but they should serve time for the offense.

Anyway, he had a substitute for his expensive medication, with all the excuses hard criminals have, who also struggle with mental illness and addiction: dirt weed and lots of alcohol! It was a brilliant plan, because he soon ran out of the sleeping pills he needs for mania, hence the healing nature of pot, which left him with a nagging smoker's cough that did not go away. In between hits off his cheap cigar blunt and hacking coughs, he liked to tell me outlandish stories, because I was already well-known in the city for storytelling, right here on this site.

I'm sure he read it, though true to the lifestyle of the not-so-rich and not-to-be recognized famous, he pretended he hadn't seen my work, choosing to bend my ear with his horrible lies instead. The tales he told were telling about his psychosis, and I didn't have a choice, so in between cleaning a room that had been vandalized for years, after my day job at an indie house as a rock star cover artist, I sat on the floor of his tiny room to let and listened.

Like any kook you meet at a cocktail party or on the Internet, he was obsessed with the usual wacky shit that crazy people get wrong all the time: sex, drugs, rock n' roll, and religion. He mixed them up poorly, fueled by the pressure to perform at NA meetings, finely honed after many therapeutic sessions. He was your average reality t.v. show guest star, having told me that he was a child actor who auditioned on Broadway and had recently tried out for a weight-loss show as a coach, because one of his jobs in Florida was as a "Personal Trainer". He's basically your headcase whose weight fluctuates wildly from extremes, which is the exact profile most producers look for in potentials, but he isn't handsome, so nothing ever came of it.

What he did have were hours and hours of bullshit; some good, some really bad, and occasionally he veered close to art, without ever crossing over into our territory, but he was fascinated with me for my beauty and my genius, which kept me safe, because he was enthralled by me as an audience. He must have read about my boogie-boarding and beach going online, which naturally led him to tell me a crazy story about him violating the "Boarders-only" policy at the Rockaways*. He must have got caught in a riptide and panicked, because he was in way over his head in rough waters, but instead of telling me that, he concocted a bizarre tale about evil surfers who tried in vain to drown him.

Why? I asked mildly, though I am shocked as usual by the utter lack of reason the seriously disordered among us suffer from. Why would Satan give a crap whether some fat Nuyorican drowned or not? Were in you in league or something? "Well, no, Marie," and then he would adopt this pseudo-white guy, actor-y voice, which let me know the real show was about to start. He forcefully told me that "Luciferians" were real, when I countered with the obvious truth that there have never been any documented cases of cult activity, certainly not while surfing poorly in Queens without a board. He pretended that I was a naive white girl, and that I should look it up online soon, on that other Wild West domain of the insane known as "The Internet", like a hypochondriac addicted to WebMD.

After I pelted him lightly with a series of easy questions in rebuttal, tired from a long day of brutally hard work, I let him know the jig was up. I sagged on the mattress I now sat on, because the floor had gotten hard during his long speechifying. So, I looked him right in the eyes, after yet another position change, this time him on the mattress and me on the floor, and he knew it, too. His eyes changed, the wind went out of him, and he told me the truth, finally: he had a psychotic episode while he was swimming, and he thought devil-worshippers sounded a lot more exciting. The only demon in the room with him and me that night were the ones flying around in his brain; a series of random, uncontrolled brain bursts that one very sick man needs medicine and treatment for, not stories and t.v. shows.

Can you guess what he was studying (and I use that term loosely) at Staten Island Community College? Some design thrown in for flash, and a lot of drunken, stoned television and movie-watching, but that's not what he called it. He told me he was a Media Major. 

Hey, have fun at the beach this weekend, America! Watch out for all those sharks that swim in deep waters. You never know where you might find one.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Rockaway_Branch

Mike Tyson and the Thanksgiving Turkey

Years ago, I found myself confronting a situation I'd always feared, like anyone else would: becoming homeless. Unlike Amanda Byne, I am not the "crazy wealthy" member of my family. I merely fight in opposition to it as a lifestyle choice, often alone, and when I don't get any kind of support from my beleaguered family, sometimes I find myself in the company of someone who happens to be in the same boat as me, though through different ways and means.

Such was the case with a friend of mine I met a few years ago at the Brooklyn Public Library. He sat next to me at a row of public access computers, fidgeted for awhile, then asked to borrow my ear-buds that I'd just taken out and put on the desk after my work was done. He said he worked in a kitchen, supposedly for the NYJets football team at their stadium. He also told me that his boss wanted him to take a cleanliness certification course online. A chef! Cool! Turns out, he was more boastful than anything else: a classic New York City "hood rat". 

C'est la vie. I liked him well enough, and as I bottomed out financially, I found that my friends were few and far between (as so often is the case), while my family hid from my "misfortune" like it was a disease they could catch through exposure to it. Going broke had never happened to me before, and without me to lead them through it (because I was the one who needed help, not the other way around), I was alone in it.

So, I free-fell into homelessness without any help from anyone, clutching at hastily applied artist's residencies (and accepted into, without actually participating in), grant applications, and housing programs in rapid succession, along with my new friend's suggestion that I could stay with him, if I needed to. At that point in time, it was the only offer I had. When the inevitable expulsion from my Park Slope apartment due to a lack of funds finally went down (with dramatic court appearances and rushing back from the courthouse to confront a U.S. Marshall by myself, none of which I'd done before), my insane friend let me sleep on the floor of his rented room in a nearby tenement.

Cotto was used to squatting, coming from a background that prepped him for it, like public housing and generations of welfare. He told me how to "petition the city for 'Public Assistance'", as I sat on the floor of my soon-to-be-gone apartment taking notes, while my guest sat on my couch after dinner. I didn't really know how confusing the system was until later on, after I realized it was designed for drug-addicted mental patients, but more on that another time. Suffice to say, I was terrible at welfare, and soon after Cotto and I became friends, I found myself back at work in publishing, which immediately kicked me out the system and any city or state-funded programs I'd been enrolled in.

In the meantime, I'd cleaned up the room next door to his by paying off the "super" and a friend of mine from my old building to do some repairs and minor chores, like garbage disposal, patching holes, and nailing down loose boards. During the day, I worked as a senior book cover designer in Manhattan, and at night, I went back to a ramshackle tenement in Park Slope to do more work. After clearing out several layers of trash, I whitewashed the badly spray-painted walls in thin coats (because money was/is so tight), then applied several washes of white vinegar to disinfect the old wood floors and chase away the roaches while I stayed in my friend's room next door, sleeping in his military-style sleeping bag on the small space he had on the floor at the foot of his bed. It was the most comfortable sleeping bag I'd ever slept in, so props to the USMC for that.

We still spoke after I moved into my own room, because he knocked on my chainlink-locked door every night (the doorknob had been completely removed, leaving a gaping hole) when he heard me come back from work. He was lonely and bored, so we talked, smoked, ate, and drank the hours away while I worked on the spare room, periodically feeding cash to a man named José, the building's illegal super. One night as we smoked (stress drove me back to it), we chatted about my favorite sport, fighting. He was really interested in MMA, especially after I kicked apart a bookcase that'd been abandoned in the hallway right in front of him (so we could pile it up on the staircase to the basement with the other junk that'd been left behind), and I also talked to him about my family's history with the sport.

Because he's utterly mad (diagnosed manic/bipolar, a narcotics addict, paranoid delusional, and hyper-sexual), he always wanted the spotlight back on him and his dubious accomplishments, expounding at length about religion (he doesn't get it), prison, women, and crime. I started talking about Mike Tyson and his similarly rough New York past in a way that linked the conversation back to fighting and my friend, when I was abruptly interrupted by a bout of crocodile tears, standing in his doorway with the door open to get some air from the horrible stank of his cheap dirt-weed blunt, while he talked at me from a small twin-sized mattress that came with the room. Well...what is it, man?! Kooks love to interrupt people abruptly, but I was too exhausted to care.

Turns out, he and "Iron Mike" shared a ghetto past in Brooklyn's Brownsville projects, a place that's been rough for a really long time. My crazy friend seemed weirded out when I told him my dad grew up in BedStuy, that I was born in Queens, and that we'd once lived in the projects there. He couldn't connect with it, questioning me more closely on minor details, like, what street had my father lived on? I directed him here, to this site, so he could read the story and see the photo for himself. I was too tired to go over it again.

With a big dramatic pause, my fat snuffly friend finally blurted out the cause of his distress, as well as his subsequent build-up: "You're really getting to me, man, because Mike Tyson once gave me a free turkey for Thanksgiving!" It was so incongruous to our actual conversation that I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I mean, without even trying, his timing was, for once, actually perfect. I had to know: "Oh, yeah? Why's that?" Bruce Lee and the history of martial arts could wait. This was comic gold.

Well, for every year of Cotto's childhood, "Iron Mike" had dutifully returned to the humble home of his roots to give out free turkeys to all the people living in his old neighborhood; a sign of loyalty that is indeed touching. My friend wasn't there every year to get a free bird because he shuffled between different apartments, which is part of the lifestyle, but 'hood heroes are a big thing in New York. The Gottis (when they lived in Bensonhurst) were infamous throughout Brooklyn and the tri-state area for their overblown light displays and free toy giveaways at Christmastime. It's the kind of thing New Yorkers remember.

Even though my cripple of an acquittance (made out of necessity) would never fully get off the ground with his disabilities, overblown delusions, crippling arrogance, huge ego, multiple addictions, and serious mental disorders, I was genuinely touched by Iron Mike's home-grown Thanksgiving feast for his people. At the end of the day, he's just like you and me: a New York kid trying to give back to the people and places he comes from. And, like every other native New Yorker, we never forget it. Amen to you on this Thanksgiving, in the year of our Lord, 2014.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/21/sports/boxing-tyson-s-turkey-giveaway.html

http://www.smokerdave.com/articles/tyson.html