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.
