Photo by Marlana Broadway: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cars-on-a-wet-road-during-night-time-12295615/
"Welcome to New Orleans man."
It was one of those dark southern summer nights where your clothes cling to your skin despite the approach of midnight, and the air reeks of jasmine and magnolia blossoms mixed with day-old garbage.
I step out of the cab disoriented at my new surroundings and stare at my friend Chuck who is standing on Louisiana Avenue barefoot and shirtless with a bong in one hand, the strange skunky scent of cheap cannabis mingling with the jasmine and the street corner garbage.
I take the bong and draw in deeply, watching the smoke turn the chamber from clear to a pea soup fog of THC before taking my finger off the toke hole and bringing it into my lungs. And it was one of those bong hits that make you cough like a 90-year-old COPD patient on oxygen, almost to the point of dry heaving into the streets.
I could feel the creeping buzz on the exhale, and at the time I was such a pothead it felt like the warm and familiar embrace of a blanket over my brain cells on a cold winter night.
What was I doing here, and how would it end?
I was 19 years old and restless as hell to change my life and get out of the sleepy little town I had grown up in. Just a few months prior I'd taken a spontaneous trip to Peru to meet this girl I had met in an AOL chatroom. These were the days before Google Translate, video chat, or any kind of safety net, so that kind of random adventure carried with it a ton of dangers and inconveniences that don't exist today.
And I had a blast.
It was one of the most memorable and intense foreign romance adventures I have had in my life, and the memories will be one of those things I will look back on when I am on my deathbed and not have any regrets about. But how to sustain that kind of excitement, those possibilities for adventure and feeling truly alive?
In the flame of my youthful passions I thought moving to New Orleans and staying with a childhood friend would be my big ticket to a new life. Little did I know it led to briefly living with a dangerous ex-con, several days and nights of wandering the Big Easy homeless, and a harrowing trip to the Greyhound station to catch a one-way bus ticket back to the Motor City while looking over my shoulders to see if this crazy roommate were coming to kill me or not.
Meeting Marc
I ended up shacking up with this old friend who spent all his time working at the little coffee shop on the corner of Magazine Street and Louisiana Avenue, trading coffee to bar owners to get in underage and smoking tons of weed in his spare time.
I won't bore you with the details but the other dude he was living with didn't like me for some reason, and he was an angry drunk, so one day he just kicked me out. This neighbor who I will call Marc took me in, and he was only a few houses down so it seemed good.
Marc had a lazy eye, an irresistible confidence, and a heavy New York accent. He sounded like Joe Pesci in Casino, and was the most likable guy in the room, drawing crowds wherever he went, and often getting everything from free drinks to free pizzas just by charming shopowners with his happy-go-lucky New York bravado and wit. But he also had a dark side.
Walking after midnight and gangster philosophy
I'm trying hard to get some sleep on the dirty carpet in the unfurnished room at Marc's little shotgun house but the heat and my fears about just what the hell I was doing here made it impossible to kill the anxiety. Hell, not even after smoking a joint and chasing it with the piss water Heinekens in the fridge could kill my anxiety.
They seemed to put my mind in an even worse place, and I lay there feeling overwhelmed at the immensity of life and just how to get started doing something, anything. It was the fear of indecision, and being too young and rudderless to get off the ground.
The door to the house slams open and I can hear Marc mumbling something and calling my name, his Mafioso dialect slurred under the alcohol and whatever other substance he happened to have taken on one of his nights out on the town womanizing and raising hell.
His dwarflike presence barges into the room and starts wrestling me in a playful bro fashion, and I can smell the alcohol on his breath. He looks at me with his lazy eye and says, "Tonight we are going to learn about fear" and pushes me out into the corridor, grabs his keys, and takes me into the dark streets at 3 a.m.
Now one thing to know about New Orleans is that even back in '01 it was not a safe city by any stretch. It seemed to be set up in a way where one block was relatively safe but if you went two streets down you were asking for trouble. That was everywhere outside the Garden District. Where we lived you might get your car stolen if you turned around, but you wouldn't get robbed just sitting on your porch. But at night - what would the night hold?
He decided to take us down back streets, the kind of places where you would regularly hear gunshots, and it was pitch black. "I'm white and I have $500" he would shout at the top of his lungs in between giving me life lessons in a drunken haze.
One of his most serious lessons was "impose your will on others." He said this in a rare moment of lucidity, staring me down directly with his lazy eye and using his finger to poke me to punctuate the words and the gravity of his message. He was deadly serious.
He said the one thing that he learned in life on the streets of New York was that if you wanted something you had to take it, and you had to impose your will on others. That was his most profound philosophy, and even as a young impressionable kid, I knew it sounded wrong.
A few hookers smoking crack smiled at us during our late-night philosophy walk, the light of their pipes shone like fireflies in the darkness as we sauntered past.
Nothing else happened that night, and as we went back home he turned to me and said that the reason he took me on that walk down those dangerous streets was to help me face my fears and to take control of any situation by using my will.
He said he felt like a father figure to me because I was 10 years his junior at the time, and he was a 29-year-old ex-con with a shadowy past. I thanked him because I was too dazed to want to argue with this guy and went back to my room.
Shit gets real
All of my staying with him was predicated on me being able to pay for my rent which sounds reasonable, but Marc had a way of coming up with reasons why pretty much every penny I brought home had to go to him, so no matter what I was often left with nothing aside from enough money to buy cigarettes and kraft mac and cheese because I still didn't have a job.
Finding meaningful work was not easy. After all, I was a scared kid with a drug problem and dreams but no will to tackle the millions of options in front of me.
I started to grow tired of this, and Marc started to get more combative and more unhinged. His big idea was that he and his friend would go out and burglarize houses, resell the stuff, and save up to buy a hydroponics system so we could start growing weed in the house. None of this sounded right at all even to my late teen drug-addled brain.
The only way I had money was to sell shares of mutual funds and stocks I had, wait for them to hit my Michigan bank account, and then transfer them to an account I had in New Orleans. It was a several business day affair each time, and each time Marc would find out how much I was getting and ask me to cough up all of it.
One day in a fit of rage he actually threatened to tie me up in the bathtub so I couldn't escape, and if I did escape he would find me and kill me and my whole family someday.
It was out of the blue, his true colors coming out in all their ugly glory. He then kicked me out of the house, locked the door, and went to work and I had nowhere to go.
I wandered to the library for a bit because the heat was intense, but then decided "fuck this guy, I need to get my stuff and then I'm leaving", so I caught the bus back to Lousiana Avenue and kicked the door down, breaking the lock in the process and leaving all his stuff ripe for the pickings of every wannabe burglar in the area.
Once inside I calmly loaded my few belongings into a black trash bag and hit the road, wandering the picturesque streets of the city like a bum, homeless at 19. I wasn't broke, but I had to wait a good 3–4 days for my money to come through so there was nothing left to do but live the hobo life for a few days.
Could I have called my family back in Michigan and asked for a motel room to be booked under their name? Of course, but I was too proud to do that, so I decided to see what it was like to sleep on the street and bum it. The only problem was I needed money, so I walked to the dingy little pawn shop I knew of and pawned off my dad's gold ring he gave me for high school graduation, its $900 value was reduced to $55 in cash after a shady appraisal.
I was desperate and flush with cash, and when you have nothing to your name $55 means I could get cigarettes and food for a few days. This was 2001, not 2023, so $55 was more than enough.
To be continued…**