“You are American? I speak English. Will you speak to me? My name is Sanjay.” He sticks his hand through the crowd of  children surrounding my camera.

I take Sanjay’s hand. His grip is firm. The sun is hot today, blasting through the perpetual haze of dust and smog hanging low in the air. You can’t open your mouth without tasting it on your tongue. Sanjay wears a hat with a flat brim that looks fresh from the store. He’s also in shorts. Something men in his culture never do. He looks different than the others I’ve met today. Perhaps there is more life in his eyes than most.

“Where are you from in America?” he asks.

“California,” I tell him. “Your English is excellent.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” He speaks slow and deliberate, handling with care every syllable as to not mispronounce a single word. “I am excited to have a conversation with you. I love your language. It can be very… elegant. I have been studying English for years. Ever since I saw an American Tom Cruise movie.”

Even in broken, third-world countries, you cannot escape the television. Men will run cables for hundreds of miles to hang a small screen in the corner of their bamboo and tin roadside tea shack. Men will spend hours standing around, spilling into the street, drinking tea and watching whatever the signal is picking up.

Sanjay tells me Tom Cruise is his favorite American actor. “I watch all Tom Cruise movies. One day I want to… go to Hollywood. I want to be an actor.”

Sanjay would fit right in to LA culture. He’s good looking, strong, and just confident enough to make me immediately like him.

“You’re never going to believe this, Sanjay, but I live in Hollywood.”

He wants to know what it is like. I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s not as pretty as it looks on the big screen.

“I cannot afford to get there. I want to study acting, but there is not a single university in all of Bangladesh where you study acting. So I will study business. I will start my own business.”

“I hate knowing you won’t be able to act. I think everyone should follow their dreams. I don’t want you to give up on becoming an actor.”

“Just pray for me.”

“I will absolutely pray for you.” In a community of Hindus it will be difficult to not exclaim, “Excuse me?” when they ask you to pray to your God instead of theirs.

“Can you tell me what your favorite movie is, Sanjay?”

“Every Tom Cruise movie.”

I laugh. “You know there’s a lot of talk about his personal life in America. Some people don’t like him because of the way he behaves. What do you think about that?”

“I don’t much care about… personal life. I did hear he separated from his daughter. I just like his movies. He’s got a good face. Good hair.” He says he also listens to American singers and wants to know my favorite band.

“Jimmy Eat World.”

“Jimmy? Eat? World? I don’t know them.”

“I didn’t think you would. I don’t think it’s your style, Sanjay. So there are no acting classes or universities in Bangladesh? What about India? Have you considered going over to India and acting in Bollywood films?”

“Shahrukh Khan is my favorite actor. He is my role model. I definitely think I have a shot in Bollywood.”

“Him and Tom Cruise.”

“Of course. Of course.”

Khan is often referred to in the media as the “King Kahn.” He is the “King of Romance” and the “King of Bollywood,” having acted in over 75 films and is currently the most nominated actor in Bollywood of all time.

I want to know what Sanjay needs to get to India so he can pursue acting over there.

“It’s all about money, you know? My parents could not afford. We live here in this community. We want to do other things, but we cannot afford to make our dreams come true.”

This community is a series of narrow alleyways and apartments stacked upon apartments, clotheslines running from building to building. You must push rugs and pants and shirts out of your way as you walk. The ground is littered with trash and urine. Chickens and stray kittens and forgotten children follow you around every corner, begging for food, begging for their picture to be taken. The door to every home is open. The occupants creep outside to confirm that yes, it was a white man that just walked passed their home. The brick and mud beneath my feet is wet even though I’m told it hasn’t rained in Dhaka for months. One block over the buildings stop and open up into a cement courtyard with water pumps and potholes. Naked children sit in red buckets usually filled with Cokes and beers at American barbecues, their mothers pouring water over their heads. A small child, a girl no older than five, walks into the center and pulls her pants down. Here she urinates in the same area her neighbors bathe.

Sanjay’s parents are sweepers. The entire community started out as a community of sweepers. Brought over from India and handed a push broom to clean the impossibly muddy and waste-filled city streets of Dhaka. Even though Sanjay believes he cannot afford to make his dreams come true, his parents dream of only the best for Sanjay and their daughters. Which is why they work seven days a week to support his private coaching lessons in English, reading, and writing. He is able to afford this because of his parents involvement in what he says Food for the Hungry calls a “Savings Group.”

“Food for the Hungry came a few years ago, back when all of us had nothing.”

When Food for the Hungry enters a community, the goal is to leave within 10 years. “If you’re not leaving, you’re doing something wrong,” I was once told by a friend who travels the world working with humanitarian efforts. FH arranges child sponsorship, but they are not child-exclusive. Sponsorship ensures a child’s education which prevents young girls from getting married when they are only thirteen. FH staff walks with these people daily, teaching them how to provide for themselves. Once the community is self-sustaining, FH leaves.

I look around. Anyone in America would consider what these people currently have as “still nothing.” But their neighborhoods are full of storefronts and food and smiling children.

“But now we have much. We have each other.”

It’s as though everyone here in this place was dealt a crap hand in poker, but instead of folding they decided to put all their cards together to see if they could come up with one half-decent hand.

Savings Groups started when someone asked if people in the community could commit to sacrificing a handful of rice once a week. A handful of rice turned into one cent. One cent turned into five. And five into ten. Savings groups are now weekly gatherings of 15 to 20 women. They each collect 10 or 15 taka per week (about five cents), and place the money into a bank account opened up in their names. As their capital grows they have the opportunity to individually invest in things like livestock, opening up a shop, or investing more into their child’s education. They draw out a loan from the Savings Group account, invest, and agree to pay the loan back with a two percent interest.

And because Sanjay’s mother is involved in a savings group where they also learn literacy, law, and proper nutritional values such as vegetables have vitamins, his parents are able to help him pursue his dreams.

“They are devoted to their children continuing their studies,” Sanjay tells me, smiling. “So we don’t have to live the life they came from.”

“You have wonderful parents, Sanjay. Do you know that? I am so glad they believe in you.”

“We are very grateful to you people for sponsoring us,” Sanjay says. “I have been sponsored before.”

“But not anymore?”

“No. I don’t know how this happened. But now I passed primary school. Next I have exams. But there is no sponsor. I lost my sponsor. But it’s no problem.”

“Did it make you angry when you lost your sponsor?”

“I wish I could meet them in person one day. I want to tell them something. I want to thank them for changing my life. And my family’s. Without sponsorship, we would not be having conversation.”

“Sanjay, what is your last name. I don’t want to forget you. Perhaps someone in America will want to continue your sponsorship?”

“My last name? No. It’s okay. You won’t remember my last name. It’s okay. It’s too long.” He looks to the translator who has joined my side. The children spilling out of doorways and climbing atop each other’s shoulders to get a better look at me all laugh when Sanjay turns to them. He takes my hand, grips my shoulder, flashes a killer smile. “You can just call me Sanjay Cruise.”

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Walking into their house is like stepping down into a basement. I leave my shoes behind outside. Cold feet on colder concrete. The neighborhood is a cement compound of alleyways and narrow walls. The interior of the house is no different. Outside chickens peck at our toes. Dinner is cooked over fires on the front steps. Stray dogs slathered in mud and fleas sleep on piles of wet trash. Flies follow us everywhere.

Joti, a sixteen-year-old girl living in the slums of Dhaka welcomes us into her home.

“Joti means ‘Bright,’” our translator, Mizan, informs us.

“It fits you so well,” Lauren tells her.

From outside we enter a kitchen no larger than your average bedroom closet. The doors to these homes are never shut. Neighbors walk in and out without question or invite. We are followed by a small crowd eager to be seen by our cameras, and fascinated with our presence. There is no privacy here. Joti is one of four children and seven people living in a one-room home the size of a Freshman dorm.

We are ushered to the main room (the only room) where two rusted metal chairs have been set up. We are directed to take a seat on the king-sized bed, which takes up three quarters of the room. The mattress is as hard and thin as brick.

I hesitate. What I first mistake for a pile of blankets and pillows is actually an elderly woman made of skin and bones buried beneath an orange quilt. She stirs as we sit. An old coffee tin sits inches from her lips. She coughs wet and deadly the way water sounds escaping your lungs after drowning and being brought back from the brink of the afterlife. Her fingers, the only other part of her body we will see during our time here, creep out from under her chin, pulling the tin close to her mouth to regurgitate whatever her lungs have released.

All seven of them, including the sickly woman next to me, sleep in the same stone bed each night.

Joti takes a seat in one of the chairs. Lauren is to my right. Mizan to my left. Joti’s older brother comes in with a bowl of sliced oranges and water.

We’ve been warned not to drink anything that doesn’t come from a sealed bottle, not to eat fruit that’s been washed. Hepatitis A runs rampant through the pipes. But we’ve been graciously invited into this home. To refuse would be as insulting as walking in with our shoes on. Mizan is kind enough to tell them we’ve just eaten.

“Joti wants to know about your religion,” Mizan says.

“Christian,” I say.

“We love Jesus,” Lauren corrects. The Bangladesh population is 89.5% Muslim, 9.6% Hindu. Religion is engrained into the Bangali culture. It is a cornerstone, a way of life. It would be absurd for them to assume it is any different anywhere else. Because Christianity is a Western Religion, their association of it is left in the hands of Bill Clinton and Brittany Spears.

Joti doesn’t mind. She tells us she is Hindu. She points us to the shrine made up of red statues, bathed in gold light. She asks us to take a picture.

Joti’s day starts with waking up at 6 a.m. seven days a week. She brings water to a boil and bathes her grandmother – the sick woman in bed behind me – with a hot rag. It’s the only way she can get clean. There is no bathroom in this home. Nor in any home within this community. Afterwards, Joti cleans the home, goes to school, returns, and helps her mother prepare dinner. The family ends the night in bed together. They are fortunate enough to have a small television propped up in the corner of the room. Sometimes the reception is good enough to watch a show.

Joti’s mother, Debi, arrives home from work. She does not seem surprised to see us. In fact, she appears quite excited until she discovers we do not have any water, tea, or food before us. She begins apologizing, instructing her son to run to the market.

“She wants you to have some 7UP,” Mizan says.

I try to let her know it’s okay. “We just had tea.” I touch my stomach. “Very full.”

Debi calms herself, sits. The grandmother coughs, spits. I fight the urge to look, to ask if she’s okay.

“So tired,” Debi says. As she speaks, Mizan translates. He tells us she is a “sweeper.” Bangladesh is the size of Wisconsin with a population of over 150 million and counting. That’s half the population of the United States. The streets in Dhaka are littered with debris, dust, piles of dirt and trash and unidentifiable waste. As a sweeper, Debi wakes up five a.m., seven days a week, and is paid 5000 Taka a month to sweep the same street every morning. This amounts to $62.50 a month.

Lauren asks Joti if she works. She shakes her head. Mizan says someone in America sponsors Jodi through the organization Food for the Hungry. As a result, Joti does not have to work. Instead she can focus on going to University and becoming a math teacher. “Debi,” he says, “is forever grateful for this.”

“Is there an age you are not allowed to work in Dhaka?” I ask.

“There is, but it is not respected. Children are willing to work. They are a commodity. The same with marriage. You’re not supposed to be married until you are eighteen, but it is happening. A lot.”

Lauren asks Debi what her hopes are for Joti’s future marriage.

Joti laughs. Her mother smiles, answers.

“Her dream is that her daughter finishes her education before she even thinks about marriage,” Mizan says.

Debi’s oldest daughter was married by the time she was sixteen. “She married my husband’s sister’s son.”

I pause to work this out. “She married her cousin?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Along with a young girl getting married between the ages of 13 and 18, this is also a common practice in Bangladesh. Girls like Joti are not forced to drop out of school to work or marry if they are fortunate enough to be sponsored.

Debi is so proud of what Joti is accomplishing. “Not only that,” she says, “but she is always helping out around the house, cooking, cleaning. She is so smart.”

Lauren asks if there is anything we can do for them. They are living in a generously proportioned prison cell. They know nothing of privacy. Their water isn’t clean. They share a restroom with an entire neighborhood. Joti and Debi live in a county oppressive to women who get married before they even get a shot at an education. Their needs are endless. What can we possibly do? Teach them English, fly them to America, build them a white picket fence?

When Debi answers, Mizan looks at us. “What does she want?” I ask. “She wants you to pray,” he says.

“She wants us to pray? For what?”

“Please pray for her,” Mizan says, pointing to the sick woman behind us. Her name is Roma. She is Joti’s grandmother on her father’s side. “Roma is quite old. She has many health complications.”

“Okay. Yeah. We can do that.” Debi smiles as Mizan translates. She closes her eyes. We enjoy an awkward silence.

“Wait. Pray now?”

“Yes. She wants you to pray here. Now.”

“So we are going to bow our heads, and, uh, just pray? Right here? Is that okay?” Hinduism doesn’t pray to just one God. They pray to millions. I don’t want to offend anyone by praying to the wrong God, let alone offend the wrong God.

“Yes. She wants you to pray to your Christian God.”

So we bow our heads. And we pray. We pray for a miracle. We pray for God, a physician greater than any here on Earth, to heal this stranger on a literal deathbed. We pray for his will to be done. We thank him for his endless grace and mercy. We love him. We love Joti. And Roma. And Debi. And we are floored to be Christians invited into the home of Hindus and asked to pray not to their Gods for healing, but to ours.

you can join me in sponsoring a child right here

We pull into the garage. My wife admires the pile of shiny, mismatched objects scattered about the street corner across from our apartment.

She asks if it’s a yard sale or trash.

I shrug. I suggest a sale.

It’s raining today in L.A.

“Why would someone choose such a terrible corner to have a sale?” she wants to know. “There’s never any foot traffic over here. Who does it belong to?”

A short, older woman dressed in slippers, jacket, and a wool hat paces the corner, hands in pockets. A small dog follows her path, loyal, huddling close to her ankles whenever she stops.

It’s raining the only way it ever rains in L.A. Like a leaky faucet. The faucet’s not really on, but it won’t shut off either.

My wife crosses the street.

“Of course you’re going to check it out.” I trail behind.

The woman smiles at us. She points out picture frames, oil paintings, dancing santas, and a brand new pair of rip-off Doc Martens made by Sketchers.

“Shoe. Brand new.” She smiles. “Thirty.”

My wife holds up two necklaces. “How much?”

“I don’t speak English well,” the woman informs us. She digs into her purse and pulls out a yellow pad of paper. She writes in crooked numbers: 10$

I hand her a twenty. I ask her name.

“Flora,” she says.

“Flora. My name is Max. This is my wife, Lauren. It’s good to meet you. Where are you from?”

“Romania”

“How long have you been in America?”

She doesn’t understand. I hold my arms out wide as if I am going to give her a hug. I put my foot down and point to it. “America. How long?” I default, as one tends to do, to speaking slow and loud as if it will help her understand me better.

“Oh! Four years.”

“Four years. What brought you here?” I’m shouting now. Lauren tells me to lower my voice.

“My son. John.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Yes, yes! Over there.” She points to the building across the street from ours. I tell her I live right here, pointing to the building behind us.

“Neighbors!” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Neighbors.”

Flora lives in Romania with her two sons. Her youngest, John, moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and modeling. A lucky gig as a background actor in a commercial leads to other commercials and magazine ads. In two days, John is going to sign a contract with a major talent agency. He is also about to become a citizen of the United States. Then a car runs a red light at an intersection in Hollywood, and slams into the driver’s side of John’s new BMW. His car spins three times before hitting a building, and like a wicked game of human pinball, hits a tree, a telephone pole, and finally lands in a ditch on the side of the road.

Flora shows us pictures of the car. It’s an unrecognizable twisted hunk of metal. I look at John who has now joined us outside, his upper and lower extremities marvelously intact. Only God knows why he wasn’t removed from this car in pieces. John slides up the sleeves of his windbreaker, showing Lauren and I the deep vertical scars crawling up the entire length of his forearm as if a mad scientist from a horror film had crudely cut him open then carelessly stapled him back together for kicks. He has matching scars on his legs and around his neck.

“And down my back,” he says.

John spends thirty days in a coma. When he finally opens his eyes, the doctors repeatedly tell him he shouldn’t be alive. In fact, they try to talk his mother out of coming to America. “He’s not going to make it,” they say.

But as mothers tend to do when it comes to someone else suggesting what is best for their children, be it medical professionals, the law, or (God help them) another parent, Flora ignores their advice and miraculously has a visa within forty-eight hours after the accident.

“This is first miracle,” she says. Flora had been trying to find her way to America for years, but both U.S. and Romanian politics kept her abroad. “God needed me here.”

When John wakes up, two things are different: he cannot cry, nor can he remember anything after the accident.

John doesn’t know the exact reason why he no longer can cry. Perhaps he cannot remember to stay sad. Or it’s possible the extensive damage to his brain altered specific nerve endings, the ones enabling us to shed tears. What John does know is that he has anterograde amnesia. This means he cannot make new memories. Every two minutes his brain relapses to a life before the accident. He knows enough to eat each day, knows when he is full, or when he is tired. He knows to take the dog out, and recognizes his craving for nicotine. He remembers how to drive, but will forget where he is going. He won’t remember if he took a shower this morning. He can retain faces if he sees them enough, but two minutes into any conversation John will kindly ask, “Please remind me what we were talking about.” He chuckles with embarrassment while repeatedly apologizing for the inconvenience. He knows it slows everything down.

“Will you remember us if we see you tomorrow?” I ask.

John looks at Lauren and smiles. “I might remember her.” Then to me, “You, not so much.”

Flora is selling everything. After the medical bills, visas, travel, and life expenses, they are broke. John hasn’t been able to work since the accident for obvious reasons. He laughs, smiles, and speaks English very well; he’s charming and full of energy, but at any job he will remain in a perpetual state of training. The accident and his condition restarted his application process to become a citizen of the United States. This is both an exhausting and expensive process. One his family cannot afford. The government allocates them only $187 a month. They have already been evicted once, and are about to be evicted again. Their current landlord, aware of John’s unique situation, has been gracious enough to give John and Flora an extension on rent. They still owe $800 for December. On February 1^st they will owe $1000 for January and so on. This is why John and Flora are sitting on the side of the road on a rainy winter day in LA in a neighborhood with little traffic, trying to sell whatever they have to keep a roof over their heads and dinner on the table.

“Where will you go if you cannot pay rent?” I ask.

“To the park,” says John.

“The park? You’re going to sleep in the park?”

He laughs. “Yes. Nowhere else to go.”

I look at Flora. She’s old. She can barely walk. She won’t last a night outside. But John, Lauren, and myself all know she will never leave her son’s side. Even if it means sleeping next to him on a park bench.

Lauren and I discuss giving them the $800 to hold off their landlord, but we both know this is only a temporary solution. They still need to come up with January’s rent. They still need to come up with a plan.

It starts with a phone call to a friend. “You’re never going to believe who we just met. A man who cannot make new memories…Yes…Exactly… Just like that guy from Memento…He was outside on our street with his mother…Selling everything to make rent…Yes…We want to help them…I don’t know…You can help too?”

Once we’ve contacted our immediate friends in Los Angeles, we tell Twitter. Then Facebook. Within a few hours we have the $800 John and Flora have spent the last two months trying to earn.

Two days later we knock on their door. John and Flora’s apartment is uncomfortable. It’s small, but that could be from the amount of boxes and belongings scattered about, piled high. The random objects from their weekly yard sales overtaking the countertops, the sofa, and bordering the perimeter.

“Our landlord is on his way over today. With the lawyer,” John says.

Flora says something in Romanian. John laughs. “With the ‘liar,’” he translates.

We show Flora and John the list of friends and strangers from around the world that want to help them out. “These people here, we told them about your situation. We know less than half of them. Some are from Romania. Some from Australia. Everywhere.”

She smiles and nods. She thinks we have come to give her groceries, a couple extra dollars. I show her the envelope filled with hundred dollar bills. “There is twenty-three hundred dollars in here.”

Flora begins to cry.

“This isn’t just from us. We didn’t do this,” I tell her. “God did. These people did.”

Flora continues to speak in Romanian. John keeps telling us how amazing we are.

Flora uses her son to translate for us. “You are angels,” she says, John says.

“We aren’t angels,” Lauren says. “It’s all the people on this list who are the angels.”

John’s upper lip quivers. His eyes look wet. “I can’t cry,” he thinks he’s telling me for the first time. “Because of my accident. I can’t cry. But I have tears in my eyes. I have tears in my eyes. Can you believe it? I have tears. We are so happy. The landlord is coming over soon to kick us out.”

Flora hasn’t stopped talking. John wipes at his eyes. “She says she is going to pray for every person on this list. Day and night. Every single say. And her priest in Romania. He is going to pray too. She wants everyone on this list to know that God is going to give them one hundred times more in return for what they did here today.”

Flora hugs the list of names like they are her own children. She clutches the tiny piece of paper close to her chest, her eyes shut tight, shaking her head, a smile on her face. She says, “God through us works.” She kisses each of us on the cheek. She’s on the tips of her toes and I still have to bend down so she can reach my face.

She points to her ears, her fingers, her neck. “I had to sell everything. All my gold from Russia.”

Flora loves Romania. Her husband is back home where he owns a farm. “Things are easier there,” she says. But Flora refuses to leave America until she knows her son is okay.

“The treasure is not here on earth,” she says. “it is in heaven.

With one tweet we collected John and Flora’s rent money through donations from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers. Today I learned not only are John and Flora my neighbors, but every single individual who gave without question, donated groceries, and prayed relentlessly. You are my neighbor. And I am yours.

hollywood, ca

Dressed in a faded, wool top hat and crocs, Mac Nolte drags a shopping cart with crooked wheels across uneven Hollywood roads. The cans and bottles he’s spent the night collecting bang and rattle over the gravel and against the cart’s wire frame.

The sun is nearly useless this time of year in southern California. There is no refuge from the cold once it sets. Walking home, Mac and I pass each other on the sidewalk. He turns, smiles.

I nod and understand that while I am done for the day, Mac’s work is far from over. It’s not uncommon in Los Angeles to see shopping carts piled high with cans, bottles, and bags, all headed to the local recycling center for change on the pound.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“Yeah. Yeah I am. How’d you know?”

“Anyone digging through the trash for bottles at 9 pm on a winter night in LA probably isn’t trying to save the planet.”

I get Mac a turkey sandwich, some string cheese, and a Snickers.

He thanks me, tells me I’ve made his night.

“Well, my name is Max. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Max? No shit. My name is Mac. Max and Mac.”

“We could be partners in crime,” I say. I ask Mac where he is headed. Tonight, we’re going the same direction.

Mac arrived in Los Angeles thirty-seven years ago, and made a name for himself as an entertainment photographer. He grew up in Mississippi where he says he learned to survive. “It was a time where if you looked at a white girl, you were hung. And to all the white people you said, ‘Ya’Sir.’” Mac was born an artist. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from a very early age, but his family was poor. If he wanted to go to school, he was going to have to pay for it all on his own.

As soon as Mac was old enough, he left Mississippi for Baton Rouge, Louisiana to work on a cherry farm. While there, he enrolled in an all black school. “After I jumped on the cherry farm bus, I worked for the Jolly Green Giant. You know the Jolly Green Giant. They do corn and peas.”

But Mac didn’t want to put corn and peas in a can for the rest of his life. He wanted to go to art school. So he hitched his way to Milwaukee. “I had a cousin there who put me up. At my school in Baton Rouge, I had a teacher in the ninth and tenth grade that encouraged me to never give up on my dream to be a photographer. So I stayed in Milwaukee with my cousin and worked all day, every day, until I finally had enough money for college.”

After graduation, Mac hitched his way to Los Angeles.

“One guy that helped me in the photo world was Lester Sloan. He was the only black photographer working for Newsweek magazine.”

Sloan was hired by Newsweek’s Los Angeles bureau in 1970. In 1975 he was awarded a Niemen Fellowship to study at Harvard University. After completing his studies at Harvard, Sloan returned to LA and worked as a photographer until 1996. Today he is a visiting professor of photojournalism at Savannah State University and contributing essayist to NPR’s Weekend Edition.

“Man, you were trained by the best.”

“That’s right. I just met a lot of people. I was with a guy, this particular guy, this guy was struggling and starving. This was Johnny Depp. Do you know Johnny Depp? I used to shoot the band Rock City Angeles. This was when Johnny Depp wanted to be a musician at that time before he landed a role on, on, on that show. That show 21 Jump Street. You see he met Nick Cave, and Nick Cave sent him to his agent and the agent signed him, and, well, the rest with Mr. Depp is history.”

When we arrive at my house, I ask Mac where he is sleeping tonight.

“I have a studio up on Wilcox.”

“Like an apartment?”

“Like an office. I can’t afford a real apartment so I sleep where I work. I don’t have a bed though. I don’t want anyone to know that I live there.” Mac tells me he sleeps on a mat. “You just roll it up and you got space.”

“Isn’t the uncomfortable? You might as well be sleeping on the floor.”

“Oh man, nawww, it’s okay. I’ve been doing this for twenty years now. I took Judo all throughout my life, and the key thing there is that your mat means a lot. So when I sleep, I sleep on that, then I roll it up and file it away. No need for a bed. Bed takes up too much space.”

“You’re out here recycling. Why are you collecting cans?”

“Well, I need extra cash. I’m trying to take a class at Pasadena City College. And that’s two credits. And that’s about $120, you see? I signed up. But I only got three days to pay. So. I’m trying to get $120 in three days. It’s a poster and silk-screening class. I want to start silk-screening.”

“Is that what you do at your shop?”

“Yeah. I make t-shirts and sell photography. I put stuff in the window. Occasionally, I have a yard sale. I can’t afford a city permit to sell. I live in a storefront. It’s all I can afford to rent. But I want to get better at making shirts. I can’t get better unless I take this class. And to take this class, I need exactly one hundred and twenty dollars.”

“How much do these cans go for?”

“Well last night I cashed in and made fifty-three bucks. I’m gonna run this here cart till about one a.m. this evening. Then I will do a yard sale of my shirts and prints and hustle up that money so I can take this class.”

“Mac, what if I could give you that money?”

Mac looks at me like he’s just realized he’s made a terrible mistake. Like he shouldn’t be speaking with me at all.

“Mac?”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

“Maaaannnn. You would be like a mother fucking dream!”

Mac asks what I do for a living. He wants to know how I can afford to give him such an enormous sum of money. I tell him I know it isn’t much. I wish I could give him more, but I don’t have a lot. I just can’t stand to see someone digging through the trash to pay their bills. “I’m just a writer.”

“A writer!? Oh man. I can’t believe it. I respect writers to the top. TO THE TOP. You are coming up with something that never existed. Come on, man. It’s not there. But you see it. And you make it real. A good artist makes things tangible. Man. I respect you.”

Mac says he used to be friends with a writer named Marilyn Ferguson. An author most recognized for her work The Aquarin Conspiracy. I decide to believe Mac’s stories about Johnny Depp and Lester Sloan. If you’re trying to drop celebrity names, why on earth would you tell me you were friends with such an obscure writer? I have no idea who Marilyn Ferguson is until I look her up later that evening. Mac and Marilyn met when he was getting ready to move eight years ago. Divorced and with an estranged son, Mac held a yard sale. Marilyn stopped by, asked is he was moving, and told him she had a small place she was trying to rent. He ought to come by and check it out.

Mac lived in her place until 2008 when she died of a heart attack. He lost a best friend. Without knowing where to turn or what to do next, Mac now sleeps in a storefront window in Hollywood on a Judo mat.

“What about your ex wife or son? Could you ever reach out to them.”

“Man. This is America. You’re alone here. My son, though, he is a computer expert and a policeman.” Mac pauses, looks down. “I don’t talk to him much. Maybe every two or three months.”

“That’s okay, Mac. Sometimes I go a month or two without talking to my dad too.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s just the way of things between fathers and sons.”

When Mac and I part ways, him needing to finish the night’s work and my needing to rest before the next day’s work begins, I hand my new friend the money for his class. I tell him to use it for whatever he needs. Food. Beer. Rent. But he insists on telling me the money is going right to that class. He thanks me, says I am an angel and it’s been an honor to meet me. He wants to hang out again, and asks me to stop by the shop sometime so he can give me a couple of t-shirts.

“No, Mac. I’m no angel.” I ask him if he believes in God.

“If I don’t,” he says, “I’d better fucking start tonight.”

copyright 2013 by Max Andrew Dubinsky, All Rights Reserved

hollywood, ca.

“Can you spare any change?”

We think to keep going. He has a cane. He isn’t looking in any particular direction. I know he’s blind.

But he also knows we’re there.

I hang back, watching the customers exiting the market doing exactly as I did. Pretending he isn’t there.

I step forward and place whatever cash I have in the tin camping mug he holds.

“God bless you. Thank you.”

They say being blind improves the rest of your senses. Does he smell my wife and I? Can he simply feel that I am near?

“You’re welcome,” I say. “What’s your name?”

“Booker. Booker T.”

“Booker T., my name is Max. This is my wife, Lauren.”

“Lovely to meet you both.”

“Booker T., do you mind if I ask whether or not you can see anything?”

“Nope. I don’t mind at all. Completely blind, sir.”

I shift side to side. I have only one eye to watch. Booker’s left eye is twice the size of his right. It’s swollen, blue and white, and bulging out of his face like a cartoon character being squeezed too hard.

“How do you survive on the streets as a blind man?”

“Oh. Well. I have an apartment on 18^th Street. I’m out here because my last check of the year isn’t coming in and I need to make sure my wife has food to eat. You know it’s the holidays. I will do whatever it takes to make sure she doesn’t live on the streets. So here I am.” Booker talks like an airplane propeller spins.

“What do you do for a living, Booker?”

“I make music. I once played drums with Stevie Wonder. Can you believe that? Man, that was my dream. Now I record at home. Sometimes I play at church. Drums are my passion. I play with anyone who asks.”

“Stevie Wonder? That’s incredible. Were you born blind, Booker?

“I’ve been blind since I was seventeen, sir.”

“What happened?”

“I used to street race when I was a teenager. I was in Miami. Miami, Florida. That’s where I am from. I won a race, started driving with my knees so I could roll a joint and celebrate. I was one cocky son-of-a-bitch, you know. Doing my thing. Five months later I woke up in a hospital.”

Booker grew up street racing. He was the best and he wasn’t humble about it. He always wanted to play drums, had a secret passion for it, but racing he was good at. Too good. The last time he will ever get behind the wheel of the car, Booker decides to drive with his knees doing 120 mph after winning a race so he can roll a joint. The last thing he will remember from that night is seeing the telephone pole that will shred his car to scrap metal and permanently disfigure him. The paramedics find him in the trunk when they arrive. He is pronounced brain dead at the hospital where he slips into a coma. The doctors suggest he be taken off life support. His organs are needed. But his father insists they keep his son alive, and he spends his entire life savings to keep Booker on life support. This goes on for five months until one weekend morning in April, Booker just opens his eyes like he’s only been taking a nap. Confused, his brain feeling as though it’s been plucked from his head and dropped into a swamp, Booker asks what day it is. He can’t see anything. In fact, he’s not even sure his eyes are open. But he is alive. That much he knows. He will never regain his vision, and will walk with a cane for the rest of his life. But he is alive.

“I thank God every day for being so kind to me. He had a reason to keep me around.”

“When did you start playing drums?” I ask.

“I played drums since I was a kid. But I took it up as my passion after I lost my sight.”

Booker moved to LA to pursue music where he would eventually share the stage with some of the cities greatest musicians and meet his wife who will be by later to pick him up. I hold out my hand for Booker to shake, forgetting already about his visual impairment.

“Do you mind if I shake your hand?”

“No, not at all.”

His grip is firm, kind.

I inspect the contents of Booker’s camping mug.

“Looks like there’s twenty-three dollars in that cup, just so you know.” I wonder how often a blind man begging for change is taken advantage of.

“Well I’ll be damned.” He smiles. “It’s been a good night.”

Twenty-three dollars isn’t going to pay his rent. It’s not like someone wrote him a check for a thousand dollars. Twenty-three dollars is nothing. It’s no money at all. It’s cat food and toilet paper. Yet twenty-three dollars is also a good night.

When I pull out from my parking spot, Booker is gone. The space he had been standing in only seconds before is now vacant. There is no sign of him or his belongings.

“Where did he go?” I ask Lauren. “The man was blind, needed a walking stick to get around. Did his wife pick him up already?”

“Maybe he went into the store to get food and stay warm.”

“Yeah,” I agree, leaning over the steering wheel, doing a slow crawl to see through the automatic doors and down the aisles beyond. The store appears to be as empty as the spot where Booker had just stood. “Yeah, Maybe.”