The summer before I started high school, on the bus home from camp, I lost my CD collection. I had experienced a remarkably privileged childhood. This was the most devastating thing that had ever happened to me. Those albums were my identity. It vanished. Then, the day before high school started, I got dumped. I had spent the summer growing my hair long while cultivating a stoned demeanor and radical politics.
My high school was a preppie cesspool. My girlfriend no longer wished to be with the resident hippie. I marched in the West Indian Day Parade, carrying the banner for a civil rights lawyer who was campaigning for elected office. I got lost, a lanky hippie kid in pre-gentrified Crown Heights, arms loaded with political placards. I sat down in front of a bodega to gather my bearings. A man sat down next to me. He had a flute in his hands, a deep trill in his voice, and a Jamaican flag bandanna tied around his ropy dreadlocks.
He used to be a rich man with his very own truck, he told me, but he gave it all away because Jesus told him toβit was in the Bible! If you will be perfect, go sell what you have, and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me Matthew My fourteen-year-old self decided he was the wisest person I had ever met, quite likely a reincarnation of Jesus.
He told me I had peaceful eyes, and that peaceful eyes were a blessing; after all, Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God Matthew I wanted to be a peacemaker. The lefty lawyer lost the election. At the weepy event that was supposed to be his victory party, I met an older woman.
Almost three years older. She was everything I thought I wanted. She came over to my house. She sat in my open windowsill smoking clove cigarettes.
