It was the last thing I expected. I was nineteen, and I had been walking in circles for hours, up and down the streets around Thompkins Square Park trying to panhandle enough change to buy a bus ticket home.
It was a time when nobody had cell phones and you couldn’t just find your friends by sending text messages. You had to take your list of phone numbers out of your wallet, use either your spare change or your calling card, and actually connect with somebody on a telephone. For me, at that time, it was an impossible task. The handful of people I knew in New York either weren't home when I called, or didn’t have a phone I could reach them on because most of them were transient, either squatting vacant buildings or sleeping on the streets.
The allure of that lifestyle, the gutter-punk lifestyle, is what drew me into the position I was in. I had gone down to the city with a few people to find a friend who had fallen back into the grasp of heroin. While there, I spent a few days sleeping on couches and partying in squats. I stood on the edge of a world I romanticized, and felt sure that it was for me.
As I circled the streets of Greenwich Village, one person after another brushed me off and walked passed me until finally, without asking, a middle-aged man with a dirty face and a shaggy beard stepped away from the wall he was leaning against and said, How much do you need, kid?
Then, as I tried to decline, Look, kid, this isn’t for you, all right? I've been watching you roam around here for hours. This just ain't for some people. Look at me. I got a family. They came and found me. They brought me home and I couldn't take it. I left again and came back to this. This is where I belong. This is the life for me.
Once is a series of micro memoirs inspired by a book of the same title in which Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker, uses a combination of photographs and text to reveal what he considers to be the beginnings of untold stories, which he encourages his readers/viewers to complete.
Similarly, I offer these moments of my life to you as if they were not my own, as if they were in no way connected to me, which in many cases they no longer seem to be. I encourage you to consider these moments as beginnings, beginnings of stories or travels that you are free to write, live, or complete as you see fit.
