Many of us can look back on our lives and see the moment when everything changed, for better or worse—that pivotal moment when, if we could go back and make a different choice, our lives would take a completely new direction.
For me, that moment came in the winter of 1984/85, when my four-year hiatus from anything religious suddenly came to an end. My goal after leaving the east coast was to visit Denver then continue westward to California, perhaps San Francisco, where I would be "fresh meat" and live a completely-open gay life and have as much sex as I wanted, with a whole new batch of hot guys that didn't know me from Adam.
Fate, it seemed, had entirely different plans for me, however.
After my harrowing experience escaping the mud and flood waters of the South Platte River, I found myself broke and homeless on the streets of Denver. I lived in my car and various shelters for nearly four months; about two months in, the transmission in my car fell apart, leaving me stranded with no transportation other than the local mass-transit system (i.e., RTD buses)—so much for California! With no income, I could not get my car fixed, much less buy another one, so I parked it on a side-street and walked, and walked, and walked—I probably got more exercise in those first four months than in the preceding four years. After a couple of months parked on a side-street, the city finally towed my car away and I knew I wasn't going anywhere for a long while; that was around December/January '85.
In October, I discovered a business called Ready Men Labor, where one shows up around 5 am hoping to get a job doing manual labor for various local companies. Usually, I'd get $30 to $50 a day, and if I did a good job, the client company would keep me on for a longer period. That, at least, gave me a few dollars for gas (until my car broke down) and food. When that money ran out, there were food lines and meals at shelters.
Interestingly, I didn't look upon this situation as a serious hardship. To me, it was an adventure; I was completely free to do whatever the hell I wanted, answerable to no one but myself. I learned a lot about survival in those few months, and to this day have a very real appreciation and empathy for those in similar situations.
A few weeks after starting at Ready Men Labor, while "cruising" the crowd of nearly-all-male laborers waiting for jobs, I made eye contact with a tall, thin, young man and realized that he was cruising the crowd, too. His name was Richard, and we became close friends almost immediately. He would, unknowingly, be instrumental in altering the course of my life for decades to come...
It occurs to me that you may be wondering how I can remember so much detail nearly 30 years "after the fact." The simplest answer is that I did not do drugs in those days. I was a very smart young man; I'd never smoked cigarettes, had only smoked marijuana once or twice, and read actual books...lots of them. My only vice back then was alcohol (rum and coke, to be precise), but after I left the D.C. area and headed west, cocktails were few and far between for a number of years. Therefore, my brain was able to retain an incredible amount of detail from those days, though in subsequent years my vices expanded to include mind-altering substances, causing short-term, semi-permanent memory loss at various stages of my life since the late '80s.
These days, now that I'm nearly 50 years old, it takes a bit more effort to learn and retain new information, but I look at it as if I'm re-wiring my brain, creating new neural pathways to compensate for the ones I've destroyed over the years. As you will see, there were regular intervals lasting six months to a year during which I stayed away from everything "vile" and focused on the Bible in my efforts to become a Jehovah's Witness, and on my health by working out at a gym or walking a few miles every morning. I am convinced that those intervals are a primary reason I'm still here after living with AIDS for over twenty years. I'm very stubborn, and it has served me well.
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