I left home when I was 9

[Author's note: I was asked by a group of grad students at my new job to write up a little piece about myself to put in the upcoming newsletter.  This is what I wrote and handed in.]

I left home when I was 9. Said, “mom, I gotta stretch my wings. Don’t cry for me."

Got on a train and ended up in new york city. By the time I was ten I was running a weed operation out of a small apartment on Ludlow and Houston. Spent a good deal of time at Pianos, this indie club down the street. Kept a dagger close to the vest. Had a multicultural Benetton model crew of dealers. One African-American dude with poofy hair was all soft and sensitive. He got anxious about going out and switchin’ ten dollar bills for dime sacks. So I had to check his ass. One night before he was going to walk into the apt, I got up on the couch (I was still only 4’10), and when he opened the door, I jumped on his ass.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!” he screamed.

I wrestled his ass to the floor.

“Please get off me!!! Please, please, please, AHHHHHHHH!!!” I started pulling his hair, which smelled really good.

I was bumpin Rihanna’s "we found love in a hopeless place" so adrenaline was coursing through my pre-adolescent body like fish oil--my childhood, you will notice, moved around in time, although this song was released in 2011 it was very much part of my 10 year old life--and I kept at it screaming, “Bitch, you better have my money!!!” I pulled the shank on his ass.

“Oh god, Oh my god! Please t-money, don’t hurt me!!!”

I got off of him and regained composure.

“Listen motherfucker, you’re done. Get the fuck out.”

“But t-money, your gifted, I know I’m not the top hustler, but I can learn!” He pleaded.

“No bitch. You’re soft like jelly my mom used to buy. She put it on my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You need to work in retail.”

He started to cry and cry, and then I felt sorry for him and said I had some connections at Tory Burch and I could hook him up. After he cried and I managed my anger back down to a cool breeze, we watched Shrek. He was really happy about the Tory Burch opportunity.

I left the weed game when I was 14 and decided to get myself a proper education. I enrolled at the New York City School of Technology in Brooklyn, studying business. I took an extracurricular class in Women’s Literature and ended up banging the TA. She screamed louder than I’ve anyone heard anyone scream, not just during the big Ooooooos (cause there were many), but the whole motherfuckin time, she was screaming and yelling. It was seriously like some political shit, like I’ma be a woman and get my pleasure and show you neighborhood, Brooklyn, that I am an empowered sexual being. And by god she was. I gave her honey four times that night, and by the end I had to put little balled up pieces of tissue in my ears like I was at a rock concert just to avoid long-term, serious auditory damage from this bitch. But it was still fun.

The next class meeting she was all demure. She even told the professor she could no longer grade my work because of what had transpired although she didn’t mention the yelling. My ears were still ringing.

After I learned some more shit, I said fuck school and just started to read a lot of books. Read this great novel about a college advisor who worked at 17 different universities and came to the conclusion that nobody has a fucking clue what they’re doing. Faculty argue everywhere about the curriculum, no one knows what to teach undergrads or how; graduate students spend 11 years on average in every program; the most prestigious faculty are the worst people; and every year seven new forms are introduced to departments, on average.

So the college advisor left his university and went out on his own. He started an international consulting business. His first client was a school in Saudi Arabia where the male faculty, by law, could not be in the same room as the female students. The male faculty member had to sit in a room all alone in front of a video camera and skype his lectures into a big auditorium filled with female students all watching a big video screen of the male faculty member. And this was at a progressive Saudi school.

The fucked up thing was that there was only one mic for the female students to ask questions of the male teacher. The mic was up front and center in the auditorium. So the most obnoxious chics would sit in front, close to the mic and hog it whenever there was a chance for students to speak, which was rare because it was Saudi Arabia. This advisor made a million dollars for suggesting the school buy a boom mic so anyone could speak and be heard. With the advisor/consultant’s help, they initiated the raising your hand policy. After that consulting job, he got many others, they were all related to college advising.

Reading this novel as a 15 year old changed my life. I went back to the New York School of Technology in Brooklyn and walked down the hallway of one of the Business buildings until I found a graduate advisor. His name was Nick. He had long hair and he wore jeans and black, button-down shirts, not tucked in. Super nice guy. I talked to him for four hours about my plans for opening a new business, about football, he turned out to be a huge Patriots fan and actually loved Tom Brady. I was a huge 49ers fan having grown up watching Joe Montana. I couldn’t really forgive his love of Brady (a douche bag who does not compare to Joe Montana). But he was a great guy, totally chill, said, “no worries man, it’s all gonna work out” multiple times. Loved Simon and Garfunkel. He was from western massachusets, small town full of Portugese immigrants. He himself, Nick, wasn’t Portugese, but he knew a shit load about Portugese culture, all about how they serve small sausages on small plates during Easter. He had a beautiful girlfriend, he showed me her picture on his iPhone. She was portugese, a super successful fashion executive headhunter and rich.

We talked about my childhood and how my mother would never forgive me. Not for leaving when I was 9, but for refusing to tell her I loved her when we talked on the phone, which was frequently. I was too hard. My shell couldn’t condone such a soft soufflé. I told Nick, “I can’t be bothered. My balls are man balls. They are not woman balls. They are made of diamonds, and we both know diamonds are hard as fuck.” Nick thoughtfully agreed, "yes, man balls are diamond balls and they are very hard."

After our discussion, I decided I didn’t want to be a college advisor. And I decided I’d had enough of new york. My weed operation functioned for four years and during that time I saved close to four million dollars. I had money but I didn’t care about in the following manner: my life still needed purpose; I had to take action and do something; I needed to feel like I was giving something to humanity, serving some higher purpose. The money was great because it made everything smooth and if I decided to hop on a plane to Bangladesh and help start the Grameen Bank and microloan the shit out of some poor, country, Bangladeshi bitches, then by god, that’s what I did.

I got off the plane in Dhaka and was greeted by my good friend Ishtiak. I had met Ishtiak at Pianos, tried to sell him some weed, but he wasn’t buying. He had enough cocaine on him to send a small horse, emptied of all its innerds and filled with cocaine, to the promised land. That doesn’t make any sense. He had a backpack full of cocaine.

When I first met him, he was dressed in long white tube socks with two blue circle stripes at the top of the socks, fake Reebok sneakers, short, khaki shorts, a fake navy blue Polo polo shirt, and a black vest. He was balding and couldn’t have been older than 22. And he was like 180 pounds overweight, roughly 280. He looked like supernerd straight off the boat, the cops just laughed as he walked by with 4 kilos of coke in his backpack. Laugh on you coppers. Cue the Strokes, “New York City cops, New York City cops, New York City cops, they ain’t too smmarrt!” The Strokes are amazing. But this fool Ishtiak was the life of the motherfucking party that night. Girls were doing like 9 lines of coke off Ishtiaks fat ass. It was pretty sweet to watch. Ishtiak would wiggle his fat ass and make it hard for the hot chics to snort the coke. Ishtiak and I hit it off like childhood friends meeting in kindergarten and discovering a mutual love of legos.

When I landed in Dhaka, Ishtiak had paid all the authority figures, so instead of going through customs, I learned the custom of having Bangladeshi authorities carry my bags, push through all the beggars and help me into a armored Land Rover.

Ishtiak and I sat in the back and the driver took off at a speed that did not correspond to the amount of space available on the road.  He went from 0 – 90 in six seconds, knifing by goats, small children and huge busses carrying loads of people on the top of the bus. We flew past cattle and baby taxis and authentic rickshaws and I guess there were lanes, but the driver was weaving like it was a basketball drill. I am not easily scared. However, during this jet propulsion entry into the chaos of the Bangladeshi streets, I was momentarily terrified. Ishtiak wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and looked bored. Ishtiak’s driver honked and violently motioned with his hand and people just succumbed to his will and moved. I told myself, “you must not hold this fear as you cannot control this circumstance.” I accepted the chaos and speed and cattle and came to the center of my mortality. I accepted everything, every moment of my life, being borne, to the present moment, to the time I would die, which seemed soon. I accepted it all and understood it as one moment trapped in amber, the entirety of my life, the entirely of time beyond my own birth and death, all one moment trapped in amber.

I let go.

My mind was like water. When we arrived at Ishtiak’s palace (there were columns), I was relaxed.

The next day I had a meeting with Muhammad Yunus. He had just returned from schooling in the States and wanted to go on a walk with me in the country side. Ishtiak had told Yunus about me and my business idea and thought the two of us should meet and walk in the country. So we met and walked in the country. We found that the women were being treated like indentured servants by the village loan sharks. The village loan sharks would lend a village woman enough money to buy a goat, but they would charge an insane amount of interest and the woman, on her own, could never pay it back. I had a light bulb moment and told Yunus, “why don’t we give little bitty loans to these women in groups. Charge them very little interest, do it on a huge scale and see what happens.” Yunus was down. He and I put the wheels in motion. Turns out if you loan a tiny bit of money to a group of women, they buy a goat, they start making money off their goat, they pay you back, and you get the small interest. And if you do this times a billion, you make hellof money. Fortunately, there are HELLOF Bangladeshis. The Grammen bank was borne, which made Yunus and me (and Ishtiak who got a cut) extremely rich. So we enslaved some women from the villages to clean our houses.

Once again I had been victorious, only this time vs. the poorest country in the world, Bangladesh, and now I was super rich. But still the question nagged: what am I meant to do. The question haunted me. By haunted I mean it occasionally interfered with my having a good time.

So I left Ishtiak and Yunus and flew back to California to confront my parents (and check out the "giant ass" art installation some Yale MFA grad had constructed on a freeway in Fresno).

to be continued…

with love,
Anthony

[Author's note: ps - As much as I wanted to, I did not send this to the kind folks in my program.]

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