Like a fledgling sea turtle released too soon into the wild, at age nineteen I inserted myself into the swift moving currents of diverse humanity in 1980’s New York. Of course at the time I didn’t know this one critical fact – I had been the recipient of inadequate preparation.
Existing in a world quite far from this self-awareness, I thought I was more like Private Hudson in “Aliens,” the ‘original badass,’ strutting and showing off his hardware. It was New York after all, and I was hyper, I slept little because there was so much to do but I had no idea where to begin. My actual training for all this consisted of living as a reluctant mama’s boy in a rundown Art Deco building in Miami Beach, Florida.