The dog, just a puppy, a brown mutt with white patches, rolled over and let me pet her belly. Then she darted back over to the guy, so I sat on the steps, hoping the puppy would let me pet her again. We talked about his dog for a minute. I asked why “Sergeant,” and he said, “She keeps me in line.”

   I kept thinking I should’ve just given him a dollar with the cigarette. Seemed rude to hand him one while we were talking, like I’d be interrupting a moment of normalcy to remind him of his circumstances. So I waited until he stood and lifted his backpack.

Then I handed him a dollar. He took the dollar and stuck out his hand as if to shake mine. So we shook. But then he turned my hand over, gently, and placed the dollar in my palm. He said, “You just try to find your way back before it’s too late.”

I said, “I will,” hoping to end this scene.

He didn’t release my hand. His damp eyes bored into mine. And he said, “Listen to me. Don’t wait until you hit the slide.” I thought I knew what he meant. This was getting weird. I wasn’t scared of him. He had a dog. But I wasn’t exactly comfortable holding hands either.

I said, “I will. Really,” with a conviction I was quickly losing.

He shook his head slowly like I was a dumb kid who wasn’t listening. He told me the slide’s when you start looking homeless. “Like me. See this beard? My clothes? The way I smell? You lose too much. You run out of toiletries. Your shoes wear down. Your clothes start looking like shit. Then they won’t even let you into a bathroom to try and clean up. You don’t come back from this.” Then he whistled his dog back over to him and he was gone.

I just stood there a minute and thought, Well, fuck. Then realized I’d said it aloud. I wondered whether, if I’d been someone else, he’d have just thanked me for the dollar, told me things were looking up, projected positivity, the can-do attitude we demand from the poor.

   What scared me is he knew I was homeless. What scared me more is he gave the dollar back. I don’t think I slept at all that night. I’d been trying to think of anything but how close I was to what he called the slide. But he knew how close I was. I refused to give it a name for fear I’d call it something like They Were Right.

One of the less pleasant hang-ups from growing up in a cult—and none are pleasant—is the gnawing thought at the back of your mind that they might’ve been right. Anytime they wanted to scare the shit out of us, they used these stories they called Traumatic Testimonies. They had a whole series of them. The plot was always the same. Someone left the Family, turned his back on God, rejected our prophet, and returned to the System. Bad things happened. He ended up using drugs, marrying a godless woman, rejoining Fleetwood Mac. Either way, the fool who’d left the Family would soon spin into suicidal depression or profound sadness. He’d realize he’d been selfish and proud. And he’d come back to the Family, where all his problems would go away because Jesus still loved him.

I was living the plot of one of those Traumatic Testimonies. Of course the guy who ended up homeless in that story wasn’t homeless anymore once he moved back into a Family home. So I don’t know if he learned his lesson so much as made a desperate decision.

Either way, this was the threat they worded as prophecy—if I left, I’d end up homeless on the streets of New York. Eventually I’d turn to prostitution. They weren’t all that creative. But it stuck. That I couldn’t afford a bus ticket to New York wasn’t much comfort. I’d fucked up my life so completely I was proving them right. And I sure as fuck wasn’t planning on rejoining the Family to complete the cycle.

   The next night, I followed Jay to the bar. No more wandering off alone to talk to weird homeless guys who knew too much. And somehow, we ended up at the one bar that was hiring.

* * *

—

I don’t remember the ad in the Blade. I only remember that Jay and I agreed it seemed “sketchy.” We also agreed that no matter what we found at 444 M Street, we were taking the room. We were out of money, couldn’t even afford the metro from Dupont.

The neighborhood was in fact sketchy, down by what would become the convention center, which back then was just a hole in the ground. The sort of neighborhood you’d head to if you needed a blow job or rock. But I didn’t mind the neighborhood. At least no one in the hood tells you to smile. (Okay, one guy did. He’d just tried to mug me. I say “tried” not because I did a Bourne-style slap-and-grab and turned the gun on him. I don’t know karate. He kept the gun. I told him I had three dollars and was headed to the store to steal tampons if he wanted to hit me on the way back. He stared at me a moment. Then he shoved his gun back into his pocket, grinned, and said, “Smile. You’re white enough, you don’t need a gun.” I smiled. But that was later on.)

   When Carl answered the door in a flowing caftan, the memories of his hair tied in a low ponytail, our suspicions were confirmed. Sketchy. Carl said he was an Episcopalian priest. He asked our birth dates and offered to do our charts, for fifty bucks, a discount. If he’d dreamed bigger, he could’ve been a cult leader. He said I had a good aura, but he said it like he’d just noticed an unpleasant smell in his mustache. I hated him.

The main level of the house was littered with crucifixes but also Shivas and voodoo idols and Buddhas, the skinny Southeast Asian variety, not the fat, grinning Buddha I remembered from Japan. It looked like a fusion church for the insane. There was an English basement he said was off-limits as he padded up the stairs in pink jelly sandals. We later found out the basement held a meth lab. We didn’t recognize the smell then. We’ve never forgotten it.