He jokes that he grew up so poor that a trip to McDonald’s meant one burger split five ways, that his parents moved to the projects to save enough money to buy a house right next to the projects, that your first time stealing dinner was a right of passage. But he doesn’t laugh. His brand of stand-up comedy is 100% truth. He doesn’t do it for the laughs but, rather, in the hopes that those that don’t understand will chuckle along instead of pitying him. Better to make people smile than to have them look down on you.

When we walk around the city he reads the graffiti to me like poetry. Lines of paint become memoirs and biographies. “Oh, I didn’t know X was back in town.” “I know how to get up on that roof.” As we walk the Coney Island Boardwalk he undresses the passersby with his eyes. Offering up their stories as a gift to the ocean, the sun, and the tired wooden roller coaster.

It’s his city and I am just an interloper. I could live here for 10 years and he’d still know my own street better than I do, warning me of a crack in the pavement that I always trip over but never knew was there.

He reads me too. He adjusts his hat, crosses his ankle over his knee and asks me why I’m afraid. Afraid to open up, be me, let down this charade of confidence that hides my socially awkward and confused interior. Afraid to admit that the things people most admire about me, openness, transparency, boldness, are just by-products of having no idea how to deal with social situations.

I feel uncomfortable at first, naked on the Q train, but for some reason when he calls me out it makes me like him even more. Like he gets something about me that I do not understand about myself. He calls me a snow bunny and laughs whenever I mention Pilates. Full bodied laughs that fill the space between us. When I was at boarding school, he was trying to make it to his high school graduation. When I was shooting at the range, he was pressing someone for a debt. Where my childhood had levity, his was hard like the park basketball courts he used to play on, grass and dandelions pushing up through the cracks. For me Tupac was a phase, for him it was life.

It didn’t work, and it would be unfair to say that I even really tried. He was willing to fight for it, and me? I just kept on walking along the boardwalk, tripping on a broken nail every few feet.

“I set goals, take control, drink out my own bottle

I make mistakes but learn from every one

And when it’s said and done

I bet this brother be a better one

If I upset you don’t stress

Never forget, that God isn’t finished with me yet” – Tupac Shakur