by Anthony Esperes-Russo

This was my first-time meeting and the first memory I have of my cousin Brian: he is in my room by himself. I look into my room on the way into my mother’s room, and Brian is attempting to steal money out of my sock drawer. He is looking through my drawer openly but trying to do it in a way that doesn’t raise suspicion, smooth as a plumule. I tell my mother, “I think Brian Lee is stealing my money.” My mother gets up from sitting on her bed, goes into my room, and starts yelling at Brian! My mother ended up telling him to leave the house, an order that he obeyed. Brian and my mother were very good friends.

When I lived with Tony, my biological father, Brian and I got in contact via Facebook. Tony was selling crack-cocaine and using it in our house, and I was also using drugs. On Facebook messaging, Brian and I agreed that I should go live with him in Texas.

Carrying a suitcase, a school backpack, and $8,000 in cash from the life insurance my mother had left me when she died, I took a plane from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Austin, Texas. I was eighteen. After my landing, I had to take a Greyhound to another city in Texas. When I got off the bus, I ran to Brian and gave him a hug like a child running to his father. Brian, thirty-five, was about six-foot-two and 180 pounds—big hands, very prominent facial features and very handsome. His usual thick stubble had become a coarse beard, black, like his slicked-back hair.

Before I had left, Brian had told me that he had a place to stay. But that first night, I figured out that was not true. It bothered me at first, but this truth comes naturally in that innuendo of the drug abusing world: nothing is guaranteed, everything is on the line, but oh, so, casually you give your flesh and spirit away to a chaotic design.

We stayed at a Motel 6 our first night together, and Brian bought $400 worth of crystal meth (speed) from the money I gave him. He got it, and I snorted some for the first time. I played Xbox on the motel’s tv for hours.

He said, “I’m surprised, that was a fat line, handling it pretty well.”

As time went on inside the motel, I laid down on the bed, and we talked, and he stood there in front of the hotel tv. The Packers football game was on. Before the game started, I predicted the score, and at the end of the game, the score was exactly how I predicted it. Was that telling? Did I know what was going to happen? Not just the game but some sort of soul-like intuition of my latter days? Did I know exactly what to expect? I knew what I was getting myself into.

I didn’t have a home, just Brian, and this money, and no plans except to be with him. I didn’t think about school, but I knew I’d eventually get there. This was entirely classless.

But in the meantime, we would hang out and walk the streets. If we couldn’t bum a full cigarette off someone, we’d seek and find half-smoked cigarettes in ashtrays. We had nicknames for them and joked that it was “mayonnaise” flavored because sometimes the cigarette filter, depending on the condition of the cigarette, tasted or looked vintage. In the local stores we would get booze, mostly Brian would steal the drinks, and he’d get boxes of wine and tall beer cans like Four Loko and whatever alcohol he could grab and stuff in his jacket. We’d be walking around the city on most nights, walking all day, stealing booze and grabbing cigarettes, or bumming them from people.

We also had this drug dealer, Audrey. In the present she is actually in prison for murder. She was arrested about 10 months after we stopped going to her house. She ended up murdering someone with a shotgun and burning the body in a barrel.

We would walk near five miles to Sixth and Allred where her house was. This is where, for a short period of time, we got our meth. And because of this house and the drugs, I didn’t eat for two weeks except for a few nacho cheese Doritos bought with my meth dealer’s food stamp card. During this occasion, I was walking up the block and noticed my teeth were going to fall out soon, so I grabbed some water, and it helped and prevented that from happening, and it tightened them back up. I could use my tongue to shift my whole top and bottom row of loose teeth from left to right. Just like a kid with a loose tooth, except all of them!

Feeling, walking out the house, light as a feather walking into town.

In a whole nether world, in Texas for me with Brian. Our shadows from the street lights and lights of restaurants and stores helped us to see where we were walking. The bathrooms inside the Starbucks became our showers. We ate cold food from stores—a home-style entrée, except the fast-living, hobo way: cold Fritos cheese dip from the aluminum can, with flour tortillas, chips and cold meat, and tacos. The HEB grocery store held the best nutrients to steal: sushi.

I doctored and prescribed myself pills—poor man’s PCP, considered “garbage drugs” on the streets. By the street sign, I raised pieces of cardboard in my hand, “Anything Helps,” on a busy intersection of a hot Austin, Texas. We slept around with strangers who became our allies. One, in his true form, was a homeless crazy man living under a bridge. We left him to his ramblings about aliens.

While sleeping on the concrete, I got robbed by a man who seemed to be possessed by a demonic spirit, his eyes bloodshot. He threatened to beat me up right as I lay on the ground before I slept. I tried to wake up Brian for help, but he is a deep sleeper. I became fearful of the aggressor and shooed him with Brian’s and my last six dollars. The next day when we were both up, I tried to explain to Brian what happened to our money. We argued and then embarrassed ourselves as we walked across the street with bed sheets and our house in our arms for the public and cars to see.

Our relationship, Brian’s and mine. What did we want? In our minds we were cousins Brian and Tony. I thought he looked cool. Now I looked up to him at eighteen. He was older than me, double my age. “At least we look cool,” I’d say.

“Peace pipe! Let me get a hit of that peace pipe!” We’d chant and sing. He’d drum, sitting outside in the daytime.

On a bench remain the names we used in our graffiti, in the cold concrete world of our sad, sad city, our tag names written sloppily by me in red, “Strive & Crave.” It’s very dark outside, I’m sitting on that bench outside, and I look at our names. To my left, I see Brian’s face. Then he walks into the darkness of midnight as if he has left me so he can be by himself.

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Born in Milwaukee with few advantages, Anthony Esperes-Russo had, by his teens, taken to the streets. After a dark journey, he reemerged in Austin with loving adoptive parents, two younger sisters, a brother, and a dachshund. Tony writes as testimony to breaking free from addiction, so that another may identify and may too find hope in Jesus Christ.