Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 59

“It started with a heavy chest. Then I began to have a fever...

“It started with a heavy chest.  Then I began to have a fever and dry cough.  They’re doing car tests in Minnesota, but I didn’t have a car.  So I ended up walking to the ER.  They put me in isolation.  I wasn’t even allowed to use the restroom so I had to pee in a bucket  Then they tested me and sent me home.  I’ve been waiting on the results for days.  There hasn’t been much to do, so naturally I’ve been scrolling through Grindr.  A couple days ago this older guy sent me a message.  My profile name is ‘Bernie2020,’ so he says: ‘Hi Bernie.’  I explained that I’d just been tested.  And he tells me that he’s a retired doctor.  He starts asking about my symptoms.  He wants to know if he can bring me anything since my family lives out of state.  And this whole time he’s calling me ‘Bernie,’ but I don’t have the heart to correct him.  I wanted to test to see if he was a real doctor, so I took a picture of my hand and asked him to identify my congenital birth defect.  He nailed it in less time than he could possibly google it, so I figured he was legit.  And who’s going to kidnap a person with coronavirus?  So I gave him my address.  The next day he shows up with a perfect little portion of salmon, asparagus, four pears, and some very expensive looking granola bars.  We barely spoke.  He seemed more nervous than I did.  He just dropped it on the steps, walked quickly back to his car, and said: ‘Good luck, Bernie.’”  
#quarantinestories

“We all have her smile. And her nose too, but we’re prouder of...

“We all have her smile.  And her nose too, but we’re prouder of the smile.  She was so giving.  She used to make everyone cakes.  Lots and lots of cakes.  All throughout our childhood, we had these amazing, handcrafted cakes: trains, ships, castles, dolls.  Kshiteeja got a stethoscope cake when she was accepted into medical school.  Deepshikha got a camera cake because she loves photography.  And I love reading, so I got a book cake.  Even our extended family got cakes for every birthday.  Mom held our whole family together.  But depression was in her blood.  Even during her darkest periods, she’d be thinking of us.  Her constant thought was always: ‘I’m bothering you, I’m bothering you.’  She hated that we were taking care of her.  So we think, in her mind, that even her final act was an act of giving.  It’s been five years now.  After her death, we made a rule.  If anyone has a feeling, we have to talk about it.  Even our dad.  And the rest of us have to listen.  It’s made us much closer.  We talk about her a lot, especially when we’re eating.  I make the cakes now.  I’m not as much of an artist.  I don’t have the same aesthetic.  But Deepshikha just had a birthday, so I made her a chocolate tart, with a layer of cookie butter, a layer of chocolate pudding, and topped with raspberries, hazelnuts, and edible flowers.  When she tasted it, she gave me my favorite compliment.  She said: ‘Mom would have been so proud.’”
(Bombay, India)
#quarantinestories

“I had very little direction in life. I was twenty-four. I...

“I had very little direction in life.  I was twenty-four.  I knew I wanted to be an actress, but I couldn’t see a path.  Even though I’d been accepted to a drama school in New York, I didn’t have enough money.  I was living on a street in Liverpool where everything had been boarded up.  I was so desperate that I decided to put a classified ad in a magazine called ‘The Private Eye.’  Oh God, I was so naïve.  The advertisement said: ‘Talented young actress desperately seeks funding to go to drama school.  Happy to meet.’  Every pervert in the city called me.  One guy offered 30,000 pounds to ‘do whatever he wanted’ for a weekend.  Another wanted ‘discipline sessions,’ which I had to Google.  When I explained I wasn’t offering sex, people would shout at me on the phone. They told me that nobody would give me something for nothing.  I felt stupid for even trying.  After a few days the phone went quiet.  Then one afternoon I got a call from a man with a very strong Irish accent.  I could barely understand him.  He told me that he’d never bought that magazine before.  And that it all felt very strange–  but he wanted to meet me for lunch.  And that’s how I met Edmund.  He listened to my dreams, and my goals, and at the end of the lunch, he agreed to pay for everything.  Edmund has been my biggest supporter ever since.  He’s helped me fund a short film.  Right now he’s helping me produce a documentary.  And he’s never asked for anything.  Nothing, ever.  He never crossed a single line.  Edmund was very successful in life.  And he always dreamed of having a big family.  But he and his wife were never able to have their own children.  So he sees me a bit like his daughter.  He’s amazing.”
#quarantinestories

“My mom didn’t want to be pregnant. She was young. She wasn’t...

“My mom didn’t want to be pregnant.  She was young.  She wasn’t in a serious relationship.  And she never even wanted kids, so needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled.  I think Mr. Duck was her way of ‘being ok’ with the pregnancy.  It was the first gift she ever bought me, and she gave it to me when I was born.  I took Mr. Duck everywhere as a child: breakfast, lunch, dinner.  I gave him baths.  I told him all my stories and all my problems.  He was my best friend.  At one point we were staying at a hotel, because our living situation was up in the air.  And when I came home from school, our room had been cleaned, and Mr. Duck was gone.  I tore the room apart.  The hotel staff searched everywhere.  My mom even tried to go to the landfill, but the city wouldn’t let her.  Mr. Duck was gone.  Forever.  The years went by.  I stopped thinking about him.  But my Mom remained heartbroken.  She couldn’t even watch Toy Story.  Then three years ago, I’m sitting in a café, and I get a call from her.  She tells me: ‘I think I found Mr. Duck.’  Apparently for years my mom had been googling: ‘Terry Cloth Duck With Overalls.’  And she finally found a match.  But there was only one way to know for sure.  Mr. Duck had stitches in his head because of a hair dryer injury.  That would be our proof.  My mom ordered him from the website, and we agreed to meet at a restaurant to open the package.  We delayed the moment for as long as possible.  We tried to make small talk.  I braced myself for disappointment.  But finally we opened the package, and pulled him out, and I ran my fingers across his head.  Stitches!  After all these years, Mr. Duck had come home.”  
#quarantinestories

Today in microfashion…

Today in microfashion…

“I was swimming at a waterfall when I was thirteen years old,...

“I was swimming at a waterfall when I was thirteen years old, and I saw the half-naked body of an older man.  It was very attractive to me.  So I’ve had these feelings for a long time, but I’ve kept them hidden.  Homosexuality is illegal in Sri Lanka.  It’s looked down upon.  It’s seen as low class, mentally sick.  You will be an outcast in society.  It wasn’t something I could pursue, so I had no choice but to get married.  My family kept saying: ‘You have a nice job.  A nice house.  Everyone else your age is married, so now is the time.’  My wife is a very nice lady.  I’ve known her since childhood.  We have three children now.  But I’ve had to keep myself hidden.  I’d still meet with men during our marriage.  There were places I could go.  But it was dangerous.  One time the police found me holding hands with a man on the beach.  They took us to the station.  They beat us.  They threatened to tell my family unless I gave them money.  I paid them off and escaped.  But a few months later, a man came to my house and threatened me.  He said: ‘I know who you are.’  So I decided to leave.  My family knows that I’m here.  I talk with them on the phone everyday. But they think I’m in New York because of my job.  They don’t know the real reason, that people are trying to blackmail me.”

“I woke up with a gasp in the back of an ambulance. They’d shot...

“I woke up with a gasp in the back of an ambulance.  They’d shot adrenaline directly into my heart.  Apparently I’d been dead for 2.5 minutes.  The EMT’s were freaking out.  My chest hurt from the electric paddles.  And I was already in acute withdrawal.  At the time, it had been nearly twenty years of addiction.  I weighed 128 pounds, and I’m a six foot tall man. There comes a point when you’re given the gift of desperation.  And that was it for me.  Today is my 160th day clean.  I’ve never gone this far before.  One of the first things I did after getting sober was write my son a letter.  He was raised by my parents.  I told him: ‘You did nothing wrong.  I was an addict.  I loved heroin more than you, more than your mother, more than my own mother.’  And he’s forgiven me.  He’s a good hearted kid.  I think more than anything he just wants his dad back.  He came to visit me in November.  It was the first time I’ve seen him in seven years.  He’s become my biggest advocate.  He knows my day count.  He texts me every day for a feelings check.  He’s become my biggest motivation.  I just don’t want my legacy to be ‘dope fiend.’  That can’t be what’s on my headstone.  That can’t be how he remembers me.  I don’t want my kids telling their kids: ‘Your grandfather was a heroin addict.’  I want them to brag about my sobriety.  I want them to say: ‘That’s something he was, but he beat it.’”

“I just want to live under the same roof with my son and his...

“I just want to live under the same roof with my son and his mom.  We’re living apart right now while I look for a place we can afford.  But it’s been over two years now.  It’s hard on our relationship.  I hardly ever get to see my son.  I work at the post office.  That’s the ‘US Government.’  You think I’d be able to find a place for us to live.  But you go to a handful of apartments, and you realize it’s all the same.  They want credit this.  Background that.  But that’s not even the issue for me.  It’s the rent.  They expect your salary to be ten times the price of rent.  It’s like c’mon, man.  Only a certain class of people can afford that.  You’re telling me who you want.  And it’s not me.  I tried to go the affordable housing route.  But that’s a ‘wait list’ situation.  I got one call back in three years, and I made $300 too much.  So apparently you have to be dead poor or incredibly rich to find an apartment.  We even thought about going the shelter route.  Just go all the way under.  Just to be together.  But I didn’t want to risk it.  It’s not safe enough for my son.  So I just throw up my hands.  It’s hard to know where to point the finger.  It’s on me, I guess.  I’ve got to figure out how to make as much as possible to provide the bare necessities.  But I’ve tried everything in my power.  I’m not sure what else to do.”

“We felt like there was a big change that was going to happen....

“We felt like there was a big change that was going to happen.  I was a student at Berkeley.  It was 1968.  All of us thought: if only people could just sing and dance, and not get so caught up in the idea of being an ‘organization man.’  We had plenty of brilliant theoreticians to buoy our point of view. They gave us tools to talk about our ideas.  But there was an arrogance there too.  We really thought we were going to enlighten those poor suckers, the older generation who went to the office everyday, and didn’t understand the world.  We were going to fix them.  We were going to save America from it’s greed.  But greed was never an American condition.  It’s a human condition.  This ‘give me,’ this grasping.  You see it in babies.  You see it in old people.  It’s who we are.  It’s us.  You can moderate it, but you’ll never fix it.  And a lot of us ‘sixties kids’ got depressed when we finally realized this.  We turned to drinking and smoking dope.  I started down that path myself, until I found a wonderful job working with senior citizens in Pennsylvania.  These were railway workers, conservatives,  people I’d always seen as part of the problem.  But they were absolute sweethearts.  I loved spending time with them.  That job is what saved me.  As a student, I’d only understood ‘work’ as part of a theoretical framework.  Something society forced upon the underclass.  But work is what gave me purpose.  It connected me with people.  It freed me from theory.”

“We used to go to KFC all the time when I was a kid. My mom...

“We used to go to KFC all the time when I was a kid.  My mom would take us every Friday.  It was a bit of a tradition.  I remember one time my brother and I were being indecisive, so it took us few minutes to decide what to order.  I think I got the kids meal or something.  But there was a black lady behind the register, and she started giving us all this extra stuff.  She was filling large containers with mac and cheese, and potatoes, and mouthing: ‘Do you want this?  Do you want this?’  I was only ten years old, so of course I said yes.  We left with enough to feed an entire family.  The lady didn’t make us pay for any of it.  Afterwards she followed us out to the car, and said to my mom:  ‘As one black mother to another, I understand.’  I guess she saw us as a struggling black family.  But my parents had been married my entire life.  Both of them had good jobs.  We never had problems paying the bills.  So I remember feeling confused.  On the way home we talked about how it had been a blessing.  And I felt that way for a long time.  It wasn’t until I grew older that I developed a more complicated perspective.  That lady had a good heart.  And she certainly wasn’t being racist.  But it’s the first time I can remember being racially profiled.“