(2/13) “My life of crime came to an end in Room 911 of the...

(2/13) “My life of crime came to an end in Room 911 of the Philadelphia Lowes Hotel. Room 911. That was the Feds fucking with me. I hadn’t been in the room for 5 minutes when there was a knock on the door. A voice said: ‘Housekeeping.’ But I knew: ‘That’s not fucking housekeeping.’ Nine guys bust in carrying every type of gun known to man. And that was the end. Part of me was glad it was over. I’d become a scumbag. A complete, sociopathic scumbag. But before any of this happened, Johnny Gargano was a pretty good person. I really believe that. Not the most emotional guy. Not the most expressive guy, but certainly not a scumbag. I believed in right and wrong. I’d bring baskets of vegetables to my friends’ mothers. I was a freaking altar boy for ten years. Not saying that means anything, those child molesting fucks. But with all things considered: a pretty good person. Then one afternoon I’m taking a nap on the couch, and there’s a knock on the door. It’s the Fed-Ex guy, with a package from the health insurance company. It says my application for coverage has been denied. Now there were only six reasons you could be denied. The first five were crazy bugs in Africa. I was a farm boy from New Jersey; I’d never been to Africa in my life. So that left the sixth thing: HIV Positive. How did I get it? Some things in life are nobody’s business. Not then, not now. It’s taken me 25 years to even talk about my diagnosis. I come from an old school Italian family where nobody talks about nothing, especially the men. Everything gets swept under the rug. Could all of this been avoided with a conversation? Who knows. But I didn’t know how to have it. I couldn’t handle the stigma. I couldn’t handle the shame.  At the time I had a garden shop, with thirty greenhouses; I left them all behind. I packed up my shit and moved to Philadelphia. This was 1997; there were no miracle drugs back then. I thought 100 percent for sure I was going to die. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen to me, but I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. I felt like I’d just been ejected from a roller coaster, and I said: ‘Fuck it. I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want before I hit the ground.”