“Stanley was a year ahead of me growing up. I met him while...

“Stanley was a year ahead of me growing up. I met him while riding the bus to kindergarten. Here was this older kid who had so much energy and didn’t seem to be afraid of the teachers. All through school he was one step ahead of me. And he always pushed me one step further. We did a lot of drugs together. We did odd jobs together. I remember one time we made 900 paper crepe flowers for a toy company on 23rd and 5th. But then our lives went two different directions. He dropped out of high school and went to California. The first time he came back, we camped in my backyard and smoked cigarettes all night, and he told me all these stories about the hustling he would do. One of his new best friends was Little Joe, from Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on The Wild Side,’ you know: ‘Little Joe never once gave it away / Everybody had to pay and pay.’ Well, Stanley learned to hustle from Little Joe, and I lost touch with him. We reconnected every few years. After one particularly long period of silence, I tracked him down through his sister, and found him on a chain gang in Sarasota, Florida. He’d been sentenced to 18.5 years for drug smuggling. He got Hepatitis C during his time in prison, and seven months after he was released, he died. I spoke to him a few hours before he passed away. He couldn’t talk, but his sister put his phone up to his ear, and I just told him I loved him.”