TWO

SEARCHING FOR PURPOSE

AS SOON AS I CROSSED THE TRACKS, I stopped and asked myself a question that I believe helped change the course of my life. I had asked myself, “Desmond, if you were to have died, if that train were to have run you over and killed you, how many people would come to your funeral?”

Now, the immediate answer was zero. Because I was homeless, my family didn’t know where I was. I wasn’t trying to hang out with any of my friends because of the shame of being a drug addict. The area where I was, it was not in my usual neighborhood. I didn’t even have proper ID on me. Would I have been buried in a pauper’s grave? I didn’t know how that kind of thing worked, if I would be identified by my dental records or something like that.

Let’s say they did identify me . . . I continued the internal discussion with myself. Let’s say in this scenario, I was killed by the train, but the local paper, the Miami Herald, got wind of it. Let’s say they put my picture on the front page with the headline in big, bold letters, “Desmond Meade Killed by Train.” Now how many people would come to my funeral? And after thinking long and hard I only came up with four people: my two sisters, Lucinda and Annette, and my two nieces, Kathleen and Elizabeth. And out of those four people, only my nieces would have shed a tear because they were still at an age where they believed in me. I could just hear the narrative, you know? Man, he had so much promise if it wasn’t for those drugs.

Only being able to come up with four people, that thought hit me in the gut like a Mike Tyson blow. It really took the wind out of me. I had a powerful moment of realization, as I stood there looking back at the tracks. It made me question myself: Desmond, you mean to tell me after all these years of living on this planet, after all the relationships and friendships and your time in the military and the places that you’ve lived and visited, after all your travel, that only four people would care if you died? Has your life been that insignificant?

What have I been doing with the time that I have spent on this planet so far? What has it come to? Was my life going to end with a whimper and not a bang? I didn’t like that one bit.

I REMEMBER TAKING THAT FEELING WITH ME WHEN I WALKED THOSE TWO BLOCKS TO Central Intake, because it was the exact opposite of how I had viewed or imagined funerals to be. I was born in Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, in a little subdivision of the city of Christiansted, called Peters Rest. One of my earliest memories, something that really stuck with me, was a big funeral of someone famous who had died on the island. I remember going to church and it seemed like there were hundreds and hundreds of people who came to the service. It was a sad moment for a lot of people. I can still see the tears in their eyes. But it was also wondrous to me: Who could this person have been to have that much of an impact on so many other people?

I was always somebody who wanted to be loved like that. I think we all have an internal compass to get to a space where you feel love and comfort and safety. Some folks may ignore it; some may acknowledge and embrace it.

I was the type of kid that my mom did not have to ask to do something twice. I was her baby, and I had an undying love for her. Her birthstone was a ruby, and any time I saw some trinket at the Cuban bodega that featured ruby-like jewels, I would buy it for her.

When we first moved to Miami from Saint Croix, it was just me, my mom, and my dad. Then, one by one, my brothers and sisters came over to the United States. Pretty soon, we had six of us under one roof. Growing up, I always looked at everybody in the household as one family. I didn’t know the difference between stepbrothers and stepsisters. I didn’t realize at the time that my mom and dad were not married.

Looking back now, I knew that I was excited about the idea of family. The desire to love and be loved was something that was just inherent in me. I picked up that some of my siblings were probably not reciprocating that love like I thought they should, and I always used to struggle with that, not realizing that we weren’t that so-called complete family like I thought we were.

Throughout a major portion of my young and young adult life I was confused and never really got the full story. It wasn’t until the death of my father that the story came out. Basically, my dad left his family to be with my mom. The tales that I heard indicated that I was an illegitimate child, and that I was the apple of his eye. Looking back now, I could see the sibling rivalry that was going on. It actually answered a lot of questions. I was flooded with memories of one brother telling me that I wasn’t really his brother; on a separate occasion, he told me that I stole his dad. Another time at school I overheard one of my other siblings tell someone that I was their cousin. I can’t be a cousin and a brother at the same time, I thought. Those things played a role in my developing psyche and fueled my yearning to be accepted, particularly by my family, that has stayed with me up until today.

Being from a different family tree, so to speak, left me with an internalized pain that I suppressed. Even though I didn’t acknowledge it consciously, there was still a need to numb it. And so, that love I was seeking, that comfort, became connected with alcohol pretty early on in my life. We used to have these parties . . . maybe it would be somebody’s birthday party. The church folks would be there, and then after the church folks left, they’d bring the liquor out and the rum corks would start popping. I remember that these were some of the best times I had, when everybody was festive and there was a lot of love flowing around. I associated drinking with happiness and that set the stage later for drugs to become my comforter.

A LOT OF THESE THINGS CAME OUT IN THE TREATMENT PROGRAM WHERE I WAS SENT BY Central Intake. They asked us to do things like write in a journal, compose letters to our siblings, and talk about our past. One by one, memories would come back to me that had been locked in my subconscious.

I thought about it this way: sometimes I have trouble thinking of the name of a kid I went to elementary school with. I could try my hardest and still not remember it. But a few days later I might be riding in my car, and a song comes on the radio from back then, and his name will just pop right back up into my conscious mind.

Certain things can trigger our memory or break things out of our subconscious, but a good treatment program doesn’t leave those things to chance, like a random song coming over the airwaves. They ask us to apply ourselves because what we’ve suppressed is exactly what is playing a key role in our abuse of drugs or alcohol.

So that was my frame of mind after a month or two of being in drug treatment. I guess you could say that the door between my subconscious and my conscious mind was swinging pretty freely by that point. I remember I was by myself in the room in the drug treatment facility that held the television. Rosa Parks had just passed away, and thousands of people were coming to Washington, DC, to pay their last respects. Tears were streaming down everyone’s cheeks as her body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. I was captivated by the outpouring of emotions, how she had touched everyone so personally.

As I looked up at the television, which was mounted high on the wall, my mind went back to a funeral I had witnessed as a young boy in Saint Croix. I instantly became overwhelmed. It was like I got a bolt of energy, and I jumped out of my chair. I started screaming and pointing at the TV, saying, “That’s it! That’s it! That’s what I want! When I die, I want thousands of people to mourn me. I want people to feel sorrow when I die.”

I knew right there and then that I wanted the big funeral. I wanted people to mourn me, lots of people. My mind raced as I started to try to plan my funeral. I was scrambling in my head to figure out how I was going to get that kind of funeral to happen for me. What am I going to have to do to make people feel sad that I passed away? I didn’t want to be that person who died and nobody came to the funeral or even knew that he died.

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THE FIRST THING MY RACING MIND DECIDED ON WAS THE LOCATION FOR THE FUNERAL. I needed a venue that was big enough to hold a large capacity of people. I quickly landed on a stadium. It would be the same stadium where the Miami Dolphins football team plays. It’s called Hard Rock Stadium now, but back then it was called Joe Robbie Stadium, after the Miami Dolphins’ founder. I wanted that whole entire stadium to be filled. And then I also wanted seats on the field, as well as people standing—standing room only; the arena would be just full of people who were sad because I died. There wasn’t going to be a dry eye in the entire stadium. That felt good. I got the venue.

Then I got stuck with the next question. What type of person can command that type of audience? In order for me to have the funeral that I wanted, I had to somehow or other impact somebody’s life, a whole bunch of people’s lives. Joe Robbie Stadium held a lot of people, so that was a lot of lives I had to impact. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I just knew that that’s what I needed to do. That was the only thing I could hold on to at that moment.

I knew I’d have to be some kind of celebrity, and I landed on either being an athlete or an actor.

The thing is, I didn’t think I could be an athlete because I have bad knees from playing football in junior high and high school. So the only thing left was for me to become a movie star. The actor who came to mind, when I started thinking about stars, was Denzel Washington. Right? Everybody just loves Denzel Washington. The ladies are crazy for him; he can’t do any wrong.

Now, at the time I didn’t think I was a bad-looking guy, but I didn’t think I was the Denzel Washington type of handsome. I sometimes look back on that day and thank God I didn’t think of Forest Whitaker, because then I think I might have felt I had a shot. You know, if he can make it, I can make it too. But I didn’t think of Forest Whitaker that day or anyone else other than Denzel Washington. And I knew I wasn’t him.

Out of options, I became disappointed because I couldn’t determine what I could do to command the type of audience I wanted. But that disappointment did not last for long because my thoughts returned to Rosa Parks. I remembered listening to interviews with her and some feature stories about her. I started thinking about how she did one thing that people remembered. She refused to give up her seat on the bus. That one act she committed (or refused to commit) endeared her to a lot of folks, although the truth is she was an activist her entire life and had done thousands of things for civil rights both before and after that day in Montgomery.

I thought, Well, maybe if I can take all of the pain, and suffering, and low self-esteem, all that stuff that came together and led me to the railroad tracks and had me thinking about killing myself, if I could take those very same things, maybe I could package it in a positive way to help other people so they don’t have to end up at those railroad tracks, that could be a start.

If I could help change someone’s life, then they could, in turn, change other lives. It would be like that old commercial about “you tell two friends and they tell two friends” and so on, and so on. Pretty soon, there would be a lot of people who when I die would be able to say, “Man, if it wasn’t for Desmond helping that person, and that person helping whomever, my life would not have been as good as it is today.”

And so I figured that my best shot was just to help someone else. I didn’t have a clue where to start, or what to do to make that happen, but I knew that I had to make a difference in other people’s lives. I had to take my small personal tragedy and use it to help someone else triumph in life.