His eyes are obscured by thick, red reflective sunglasses that hook behind large ears. A maroon knit beanie covers his forehead, and several black dreadlocks poke out below his ears. His face is round and wide, curving into thick lips that spread up when he tilts his chin up—voice lazy and self-assured. His skin is coal-black and smooth.
‘Grant’ chose not to reveal where he was born.
“I’m not saying where cause I don’t want anyone in here following me to another state.”
His childhood was extremely troubled, he said, and he was homeless several times before he ever reached high school.
“As a kid, there were other things going on, and it wasn’t just like oh, my parents are lazy, they won’t work and we’re homeless.”
In fact, they moved so often as a kind of perpetual escape act from abusive situations. Some involved fraud.
“When I was younger, we left certain situations cause there were certain people in our midst—the pimp on the corner, the drug dealer on the corner, whatever. He called himself a pastor, but he was a pimp. He was a drug dealer. Every time my mother got a paycheck he thought he could take her paycheck. So we would leave situations like that and come to another city, and that’s why we would be homeless. ‘Cause we’re better off in that situation than we were with that relative that kept on doing that to us.”
Many situations involved sexual abuse.
“You’re moving out of New York where it’s the projects, and it’s drug-infested, and it’s your black family that you’re sick of—your black old relative that’s sexually abused you. He still keeps coming around and you still don’t like him, and he still doesn’t get it. He thinks you’re being funny.”
He explained: “In black culture, when you joke with an older black male and you’re like, ‘Dude, I’m sick of you,’ and you’re trying to communicate that, they think you’re playing. They think you’re being funny, and you’re like no, I’m actually sick of you, I want you to go back home. I don’t like you.” That relative abused both him and his mother, he said, before they finally moved.
Whatever the cause, each move immediately resulted in a period of homelessness for his family. He finally landed in Austin in his early adolescence, he said, and eventually attended McNeil High School. Though now settled in one city, he was constantly moved from household to household as legal concerns hovered overhead.
“Whoever I was around then, whether it was a parent or a babysitter. You’ve got a mom and a dad: not everybody’s life is like that. [There were] other people, a babysitter or someone like that: the state [paid] somebody to take care of [me].”
Throughout his tumultuous childhood, he said, one constant he held onto was actually a strong interest in medicine.
“I took an interest in the medical field when I was a kid, because of who I was around, or whatever I was watching on TV, whether it was on PBS or KLRU or whatever it was. So, basically, I would go to the library, whether I was in high school, or middle school, elementary, and I would get books on the medical field and I would read them. So a lot of stuff I basically learned myself, and then I took the [MCAT]. Because I asked about it at a young age, and I was like, how can I take this test?”
The other constant in his life? Gangs.
“I was in the ghetto, I was in the hood, and some of these people did not get along with each other. And I’m talking about the older people. There was a lot of drug activity, and sex.”
He recounted the mood of their interactions.
“A lot of them, they would think they’re really arguing about something, and they weren’t really fighting or arguing about anything. It was just them being doped up, making them think what they were doing was battling with each other.”
At the same time of his involvement, he took extra coursework at school and graduated early from McNeil in 1994, he said. He took a job at McNeil almost immediately afterwards. But then, something happened at a social event, he said,
“Somebody played a joke on me and poisoned me. Poisoned me in my food and my drink. I got really sick. So I basically had to go back to school.”
He moved households yet again: “I was kinda taken from my actual people. Cause this other family wanted me around for whatever else was going on with them. So basically I went back to school for a little while. And I graduated again in 2002, but my original graduation from there was ’94, and believe it or not, when I was going back to school for the last time when I was in high school, there were other older people trying to get their GED’s and finish with us, you know.”
After graduating for the second time, he was accepted into UT Austin—and a new nightmare began.
“The medical industry, it’s very competitive, and people are going to medical school and they’re on drugs. They can feel inferior to you, they can feel like they’re jealous of you, even though they’re not—it’s just the drugs.”
After all, he felt, if people didn’t get in and hated him for it: “All you gotta do is retake the test. If you took the MCAT, just retake the test, you know what I mean?”
During this time, he was living with yet another ‘babysitter.’
“She thinks she’s my mother, dude, and it’s funny, dude. She wasn’t actually my mother. But I think there was some sort of confusion going on then. Confusion with hospitals and births and all that type of stuff. She thought she was my mom.”
She sexually abused him.
“Kept messing with me in some weird way, ‘cause something weird went on with her, cause she was sexually abused or a little bit awful on drugs.” He laughed sardonically. “Yeah, there was some crazy shit going on back then.”
Then, a controversy flared up.
“An argument happened about me being there almost. A PTA meeting. An argument happened between parents at a PTA meeting about a student when it’s not really about the student, it’s about something else that the parents are actually doing. They made it something about me that wasn’t about me, and basically made me out to be some sort of target. About some sort of issue that didn’t really involve me, it involved them, and how they are. It could have been anything. It could have been they thought some teacher was showing me favoritism, and gave me all these tests, or I didn’t do this work to do this and this and this and that. I think there were other things going on that I didn’t even know about, whether it was drugs, sex, they were having sex with each other, doing drugs with each other, something going on at the UT campus I don’t really know about. Maybe I walked into something and they were trying to cover that up.”
In any case, he barely graduated from UT, he said. Then he started working.
“Just worked, some normal jobs. I don’t do it [medical work] anymore. You have to be a really caring person to do that, and I don’t care about people that much to be a doctor anymore.”
His reality has been off-and-on homelessness, depending on how much money he can conserve at a time.
“Most of the time when I’m working, I’ll have an apartment or something that I pay for,” he said.
But constantly, he lives in a state of bitterness towards the world and its injustices.
“There’s a lot of things I don’t like anymore, there’s a lot of people I don’t like anymore, there’s a lot of their art I don’t like anymore, there’s a lot of their writing I don’t like anymore, and if I once liked it I don’t like it anymore. Cause you got an attitude problem. So I’m learning to find other interests also, cause there’s always going to be someone that’s sexually abused you or something, trying to control something in your life in this conniving way.”
He harbors a resentment against not only the people he used to respect, but also the homeless population of Austin as a whole.
“A bunch of these guys are going to jail, the guys who are tripping out here. I’m like thank God, dude, I’m sick of you dude, get the fuck out of here dude. Literally, they’re rich black people and they’ve never done shit in their life, dude. And a lot of these old black guys, they’re like that. They’ve never done shit, and they cause trouble all. The time. And I’m like you’ve never done shit in your life, dude, you’re a fucking asshole, dude.”
He continued: “You’re not even from here, I’m like dude. You know you’re not even supposed to be in America, you’re from like Pakistan dude, you’re a black guy from Pakistan, and you’re getting on my nerves. I like you, we’re friends, and I’m going to be around you like that and I’m not. It’s just so fucking crazy.”
People still try to take advantage of him in different ways, he said.
“My experience is frustrating. Cause it’s like dude, I worked with you for so many years, and you still agitate me, cause I went to school with you, I went to medical school with you, I worked on this project with you, and you still don’t recognize me. So my experience is different because certain things kinda went on. You’ve gotten heavy into drugs and you’re not the same person you used to be, or something else is going on with you. So my experience is people agitating me that I’ve worked with before, that I’ve known forever, and that’s what my experience is.”
Right now, he lives with his grandpa and draws his concept artwork in blue pen. He hopes to place his work in an East Austin art show in late October.
I wished him luck.