- I never saw my friend again.
And this is that story.
So, it was many years ago and I was walking my dog
in Brooklyn one night.
Little, tiny, white, Jack Russell Chihuahua.
And it was very, very hot and I just wanted to go home
and I was saying,
"Make poopy, make poopy."
I have no empirical evidence that this creates poop
but it was what I was doing.
And he had finally pooped and we were gonna go back home
and if you've ever lived in New York,
the summer can be very sultry and disgusting
and I just wanted to get inside when I see this guy
walking towards us down the street with a little dog
on a leash.
My little dog, Charlie, gets very excited,
like wagging, getting down on the ground,
the other dog's excited.
Now I have to talk to this total and complete stranger
about nonsense because we have two animals
at the ends of ropes that wanna sniff each other's butts.
We start talking, just sort of talking about the weather,
and he says,
"Oh, I was just in Texas."
I was like,
"Oh, I'm from Texas."
And he was like,
"Oh, what part?" And I was like,
"San Antonio,"
he was like, "I was right near there.
"We had so much great Mexican food."
"Oh, I miss the Mexican food.
"Don't you love the guacamole?"
"Man, I love the guacamole.
"They don't know how to do guacamole here, am I right?"
We're just like going back and forth,
it's been like half an hour, our dogs are just sort of like
chilling next to each other like, checking out the block.
At one point, I finally tell him, I'm like,
"Hey, I live right here, why don't we hang out sometime?"
And he says,
"Oh, well um..."
And there was like, a weird pause.
Like, I don't know why he's not saying yes, let's do that.
He's like,
"Well I'm, um, I'm moving away soon."
And I say,
"Oh, well that's fantastic.
"Where are you going?"
And he says,
"I'm moving to Belize."
And I'm like,
"Oh my God, you're making your American dream come true
"of leaving America, good for you."
And he says,
"Yeah, I've been going there scuba diving for years,
"I love it."
I'm just gonna like go there and just float in the ocean."
And I'm like,
"That is amazing."
Earlier, he had mentioned that he lived with
his dog and his girlfriend and I was like,
"Oh, are they gonna go with you to Belize?"
And then he got real quiet again like I had said something
really wrong and he says,
"Oh, they're not coming with me."
I'm going like mmm, okay, this is weird.
It's really quiet.
And then he just blurts out,
"I have terminal cancer and I only have six months to live."
(somber music)
And I kinda don't, like know
how to respond and he can see me flustered
and he immediately starts kinda like spinning out.
Like, he starts apologizing, he explains to me that,
you know, he's been having to tell family members
and friends this information for months
and people have cried and screamed and he feels like
over and over again he has to comfort them.
And he said it was so nice in this moment to tell you,
a total stranger and be okay about it.
But he starts to apologize and he's kinda getting tears
in his eyes about it and I wanna calm him down
so finally, I just blurt,
"It's okay.
"I'm a storyteller,"
at which point, like the ghost of myself exits
the front of my body, walks around, and kicks my own ass.
Like he just basically confronted me with his mortality
and I was like,
"I have a hobby."
And then I freak out.
Oh my God, I mean, I'm so sorry that you're dying.
I mean, not that you're dying, I mean--
hey, hey, hey, no, no, it's okay.
Telling you this, my experience, my story,
what I'm going through was really wonderful
to say this to a stranger and I honestly think
the world would probably be a much better place
if everyone told each other their stories.
And I said,
"Yeah, I agree."
And we stood there for a minute, and
made some small talk, and then he finally said,
"Well, I've gotta go."
And I said,
"Okay, well take care."
And he opened his arms and
he hugged me and then I said goodbye.
Like goodbye, you know?
We turned around, we walked opposite directions.
And literally, I probably wasn't 10 seconds away from him
when I burst into tears.
(mimics crying)
And I remember my little dog being like,
"What?"
You know, 'cause animals they don't get immense
like, sobbing, they're like,
"What's happening?
"Do you wanna play?"
I get upstairs in my apartment and my boyfriend is there
and he's like,
"Davie, what happened?"
And I'm like,
"Well I just was like, walking down the street,
"I looked at this guy so we started talking because
"of our dogs and he said he's gonna die of cancer."
And he's like,
"Calm down."
The next day, I woke up and I couldn't stop thinking
about him.
I did what you do in, you know,
the 2000s when you meet someone with a terminal disease,
I befriended him on Facebook.
And I sent him a little message, I just said,
"Hey, it was nice meeting you."
And over the next six months, I watched his Facebook page
and I literally saw his experience in Belize
just through images that changed in his profile pic
and his banner pic.
I saw beautiful trees swaying on the beach,
I saw these sort of underwater pictures of this beautiful,
like azure ocean, I saw like stingrays, and starfish.
And after about six months,
the pictures just stopped updating and I knew
what had more than likely happened is that Kevin
had passed away.
Now, during this time,
I had actually been really sick too.
I had Crohn's Disease and I got down to like 117 pounds.
I had been in a bad place, but
my life had started to change, I was feeling healthier,
and I was really, really hitting storytelling hard
and I started teaching storytelling.
I would use the story of meeting Kevin
as a way to tell students or people I was coaching
or directing about the importance of sharing their stories,
you know?
People would be working on stories about domestic abuse
or really personal loss and when they would doubt it,
I would often times share this anecdote about Kevin.
It was probably about two, two and a half years
after I'd met Kevin when one day I was on Facebook
and you know, Facebook had just done that thing
where they'd redesign the interface and it made you feel
like a senior citizen like,
"Where are my old messages?"
Like banging and stuff.
And I finally found this thing I didn't know was there,
it was like a sub-trash folder under like,
a spam.
Kevin had sent me a message the night that we met.
And all it said was,
"It was so nice talking to you,
"I'd love to continue this friendship.
"Here's my number."
And I immediately burst into tears.
And I was so angry, I was so frustrated,
thinking how did I like, miss this chance
to maintain this friendship?
And I put Charlie on a leash and I went for a walk.
And I was probably halfway down the block when I saw
a neighbor of ours.
And she could tell I was upset and she's like,
"What's wrong?"
And I was like,
"Ah, well, you know,
"about two, two and a half years ago, I met this guy
"on the street with cancer,"
and as I'm telling her this story, her face shifts.
And she says,
"Oh, are you talking about Kevin, that jerk?"
She tells me the story of Kevin,
a man who had sub-letted her apartment with his girlfriend
and their dog a couple years earlier.
Him and his girlfriend were going to part ways,
he was gonna go to Belize, he was gonna get her
kinda settled, and then she was gonna go and move west.
Kevin was gonna put her stuff in storage.
Anyway, he went to Belize, and she came to the storage unit
and the apartment, it was all empty because Kevin had sold
all of her stuff to feed his crystal meth addiction.
Kevin did not have terminal cancer.
He was a drug addict.
I don't know
how he developed this lie.
I did find out that I was one of
many people in the neighborhood who had met Kevin one night
and held him while he cried and they cried.
Maybe he was so caught up in his addiction,
and the lies around it, and the money he owed people,
and the jobs he'd lost, maybe one night he just tried
it out, you know?
He just wanted to see what is it like to say,
"I'm dying,"
and someone held him and hugged him and it felt good?
And I come away from this conversation
and I'm so angry and
I go upstairs back to the computer and I sit down
and I look
and Kevin has sent me a message on Facebook.
And it just said,
"Hey what's up?"
I click on Kevin's profile.
Kevin moved back to New York, he's a foodie.
There's pictures of him like, eating chocolate cheesecake.
Hashtag yummy.
I am just like in a rage.
Like the sadness that I had felt down on the street
talking to this woman became this kind of like
(growls)
Like, as I look at this like
who the hell does this guy think he is?
But then the thing that really hits me is like,
not so much that he betrayed me but
I told the story of him to people who I was teaching.
And when I think about having used this story to do that
I'm just like I spread this like,
figurative cancer, ironically, do you know what I mean?
Like I used the story of this dude
to impart the importance of truth to people.
And it was just a flat out lie.
It made me think about the importance of stories
and why we tell them.
I think meeting Kevin served a purpose in my life and
even though the story that Kevin told me was a lie,
the way that it made me feel wasn't.
(tranquil music)