by Greg Dybec
So, I was right back where I started, contemplating the existence of a higher power only if I’d had enough beers and the conversation with friends took that turn. It was nothing to be proud of, but it was how I’d been used to living my adult life. It was also how most of my peers were living their lives, so I didn’t feel out of place. We’re all so busy trying to leave our mark on the world in any way possible that we barely fit in time to call our parents and have relationships, let alone talk to a being that may not even be listening.
It wasn’t until a few months after abandoning my lazy quest to find God that I was reminded of why I’d questioned my contradictory beliefs in the first place. I was taking my usual morning commute when, for whatever reason, I took extra notice of a woman handing out religious pamphlets. It’s not at all rare to see people with tables set up on subway platforms in New York City, offering up free literature about faith and Jesus and everything in between. I had just never stopped to give them any thought.
This particular woman wasn’t preaching the way I’d seen others preach about the power of the Lord in the dreary underground corridors of the subway. She simply stood there smiling next to her table with her arms folded, the way a teacher does when she’s waiting for her class to quiet down. If she had a quota to fill, she wasn’t doing a very good job. I decided to stop next to her table while I waited for the train. I tried to catch a glimpse of the pamphlets without her noticing my growing interest. The typed font mentioned something about finding eternal peace through God.
For the next couple of weeks, I eagerly made my way to the same spot on the subway platform each morning to find a place near the woman. Some days she was nowhere to be found, but on most days she was right there in her usual spot, under the busy corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue. Whenever she was there, I stood near her, anticipating what she’d say if someone came over to her table. Though, nobody ever did, and so she just stood there smiling, waiting patiently for a taker.
In a way, I felt bad for her; but at the same time I admired her. I was desperate to know what made her so positive that her beliefs had value. What drove her to wake up each morning just to stand in the same spot, offering up a message that, it seemed, nobody was interested in receiving? Did she ever think she was wasting her time as she watched the world pass her by during morning rush hour? I envied her confidence.
One morning, I made a plan to pick up a pamphlet from her. At the very least it seemed like a nice gesture. I even woke up early to make sure I had enough time to miss a train or two if needed.
I never in a million years would have imagined myself approaching someone passing out religious paraphernalia in the subway, but that Monday morning when I arrived at the station platform, I immediately made my way to her table. I lingered for a bit before picking up one of the pamphlets.
“Hello,” she said with a smile the moment my fingers gripped the paper.
“Hi,” I replied.
“What is it you’re looking for in God?” she asked in a gentle voice.
I was caught by complete surprise. I’d played out conversations with this woman in my head for days, but that straight-to-the-point question took me totally off guard. All I could do was stand there frozen as a list of possible responses ran through my mind.
Somehow, this woman had found a way to ask me the one question I hadn’t asked myself. Throughout my entire ongoing quest for faith, I’d never stopped to consider what I’d actually hoped to find, or if I even wanted to find it. I suddenly felt like I’d gotten caught cheating on a test. Perhaps I was looking for assurance that there’s an afterlife where I’d live happily ever after, a place in the clouds with a strong Wi-Fi connection. Who isn’t curious about that? But that didn’t feel quite right; isn’t the point of having faith believing in something without ever needing definitive proof? Maybe I was simply nostalgic for the hymns and community that made up part of my childhood. It could have been that I just wanted something new to believe in.
Had I been forging a perpetual search for spirituality because it seemed like a better option than not searching at all? I didn’t feel like I’d gotten any closer to discovering faith. I was still balancing on the fence between God’s existence and His being entirely made up, ready to jump to either side if definitive proof were ever determined.
I noticed the light of an oncoming train creep around the edge of the platform. I looked back at the woman with a blank stare.
She smiled again, encouraging me to answer.
“Well,” I started.
I paused again as the train hissed into the station in front of us. The crowd of commuters stepped closer to the platform’s edge.
“Well . . . that’s my train,” I finally said. “Sorry,” I added, before hurrying off, barely squeezing my way into the hot, crowded subway car before the doors closed.
As the train pulled away from the platform, I watched the woman’s face, completely unchanged, disappear in a quick flash. Had she seen right through me?
It was clear I wouldn’t be coming to a conclusion any time soon. If I wanted any peace of mind, I’d have to at least appreciate the fact I was asking questions. Even if my search was spurred on by selfish intentions, it was a start. A shitty start, but a start nonetheless. Luckily, God didn’t create the universe in a day. Some things take time.
Maybe one day I’ll find what I’m looking for, I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t know what I was looking for until I stumbled upon it. Or maybe the search would go on forever. The only thing I knew for certain was that I’d be doing a lot of apologizing later that night, tucked under my covers, where I was safe and nobody asked questions.
Homeless Joe
Not many people can say they’ve played a part in making a homeless person famous. I can.
It all started when an Elite Daily writer, Dan, got writer’s block, as all writers do. In an attempt to overcome the creative stagnation, an editor sent him outside to observe a homeless man on the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Park Avenue. Questions about this man, who held a cardboard sign that read “Seeking Human Kindne$$” and didn’t look a day over twenty-seven, were beginning to float around the office. Nearly every morning he was on the same corner, sprawled out comfortably on the pavement with a small cup to collect spare change and dollar bills. And yet every morning he appeared to be in clean clothes, his hair strategically sculpted with styling gel. We couldn’t help but wonder if he were really homeless and actually as young as he appeared. If he’d walked into the office for an interview I wouldn’t have questioned a thing. I was even jealous of how effortlessly his hair fell into place, messy but calculated.
After a couple hours passed, Dan burst through the office door, nearly knocking over desks in excitement. “I’ve got a story!” he exclaimed. A few of us sat down in a conference room and Dan explained the time he’d just spent with the man he now identified as Homeless Joe. Between heavy breaths Dan told us that Joe was twenty-six and definitely homeless. The catch was, he wasn’t technically homeless every night. According to Dan, Joe was a master of picking up women and convincing them to bring him back to their places. He’d use these one-night stands as a way to get some temporary shelter and take a shower. He’d even sneak in laundry when he could.
Joe told Dan he met most of these women in bars, where he’d spend his saved-up money on drinks. He claimed he was averaging 150 dollars a day, which, if true, would put him in an annual salary bracket significantly higher than the average millennial. And that income was tax free, the bastard. He also claimed he slept with three to four new women a week, which, from my experiences as a single male, would put him light-years ahead of the average (right??).
Dan was eager to spend as much time with Joe as possible. Joe had even hinted at being a fugitive on the run. He mentioned he hadn’t seen his family, who lived in Boston, in years. He was apparently kicked out of college for selling drugs, though he was homeless by choice. From what Dan told us, Joe spoke of his situation as an ex
pression of freedom. He viewed his circumstances as a way to prove you don’t need to conform to societal norms to be happy.
The decision to let Dan further explore the story of Homeless Joe wasn’t an easy one, mostly due to the fact that, at surface level, Joe deceived women and openly admitted to using drugs and drinking in public. It’s not exactly the type of behavior that should be celebrated. On the other hand, Joe was an interesting case because he was so young and truly believed he was in control of his life. If he was making as much money and meeting as many women as he claimed, was he not, in a way, successful, even if by confused, self-absorbed standards? I know plenty of people who measure their self-worth by the same exact principles. They boast about how much casual sex they have and their high tolerance for Jägerbombs and warm Bud Lights. And yet Joe was doing all this without a job or home or any real structure in his life at all. Though behind the flashy smile, styled hair, and surprisingly suave pick-up lines, Joe was not a role model. What he was, however, was a reminder that life can take you places you never thought it would, based on the simplest decisions we make each day. Dan explained that Joe was once a good son and engaged student. He went to college and was a semester away from graduating. He was, for lack of a better term, a normal millennial. And though we hated to admit it, the story fascinated us all. We decided to give Dan the green light to pursue a piece on Joe, to, at the very least, see where the story would go.
It didn’t take long to realize that a story on Joe, the not-so-average, clean-cut, womanizing, homeless-by-choice millennial, would be much more compelling with a visual component. It only took our video crew an hour with him on the street to determine he was a character the world would be interested in, for better or worse. Joe agreed, signed some papers, accepted some money for his time, and filming began immediately. So much for being a fugitive on the run, though the line of truth and exaggeration had been a blur from the start with Joe. To Joe’s credit, his ability to pick up women was not an exaggeration. With cameras following him from a distance, he approached almost every woman that caught his eye, and even kissed a few of them right on the crowded street.
When the concise but action-packed short documentary hit the Internet early on a Monday morning, we weren’t aware of the storm that would follow. The video starts out with Joe, as confident and laid-back as a retired billionaire, saying, “Since there’s eight million people in this city, if you’re not getting laid, you’re an asshole.” He goes on to refer to himself as a “cardboard all-star,” and proudly announces, “I have no bad outfits.” Joe then takes viewers through his daily routine, which consists of mixing cheap vodka with Gatorade, racking up wads of cash from strangers, and successfully picking up women all over the city. Perhaps Joe’s most human moment comes toward the end of the documentary, when he admits, “The reason people give me the amount of money they do is because they realize that they’re just that fucking close to becoming homeless.” He then goes on to tell the youth of America to never end up like him. As the video wraps up, one is certainly left with an unfamiliar taste in their mouth, which was really the point of telling Joe’s story in the first place. Simply put, Joe was a force unlike anything anyone had seen before, and the Internet responded in droves: some angry, some disgusted, and some unashamedly impressed by Joe’s confidence and sense of self-worth, despite living on a street corner.
Within hours of Elite Daily’s posting the video, the story was picked up by a number of publications, including People, Cosmopolitan, the Huffington Post, New York magazine, and Business Insider. Clips from the video even made it to a segment of the Today show. In the first day alone, the YouTube upload reached two million views, and would ultimately go on to reach over five and a half million. I even heard a couple debating about Joe’s behavior on my train ride home from work that day. The man didn’t see anything wrong with Joe’s turning his shitty circumstances into a life he could at least somewhat enjoy. The woman was appalled. She believed everything Joe did was disrespectful and fueled by his own insecurities. A day ago he was just another homeless person asking for money, I thought.
The next morning, as I made my way from the train to the office, I noticed a long line of people gathered outside Pret a Manger on Twenty-Third and Park. I assumed they were offering free coffee or some other promotion. As I crossed the street toward the front of Pret, I could see Joe. He was standing in the middle of an excited crowd, holding a phone and snapping selfies. The line, it turned out, was to meet Joe, and it was nearly around the corner. He was officially an overnight celebrity. I watched as people passed by, taking notice of the line, then seeing Joe would exclaim, “Oh my God, it’s that homeless guy from the video!” Then they’d either pull out their phones to snap a photo or get in line themselves. Joe was of course charging a small fee for each picture, and people were happy to give up their cash.
At some point throughout the day Joe even ditched his “Seeking Human Kindne$$” sign for a new one that read “Internet Sensation.” Joe loved every minute of the attention, but there was a part of the whole ordeal that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. Joe’s rise to notoriety was so rapid it almost seemed wrong. It was hard to imagine what Joe thought of the whole thing. Here was a guy who one day was spending money on drugs and sleeping on cardboard, and the next it appeared as if he were a household name. The biggest question that was beginning to form in my mind was, Is there a way to get Joe help, if he’d even accept?
My question was answered when Dr. Phil reached out to us. He wanted Joe to appear on his show so that he could convince him to go to rehab. We never knew the full extent of Joe’s drug use, but he’d mentioned he’d been to rehab a handful of times.
As much as Joe enjoyed the spotlight, appearing on daytime TV to talk about his problems wasn’t as appealing to him as charging for selfies on the street. It took some convincing, but a little over a month later there was Joe, sitting a few feet away from Dr. Phil on national television. He was dressed in a button-down shirt and blazer and his hair was as perfect as ever. Joe was all laughs, admitting to having drunk ten beers before the show. One of his eyes was so bloodshot it was difficult to look at. Dr. Phil on the other hand was his usual all-business self, not enthused for a moment by Joe’s carefree attitude. For most of the show it was like watching a heavyweight title bout. Joe’s laid-back egotism was for the first time being matched by Dr. Phil’s searing inquisitions. When he looked Joe directly in his red eyes and asked, “What are you running from?” the audience provided a barrage of “oohhs” and “aahhs.” A handful of us watched from the office, shaking our heads in disbelief at what we’d caused.
Dr. Phil finally broke Joe as much as Joe could ever be broken. A new side of the cardboard Casanova had emerged as the two spoke about how Joe wakes up shaking and victimizes those around him. It was an honesty we hadn’t been able to see behind Joe’s hardened exterior. Even the warnings Joe had given us seemed feigned, as if to say, “Only I am fit to succeed at this lifestyle.” But now nothing seemed phony as he admitted that every day he was running from reality.
Joe eventually agreed to give rehab a shot. Only time would tell whether it would pay off or not, but at the end of the day, Dr. Phil did what he’d set out to do. He had taken our Internet sensation and brought him back down to reality. As quickly as Joe had gone from drug addict homeless guy to quasi celebrity, he’d been brought back down to earth by America’s favorite TV-ready psychologist.
Such is the cycle of instant fame, I suppose. Far gone are the times it took years of training and networking to build up a name for yourself. Fame was once a by-product of hard work and dedication toward a craft. It was an industry thing, more or less. But fame in this day and age is fleeting and fast. It’s not all about talent and paying dues. It’s about getting yourself in front of people’s eyes, and since our eyes are pretty much extensions of our phone and computer screens, it’s not as hard as it once was. Joe, who experienced his moment of fame just for living an unconventional
and pretty illegal life (besides the drugs he admitted to stealing hair gel from Walgreens every morning), is an example of just how much sense the viral nature of today’s nontraditional celebrities makes. (That is, not much.) Though, his instant rise in the public eye is what eventually put him on the road to rehab, so there is a glimmering hope somewhere in the mess.
For most of us, we tend to fantasize about fame and notoriety at least once in a while. We don’t necessarily all try to attain it, but it doesn’t stop us from pretending our shower or car is a ten-thousand-person arena as we belt out tunes. The desire for our names and faces to be known is natural, and if it’s not, living in an age where a homeless person can end up signing autographs is causing it to become natural.
Savior of None
When I arrived in Brazil for the 2014 World Cup I expected to see flags lining the streets and parties on every corner. I’d imagined Italians dancing with Swedes; Brazilians raising glasses with Germans; the British scoffing at the French before hugging it out. Unfortunately, there were no such celebrations. In fact, there was hardly anyone on the streets at all. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a city hosting the largest single-sport event in the world, in a country where soccer is religion, would be so deserted.
It turns out celebrations were happening, only they were happening in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and the other vibrant host cities teeming with global visitors and enthusiastic locals. They definitely weren’t happening where I was, in Brasilia, the country’s capital and perhaps the stalest city in all of South America.
Brasilia is a planned city, which means the country decided one day to build it from scratch, like a child playing with Legos. The expansive piece of land in the middle of the country was their playroom, and they came up with a quaint yet sprawling metropolis that is, for some reason, shaped to look like an airplane from above. Once the city was finished being built in 1960, it became Brazil’s official capital, replacing Rio de Janeiro, which has, to its credit, remained the capital of beautiful women and beaches.