Hard as Hell
9 years ago he changed my life. Today he shares part of his own story.
Nine years ago today, I met a man who changed my life. We've spent the last year turning that friendship into a book — part memoir, part theology, all truth — and today, on the anniversary of our first encounter, I want to give Ja the floor. What follows is an excerpt from one of his chapters in the manuscript: an unfiltered account of an abused, abandoned, undocumented, and unhoused young man navigating New York City alone. No pastor's gloss. Just Ja.
Chapter 11 | Hard as Hell (Ja)
In my twenties, I was peak James Dean. Live fast, die young.
Although I had no movie contracts, no modeling agency, and no working visa to help me pay the bills, I lived fast and, without anyone in the world who gave a shit about me, I had every intention to die young.
I would ride atop the subway cars in Queens, jostle between them once we arrived in Manhattan, swinging my body around the tail end of the moving train as we pulled into Times Square, not a care in the world. I hustled the hustler. I maneuvered through the masses in the city, scoring enough bread for the day – and sometimes the week – without a single concern for the consequences. No accountability. No cop could stop me. No God watching out for me and nobody waiting up for me to come home. Lost and alone, I spent the next year with my middle finger extended to a God who didn’t exist and to a city that didn’t care about my existence.
But something in me changed one day just outside Grand Central Station. Bouncing down Lexington Avenue, I was about two blocks away when a manhole cover exploded into the air at 41st Street. Apparently, a gas leak in the pipes had been brewing and bubbling beneath the surface until it had nowhere else to go but up. The crowded sidewalk screeched in unison as the ground beneath them shot into the air.
A couple thousand people had to be evacuated, and a few were carried out via ambulance. In typical New York fashion, after a brief pause in the day, most people carried on as if nothing happened. At first, I laughed. Then, like the hurried New Yorkers beside me, I went on about my day. But later that evening I recounted what happened and could feel that, just like the gas leak bubbling up beneath the surface of the city streets, I was also about to explode.
The childhood trauma that tortured my soul would occasionally disrupt my schemes. I would whack-a-mole the pain and carry on with my fast life, not realizing just yet that unattended trauma would soon get at me like a jackhammer to concrete, bringing me to my knees without any regard for my dignity.
I fell asleep that evening outside a church near Grand Central, reminded of James Dean and his tragic death at twenty-four years of age. He lived fast, died young, and all these years later, he’s still an icon.
As I had just surpassed the quarter century mark without any fanfare, I had a change of heart about the direction of my life.
Undocumented. Unloved. Unwanted by the world. But like the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, I was not about to go gently into that good night. No, I was going to rage against the dying of the light. Whether it was God or the Universe or Mother Mary who spoke to me as I drifted into a deep slumber, I awoke the next morning knowing I was determined enough, and smart enough, to make shit happen – my father, Willamae, and everyone who ever tried to eff with me be damned.
I was broken, but invincible. Highly flawed, but also highly favored.
I was a natural born hustler. A PR agency’s dream hire. A smooth talker, conniver, and master manipulator. I had just enough integrity not to invite God’s wrath down on me, along with just enough intuition to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.
Before the internet came along, and decades before the president would make it harder for companies to hire people like me, I could bob and weave through the complexities of fake social security cards, ITIN numbers, and those pesky tax forms. If I timed it right, I could work for several months, gathering enough steady paychecks to sleep in a hostel for nearly a week straight!
Or I’d find the cleanest bathrooms in the city that had a lock on the door. I managed to shower at the sink, shave off any stubble, and swap out my clothing in five minutes flat, causing zero stress to management. As I strode out the door, fresh and ready to fool everyone into believing I actually belonged in this world, LL Cool J’s beats busted my ear drums as I bounced down the street with my new black market Sony Discman in hand:
LL Cool J is hard as hell
Battle anybody I don’t care who you tell
I excel, they all fail
Gonna crack shells, Double-L must rock the bells
Before I was consistently confined to the darkest corner of a psych ward, isolated from the world outside, attempting to rid my mind of every inhumane experience forced upon me…
Before the headaches pulsated so frequently through my neural pathways that I couldn’t see or think straight without my pals Jack and Bud to relieve the stress…
Before I extended my middle finger to the heavens and told God to go eff himself for all the unfulfilled prophecies made about my own promised land just beyond the horizon…
Before I could no longer face myself in the mirror. Before I laid in a pile of my own excrement. Before I had a KICK ME sign tattooed on my back. Before attorneys told me of my lose-lose situation, and before the leak in my soul bubbled up and blew the top off all my aspirations…
Nothing was impossible for me.
Read more excerpts from our book below:
Chapter 1 (Ja + Brian)
The Undocumented Gospel (Brian)
