‘Dylan’s birth was a sort of miracle. His mother had been infertile: she met his father, a Puerto Rican, when he was serving in the Navy. Together they adopted two boys and one girl—and, elated, they welcomed Dylan into the family in 1982.
He was raised, or rather, grew up, in New Orleans. It was a dangerous town.
“It’s like a big ghetto,” he said. “It’s all black in New Orleans. And light skin makes pretty boys. And so a lot of people gave me a lot of misery growing up—because I’m light-skinned and handsome. And my hair—my attractive hair. People just didn’t like it.”
The danger and hostility surrounding him put him at odds with his faith.
“My mom always told me, you can do what you want to do during the week, but give God at least one hour a week.” So Sunday church was a regular event.
But if God couldn’t protect him, who would?
“It created a barrier between me and God. I asked God for His protection. Since I’m your follower, shouldn’t you protect me? But he didn’t. And that’s where the Evil One came in.”
When he was 16, his father kicked him out of the house, he said. He ran away, taking the car, and began sleeping in it. He needed a way to eat, so he started hustling.
“I needed a way to sustain myself. And I discovered I had a talent—I could communicate with people for the point of making money. I’m not trolling them, I give them some good stuff, it works, and it’s brand-new. I let them test it, and they say, ‘Alright, how much you want?’ I say, $5. They say, ‘$5? Yeah!’”
He found that most everyone was willing to pay $5, and the small sums would compound to make enough money to live on.
He also found that New Orleans was a brash town. He remembered the unique Mardi Gras festivities.
“There’s a street called Bourbon Street, and when they get drunk, people do things that they don’t normally do. Women get on their balconies and show their breasts. Just crowds of people. And it’s tradition.”
His experiences with Mardi Gras led him to his first drinks.
“I was 16 years old, I went into a store, and I saw a box of wine. I didn’t even have a moustache or anything. They’re like, ‘He’s cool. Give it to him.’”
At the time, the police, he said, were criminals themselves. Crooks with badges.
“It’s legal to go in and buy a drink and come outside—the police will just pass you by and they don’t say nothing.” And so, homeless at 16, he started down a long path towards alcoholism.
His experiences with women led him to lament that New Orleans was a poor town.
“Where I would approach a woman to court her, you know what she’d tell me? ‘Where’s your car at? How you gonna take me out?’” He didn’t have a sports car. He’d be irked, and moved on to the next woman: she’d say the exact same thing.
“It made me bitter. And then that’s when the Evil One comes in. He lost his place in heaven, but he didn’t lose his intelligence. He knows how to deceive people. He doesn’t come as a dragon. To me, he comes in a suit of armor, with his hair nice.”
Satan said: “Hey Dylan, none of the girls want to date you. I don’t blame you man. You’re a guy looking for a girl to go on a date. And they always tell you the same thing. Where’s your car. Where’s your material possessions. I tell you what? I can get you a car. I’ll get some TVs in it, a sound system on it, a sports car. Would you mind that Dylan?”
Dylan said: “I don’t know.”
“I tell you what. I’ll make you shine like the brightest star in the sky at night. But only for a little while. Shake my hand if you’re interested.”
“I don’t know man.”
“Come on man. I know you’re lonely at night. You’re going to be lonely tonight. And then tomorrow night—what do you think’s going to happen? Same thing.”
Dylan shook. “He said, Done. Now, I need you to do some things for me. And I did them. Do this for me. And I did it. And this. And this. And this, and this. And sure enough, I got that car.”
But he didn’t realize Satan’s plans. “He only told me half the story. Yeah, Imma get you a car. And you’re gonna shine, gonna get the girls, gonna have a sound system, gonna look good. But. Since I don’t love you, I’m gonna send my other worker on heroin to rob you. And almost kill you. Cause I don’t love you—I just got you to hurt these people for me. And then he laughs. Says, ‘You son of a bitch.’”
Dylan almost died of cardiac arrest at the hospital. God saved him, he said.
***
Imagine Dylan, 15, 16, going from girl to girl as if trying on scarves. Imagine him dealing drugs, to try to get a car, to try to get a woman. Imagine him suddenly struck starry—he drops all his things. Imagine Dylan, crazy with love with a woman who loves him back, trying to get a car so that he can take her out on Fridays. Drive her around. Two teenagers. But remember: this is a real story.
So Dylan is kicked out of the house. He leaves Monica behind. (“I asked Monica, ‘I’m coming back, will you wait for me?’ She said, ‘If I let it go and it flies back, that’s true love.’ And I believed her.”) He lives on his own in New Orleans for a little while, then begins to travel from state to state, living with different cousins and relatives for months at a time.
Years later, Dylan is in his twenties. He makes it back to Louisiana, seeking his girl. If he is to impress her, ensure that she will take him back, what he really needs now, he thinks, is his own sports car. It’s the same old goal. He pursues it with the same old means.
“I had to do some things to get the car, I had to gamble. But this is not gambling with money—this is gambling with freedom. If I get caught, my punishment is jail. And for a long time, I kept gambling, I kept winning, I kept winning.”
He got his sports car, but the thrill of the win kept him playing the game. “It’s like, I’m gonna win just one more time. Let me roll the dice just one last time. And on that last time, something came over me—no, it doesn’t feel right. And I’m like, no whatever, just one more time. And that’s the time that I got locked away.”
So imagine him sitting on a bench in a cold hard cell, the chill seeping into his thighs. He has a choice—sell his sports car, earned through months of danger, to pay the bail. Or sit and wait.
He stays still for weeks.
“But time goes by so slowly in jail. One hour feels like ten hours. One month feels like a year.”
Finally the temptation to sell the car grows so sore that he turns toward the direction of the bondsman. But another striped man approaches him. He’d gone to school in Slidell, a small city just 10 minutes northeast of New Orleans. They talk about people they know.
“I know her.”
“You do?”
“Monica? Yeah, she’s got kids now!”
And in the back of his mind, he thinks: “Don’t believe him. He’s lying. People in jail will say anything. She’s somewhere out there waiting for me, we gonna get married, and we gonna have a big house, and I’ll have a job and have kids.”
A few days later, all charges against him are dropped.
“No bail, no nothin’. Just walked out of jail. They even gave me my cell phone back.”
He dials her number.
“I guess you sold my sports car.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Then who paid the money to get me out of jail?”
“I don’t know.”
He thinks: “It was God.”
The story doesn’t end there. Dylan reclaims his car. Dylan drives to the car wash. A man, high, comes up to Dylan, pulls out a loaded gun, and points.
“‘Give me the car, or I’m going to kill you.’ And I mean, I like that car, but it ain’t worth my life.” So Dylan obliges.
“‘Give me your money, give me your jewelry, give me your shoes.’” Dylan obliges.
The robber tells him to get on the floor, then tries to shoot him anyway. Dylan gets up and runs.
“And I had a phone—I called the police. I said, someone just carjacked me and took all my stuff. They said, we’ll send someone in an hour. I said, an hour? I’m thinking about my car getting stripped, my CD player getting ripped out.”
When a policeman finally arrives, he accuses Dylan of lying and demands to know what really happened. Dylan curses at him and turns to leave. He grabs Dylan by the collar and screams for the truth. Dylan makes up something he doesn’t remember.
In the following days, Dylan is dazed. What just happened. He heads to the mall, walking through, to blow off steam. Guess who he sees, pushing a baby in a stroller. He doesn’t want to believe it. He turns to leave, then things, “I wouldn’t be a man if I didn’t go and ask her.”
They talk for a little while.
“I loved her so much that even though she did go away from me, I still wanted to make it work. I still wanted to have a relationship. I said, ‘Imma get another car.’ And I did.”
He pursues the same old goal. Through slightly different means.
“I met someone in 2004, and they had a brand new [sports car]. That person told me that if I had sex with her, she’ll take care of me.
I’m like, ‘Man, I really don’t want to do that.’ But then they pull out $50 bills.
So it’s like, ‘Alright.’”
He earns more and more money, and the car.
So then he meets up with Monica. Says, now, he can take care of her and her boy.
She wants nothing to do with him.
Is this God? he thinks.
***
In August 2005, one of the most devastating hurricanes in American history reached New Orleans.
During the city-wide voluntary evacuations, his mom and dad left on their own. Dylan was left to take care of his brother and grandmother. The three of them rushed to a church, transformed temporarily into a shelter.
“The night it hit, it sounded like it was going to rip the roof off the church. It was bad. And then the next day, I looked out the window. And everything was underwater. Everything was destroyed.”
For the next few days, there was no food to eat. There was no fresh water to drink.
The first helicopter came to take away survivors. Paramedics, an ambulance, were waiting. They told the three that only one person could ride with the elderly grandma, so Dylan motioned for his brother to go ahead.
On the next helicopter, Dylan was taken to the New Orleans airport.
“The airport was just destroyed. People were passed out.”
The helicopter crews were handing out military MREs—Meals Ready to Eat.
“You pour water in and ball it up, and it gets hot. And you tear it open and stick a fork in there and eat it.”
Half-eaten MREs and empty bags lay everywhere. He waited for hours more. And then they told him to board a jet. After the pilot had ordered all guns to be placed in the front seats—Dylan didn’t have one—they took flight.
“I didn’t know where they were taking me to,” he said.
Hours later they touched down in Austin. He was bussed to the Austin Convention Center, where he stayed with thousands of other evacuees for weeks. They slept on cots and imagined home.
“It was hard coming here. I’m from the bayou, with the alligators, and the pelicans, and the swamps. Coming to a whole nother climate, and not seeing any of my family or my relatives or my friends.”
He was alone.
“But God had a way.”
***
He wandered. Eventually, he became homeless. He slept at the ARCH by night.
“I’d go to sleep, and I’d wake up and somebody would be right up snuggling next to me. And I’d get up and leave, like, ‘No, dude. Sick.’”
By day, he drank.
“It started as a casual drink, in a club. But after so many shots, so many drinks, the body starts withdrawal symptoms. Sweats—when I’m sleeping, I’m sweating, and all my clothes are soaked. And I can’t blame anyone but myself.”
He partially struggled with drinking, he said, because in his faith, Jesus tells his disciples to drink wine—this is Jesus’ blood.
“I’m not a vampire, I ain’t gonna drink to physical blood. But we goin’ convert it to wine. So he says drink it. It only works if you truly believe.”
His first visit to jail as a homeless man, he was arrested for public intoxication.
“I’m in this freezing cold cell, with stripes on and sandals, and I’m in handcuffs, lying on my stomach, but you know what I’m doing? I’m still with the LORD.”
He was soon diagnosed with schizophrenia. And after his release, that crippled him.
“I wanted to join the military. But with the mental disorder, they might give me a rifle, they say, ‘He’s going to shoot one of his own men—he’s crazy.’”
Ironically, someone tried to give him a gun for his birthday.
“If you give a homeless person a gun… the devil’s come around. You could go in that bank and rob a bank. It became tempting—but only for a second. So I brought someone with me. ‘Watch what I do.’ I threw it as hard as I could. Somewhere in that lake there’s a gun. You know how hard it has to be, throwing that gun away.”
His struggle with self-control and faith began to yield fruit—he found, somewhere, the will to improve. He found a job as a construction worker. He saved his earnings.
Years later, just recently, he moved into a shared house in South Austin. He pays $525 a month, just barely making enough with his worker’s wages.
One day, he was on the bus going home. Next to his feet, he noticed a plastic bag, filled with smaller bags of white powder. Back at home, his rent mates recognized it as cocaine. “People are flashing money now, give this to me. I’m broke, but I know what drugs do to people. And consider this—if I’d sold them the drugs and they overdosed and died… imagine not having one penny in your pocket and going to the toilet.” He flushed it all.
He still goes to church—St. Mary’s Cathedral.
He still harbors a weakness for alcohol.
He still harbors a weakness for women.
“I go to a gentleman’s club. And I do things that I know I’m not supposed to be doing. But the lust—it’s just, the power is too concentrated. And once I put the alcohol in, it’s all over now. She takes me hand and she’s leading me, and I’m following. A part of me is still alive—a little piece of me is like, ‘What are you doing?’”
***
“And last night I had a terrible dream. The sun was close to the Earth, and the moon was next to it. And I said man, that’s so beautiful. But then a nuclear bomb came through. And then my last words were, I’m still with you Jesus. I’m still with you. And the whole world just, boom. And I started to feel the burning sensation, and then it just stopped.”
And once: “I had a dream about hell. One day, I had no job, I had no money. I said, ‘Okay God, what makes heaven so great anyway?’ And automatically, I’m on a trip. I think I’m riding on something, but the way I interpreted it, I fly to heaven. That’s how none of the bad people can’t get there. You get wings, and you fly. After 30 min of flying, I’m like, there’s nothing up there but clouds.
Then the clouds part. And there’s this gold city. Gold you’ve never seen before. It’s not the architecture of the Earth—those are built by humans. Imagine it built by God. And the singing that comes from this place, it’s so beautiful. You could cry, it’s so beautiful. It’s triumphant. Like, ‘We finally made it. After all that crap, after all those years of suffering.’ It’s by angels and it echoes out of the city. And the closer you get, all this mental anguish is getting stripped off. And the closer you get, the better you feel.
I got a fly-by. And I’m just flying by, and I’m like, I wanna go in, I wanna go in. And when you go into a building, it’s alive—it changes colors. The hues change from yellow, to orange, to purple. It communicates with you. And there’s the door. So I grab the door. And the door was locked. A voice says, look in the book by the door. I open it—it looks like a normal book, but when you open it, it’s like a bottomless well full of names. Billions of names, of people who loved God. True people who loved God all their lives. But it’s not written in English, or Spanish, or German, or Russian. It’s written in God’s language. And I’m going down the names, and a voice says, what’s that name. In gold ink, I saw the name—I couldn’t understand it, but I knew—it was my name. And the book closed, and the trip is over. I’m coming back to Earth, and it’s like, it’s almost too much. But I have a job to do.”
Talk to people about God.
***
Dylan will never forget Monica. But he’s open to marrying in the future, as long as the couple tests themselves for HIV/AIDS.
“I’d say, ‘I don’t want to offend you, but I’m going to test myself out, and you should test yourself out, and then we’d know what you’re dealing with.’”
Dylan will never forget Monica. But he’s still dreaming.
“I’m not going to get myself into some kind of depression on someone who lied to me. I’m more concerned with my career. Becoming CEO of my own business besides my mental disorder. I’m going to work around [schizophrenia]. That’s my dream. I had to overcome so many different things. Hurricanes. Homelessness. People shooting guns at me.”
In spite of it all, he has a dream.