The year is 2010. I’m a junior in high school. How To Make It In America is my favorite TV show. Kid Cudi is my favorite artist. New York City is my favorite city, but I live in metro Detroit.
With college application deadlines looming, I wanted nothing more than to leave home and chase dreams that had only just begun to form. In hindsight, I don’t even know what these dreams were, but I knew that there was a whole world out there that I needed to explore. My mom was open to the idea of me going to school in NYC, and even drove me ten hours to visit Columbia & NYU, but any time I expressed this interest to my dad, he would say “Dude, New York City will eat you alive. You just want to do that fashion-hip-hop shit. You can’t handle New York City.”

So that was that.
Less than a year later, I’m getting dropped off in Washington, D.C. for my first semester at Howard University. I didn’t know a single soul, and had never even visited D.C… I had no idea that I would spend the next 7 years of my life here experiencing and learning more than I had in the previous 17. And honestly, getting eaten alive by Washington D.C. - and then shit out in one whole piece was better preparation for NYC than anything else I could have done.
Fast forward 7 years through what you could consider to be the “prequel” to this story - I’m in LA on my first vacation in forever, and I get a text from my girlfriend saying she’s moving to New York in less than two months. We were living together and had never once discussed moving, so you could say this was a bit of a surprise. One of her friend’s had offered her the opportunity to sublet her bedroom in Williamsburg for two months, and after having an actual conversation about it, we decided to make the move together from D.C…. with no prospective jobs lined up.

The first few weeks were fucking wild, finally living out my dream of living in New York City. It basically felt like I was living out the non-existent season three of How To Make It In America; trying to learn the ins-and-outs of the fashion world, partying in LES & SoHo, exploring Brooklyn and Manhattan.
After three weeks of living in New York, my savings was dwindling, and I was still on the hunt for a job doing anything that wasn’t working in a restaurant. Before I knew it, I was riding my bike all over the fucking place delivering food through the Postmates and Caviar apps just to make some money. Everywhere I went I was dropping off my resume, hoping someone would hire me for real. Pizza was for breakfast, and garlic knots were for dinner. Finally, I got a job at this WACK ASS yuppie restaurant in the West Village. They would only let me be a host, even though I had plenty of serving experience, and the manager constantly tried to shit on me for my uniform (the drip was too much for him), among many other arbitrary things. But I I learned my most valuable lesson here on day one: “Keep your chin up, bro” is what one of the food runner’s told me. “They don’t usually let people that look like us do the job you have, and they’re definitely going to try to play the shit out of you. Don’t take that shit. Everywhere you go in this city, keep your chin up.”

Taking the subway to the city everyday, I got a crash course in New York City culture. You quickly get desensitized to the bullshit. You realize how much hustle it’s gonna take to survive, and that if you don’t buck up, your ass will be right there on the train begging for change too. The “New York City Eats Its Young” t-shirt that Ben & Cam pop-off with in How To Make It In America becomes a reminder to go even harder. Soon after, I got a second job back-waiting at a dope little restaurant a block away from the apartment, and was actually making good money. I was finally working everyday, getting fed free breakfast, lunch, and dinner via “family meal” between the two jobs, which meant that I could save up all my money to find a new place to live since the sublet was ending. A day before the sublet ended, I found another sublet for us on Craigslist in Bed-Stuy and felt some much needed relief.

This relief lasted maybe 5 days. The new room was a sublet in a house that I would equate to the boarding house in the cartoon “Hey Arnold!”. At no point were we introduced to anyone else that lived in the house. When the girl that we sublet from first showed us the house, she said everyone was pretty chill and stayed to themselves. She also mentioned that there was one cat that lived in the house… There ended up being three. And they only had one litter box. And no one EVER cleaned it. EVER. It got so bad that the cats wouldn't even shit in the litter box, and just started shitting in the hallway outside our door. And no one would pick it up. Sometimes there would be a dog in the house. Other days there would be a random baby and their mother staying there. The house did not have any A/C and faced southwards, cooking in the scorching summer sun for 16 hours a day, permeating the smell of cat piss and shit all throughout. Everyday felt like the day from Do The Right Thing, and I was Mookie.

I’m also allergic to cat’s so our bedroom door stayed closed 24/7. Which meant ther was literally no air circulation to cool down our room. To make everything even worse, my girlfriend and I were not getting along at all. After about 3 weeks in this room, the heat of all these moments was finally too much, and we broke up. But with no money or other places to live, we agreed to make the living situation work. My resolve was basically to work ALL the time, and never be home. I was out of the house by 9am every day, and didn’t come home til 2 or 3 am. When everything seemed all the way fucked up, I finally got a break that made it all worth it: an unpaid internship.
I don’t necessarily agree with the idea of unpaid internships, but I was in the most desperate of circumstances. Thankfully I was making enough money as a back-waiter and I was able to quit the hosting job that I hated, and FINALLY I was working in the fashion industry… even though it was unpaid. I spent every single day for the rest of the summer busting my ass.
Weekdays I as working the internship 10am-5pm, then back-waiting 6pm-midnight, then going out drinking from midnight-2am, then waking up hungover and doing it all over again. On weekends I was working 9am-5pm serving brunch, then engaging in post-brunch shenanigans with friends & co-workers until lord knows what time. Honestly, it was one of the best summers ever. And all the while I was still sharing a bed with my ex-girlfriend. Finally in September, she couldn’t handle the circumstances anymore and things were not going her way at all. She trashed our room in an angry rage and left. Not sure where she went, but I continued to bust my ass everyday between interning and working in the restaurant. I found myself in meetings with my favorite designer, producing their biggest fashion show to date, and finally saved up enough money to sign a lease on an apartment.

There was an 8-day gap between moving out of the Hey Arnold! boarding house and signing the lease for the apartment, but by this point I had made some real friends that let me crash on their sofa for the interim. On the day I got the keys to the apartment, I had no furniture at all. Luckily for me, my friend had just gotten an extra casper mattress through a shipping mix-up, and let me buy it from her for the low-low that same night. I’ve had to sleep on floors for extended periods of times on more than one occasion, so to have just this mattress with no sheets, blankets, or any other furniture was one of the most grateful moments I’ve ever experienced in my life. I felt like Cam Calderon in Season 2 Episode 3 when he finally gets his own apartment and wheels home a used Viking range.

Finally feeling like you’re making it, and realizing that all your hard work has been for something is something that I don’t think I’d ever really felt before that moment. You get little tastes of it here and there, especially when you’re so caught up in the work, but you never stop for a second to see the whole of it. It takes that “oh shit!” moment where you allow yourself to feel the emotions of actualizing your dreams. It feels better than any booze or drugs, and you want nothing more than to dream bigger, and make that shit happen again.

So that’s what I did. Got right back to it: 60~70 hour work weeks doing any and everything to make it in America…. whatever that actually means. I didn’t know back in 2010, and honestly ten years later I still don’t. In the last year, I’ve gotten flew’d out to other coasts and countries to do jobs I’ve only dreamed of. I’ve worked jobs I didn’t even know existed, and made more money in one year than I’ve ever made in my life. I’ve met some of my heroes and made new one’s in the process. I even randomly met Ben Epstein from How To Make It In America (Bryan Greenberg) at a small little 4th of July get-together. And still I question what it means to make it in America?

I mean, here we are in 2020 and like the theme-song “I Need A Dollar” proclaims: “Everything around me is crumbling down. And all I want is for someone to help me.” I’ve busted my ass for two years straight to make it in America, only to end up on unemployment insurance. I was literally 2 hours away from getting a plane to Paris to work my second fashion week there in 6-weeks, and then BOOM: CORONAVIRUS!!!!! *Cardi B voice*. Trip Cancelled. Two weeks later, both my jobs have to close, then BOOM: another innocent black man is killed at the hands of the police and we have the biggest civil rights movement in history happening during the middle of a deadly pandemic. And you ask yourself, how can something like fashion, or restaurants even matter anymore? Did it ever matter?
These are the questions I’ve been asking myself lately, and I guess they are essentially the same questions I’ve been asking myself my whole life… What does it mean to make it in America? Obviously there’s no explicitly objective answer. We can only dream of the world that we want to exist in, and then try to actualize that dream. Then dream even bigger, and further actualize our dreams. And repeat.

Rinse. Lather. Repeat.