It was my old open mic friends who brought me back home. My old poet friend Frank, now in his 50s, had had six heart attacks in the previous year, had stopped working, and was waiting for his SSID to be approved, so he needed help with the rent at his apartment in Sugar Hill. And my friend Meagan, a poet who before the end of the Aughts would have a long-term book deal in the young adult market, got her boyfriend, the chair of the English Department at a local liberal arts college, to give me a couple of classes teaching writing as an adjunct. I moved in with Frank for six months and never bought a mattress.
Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts