Every time a DVD player breaks, we have a panic. How to watch the stack of movies I, Hef and Kid scavenge several times a week from the Mid-Manhattan and Brooklyn Central libraries? Without our movies, what have we got? A bunch of homeless guys with no more than a bag of clothes, some food stamps and dollar store toiletries each between us. There’s only so much shit-talking and communal daydreaming (typically about which beautiful celebrity we would treat to multiple orgasms) one can do in the downtime, the hours between 5pm and lights out. And we can’t bring women in here. And we keep forgetting to buy a cheap chess board. And the streets of East New York are no place to find non-lethal distraction. Gunfights every night.

I downplay my advantage, my notebook. The fellas don’t know I’m a writer, nor that I have no criminal or substance abuse history. Nobody pries. It’s understood that we’re all here because we fucked up in one way or another. But it’s the DVD player that helps me sort of love these guys. What comes out of that machine is real to them. And when it isn’t real, it gets ejected and tossed aside. That’s how I live, too. My film critic and filmmaker friends who tell me that movies can’t cut, kill or save lives… man, listen.

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