Dex and Karma

It’s been a year since Dex had his head cracked. He didn’t see who did it, but he is pretty sure it was the police officer who’d been transferred to the jail where he was serving a brief sentence on drug charges in Florida. He suffered a traumatic head injury, had brain surgery and went through months of rehab to learn to walk and talk again. His neurosurgeon told him he was lucky to be alive.

Dex grew up in Queens, New York. He said his was the only white family in his neighborhood. He has two brothers and three sisters. He went to college in Virginia until his father stole his student loan check. they were driving in a car when Dex found out, and when they were stopped at a red traffic light, he punched his father in the face. The fight spilled out of the car onto the street. The police showed up and the police searched the car, they found a small stash of pot. He went on unsupervised probation. So began a fringe association with the economy for Dex. In order to pay for college, he grew mushrooms and sold acid. Everything was going fine, he said, until his room was burgled. He began painting in jail and began selling his artwork on the street when he was free.

Dex traveled to San Diego circuitously, hitchhiking and hopping trains. He wove his way across from the east coast, stopping along the way to work, hustle, play music, live. It was eight years ago, sitting on the wall at Ocean Beach, watching the sunset, listening to Katy Perry’s song “Fire” when a crazy person from the street came up behind him with a golf club and knocked him out. He woke up in the hospital from a medically induced coma, with a cop leaning over him. They wanted to know if he was going to press charges. While he was in a coma, his friends on the street had been beating up his assailant daily. Just enough to keep him injured and scared, but he still wouldn’t leave town. When Dex got out of the hospital and the guy saw him, he was terrified. Dex got his mother on the phone and had the guy apologize to her for killing her son.

After that Dex headed south, and ended up in Pensacola where he was picked up on an outstanding warrant. It was there he got beaten up in jail. Prison guards told him it was another inmate. But Dex was able to remember where he was when it happened and there were no inmates in that area at the time. He was set up. After his recovery, his time served, he contacted a friend in San Diego who wanted to hire him to do computer animation, so he returned to the west coast in January. Only the job wasn’t legitimate. The friend was living out of his car and only had ideas, not computers.

Strumming “No Wagonwheel” on his ukulele outside an abandoned building downtown, he told hippy jokes and talked about drawing again, selling his artwork for cash. “I gotta feed my dog Karma,” he said. “She’s getting on in years.” Dex himself is 35, but “I feel 80,” he said. “I’ve played in bands, created websites, but never been able to make a living at either. I’m not living in mansions. I eat shit food out of cans. But I still have a good attitude. What else am I gonna do? The world’s tried to kill me several times,” he added. “This is way more exciting than being dead.”