My bus arrived in San Francisco around midnight.

I grabbed a map of the city and found the nearest public library.

I love libraries. In school, when other kids ran to the playground during recess, I went to the library and read fantasy stories in a comfortable corner. I learned to research at an early age, so I knew I'd find the information I needed in a library.

The main city library was beautiful. Eight tall stories high, built of granite, with a glass ceiling, providing lots of natural light. Rows of staircases and bookshelves spiraled upwards, resembling a double helix.

I went to the information desk and asked for help finding homeless shelters and job search centers in the city. The librarian didn't seem surprised. Skinny teenagers must have been inquiring about homeless services with some regularity. She printed a few pages of information, and that's how I learned about Larkin Street Youth Services.

It was 2008. Some rich bankers had gambled with everyone else's money, and millions lost their homes. The economy was in freefall. Austerity was the word of the day. Social programs were slashed nationwide. Homelessness was an epidemic. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the nation had come to San Francisco, fleeing poverty, hoping for a better life. In the harsh light of day, I saw them sleeping in abandoned doorways and huddling together for respite from the cold April winds.

Larkin Street Youth Services' federal budget had been cut in half. It would endure more cuts before the economy rebounded. All 50 beds in the Lark Inn were full. I wrote my name at the bottom of a long list of names, and they told me to check in every day to move up the list. It would be five weeks before a bed opened. They also gave me a paper bag. Inside was a thin PB&J and a banana. A few doors down was the Larkin Drop-In, where homeless youth could rest and eat during the day. Next door was an employment and training center. I asked around, and everyone gave the same advice: make a friend. Find a couch.

I wasn't very good at making friends and didn't know how to trust people. So instead, I explored the city, looking for a place to sleep outside. I spent days walking to every corner of the water-walled city. At night, I retrieved my luggage and brought it to the safest place I found on my search. I trespassed at a dozen places or more. No construction site, dark alley, or stairway escaped my consideration. I jumped fences and slept in trees. I passed a thousand homeless people curled up on the sidewalk. Those wretched dark and shivering doorways seemed unambitious. I wanted something more.

I found it on the third day of searching: the rooftop of a parking garage. To reach it, I took an elevator up five floors, stepped out onto a fire escape, climbed some stairs and a ladder, crossed the roof, descended a different ladder, and then jumped onto another roof. But seeing the stars and city at night made it worth the trouble.

My rooftop had a broken water tower, with a man-sized tube for me to crawl in to take shelter from the misty rain. Most nights, the winds carried the music of a homeless saxophonist playing for change on the street below. I gave him more money than I could spare. In truth, it was one of the happiest times of my life.

But nights in San Francisco can be cold and long. Some nights I couldn't sleep. I'd walk up and down Market Street, stopping at a 24-hour fast food joint to stay warm. The security guards would wake me up whenever I closed my eyes. What little money I had only lasted long enough for my food stamps application to process. When my food stamps ran out, as they did on the third week of every month, I stole food from Walgreens or Safeway.

Next, I started looking for work. Larkin's employment center helped me improve and print my resume, and by May, I was working as a teller at a check cashing store in the Tenderloin. Locals call the Tenderloin 'an island of poverty in a sea of immense wealth.' My store's clients were mainly disabled veterans and societal rejects, either denied service by banks or through their own deliberate disavowal of mainstream society. Some were noble, many were swindlers, most were sad and miserable, but it was a living. By late May, my name reached the top of Larkin's list, and a bed opened up in the Lark-Inn Shelter.

I dragged my belongings to the shelter and secured them in a locker beside my bed. I shared the room with three other people. Having secured my basic needs, I explored San Francisco and returned to the library to research how to be gay. I read about Castro Street, Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Stonewall, and some history of Queer civil rights.

I also learned about cruising. In the before time, pre-internet, gays would walk down the street and try to make eye contact with passersby. If someone met their gaze, they'd turn around after passing to look again.

Since Grindr wasn't a thing yet, and I had limited access to the internet, I figured I would try my hand at cruising. I walked to Castro Street, San Francisco's affluent gay district, and found a seat with a view of the sidewalk so I could watch as men passed by.

Like everything else in life, I thought of it as a game or experiment, practicing how to meet people, how to have sex, how to fall in love. And I did want to fall in love.

But what I really wanted was for someone to fix me. I felt broken. Unlovable. I wanted someone to help me put back my broken pieces and quiet my screaming mind, to hold me tight and tell me I was safe and it would all be okay.

Sadly, that's not what the men on Castro Street wanted from me.

See, I dropped out of high school when I was 16 to work two jobs, and I was never good at making friends, anyway. So my exposure to people outside of my immediate family was limited. I'd never even kissed a boy until three days prior, but that's a story for a different book. The point is, I was about to be told, over and over again, by total strangers that I was attractive, relatively speaking. Think Ryan Reynolds, but 19.

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I only mention it because, from their perspective, I was fresh meat, vulnerable, inexperienced, and ripe for the taking. The way wolves look at a deer alone in the woods. That's how they saw me. I wanted someone to fix me. They wanted a meal.

I lost count of how many men there were. At first, I thought they wanted me. Then I realized it was my body they wanted. Once they had my body, they'd lose interest in me because that's the nature of wolves: they're hunters.

It didn't do wonders for my already shaky self-esteem. As my sex partners multiplied, so did the number of men who didn't call or text me back. Every time I returned to Castro to meet someone new, I grew a little more distrusting, a little more certain that something was broken in me. Why else would so many men take me and then forget about me completely?

And when my fears were confirmed, as they often were, the screaming would start. There were no words, not even a noise, just a blood-curdling scream of rage and pain and fear that echoed in my mind. My imagination would envision me pulling my hair and crying and banging my head into things. But in reality, I'd be sitting at a table somewhere on Castro Street, calmly drinking a hot cup of coffee as strangers walked by.

I met a string of fuckbois, narcissists, and drug addicts. I met men who never grew up. Men who tried to fill the void in themselves, sometimes with alcohol, sometimes with sex, or drugs, or money, or something else.

I met more than a few good men. More often than not, I messed something up, and they ghosted me. But I kept meeting people, and as I met more people, I learned more about myself and others. I learned how to communicate.

But the more people I met, the more alien I felt. Alone in the city and utterly inept at intimacy, I had nothing and no one. But I had a few things going for me, namely being a skinny, pretty, white twink with sharp cheekbones and bright blue eyes.

You see, the mainstream gay community is racist AF on the DL, with several prejudices, spoken and unspoken, running through it like veins. There are a variety of gay subgroups, most of which serve to reinforce the established hierarchy (adhering to the values of white supremacy, money, and masculine power), but everyone is fetishized and objectified to some extent by someone or other. Gays sort themselves into 'tribes' of furries, puppies, bears, cubs, otters, wolves, silver foxes, rice queens, white rice, sticky rice, daddies, bros, jocks, twinks, twunks, queens, queers, chubs, chasers of every variety, and many more.

Almost 8 billion people in the world, and everyone has different tastes. No matter who you are or what you look like, someone thinks you're the sexiest thing alive. But not everyone is in equal demand. Being young, white, and conventionally good-looking opened many doors while shutting a few others. Total strangers wanted things from me and gave me stuff, lots of stuff, just for showing up. And I traded on my good fortune. Alone in San Francisco, I was grateful for whatever reason people were nice to me. God knows not everyone was. Some people were outright cruel. Do you know the song "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" from Evita? I know. Musical reference. Gay. Whatever. That song sets the tone I'm going for here.

Anyway, I don't remember much. Partly because I was experimenting with drugs and alcohol for the first time and partly because I don't think there were many memories worth holding onto back then.

But maybe I deserved it. I was insecure, impulsive, and dishonest with myself and, therefore, with everyone else. For that reason, I suspect, people didn't trust me. Even when I spoke the truth, people didn't believe me, so I lied more. With every strange man I met, I practiced a different version of myself.

That's how I approached each new encounter, like a game. I would envision a better version of myself. Perhaps I'd have no family. Perhaps I'd be visiting from Utah. Perhaps I'd be sweet and naive. Or maybe dark and stoic.

He would take me to dinner somewhere, and I'd watch him watch me, observe his ticks, smiles, and frowns, like a scientist jotting mental notes. Little things like where to put my hands, how to use a knife and fork, how loud I should talk to waiters, fundamental stuff most normal people take for granted. I needed practical experience, and I got it from one man after another. Sometimes I had sex with them. Usually. Not always. Once, I traded sex for money.

I was dating someone at the time. Kevin. Had great hair, a cute dimple when he smiled, and the sex was excellent, but his mind was erratic. His emotions were wild and unpredictable. He was never violent, but he was unstable. Most importantly, he was kind to me. He wanted me around. He was also homeless, and we were about the same age, so we had stuff in common.

One day he suggested I try hustling, as he called it. He said boys like me could make thousands of dollars a week hustling. It was like a rite of passage, he said. Every gay boy in the city does it at least once.

I can neither confirm nor deny that last sentence, but I can say that I did it at least once. I used craigslist to find my john, back before the government gutted craigslist to 'protect us,' ironically taking power and autonomy out of the hands of vulnerable sex workers.

The john and I talked a bit online at first, exchanging information and the usual. When all was agreed upon, I walked to his house. He was kind and generous. I pretended to be Julia Roberts before she met Richard Gere. You know, confident and sexy, like, I know what I'm doing because I've done it all before. The sex was fine, and the money was nice, but I felt cheap. It's hard to explain. I would have had sex with the same guy for free. He was good-looking and seemed nice enough. It was an otherwise normal hook-up, except this time, I was paid for it. And for whatever reason, I didn't like that. I thought I'd be pleased. I got off, and I made some quick cash, but I didn't like feeling up for sale.

So I bought a caramel frappuccino from Starbucks to make myself feel better. An impractical thing. A luxury I couldn't afford, a lifestyle I wasn't born into but could taste for a small price. Next, I bought an MP3 player, so I could listen to music again. The first albums I downloaded were "Attack and Release" by the Black Keys and "The Sunset Tree" by the Mountain Goats. I spent the rest on necessities, like minutes on my phone, deodorant, razors, and other things food stamps can't buy.

I resolved not to do sex work again. It wasn't a traumatic experience. I don't regret it, but I didn't enjoy it. I also decided to end things with Kevin. I had enough problems without adding his to the mix. He later went to prison for money laundering, so leaving was probably the right call on my part.

Meanwhile, Lark-Inn Shelter had an 8 pm curfew. So at the end of each day, I would wait outside for my name to be called. If I wasn't present, Lark-Inn would give my bed away to someone else, and I would fall back to the bottom of the list. For a month, I drifted to sleep listening to the snores and farts of forty-nine other street urchins; my spiral ring notebook on the floor next to my bed, so I could write notes of my dreams. And when I dreamed, I dreamed of Eden.