At seven years old I came home to find a man lying in a puddle of blood.

Each day I walked myself the 11 city blocks to and from school, not to mention feeding, bathing, and dressing myself. My mom worked 14 hour days just so we could survive.

It was the late 1970’s and she and I lived in an old, run-down, walk-up building on 88th Street between First and Second Avenues in New York City. The kind of building where the stairs weren’t built quite right and they sagged to one side or the other, creaking and moaning with every advancing step. The kind of building where there was a shared toilet at the end of each hallway and the tub (which doubled as a storage chest and table if you were lucky enough to find a sheet of plywood in the garbage as a top) was in the kitchen. The kind of building where it was so hot inside during the summers that we slept out on the fire escape for the slightest bit of reprieve, but there was also never enough heat for a hot bath so we always had to boil water on the stove. That kind of run-down, walk-up building.

I think my mom met Eugene a few months earlier when we passed his furniture store on Second Avenue near our building. Maybe she was seeing if we could afford a dresser or perhaps a bed. I don’t think that worked out because my first bed in that one room apartment was two pallets (the ones used by forklifts) that we dragged home and draped blankets over. I recall seeing Eugene a few times after and come to think of it, he and my mom might have been dating.

On this particular day, I opened the door after climbing the rickety stairs four flights to the apartment, and there he was, alone, slumped in the corner holding his stomach with blood running across the floor. Did my mom give him the key? Did I forget to lock the door when I left for school? He must have dragged himself up each one those rundown steps that moaned with him. He must have thought he would be safe here.

As I came through the door he looked up at me, not with a startled look, but more like the look of someone barely holding on and now what seems as slow motion said, “I got shot” and then took his hand away to reveal the bullet hole as if to prove he was telling the truth.

Was this really happening? Or was it a dream?

Still standing at the front door, I put my head down and went and sat in the closet across from him and closed the door. I was scared, yes, but more than scared I recall being disappointed and honestly, I don’t even know how, but I felt inconvenienced by it all.

This couldn’t be real. Could it?

How could my mom let this happen? We left Georgia a year before to flee my abusive dad, as well as her ugly past that included her first husband shooting her. Now this! What did this mean? Does everyone end up getting shot? Am I going to get shot one day or worse yet shoot someone? Is there any safe place?

The closet was dark, messy and full of stuff we just threw in there. Things like broken Christmas decorations, moms wigs, shoes with a few too many holes in them, some little plastic army men that I nervously chewed on when playing war with my one friend Bernard that lived up the block. I would hide in there when mom was incredibly angry trying to beat me or when I heard the Budweiser gang (a bunch of neighborhood Irish kids who later on killed two homosexuals in Central Park with baseball bats) fighting down the block. It became the perfect place for me with all the rest of the useless stuff.

I don’t really recall what happened next or to him. I’m guessing he either crawled to the hospital himself or maybe mom dragged him there like she dragged herself there when her first husband tried to kill her. That was most definitively not a dream. But this might well have been.

Years later I’m still trying to figure it out. Whether it happened, or whether it didn’t, I’ll never know. But the closet was real and I really used to hide in there.

In many ways I’ve continued to hide well into my adulthood. I still have regular run-ins with all the feelings I felt that day, or in that dream — the fear, disappointment, unworthiness and, yes, even the inconvenience. It can get pretty dark.

But every day I work hard to open up that door and live with Love, in the Light.