PhotoCollage: In my solar system, everything is fiction. In my universe, everything is truth.

MY DERELICT HOTEL is more a state of mind than it is about a specific place.

MY DERELICT HOTEL is an Art project I've been working on since I was ten-years-old.

Other People have tried writing about my past but they weren't there, were they.

In the beginning, it was simply a few black and white photographs taken with a Brownie camera that I purchased for a dollar at a flea market. I still haunt flea markets. Those initial photographs of that initial stairwell -- a place that was my safety net, my world, my refuge, my fort, my hideaway -- are still appropriate. I was not trying to tell you the story of either a boy or the stairwell he played in. I was attempting to document two things: how that territory of the stairwell was being taken over by drug dealers, and fear.

The boy was afraid. Of being killed.

He had already lost the battle for the stairwell.

How to make sense of it with a camera. How to see it through the plastic lens curvature of a Brownie and the eyes of a ten-year-old.

This is not a family drama. This is not the story of a tribe. This is not a narrative that looks at father, mother, siblings. This story is mine.

These blues belong to me and my crazy shoes. I have never been able to live in one place for very long. My crazy shoes and I are always going somewhere else. We are never really sure were we will wind up but we're out there travelin'.

This could never be a family story because, frankly, I don't have all the answers as to who was really who or who lived with who or who had married who or as the case might be -- not married -- and who was where and when and why is a set of enigmatic liaisons I am not sure I care to know about. They are not the point nor is some family tree that tells you absolutely nothing about the indiviuduals in the family. If that's the symbolism you seek, don't delve into MY DERELICT HOTEL because it's not that kind of remembering. The memories are out of sequence. They're about the contrasts behind the remembering and not about the memories themselves. They're lies. "Art is a lie that makes you realize the truth." Picasso said it. MY DERELICT HOTEL is a confluence of painting, photography, story-telling, poetry, remembering, and music. It is filled with symbols and representations. Its purpose is to transport you from one place to another place. While much of it has a significant amount of pain, its purpose is to be transcendent.

SRO means: Single Room Occupancy.

It definitely does not mean: One Person Per Room.

These rooms and these walls have a plethora of voices and languages and eyes and they know everything. Every drama ever told in the history of humanity. For some people living at the edge of life, they're a charity. Socrates was essentially given an ancient SRO to sleep in night to night. The SRO has seen the likes of a million Romeos and Juliettes. Stanely and Blanche. Travis Bickle the taxi driver versus the rest of Manhattan. Paul Newman as Hud Bannon. The Days of Wine and Roses. Charles Bukowski's Factotum. The SRO has seen it all.

There are fewer and fewer SROs. Modern development paves the way. Nevertheless, they're out there and I have lived in them. They are the human ruin of Rome and inhabited mainly by gypsies. They're in Cairo with the flies. They are the motels of Gallup. The grimy eyes of windows along Forty-Second Street. The glue-sniffing from paper bags block after block of Mexico City. The edges of the flavelas of Venzuela and Brazil. The honky tonk of Chinatowns. Downtown Los Angeles. The brick bakeries of sweat and heat in El Paso. The East End of London. The old Red Light District of Ho Chi Minh City. Manilla. Hong Kong. They are where the forgotten live in Dublin, Paris, Belfast, Tokyo, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and the K-Mart that is all of Reno.

They are Havana.

Everywhere a mental institution has closed or where homelessness meets one slight step up.

They are not the chic and trendy places where one thinks of artists making Art. Yet they are the places most artists can afford to live in and usually barely.

I am told that the art market is hot and that artists are raking in the cash.

No Artist I know. Yet it's been Art that has always paid my way. Nothing else comes close. I have always lived hand to mouth and mouth to dick. In the places I know -- landscapes with their own definitive vast oceanic horizons -- hookers, whores, and hustlers are the norm and prostitution only is. Disease only is. Crime only is. Garbage only is. Drugs are an escape. Alcohol is a given. Pimps live on the detritus. Cops are crooked. Foster children live in the halls. Recovery is a long waiting line waiting to get in. The librarian is a babysitter. The guy across the hall has a gun. Visitors are required to sign in at the front desk. And a cup of coffee is at least a dollar.

The Artists I know are likely to be junkies who paint on newspaper when they can afford the paint or they steal it. I have stolen tons of art supplies. Anywhere and Everywhere.

Anywhere my crazy shoes will take me. Cheyenne, Wyoming. Cleveland. Albany. Louisville. Belle Glade. Omaha. Berlin. Oakland. Tucson. Naples.

Memphis: we carried that mattress out to the fire escape and drinking tequila shots teasing the sidewalk whores down below you girl where you going to all dressed in your titties and your high heels you come up you hear. Daddy got tequila.

And they did, too. Sitting in the window screamin' jesus.

Memphis was the blues falling down all around me like rain.

I'm gonna take a shotgun and disconnect my brain.

They got me on that stairwell. It was so long ago I can't remember and then I remember. Memory is not unlike a tequila shot. Long on the rush and short on the warm. Any tequila shot; any refuge only lasts so long. They can become your prisons, too. When they get you, that's when you go to work for them. Up and down the stairwells of desperation, survival, poetry, and defeat.