PhotoTransparency Collage: When I made this I did not want it to be a perfect picture someone might put on their fucking wall.

I wanted it to have an edge. I want my art to be like something you would find blowing around on the street. Crumpled. Torn. You can't even read what it has to say all that clearly. But you stare at it anyway.

Angel really had been living on the subway that year. Here he was, a Puerto Rican drag queen who worked with blind children during the day -- In Jamaica, Queens -- but it wasn't enough money to make rent so at night he lived on the subway.

It was rough stuff just knowing Angel but I did love him.

I was not alone.

Those blind kids who he met every morning when they got off the bus to go into the school loved Angel, too, and his excitement at seeing them every morning without fail was something for them to get up in the morning for.

Their lives were beyond the realm of grim. I knew them all. Angel was their light.

You have to trust the person who is getting you off the bus and down the block and into the school when you're stone dead blind.

Sometimes I rode around the subway with him in some vain attempt to get him to understand he deserved better.

Than the subway.

I took him home. He was a soft lover and he cried.

Angel had this: he fell in love a lot.

Other lost souls he would meet on the subway.

"And I have my kids," he would say.

There's the Angel I put into the photograph above. And then there was the Angel I knew.

This was no shrinking little drag queen. It's HARD being homeless.

I finally got Angel into a permanent room at the YMCA. He could barely believe it. But by then his health was slipping away from him like water slips through fingers.

I will never forget for as long as I live the day I had to tell the blind kids Angel wouldn't be coming to get them into school anymore.

They sat there in their bus seats listening intently. Rocking back and forth. Weeping.

Many of them were kids who never let you see their eyes. They were either always looking down, heads held low, or they deliberately closed their eyelids -- or both.

But not today.

It hit me. They had never seen Angel. They had no idea he was a Puerto Rican drag queen. Maybe they knew Angel better than anyone with eyes that worked.

The day had arrived when they would find their own way off the bus and into the school. Eyes staring straight ahead as red and wet as a bloodred sea.