Vegas, Sardineville

Sardineville. I named the house and the house earned it.

May 2019. I left Pennsylvania for Las Vegas with what fit in a car and moved into the master bedroom of a share house. Master bedroom sounds better than it was. It was the biggest room in a building that always had more people in it than it was designed for.

I told myself it was for a few months while I got straight.

I was there five years. Seven or eight roommates came and went past my door in that time. I heard every one of their lives through a wall while I built mine on the other side of it.

And I was behind on rent. Not once, and not by a little — months at a stretch, more than once, in a way that would have ended the arrangement anywhere else.

My landlord's name is Ryan.

He had every legal right to put my things on the sidewalk. He never did it. He kept extending the one line of credit nobody else in my life would touch, which was believing I was good for it before there was a single piece of evidence that I was.

I have been funded by clients, by banks, and by credit cards at rates I would rather not say out loud. The cheapest capital I have ever received in my life was a man deciding to be patient with me.

People picture the turnaround happening somewhere impressive. It happened in a room in a crowded house, on a bed that doubled as a desk, funded by a landlord's patience and a freelancing account.

Sardineville held the roof up for five years while I worked out what I was. Everything I have built since was built in that room.