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David grew up hard, in the hardest part of La Brea—a village of houses near the coast left crooked by the movement of the land caused by the famed Pitch Lake. He didn’t know his mother, and grew up in a home filled with step-­siblings, getting a primary school education considered enough in the 1970s to go find a work and make a life. And work he did, selling coconuts roadside and learning to craft hats and baskets from coconut palm leaves, bought by tourists visiting the lake, making enough to live by after his caregivers died. Then cocaine found him, and the long decline began. Every action thereafter was meant to earn the ten dollars for a foiled-wrapped ball of the drug. The candles he used to smoke the cocaine burned down the house, and his life on the streets began; his neighbours seeing the gifted boy, and not the ragged shell of a man dragging around a suitcase containing his entire life. For some time, he lived under a tent near a dam in the village. Then he would find a bed at the San Fernando General Hospital for several weeks after a fall from a coconut tree left him with internal injuries that never healed. But he checked himself out of hospital and returned to Brighton, La Brea, to find his cocaine, living in pain so agonising that he would beg people to buy him the poison so he could end it all. But David would not remain homeless. About ten years ago, he moved into his finest residence—eight sto­reys high, with a staircase taking you to a lookout 200 feet (61 metres) above sea level, with an unimpeded view of the entire arc of the Gulf of Paria, and Venezuela. His friend since childhood, Vincent Anthony, told us: “It was a place with rooms. He put down a bed, chairs, had a place to lie down, a little fireside. Nobody to bother him, no rain to fall on him. He lived there for years and nobody know when and how he died”. You can read more about what we found by clicking the link in our bio or stories

January 12, 2022