The man walks into a Las Vegas Starbucks and his hands speak first. They are small and rough and soiled, with used-sandpaper skin and nails nubbed down by an uneasy life. You can read so much from a person’s hands, and Tony Rodriguez’s hands tell the story of a troubled journey.
Or, put differently: There is no joy to the 47-year-old sitting here. Not as a medium black coffee is placed before him, not as he talks about shared geography and athletic glory days. Some folks walk the earth with a pep in their step. Others come to believe they are cursed.
Tony Rodriguez does not use that word, cursed. But there are certainly times when he wonders how, exactly, it all came to this: his past life dealing drugs along the Vegas Strip, his three years and counting addicted to heroin and meth, his long nights sleeping inside tunnels and on park benches, his hunger, his anxiousness, his waywardness.
