By Matthew Monks
If so, pick up the latest issue of Esquire for a dazzling first-person account of an Astoria man's life on the street. Cadillac Man, a 55-year-old Army veteran who has lived outdoors for a decade, just published excerpts of his journals in the May issue of the monthly men's magazine. “I'm happy because it's telling my story and my people's story,” said Cadillac, who has squatted beneath a viaduct in Ditmars for the past four years and won't give his real name. “I wasn't in it for fame or fortune. (I write) to give people insight into how we truly are and because we are so stereotyped.”For two years, Cadillac has been scribbling his life story long-hand into eight spiral-bound notebooks. It's part memoir and part homeless survival guide. “I have nearly frozen to death and I've nearly had heatstroke, I've bunked down between crypts in a mausoleum to sleep among the dead, I've spent the night in sewer pipes on the East River with the river bunnies (rats) and the stench,” Cadillac wrote in the magazine. “I've learned that it's a good idea if you're sleeping on concrete to scatter peanut shells around your position to act as an early-warning system … I've come to dislike the Salvation Army (overpriced), I've come to hate, hate, crackheads, I've come to realize that racial segregation exists among the homeless in America just as it does in American society at large.”Esquire Executive Editor Mark Warren said he met Cadillac last year through a former editor who lived in Astoria and befriended the homeless man. He suggested Warren take a look at Cadillac's work. The executive editor was stunned by the writing, describing it to the TimesLedger earlier this year as “extremely raw and pretty extraordinary.” The hardest thing about deciding to publish it, he said, was choosing the right passages from the roughly 150,000 words he estimates Cadillac has written. Warren said the street dweller has a real chance of getting a book deal. “He's been getting a lot of spontaneous interest from agents,” Warren said, later adding that “I think this piece will likely make it possible to actually publish his book, which is astonishing.”Cadillac said he would use the money from a book deal for two things: moving indoors and paying off the $30,000 in back child support he reckons he owes his youngest daughter, a 16-year-old who lives with her mother in New Jersey. “I want to do the right thing by my daughter,” Cadillac said. “If this book deal and stuff goes through, whatever I make from it, she'll get that.”Years of exposure have left him in frail health and he worries he might die if he does not get indoors soon so he is looking for a cheap room. He had two minor heart attacks this year and suffers from a severe case of sleep apnea that makes it impossible to get a full night's rest. “With the time I have left, I am writing down all my experiences in a spiral notebooks,” he wrote in Esquire. “Got eight filled so far, as a testament to how I lived that maybe my kids can read or just have, and as a memorial to all those I have known who are gone and completely forgotten.”Reach reporter Matthew Monks by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 156.
