Greg Cayea

It all started when I was fourteen years old. I left high school in the middle of ninth grade and went to a rehab for thirty days. While there, I fell in love with a nineteen-year-old heroin-addicted hippie chick from Purdue, Indiana and broke every rule I could find. It’s safe to say my life was a mess…

I rigged the alarm system in my room and broke out during lunch hours to impress my peers and see that chick from Purdue who stayed one floor above me. I wrote massive amounts of shitty poetry and paraded down the hallways doing all sorts of ridiculous attention-seeking shit. Eventually, they kicked me out. I was unsure how to fix my life.

I WAS DESPERATE FOR HELP…

A small plane took me to Louisiana where a white van shoved me in the back and drove me off to Opelousas, a small town on the outskirts of Lafayette. I was almost fifteen years-old, and after six months of fighting off anti-Semitic threats and causing mayhem for giggles, I ran away with some hot chick from Lawrence, Massachusetts until I was picked up at a truck stop a few miles away.

I was eventually kicked out of there too.

I thought I had beat the system, but at four in the morning, two large men escorted me to the New Orleans airport and took me to Atlanta. They shoved me in a pickup truck and drove me to a small and very rural town called Dahlonega about two hours away, where I was thrust into a “therapeutic boarding school,” which can only be described as a cross between a juvenile detention center and mental institution.

MY LIFE WAS GETTING WORSE…

I tried to run away but got lost in the woods and picked up by the sheriff, then sent to a wilderness program in Utah for five weeks by way of two more large men; another attempt to straighten me out. After five weeks I was transported back to Dahlonega and stayed trapped there for two long years. I read every book by Jack Kerouac. It was there that I became obsessed with the idea of travel and true freedom.

After many more horrific events, including an eight-day venture into the woods to endure a treacherous period of time they called “isolation,” I tried to escape one more time. That time, I made it. By then I was almost seventeen years-old. It was August 17th of 2001.

THEN 9/11 HAPPENED…

The country was in disarray and it was a mission to find food every meal, clothing to keep warm, and shelter to sleep (without getting arrested). I spent the rest of the year living on the street, spare-changing for food, and hiding out in different parts of the country till I was eighteen. I was hitchhiking from point A to point somewhere, and eventually I laid down some roots in Boulder, Colorado.

By the time I was able to get a real job (that didn’t require the work permit I didn’t have), I worked every position under the sun. I became deeply addicted to drugs—once again—and in the midst of it all, decided I was special enough to become an actor. I moved back to New York around the time I was twenty.

ONE MORE TRY TO GET MY LIFE TOGETHER…

Suffice it to say that life took another wrong turn when my acting career fell on its head and I resorted to sellin drugs and producing theater and promoting concerts with coked out actors and cracked out musicians. Life got messier than ever.

I moved to Los Angeles after Brooklyn failed me. I got sober on October 15th of 2011 and decided to rebuild my life. One of the best tools I found to keep me sane was writing, so I wrote it all down for ya, every last bit.

Point is, I’m Greg. Hi. Read about my troubled childhood and laugh your head off, I wrote it just for you.