Living on the ‘edge’.

Have you ever heard about JT LeRoy? She wrote an exciting memoir about her extreme life on the edge. She was an HIV-positive transgendered, former drug-addict teen prostitute who decided to tell her story so that other people could learn from her mistakes and earn some money from the distribution. This book was a hit in America. However, it was later found to be a completely made up story. JT LeRoy is Laura Albert, an average American woman in her 40s who had an average life full of average moments. More than twenty people in the USA wrote memoirs which were found out to be fictitious after short investigations. Maybe more and more people feel a need to become a hero after learning about survivors of catastrophes, addictions, operations, diseases and misfortunes on TV.

However, people with the most exciting stories usually keep them to themselves out of fear, afraid of being isolated or called ‘different’.

His name is Luke Griffin. We went for a beer one day and when I told him that I wanted to be a journalist he sadly looked at a newspaper on a window sill and said: ‘I can’t read’. Luke cannot write either but he knows when the EU was formed and how America helped Russia in the Second World War. He is 19, he lives in north London, he wants to become an actor and does not believe in family. He doesn’t know his real surname either.

‘I was shipped’ from Spain 19 years ago. His mum and dad, being extremely religious, did not want a child who was born before the marriage and decided to get rid of him. They blamed him for their own sins and thought that sending him away will help them to escape God’s anger. This is how Luke arrived in England and ended up living in an orphanage. He moved from one ‘caring’ family to another which were paid, according to his words, around £3 000 a month for keeping him. Luke was one of those ‘missing from the list’ boys who were not registered anywhere and so the government did not want to keep an eye on him. He took care of himself since he was 13, working in factories, doing Thai-boxing where he learned not only to defend himself but also hurt people. One of his caring families which took ‘care’ of him when he was eleven used to torture him and a dozen other boys they kept in the house. Luke’s right hand is full of burn marks from cigarettes that he got during fights with his host family. He also has scars from stab wounds on his chest and arms. Scars everywhere. ‘I was also hit by a car one time. I was paralysed for a year and had to learn to walk again’. He has been hit by a car, had a brain tumour, was nearly killed, stabbed, tortured, he carries around 200 scars on his body, has broken ribs, was shipped to England, sold in China for child labour and didn’t eat for two weeks… And this is only a short list.