Summary

At the outset of My Government Means to Kill Me, Trey Singleton moved to New York City in May of 1985. At seventeen, he felt confined by his parents’ expectations of success and renounced his trust fund and padded life in Indianapolis for the New York metropolis. Trey moved into the Chelsea Hotel, which was largely occupied by drug addicts and sex workers, not the famous artists he had read about living there. In the lobby, the narrator met Gregory, who asked to borrow five dollars. The stranger asked who Trey’s daddy was, assuming that he had a “man turning [him] out and paying’ [his] bills” (3). The protagonist had become accustomed to people thinking he was a sex worker, within his first weeks in New York. Several days later, Gregory stopped by Trey...