Joey was selling paintings on the street for 30 dollars each when Zach walked up and asked which one would work for his mom’s birthday. Joey picked one out, offered to add her name, and quoted 35 dollars. Then he dropped the price to 24. Then to 20. Not because he was a bad negotiator, but because Zach was buying it for his mom, and Joey had lost his own mother nearly a decade earlier, and there was simply no world in which he was going to be greedy about that. What happened next, and what tens of thousands of strangers did when they heard Joey’s story, is the kind of thing that is easy to dismiss as too good to be true right up until the moment you see a man standing in his first home in years, shaking.
Zach had no cash on him that day. All he had was a can of Pringles. He offered them to Joey, apologized, and said he would come back and pay. Joey waved it off. ‘At the end of the day, only thing I care about is the fact that somebody you love that loves you got something,’ he said. Zach handed over the Pringles, they shared one together, and then Zach pulled out a thousand dollars in cash.
The man behind the paintings
Joey had been living on Skid Row and sleeping in his car, working the street with handmade pieces, a music note silhouette here, a figure there, built from a morning’s work. He had been on his own since he was 12, when his stepfather kicked him out while his mother was in the hospital. He moved in with a stripper and a bouncer who sold drugs. His mother was a 13-year dialysis patient whose husband had taken off to Florida with her savings. She missed three dialysis appointments and died. The last thing she told him from her hospital bed was: ‘It’s okay to be okay.’
He carried that line everywhere. On the street, in the cold, through nights in Columbus, Ohio, where the temperature hit 12 to 14 below and the only warmth he could find was the steam venting from a neighbor’s laundry exhaust. He stayed there until the cold passed.
When MDMotivator shared Joey’s story, the response flooded in. Together, viewers raised over 100,000 dollars for him.
Along came an artist
The team came back for Joey with a full day. First a haircut, the first time he had cut his hair in two years. When it came off, he said he had been holding onto it thinking he needed to keep it, but he felt lighter the moment it was gone. New clothes followed. Then a question: where was he staying? Behind a building, he said. He was tired of the elements. Exhausted was the word he used.
His new apartment had already been turned into a studio by a handyman sourced through Angie. The name on the wall read ‘Along Came an Artist,’ which is what Joey had said he would call a gallery if he ever had one. Two years of rent, fully paid. And then one more envelope: 40,000 dollars in cash.
He had walked into that day planning to sell enough art to afford a room for the night.
The painting that started it
One of Joey’s pieces made it onto the wall of the apartment, the same kind of quick-morning silhouette he had been selling for 30 dollars on the street.
Zach’s mom got hers, too. Joey had never met her. He just knew what it felt like to want someone you love to know you were thinking of them.
