Transcript :

It’s like my drug. You know how everybody says they have their drug? Well, my drug is dance.

It cleanses my body. It cleanses all the negativity. It cleanses all the bad things that I have done in my life. It makes me forget everything I’ve ever done that I wasn’t supposed to do, and I still hold on to.

At 19, I ended up getting in trouble with the law. They gave me 10 years probation. It just changed my whole life around.

There were times that I thought about, like I didn’t want to be here anymore. Like, I’ll be honest, I just didn’t want to be here.

Once I start dancing, or once I put my headphones on and I’m just listening to music and I’m on the train and I’m about to go somewhere and I start busting out a move here and there and I’m about to do something big. It makes me get into tunnel vision.

The risk of getting on that train everyday is…what if you don’t come back home? Maybe, you know, getting arrested and they using me being on probation against me and I get violated. Damn that’s three to two years of my life gone…just for living out my dream?

Honestly, like it brings to me a world where there’s no drama. I’m free. And there’s nobody bothering me. It’s just me and the music.

more info:

Christopher Gonzalez, 26, has built his life from the underground up. Born homeless to a deaf mother in Staten Island, he learned to express himself through motion before learning to speak his first words.

Through his father’s death at age 6 and a childhood living between homes, Gonzalez found emotional release in the moves of Michael Jackson and Rock Steady Crew.

At 19, Gonzalez hit rock bottom. He found himself in trouble with the law and was sentenced to ten years probation. While friends and family abandoned his side, Gonzalez kept on dancing. In 2011, he joined his buddy Louis to take over New York’s subways.

Everyday Gonzalez dances on the train he risks violating his probation. The consequence? Being forced to serve the rest of his sentence in prison. With New York City police commissioner Bill Braton cracking down on panhandling in subway cars, the possibility of Gonzalez spending his next years locked up just got higher. But Gonzalez says it’s worth the risk: “When I dance I’m free from everything.”

In the news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/nyregion/arrests-of-panhandlers-and-peddlers-on-subway-increase-sharply-under-bratton.html
http://pix11.com/2014/03/27/entertainment-or-nuisance-nypd-cracks-down-on-subway-break-dancers
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/subway-arrests-have-skyrocketed-under-bratton.html

– See more at: http://vsw.journalism.cuny.edu/category/2014-spring-sacha/new-york-stories-of-odd-and-interesting-jobs-spring-2014/#sthash.9PBRGsOd.dpuf