I Was in Grad School: That's Sort of Like Being Homeless (Only More Humiliating). Where's My Book Deal? Oh. I Forgot: I'm Not a Writer

Cadillac Man has been homeless in New York City for about a decade. But now the Queens street dweller is banking on an unlikely ticket off the street: a book deal.

Sounds crazy?

Tell that to his agent.

Cadillac - who is 56 and won't reveal his birth name - caught the eye of the book industry after Esquire magazine published parts of his memoirs in May....

One ...former Esquire editor, befriended the street dweller last year and connected him with the magazine. Executive Editor Mark Warren was intrigued by his story and came out to visit Cadillac last year. Warren was blown away by his manuscript.

"The more that we got to read, the more we became convinced that this was a story worth telling," he said.

The magazine paid Cadillac $7,500 and dedicated 10 pages to his writing.

"I have lived homeless in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, all the boroughs of New York City save Staten Island," Cadillac wrote. "I have been urinated on because some people find that amusing and I've been shot at for the same reason, I have been given food mixed with bleach and food with scouring powder as garnish, I have fought dozens of fights using fists, feet, knees, elbows, blackjacks, ice picks, tire irons, chains, pipes, bricks, cans of soda, rocks, M-80 explosives, garbage cans, and even other people as weapons, never guns."

Well done, Cadillac. Way to draw the line.

But don't take this opportunity to tell everything about life on the streets. While you may be moving on up, your homeless buddies are not, and I'm sure they would sleep better -- by which I mean "have a greater chance to sleep through the night urine-free" -- if those "normal people" out there who treat homeless people like urinal cakes suspected just a bit that said urinal cakes were packing heat.

But you know them better than I do. Follow your heart.