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Larry showed me how to fill out a profile on Charleston.net, but my research time was cut short when it came time for us to make the half-hour trek up Meeting Street back to the shelter.

We arrived just in time for check-in. I arranged my mattress in my corner at the front of the shelter and got in line for a dinner of chicken, rice and gravy, and green beans—a common meal prepared by men from the shelter when we lacked the volunteers from area churches.

And then began a rather eventful Thursday night.

First, at dinner I became acquainted with a few of the fellas. Up to that point, pretty much everybody, except for Marco and Larry, treated me as more of an annoyance than as someone they could accept as one of their own. I had always been awkward and out of place in social settings, and, for reasons unbeknown to me then and now, my goofiness was working even more against me at the shelter. It wasn’t too much of a problem for me in my current endeavor, but I thought it would be rather boring to go through my entire journey as “the outcast.”

So, I was sitting at one of the dinner tables, quietly munching on a dinner roll, playing the part of the geeky kid in third grade that never got bullied but didn’t have any friends either. Everybody was leaving me alone. Marco wasn’t there, so I was left to fend for myself. Several of the guys somehow knew my name, which was convenient for them, because they were talking about Adam’s apples.

“Hey, man,” one of the guys said, thankfully interrupting my peaceful dinner. “You have an Adam’s apple, don’t you?”

“Um, yeah.” From the sly looks being shot my way, I could tell that this conversation was somehow leading down the road to mockery, but I had no choice but to play along.

“And your name is Adam, isn’t it?” he asked, giggling like a schoolgirl.

“Yeah.”

“Well, how does that work? Do you still call it your Adam’s apple?” His peers were joining in giggling.

I was a bit confused, but I retorted, with a deadpan, straight face. “Actually, no. I don’t have to. I just refer to it as ‘my apple.’ And interestingly enough, my parents refer to it as ‘your apple’ when they’re talking to me and ‘his apple’ when they have friends over for wine-and-cheese gatherings.”

They loved it. As strange as our discourse had been for me, they laughed hysterically as if it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. We joked about it for another two minutes. Adam’s apples! We joked about Adam’s apples!

And that was it. Just like that, I became accepted, part of the group. I began to learn people’s names and where they came from and how they came to find themselves at the bottom of the social chain. I discovered aspects of Charleston that were general knowledge, and I discovered unique things about the town that one can only learn about on the streets. I heard stories of war, lost love, and crime that didn’t pay. I heard about times of triumph and trying times where $16-an-hour jobs disappeared to the production lines of Mexico and China almost overnight. They taught me where to sleep if I ever got kicked out of the shelter for three days for a rule violation, and they told me where to go for the cleanest restrooms in town. One guy even showed me how to remove the cork from the inside of an empty wine bottle (inflate a plastic grocery bag inside an inverted bottle and pull it out quickly), a trick that had won him a host of bar bets in his previous life.

They took me in under their collective wings that night during dinner. They were the teachers, and I was their apprentice. They talked and talked, and I listened. They didn’t care about me, and I didn’t care about me either! I was eating it all up. I learned more that night than I had during my last semester in college.

From that point, there was no refuting that I was in. They didn’t judge me, just as I didn’t judge them. You were either a part of the “in” group or not, either working your way out or being a passive member of society, preparing to grind