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Later that night I took my first shower since my arrival in South Carolina. For the first two days, my attitude had been, “Screw it. I’m not going out to the clubs and bars trying to pick up chicks, so why do I need to shower?” But then I really started to smell myself, and I decided that my personal hygiene did not deserve to suffer at the hands of my own disregard. There was no denying my pungent body odor and, just like one of the guys Jerry said to me later, “If you can smell you today, then somebody else already smelled you yesterday.”

I wasn’t sure how the shower system worked, so I took all of my belongings with me. In fact, I hadn’t felt comfortable leaving my gym bag anywhere out of my sight, so I had kept it with me at all times. I removed my shoes only to take off my socks, but since I had already made the conscious decision that my bare feet shouldn’t touch the grimy bathroom floor, I put my shoes back on.

While other guys would walk in the shower with a bar of soap and walk out and air dry or use a shirt to dry off, I came a little more prepared. From my shopping spree at Family Dollar the day before, I had soap, a washcloth, a towel, shampoo, and my counterpart in the shower room swore that I was probably one of the only guys in Crisis Ministries’ history to use conditioner. But what could I say? I like the way Garnier Fructis’s active fruit concentrate penetrates my roots and fortifies my rebellious, frizzy hair, enhancing its natural curl and shine.

I took a long shower. I wasn’t tired, so I wasn’t in a hurry to get to bed, and there wasn’t a line of people waiting to bathe since most of the guys that took showers had already done so earlier in the day.

Not that I wasn’t brimming with confidence and enthusiasm before, but that clean feeling made me feel much better. I opened the packages of socks and underwear and shirts that I had bought, and, although I still had to put on the same pants I had been wearing since I left Raleigh, I felt rejuvenated.

I had planned on reading before I went to bed, but they turned the lights out early, so my only option was to watch TV. Since the TV only had two channels (and those didn’t even come in very well), people brought DVDs to watch with Carlton’s DVD player. Nobody really seemed to mind what the movie was, and although we usually had a wide selection from the assortment that people owned or checked out from the library, we didn’t have much trouble agreeing on which one to watch.

That first night we watched Crank starring Jason Statham and Amy Smart. It was a new release—in theaters—and somewhere in between the sound fading in and out and one of the people in the theater on the screen getting up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was watching my first bootlegged film ever. And it wouldn’t be my last. One of the guys was scoring pirated copies of a wide variety of feature films from a guy around the corner for just $5, and we were reaping the benefits. One time he even took up a collection so that he could purchase a “package deal” of the illegal discs for our viewing pleasure.

Call me crazy, but those are the times I’ll never forget. When I’m eighty and sitting in a wheelchair at a retirement home in Florida with little or no control of my bladder, and the nurses are talking about how that old Mr. Shepard is “ringy as a pet ’coon,” I’ll be sitting back remembering those nights at the shelter. Those times when I was just hanging out with the fellas, sipping on warm soda, munching on stale cookies, and watching bootlegged movies. Down and out, back to the wall, can’t get any worse. Not a nickel to our name, nowhere to go but up. Too cliché? That’s what we were! Looking around the dark room, I couldn’t help but admire the stark complexity of our situation. We sat on the bottom rung of all social and economic ladders, and we knew it. We knew we sucked. Yet there we were, gathered together in the dining room slash living room slash auxiliary sleeping quarters of Charleston’s premier homeless shelter, our eyes