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Which, of course, didn’t mean we weren’t hungrier every day to get the heck out of that place. Truthfully, I could have made plans to move out of the shelter pretty soon after I had landed a job, just like Larry was doing with the two-bedroom apartment that he was planning to move into the following Friday. One-bedroom apartments with the Housing Authority—where a lot of homeless guys made their transition—were $150 down and thirty percent of one’s paycheck per month, or I could rent a room from “Honest John,” who worked at the corner Quickie Mart, for $95 down and $95 a week, cash. Either would be a feasible first step out of the shelter, a step that many people from the shelter were making, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing. I wanted something more concrete and certainly something more secure. The area around the shelter represented an environment that seemed to inhibit progress rather than promote it. The year before my arrival in Charleston, the Post and Courier reported that a group of local gangsters had used a housing project right around the corner from the shelter as one of the backdrops in a homemade rap music video. They carried assault rifles and showcased drugs and heaps of cash in the presence of children that appeared to be younger than ten. The lyrics displayed their rebellion against the police and their defiance of the law. The DVD, which became infamous almost immediately after its publication, became a great investigative tool for local police and led to the arrests of many of the men that appeared on screen, most of whom already had outstanding warrants. It was big news for a year. Yeah, the area around the shelter was exciting, no doubt, but not the kind of excitement I was looking for. The whole point of what I was doing was to crawl my way out of that lifestyle, so I planned to hold out for a better situation.

So I resolved to stay at the shelter as long as I needed to, until I could find a secure place to live either by myself or with Marco.

But Marco still wasn’t showing his face very often at the shelter. In fact, I hadn’t seen him since Friday, and I wouldn’t see him again for two more weeks after I started my job. I would come home to the shelter after work every day with high hopes that he would show up, and every night I’d be disappointed. I would literally watch the door for him to come home. I was a dog waiting for his master to return. I missed that guy. I’d only known him a short time, but he was already working his way into being an integral part of my life. As independent as I tried to believe I was, the truth was that I needed Marco. This wasn’t my story, my project. This was our project. Adam and Marco’s story. A companion like Marco would make my life so much more livable, especially since we had connected on so many levels, and, most importantly, we had a plan. I felt like he was letting me down, like he didn’t care about me or our plans or what we could accomplish together. I began to realize that maybe he was all talk.

But I did my best not to think about that. Besides, I had plenty to keep me entertained. Like TV. Although I appreciated film, I had never been much of a television watcher. I would watch it if it was on or if there was some special event or maybe there was a show that I would really get into for a month, but I was always so busy with other pursuits. In the confined world of the shelter, though, the television was one of the things that kept us amused and connected to life elsewhere.

There was no question that COPS was everybody’s favorite show. At 8:00 P.M., when COPS appeared on one of the two channels that came in with minimal static, everyone in the shelter crowded around. It was routine. Everybody was loud and obnoxious during dinner, but when COPS came on, we all fell silent. There was important business to tend to.

But we didn’t watch TV’s original reality show like I used to when I was a kid. Growing up, I used to love watching that show so that I could see what idiots there were around the nation and find satisfaction