• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Nope. We watched it in a completely different light. We cheered for the suspected criminal the whole way through. It didn’t matter what the accusations were, and it didn’t matter who was on the other end. We always cheered for the guy the cops were after. Guys would be huddled around the TV set hollering, “Go mother fucker! Shit. Go! Hop that fence! Go! Go! Ah. Ah. Ah, damn, they got ’im. Again. They got ’im again. He shoulda hopped that fence like I said. Damn. They always get ’im.” And they would always give the criminal the benefit of the doubt. After a long chase, the cops would dig in the suspected criminal’s pockets and find some illicit drug or whatever, and the guys at the shelter would look around at each other and murmur, “Shit, that’s bullshit. You know that’s bullshit. They planted that on him. He ain’t have that on him before. They put it there, so their stupid TV show can get ratings.” And they were serious, too. Every night we would watch, every night we would pull for the criminal, and every night he would be dragged away in handcuffs.

But we didn’t always need the television for entertainment. Somebody was always around to stimulate our attention. If it wasn’t one guy creating mischief around the shelter, it was another. Every night there was something new. It was great. And once one guy got going, it was easy for everybody else to follow suit. We would have some of the most intriguing debates I’d ever been a part of. Sometimes intellectual, sometimes philosophical, sometimes political, but always insightful. And everybody always had at least his two cents to put in. Usually more. Even guys who normally remained silent and in their own worlds would offer their input from time to time. I can remember one night we were talking about the war in Iraq, a frequent topic of conversation. We were going back and forth on the various issues knowing that none of us was necessarily right and that nobody was going to change anybody else’s mind. Then this guy, Davey Dizzle, who sat, ate, and then slept in the same corner every night and said about two words per day and never bothered a soul, said, “You know what we need to do? We need to just drop a God-damned bomb on all them mothers and call it a day.” We all just looked at each other in absolute puzzlement, I’m talking almost terrified, like, Wait a sec? Dizzle? Did Dizzle just speak? And did he just say that we should drop a bomb on all of ’em and call it a day? Even Brian Brizzle—Davey’s twin brother and the resident loudmouth—had a shocked look plastered on his face. We all sat there for a moment, speechless, and let it sink in before we picked up our discussion right where we had left off. But the point had been made: everybody had a voice at the shelter.

Most of the time, though, we didn’t even need a TV. Not with some of those guys that were living at the shelter. Most guys didn’t wait for their turn to speak. They would just come over to you and start a conversation. Guys like Mustafa Frederick. If there is one person from the shelter that I will never forget, it’s Mustafa. He was the kindest, gentlest young man that I met at the shelter and probably during my entire stay in Charleston. He was about five feet, four inches, and his muscles were chiseled like those on a statue of an ancient Greek god. He always walked around shirtless, and he was always doing some form of physical activity. He was respectful to everyone, no matter who it was, and everybody was respectful right back to him. You never would have guessed that he had spent three of his twenty-seven years in prison.

And he was eccentric. Super-eccentric. He always had something fun and new and, most importantly, absolutely insane to talk about. One time he came up to me and told me what he knew about the barracuda. He said something like, “Hey, Gabriel…” (he called me Gabriel because he said I reminded him of one of the archangels in the Bible) “…did you know that a barracuda is actually a combination of