My entire life I had been a short cutter. I took the first shortcut of my life by forcing my mother to undergo a cesarean birth. Rather than facing the pressure, I opted for the easy way out. I bet the trend was set as a sperm, somehow taking a short cut to an egg nestling on one of my mother’s fallopian tubes, probably her shorter one. I’m not gonna cop out and fault my genetic make up though the whole “born like this” bit. This for the most part, was self-induced.

I blame it being a part of the Nintendo generation. On Super Mario Brothers, level 1-2 to be exact. It’s the level that taught me to take warp zones and bypass a majority of the game. I blame it on the game Contra, the one where you could start the game with ten times as many lives by pressing: up, up, down, down, left-right, left-right, B, A, and then start as the opening credits appeared. My life has been a search for the next extra life, warp zone, and turbo boost since those early thumb-blistering, television- cursing days of my childhood. I made parallels between Mario’s World and our own. Sometimes one needs to cheat a little in an environment that is set to destroy you. In my case, I just took short cuts here and there. No harm, right?

I didn’t last long in T-Ball. I’d run to first and rather than rounding second, I‘d cut across the infield behind the pitchers mound and shoot straight to third. The term “rounding the bases” was non-applicable to me. It showed up in other areas of my life too, spread like a horny colony of ringworm on a high school wrestling mat. I’d cut across circular formations of puzzled-faced, finger pointing 3rd graders in duck-duck goose. I read the last chapter of Charlotte’s Web, James and the Giant Peach, and any other book assigned growing up. I was the kid in catechism that spoke of the end of the world. Genesis never interested me. I wanted revelations, the apocalypse, the future.

I had problems with females as long as I’ve lived. Why hold hands when we can make out? As a 12 year old, I stridently slurped saliva and fumbled with Tara Hill’s underdeveloped breasts in the middle rows of Granada theatre during Toy Story. And in my high school dating years, I developed the tee-ball syndrome all over again-going straight to third base. Diploma? I went straight for my G.E.D. Get the fuck out, shortcut college, see the world.

It got worse. I bought into pyramid schemes thinking I could strike it big. I even contemplated on going on one of those Alaskan crab runs in order to get ahead financially. I took the carpool lane alone, had a fake handicapped parking sign, lived off drivethru fast food and cleaned my car in a drive thru car wash. I was the guy that boasted about being a step ahead of the norm. It’s funny how sayings go: things change, life happens, the world rotates-blah-blah-blah. Because the world seemed so still, when that shit went down in the canal.

It was like any other day. Richie had his blue hooded sweat shirt on and was over at my apartment smoking weed, selling weed, making brownies with weed, and listening to songs that mentioned weed. The blinds were down. My coffee table was a jungle of leftover fast food: bright wrappers, bitten burritos, and some withered tomatoes Richie didn’t want on his Whopper. A glass bong or extra large to-go soft drink container sprouted through the jungle’s canopy wherever room allowed it. My eyes were burning from lingering smoke. We were in our usual spota typical torn up, hand me down, front room apartment couch with our matching ass indentions. As usual, I was kicking Richie’s ass at John Madden Football, when I got my little brother’s phone call. I had been ignoring his calls for about a week and his persistence intrigued me.

So, I answered his call only to have him remind me what a piece of shit brother I was. He would never say that, but that’s what I’d call my older brother if he had promised to help me with a science project and then flaked on me, if I had an older brother. It was a simple project that he’d given me the heads up on a month or so in advance. I had told him I would take him to Yosemite to study some of its aquatic life, only to have my car break down shortly afterward. I couldn’t tell him that because then my mom would bitch and moan for breaking a promise. Blame me for being an irresponsible car owner or something. Like my mom had never flaked on me.

There were two things that went through my mind: You can’t let your little brother down, and don’t give mom the ammo for one of her, “You’re supposed to set an example” tirades. I had to think of something on the spot so I said, “No, dude, you don’t need to worry about going there and observing them and all that because I caught specimens of all of them. They’re here at my apartment I’ll bring them over to you tomorrow because I got to go to work tonight. Okay. No need to worry about it. Okay, okay. Yeah, I went up there a few days ago and caught them. For sure, love you too. Bye-bye.”

I only had to gather three things: some aquatic plants, and some local minnows and snails. I considered the pet store across town, but then I remembered seeing one of their fish bowl ecosystems. They had these fancy-tailed guppies and shiny yellow snails. The plants were these bright green, fanned out fern looking things. Maybe those would have fooled my brother and his 5th grade science teacher, but I didn’t think so. He needed plain old grey minnows, and the ugly little snails that look like burnt pop-corn kernels. He needed the plants that looked and felt like the slimy, flattened lettuce on the bottom of the produce drawer in the refrigerator. He needed the stinky water they all thrived in. He needed the real deal. Looking back on it, if I had better transportation that day or if I hadn’t been such a short cutter, I wouldn’t have chosen to go to the canal. But I did, we did, Richie and I.

I had made many canal expeditions in my childhood, lifting rocks, barrels, and searching under concrete embankments for any little creature to call my own. I’d taken home toads, treefrogs, bull frogs, garter snakes, tiger salamanders, minnows, crawfish, a three legged turtle with B Bs stuck in its top shell, and a few bacterial infections which found their way into previously existing open wounds. I caught them all using a homemade net and a bucket. I figured that if I could do all that at twelve years old, it would be twice as easy now.

Richie was anti-canal from the beginning, but he was like that with anything that took his ass away from the couch and his lungs away from the bong. I could understand, he lived at home with his hardcore Christian parents and my apartment was the only place that didn’t feel like a warm slide under a high powered secular microscope. Besides that he didn’t work, so he needed my place to sell weed to people in order to pay for his own smoke. It was a vicious cycle for my couch, the video game controllers, his lungs, and oh yeah, did I mention my sex life?

I could have trusted him at my place alone. He probably valued it more than I did. But I pestered him, until finally the canal chore sounded like a hunting trip for two badass survivalists who were above pet stores and consumerism that could catch their own creatures and find their own way. Lewis and Clark of the new millennium.

“I mean, isn’t that why you sell weed? The principle that you’re one-upping the man, making your own rules, being a non-conformist and avoiding that dreaded punching in of the clock?” I asked.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Well, that’s what this canal trip is like to me. I help you one-up the man, so you help me.”

“It’s just, dude I don’t want to get all muddy because my parents will give me the run around about heathens playing in the mud, and all that B.S. And how I must have been up to no good. You don’t know what it’s like. Plus, how we gonna even catch anything, dude?”

“You can either finally tell me your top three Beatles songs, stop being my friend, or go with me to the canal.”

“Don’t be an idiot, you know I’ll go.”

“Okay, you let me take care of the equipment. All I want you to do is roll us a couple of fatties for the adventure. And I mean fatties.”

“You gonna help pay for those or what?”

“I pay rent dude.”

“I know, I know, I’m just playing bro.”

And that was how the trip started. He sat in the front room blaring The Beatles, preparing our herbal necessities while I searched the house for a bucket, a metal coat hanger, and some netting of some sort. The bucket was easy but I had to ask a neighbor for a metal coat hanger, all I had were plastic hangers. Making the net was a challenge. First I tried one of those bathtub scrubbers made out of mesh netting that are wound up tight to form a ball of some sort. I took the elastic off, spread the mesh out, and figured it to be too weak and small for fast underwater strokes. I was about to give up when I had remembered seeing an old screen door next to the dumpster while I was asking my neighbor for the coat hanger.

It worked perfect, I wrapped it around the circular shape I had made with the coat hanger and stapled the top in a hemming fashion. I then duct taped the net to a broom handle to complete the primitive fishing tool. And Richie, he was ready too, with two joints as thick as sidewalk chalk, four pot brownies, a look to prove himself, and his buck knife, his good for nothing buck knife that he’d sworn by since I’d known him.

The sky was baby blue, stamped with cumulous clouds shaped like those scoops of vanilla ice cream that sit atop waf- fle cones. The air felt thick not in weather, but silence, lack of human activity. We were in an area where the edges of a cool college community began to mesh with the neglected, avoided, and often dicey downtown. The canal was a block or so away from my apartment. I hadn’t been there in years.

I imagined we looked funny at our age, walking down the streets with a bucket and a homemade net which looked suitable for catching-I don’t know Ladybugs. Some people laughed, others pointed, and I figure those were the people that knew what the canal looked like. When we got there, we both had to do a double take and sort of check the cross streets to make sure we were in the right place. I‘d never seen Richie‘s forehead so wrinkled. His eyebrows nearly touched his hairline in shock.

We were in the right spot. The canal was just fucked. It was like a memory from the Exxon/Valdez oil spill. The water was black, its surface a rainbow. Some garbage floated: plastic bags, barrels, a W-D 40 can, a couch cushion still wrapped in plastic, and a half deflated basketball. Other objects jutted trough the murk: umbrellas, pots, pans, grocery carts, a mannequin, two TVs, a B.B.Q. pit, and a full sized refrigerator. A curtain of white foam clung to the bank furthest from us like hydrogen peroxide on an infected wound. It smelled like the inside of a rubber mask combined with what the inside of Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator would smell like after a week without power.

“Dude, what happened?”

“Too many humans, I don’t know,” I said.

“Let’s go back to your place. You can’t tell me that you actually want to go in there and look for shit?”

“Not right here, but it might be better upstream.”

“Yeah, but how far we gonna go, dude? It could be worse up there.”

“I don’t think it can get much worse than this”

“Have you thought about going to Kyle’s and borrowing some of his fish or something? Hell you could even just make up the observations. This is lame, were gonna get all dirty for nothing dude. For nothing.”

“Kyle has African Cichlids, Richie. Not Minnows. They would die in a bowl and besides, that’s not the point. The point is that we’re not doing this for nothing. I’m doing it for my little brother and you’re doing it for me, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Well then, let’s climb this fence and fire up one of those joints before we lose our spirits.”

“I thought you’d never ask. But uh, do you wanna start walking along the canal already or just shortcut upstream using the streets?”

“Um, we might miss a spot if we do that. Let’s just start here.”

*

Richie’s blue hooded sweater had been a mainstay since I’d met him my senior year. He had moved from a place in Idaho called Pocatello. He sported the sweater on the first day of school, when its cotton was still shiny and soft, when it had a functioning zipper. His tightly fastened backpack, bouncy walk, survivalist talk, and freckled faced red head earned him the nickname, “Richie Poke-A-Fellow.” That and he was the new guy from Idaho. How many times did I hear someone laugh in the guy’s face and say, “Ha, ha, you just said you’re a ho,” after asking him where he was from. I’d known him for five years and the sweater had made it through the stage of late teens and early twenties. It had been left behind in theatres, screwed on in backseats, puked on, used as a towel and sperm rag, torn off in fist fights, and most importantly, it concealed pounds worth of cannabis in its days. It had survived all that only to perish on a chain link fence. Richie and I should have seen the ill-omen that it was.

“Damn it! That was my favorite sweater. My parents are gonna flip.” He huffed as he stomped down the concrete embankment.

“What’s wrong with just telling them that you were helping me and my little brother with a science report and it got stuck on a fence?”

“Science report, Hah! Everything, don’t you get it, Luke? To them, science means witchcraft. Whether it’s observing minnows or speaking of evolution, it’s heathen and so am I. I am literally doing devil’s work in their eyes. And as far as climbing fences go, only criminals and delinquents do that.”

“But you know the truth, right? You’re helping out one of your friends. You’re not doing anything wrong?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Now for the last time, start the joint.”

We sat on the slopes of the canal as we smoked. Any plant within ten feet of the water was dried and discolored, dead like snake skin. The only life was a murder of crows who mocked our presence way up from a bird-shit speckled palm tree. I let Richie think he convinced me into smoking that second joint, and eating the brownies all in one sitting. The fact is I wanted to, needed to, and so did he. Our first glimpse of the canal had left me skeptical of finding anything and Richie‘s shredded blue sweater hung up in the air like a warning sign to trespassers on an Indian burial ground.

It was after this sudden and extreme-yet very common-dose of cannabis that we began walking up the banks. Our once gloomy calculating faces were replaced with ear to ear grins and an aura of contentment. We walked for miles encountering similar scenes. Our bitter cursing of the canal became a laugh out loud boasting of man’s ability to destroy nature. And as we walked, our manner progressed, adding ugly ingredients to an already disgusting human creation. We skipped debris across its shallow waters, spit saliva at targets, and urinated along its edges, creating chemical reactions and foam of our own to marvel at. Richie carried the net. I carried my bucket, until the narrow concrete banks became wider and concrete free. And at our peaking moment when Richie had crossed to the other side of the canal via a couch we had tipped over, we discovered life, human life. More appropriately it discovered us.

“What the fuck did you just do to my couch, motherfucker?”

I remember thinking of the word brutal. It was a brutal voice. There would be no rationing with whoever spoke in that voice, no apologies, and no explanations. It was a voice that promised action. Before I got a chance to look around, Richie let me know I was in trouble. His eyes were as big as a couple of fried eggs with blue yolks in their middles, and he was looking directly over my shoulder.

In the same instant I thought to duck, it occurred to me that I was about to brawl with a homeless person-Did he say, “My couch?” The thought of rolling around with a bum, rubbing skin, exchanging fluids while bloody knuckles made contact with gashed lips sent an equal jolt of terror and disgust through my nerves.

First it was his footsteps, then a hard blow to my right shoulder blade, followed by his fowl, alcohol smelling warm breath on my face as he toppled over my ducking body, I felt them all. He was a bum. Besides his average size, the first thing I noticed was that he was shirtless with jeans. He had a black cowboy boot on one foot, and a yellow construction boot on the other.

“What the fuck’s your problem, asshole? You wanna get fucked up? Let’s go, come on?” I hollered.

He wiped the dirt off his bare tattooed covered chest and charged with haymakers. I closed in on him and landed a left to the side of his neck. He began to yell, “Fucking cock sucking” repeatedly, louder with each whiff. In the background Richie chanted, “Fuck him up, fuck him up!” We exchanged blows for what seemed like ages. His eyes were watered with either hatred or methamphetamines. The tattoos on his torso were giving a disgusting life. Demons and reptiles smiled and slithered with his heavy laboring lungs until he finally came at me with one last Tasmanian devil like flurry. I gave him a precise left uppercut that left him wobbly until he tripped backward over his own untied construction boot and smashed against the concrete embankment, leaving a red stain of blood. I hadn’t been in a fist fight for years.

“All I wanted to do was catch minnows today. Are you happy now, you got knocked out! Are you happy now?” Then I heard the barking and the splashes.

I turned around to a heart dropping sight. Richie was being drowned by a man, and attacked by a dog at the same time. He thrashed violently beneath the shallow murk while a man no older than me crouched over him, pinning his neck down to the canal floor. A large mutt, noticeably dirty, possibly a shepherd of some sort had a bite on one of his ankles. I charged across the canal with my teeth grinding, eyes bulging, quadriceps burning, and my knuckles ready to impact someone like asteroids. There were two things Richie hated: getting dirty and dogs. The strangler shifted his dim murderous eyes towards me and yelled, “Sick him Lucifer, sick him!”

My piston-like legs splashed toxic water into my eyes, my laboring mouth, and probably high enough into the air to be seen by people on the streets above us. I was like a herd of Clydesdale horses running through a river in a Budweiser commercial. Lucifer met my elbows and forearms in full stride while trying to lunge at my throat. I fell on top of him in the water, clinging to his hair, banging on him like a hysterical chimpanzee. I looked up to see Richie making progress now that he had his legs to stabilize and push off with. Lucifer struggled for breath, room to bite, room to yelp, anything and I didn’t let it. I put a vice grip on its muzzle while its claws tore up my inner thighs and collar bone.

It was tough trying to contain that rabid, muddy Lucifer while my best friend fought for air, his life, and that cursed thing at his waist, his buck-knife. I knew what Richie was trying to do. I had to get there before he could do it, but I didn’t want to let go of the dog only to have it attack us again. Its jagged claws flailed and cut into me, its teeth gnarled on my right pinky, I could feel the bacteria infested water mixing with my adrenalin filled blood and that set me off. I slid my fingers under the dog’s resisting eyelids and gouged deep and hard into its warm, slimy skull interior, then dropped its convulsive body into the slow dying current of the canal.

During my struggle with the poor dog, I had watched Richie. I watched him wiggle under the skinny pony-tailed guy until he had enough room to grab his knife. I watched him unlock the blade with his struggling left hand while fighting for breath and gurgling up profanities and declarations. I watched him resheath his four inch blade somewhere into the man’s intestine in a series of quick stabs. I watched him wiggle up from under the guy who bled like a stuck pig, then chase down Lucifer’s drifting carcass and shank it a few times. He balled, spat unintelligibly, while strands of mucus hung from his nostrils and he kicked at the floating dog. His face was so swollen and red I could feel heat emanating from it. I turned around to look for the first guy, the guy with different boots. He was gone.

The young homeless man Richie stabbed was dying and in shock. He had slithered up out of the water to lie on the bank. He cradled his frayed midsection with muddy hands and a blue face. A pool of blood laid beneath him mixing with the mud, creating a rusty swirl which trickled its way down the canal. When we approached him, he squirmed backward with teary eyes and a god awful shriek. He treated us like murderers. As if we were going back to finish the kill, as if we murdered canal residing transients for thrills. It wasn’t like the movies, we were all silent, all victims, there were no cries for help, and no hysterical sidekick blaming their own stupidity over and over. It took all of about forty five seconds for me to knock a junkie out, kill a dog, and become an accomplice to murder. They were innocent, the guy and his dog. Ones involved in the wrong pack and doing nothing more than defending a friend.

I knelt beside the dying young man and grabbed his hands. I cried and apologized, for everything we had done. For everything I had ever done to lead up to this point. He fought against my grip. I would have too. I wiped the mud and blood off his face. He looked a lot like me. He spit blood, and coughed up bile, while trying to gurgle up his last words, “Louie and I are sorry.” I was a balling mess and Richie was catatonically quiet, staring into the lifeless eyes of someone we should have been smoking a joint with instead.

I would like to say that we stayed with his body and prayed with it, dug a grave, and buried him with his dog, all his valuables, and pictures of loved ones, but we didn’t. Didn’t cover him up with anything, didn’t even pull the dog out of the water. We didn’t grab the bucket or net. Every second in that canal we felt like we were being watched by millions of viewers-World’s Stupidest Murderers Caught On Tape. We ran upstream for no reason other than escaping our guilt, which flowed the opposite way. The tear streaked mud hardened on our skin, smelled of microscopic life and then crumbled back into the place it came from. This all happened because I didn’t want to tell my mom that my car broke down, all because I was always looking for the easy way, all because I was a good for nothing short cutter.

I imagined police already at the scene, a manhunt being underway, bloodhounds and German shepherds, helicopters, telephone circuit boards backing up with callers beaconing in on our exact canal location. We leaped barrels, hurdled waterlogged television sets, tripped on slimy rocks, and crawled on our hands and knees during stretches of complete exhaustion. We dislodged shards of glass from our palms and the place where the shin meets the knee. My lungs burned, my knees were bruised and felt grinded to the bone. Half of my right pinky was missing and the open wounds in my body sizzled with every drop of canal filth. I savored all of it. I savored my pain, my life, the graffiti on the concrete bridges and banks, the poppies sprouting from a cement crack here and there, and especially the seven metallic colors shining on the surface of the water we trudged through. It all became more tolerable by the second.

“Hold on, wait, I can’t fucking breathe!” Richie sputtered, bending over with his hands on his knees, saliva dangling from his wheezing mouth.

For the first time in ten minutes or so, the relentless putchee, put-chee sound of our fleeing legs treading through the water had ceased. There were no sirens, no helicopters, and most importantly, there wasn’t any more dogs to deal with-no yelping bloodhounds in hot pursuit. I wiped canal sludge out of my eyes and off of my lips. I spit out the remnants of shower drain tasting, fetid water that had found its way into my open mouth while fighting for air in our escape.

Richie finally started to try and form words.

“I say we go to your place and come up with a plan.”

“Yeah, a plan. A plan like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. That’s what I’m trying to say. We can’t stick around here, though. I know that.”

“Well, you’re the one that stopped, bro.”

“Just so I could make sure we were going to your house.”

“What, did you think we were going to your parents’ house looking like this?

We decided to walk the remaining quarter of a mile or so. We had been lucky to remain unseen as long as we had and we didn’t want to draw any last minute attention. My lips tasted of mud and dried up diarrhea. My eyelashes were laced with mascara: black and itchy glop. I tongued granules of soil against my teeth, and my shoes squeaked with every size thirteen water print I tracked. My white Abbey Road t-shirt was now brown with red blood streaks and authentic K-9 slashes. I wanted a peroxide shower, with Neosporin soap and penicillin shampoo and conditioner. No, I wanted to shave my head.

Richie’s skin was crusted with mud, his jeans were no longer river-washed, and they were caked with dark grey and rusty brown slop. His hair was a matted bluish-grey. He had little clumps of moss and pieces of twig placed evenly over him like a decorated Christmas tree. He was half Swamp-Thing.

We expected to see cop cars with flashing sirens, a S.W.A.T. team, and news reporters ducking their heads in the background when we poked our heads up from the canal. We didn’t. We saw traffic, people in a hurry, a bicyclist, a couple of kids with backpacks, we saw hope. We walked the remaining ten minutes and we each developed our own unique handicapped looking walk to match our appearance. To look more transient like, down and out. It worked. The adults avoided our potential beggaries and the kids walking home from school laughed and pointed fingers.

We made it to my apartment. We took a hot shower together with our clothes still on, and when he was clean enough to sit on my couch, I showered alone and naked. I scrubbed my wounds hard enough to make them bleed all over again, and then I scrubbed again, with soap and a mouthful of Listerine.

We didn’t talk that first night, the night Richie and I super glued our eyes to the local news stations, and the first night that Richie had ever spent away from his parents. I would also like to say I slept, but I didn’t. I stayed awake watching the replay over and over, wondering why. I wondered what their relationships were based on, the man, the dog, and the guy our age.

The next day was no better. We bought the paper, contemplated on passing by the scene, borrowing a friends police scanner, all while exchanging no more than eye contact or a nod. And when my brother called and I couldn’t think of a lie to tell him, I didn’t need to. He told me the project was done. Our mom had just told him to get the information he needed from the internet, because she would be too busy to make it to place that day.

Richie and I continued to hold up in my apartment for the next day and a half, pacing and brainstorming, mending our wounds, Richie wearing my clothes and dodging his parents until it broke: “Runaway and His Dog Slain.”

I didn’t watch. I left the room and covered my ears. I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t want to know where he came from and when or why he ran away. I didn’t want to imagine Lucifer as a family dog that stood loyal by the runaway son. I didn’t want to think he was under eighteen. Richie did, he sponged it all up. Maybe I would have too if I had killed the boy instead of the dog. He was the person they would hunt down. I stayed in my room for at least an hour and came out to a lifeless front room. On my coffee table laid an old McDonalds receipt which on the back of it read:

From The Beginning, I am the Walrus, and Within you and without you. There you have it. My three favorite Beatles songs. Peace forever, Richie.

I never saw Richie again. He turned himself in, took the blame, for all of it, the canal trip, Lucifer, and the Runaway. He left it all in a note, a note that sat on his desk for three days while the blood that trickled from his slit wrists formed a hardened puddle cocooning him to the carpet, and whatever Beatles album he was listening to in his headphones ceased to play from battery drain. Three days that brought the investigators as close as my apartment complex, asking questions and profiling residents from their vans as we left the complex. I watched it all transpire from the window. I passed on the funeral, where they would pray for god’s mercy on his soul, where someone might mention him having to burn for all eternity. I went to his grave every Sunday, blew smoke on his headstone, played all of our favorite Beatles songs out of our old portable boom box, and bought him a new blue sweater for the cold lonely nights. He was worried how he was going to explain his muddy shoes that day, yet alone the taking of another man’s life. And every time I heard the coincidental lyrics to his top three Beatles songs, I couldn’t help but to blame myself for all of the bizarre events that took place in that canal.

*

Did he choose them based on the events of that day, or were they warning signs that I should have seen? Like his sweater, and that murder of crows. Some of the lyrics to the songs in his top three-Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. This is not dying. Yellow mattered custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye. (And the kicker) Life goes on within you and without you. I can now truly say I believe in destiny.

So now, I take the long route. I play it safe. I’m one of those “born again” virgins. I drive in the far right lane, I file my taxes, I sweep instead of vacuum, I cook my eggs on low, I tore the fast forward button off of my DVD controller, and I have the patience to floss before brushing. It took me four years to get through a two year community college. During that time I read. I read from the first page to the last. No chapter summaries, no glossary skimming, no glancing at the last page of a novel, no shortcuts. And during my last semester there, I walked past a man who carried a briefcase and wore a nice collared shirt with long sleeves, a man who once wore a pair of mismatched boots, and a man who didn’t recognize me, probably because of my shaved head and nice clothes.