November

I've been thinking a lot about him. Not the businessman in a broad sense, but how he relates to me, specifically. I've been doing a lot of research in the past couple days, and to be honest, in light of what I've learned that sounds like quite the presumptuous statement. We should mean nothing to one another.   I am another apple to be plucked. But if this is so, why does he invade our psyches so, the seedlings of his grand tree planting themselves in our lives and splitting them apart with growing roots?

Perhaps I'm just weak. It's a coincidence, another iteration of the businessman who just happens to break my fragile humanity apart.

A long time ago, I was in a very bad place. I was what the common man saw as filth in the gutter, an unkempt man without a dollar to his name. Sadly, I fulfilled the stereotype of the drunken homeless man, spending money given by generous strangers on as much alcohol as I could get my hands on. I worked past my shame a long time ago, but I still feel awful thinking back on it. I will not bore you with the details of how I fell to this state - my job fell through, and I was far from a home that had all but washed its hands of me.

It was a dreary November morning. I was soaking wet and shivering, watching men in suits walk by through the fog. It had rained that night, and the thick blanket I used to cover myself for so many nights had been taken away a week prior by somebody who thought themselves more desperate than I. I swore drunkenly at the sky. "Fucking cocktease, are you going to rain or not?"

I remember that morning quite clearly, and I feel it would cheapen the story to omit anything.

"Excuse me," I heard, and I turned with a frown. It was a man half a foot taller than me, clean-shaven with neatly-trimmed frighteningly orange hair and a navy blue blazer.

"The fuck do you want, kid?"

"Are you hungry?"

"Course I'm hungry, I'm always hungry. Do I look like a man who eats often?"

"Would you like to come with me for breakfast?"

I was taken aback, and at that point felt a piece of myself that hadn't been lost in the haze my life had become. I held on to it, and the shard yielded to me gratitude.

"Sure?" I replied, slightly incredulous. "Thanks, kid."

"I've seen you a lot walking by here," he replied, beginning to walk briskly in that manner of his. "What's your name?"

"Basil."

"You don't look old enough to be a Basil."

"Oh yeah? What's your fucking name then, smartass?"

"Jasper Shaw. Let's go, I'm in a touch of a hurry. Will McDonald's do?"

"Damn, man, anything," I said a bit more quietly.

He'd said that he was in a hurry, but we spent at least an hour eating breakfast. When I questioned him, he said that he wasn't all that worried about being late to work. Although he was two years younger than me, Jasper was the far better man, and I became his pet project. The fruit of his efforts?

The man I am now.