Each time Ricky’s name came up in conversation, it was met with a series of admirations: “That guy’s a real hero.” “Ricky’s brave, man.” “He’s been through hell and back and still finds it in him to smile; it’s inspiring.” When I asked people why they felt this way, they’d never give me a direct answer. Instead, they’d say it wasn’t their place to tell Ricky’s story, and I needed to talk to him myself. Today was the day.

  

     I scan the space around me, watching different people walk along the neighborhood sidewalks. Some are homeless people, leaving the non-profit facility, others are college kids walking to class. Is one of these men Ricky? 

 

     “Hey there!” A cheerful voice behind me exclaims.

 

     I turn around to see who the sociable voice belongs to. It’s a rail-thin man with scruffy brown hair that seems like it hasn’t been washed in days and a thick, tangled beard. The man looks as if he hasn’t eaten a substantial meal in weeks. He wears an oversized white t-shirt with dusty-brown stains around the armpits. His shirt is so long it hangs by his knees, further swallowing his frail body. Wrinkled khaki pants, two sizes too big, slunk around his waist. His sneakers, I assume once white, are now a cornmeal yellow color with missing shoelaces.

 

    The man leans in with a toothy grin. “I’m Ricky.”

 

     I soak in his appearance. He is not the brave hero I was imagining. He comes across like a fragile stray cat that was not cared for properly. My heart aches just by looking at his small structure. Then, there is his right eye. Something is not right about it. I look at it more closely. It is spinning out of control like a broken roller coaster unable to stay on track. Is it a glass eye? Is it fake? Can he see out of it? Why can’t it focus on anything?

 

     “I heard you wanted to talk to me,” he says energetically, each word racing out of his mouth after the other. Ricky talks incredibly fast. He sounds like a live auctioneer at an antique road show. “You want to hear my story, so that’s why I’m here.” Before I say anything, he continues, “Sorry if my eye scared you.” He points to his right eye. “It scares everyone at first, but I can’t see it, so it doesn’t scare me.”

 

     He shrugs and unexpectedly giggles. His high-pitched laughter has an innocent silliness about it, like a kid in elementary school. His instantaneous ability to make a joke about his right eye, catches me off guard. It’s not what I expect, but his playful demeanor puts me at ease.

 

     He points at his crossed eye again. “I didn’t always have this here eye. I was born with two good eyes, but the accident made this eye crossed.” He bounces his weight back and forth, shifting from left foot to right. His torso constantly bobs up and down. “That’s what you want to hear about, right? My story?”

 

     “I do.” I pat the familiar open ledge next to me. “Do you want to sit down?” I suggest. He shakes his head no. He glances at the ground for a moment, contemplating something. Quickly, he looks up. “That okay?” 

 

     I nod. “Of course.”

 

     I grab my pen to take notes on an open spiral notebook on my lap while Ricky continues to talk. Words spiral out of his mouth, one after the other, like a wildfire that can’t be stopped. “I’m so sorry I haven’t been around much. I should have been here to support you sooner than now.” His jittery fingers loop in and out between each other as he talks, accelerating faster and faster with each word. “I’m so sorry I didn’t show up earlier to do the interview!”

 

     I’m taken aback by his incessant apologies.  “Ric—” I calmly try to butt in.

 

     “I really let you down.”

 

     “Rick—” I try again.

 

     “I’m so, so sorry!” 

 

     “Ricky!” I say with urgency, growing concerned for how hard he is on himself. “It’s okay. Nobody’s upset with you. We’re good; we’re all good.” I smile softly.  “Are you ready to tell your story now?”

 

     Ricky removes his hands from his pockets and snaps both of his fingers together, posing like a teenage boy might do for the cover of a rap album. “Sure. Yeah!” He lowers his hands, "That's why I’m here, right? So, yeah . . .” He swiftly looks to the right, then to the left. All the passersby’s have left. It is only us outside now. His head tilts forward and he begins his story.

 

     “It happened when I was 14 years old.” His fingers continue to fidget; his short nail beds dotted with little specks of dirt. “It was a typical night at our house, my parents were out drinking, and I was in charge of watching my nine-year-old sister. Our parents were rarely home, so they were always on my sister and me about keeping the doors locked. We lived in a high crime neighborhood, and it wasn’t safe to have the doors unlocked. We were eating our TV dinners, and I heard a rattling at the door. I turned to my sister and said you didn’t unlock the door, did you?” Ricky says in a concerned big brother voice, one that immediately tells me he was a good brother. “Then her eyes got real big and scared, and I knew she had. She got real quiet and said she wanted to see if Mom had come back early. I was so mad at her ’cause I knew someone was out there and Mom and Dad never came home early anyway. Before I could think to do anything, the door BURST open.”

 

     Ricky rubs a sea of sudden goosebumps on his gangly arms. “He was this big, big man. He had a black mask on with two eye slits so I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was coming for us. I ran out of the room. He started yelling, “You can’t hide, kid, you can’t hide.” Immediately Ricky lowers his voice. “But I wasn’t going to hide.”

 

     He abruptly stops talking. He takes a deep breath. Inhaling, then exhaling, he says, “I was going to get my dad’s gun.”

 

     He finds my eyes, as if he can’t believe this statement himself. “My dad had a gun hidden in a shoebox in his closet.” He gives a slow nod. “One time when they were out, I was snooping, and I found it. Before then I didn’t even know he had a gun!” he blurts. “It scared me so bad, I never told anyone about it. If I told my dad I found his gun, then he’d know I was in his bedroom, and my parents said never to set foot in their bedroom, or we’d regret it. They were real secretive about their room. I know they were on drugs because I saw it in their room sometimes, but I guess I just didn’t want to believe it. And after I found that gun, I had a feeling there was a lot of other bad stuff they were doing too.”

 

     Ricky looks at me, his eyes are a darkish blue tint, the color of a stormy sky right before a tumultuous thunderstorm. “I want you to know, I never planned to use the gun. I didn’t even know if it was loaded or not. I just wanted to scare the man away and get him out of the house. Then I heard my sister. She started screaming, ‘Help, Ricky! Help me!’”

 

     He mimics her cries. My top teeth sink into my bottom ones forcefully and instinctively as these barbarous visuals start to flash into my mind.

 

     “I knew by the sound in her voice he was hurting her. I grabbed the gun and ran back to the living room.” His breathing ramps up, as if he’s still running. “When I entered, he had her pinned to the ground.” His eyes snap shut. He shakes his head violently. He brings his calloused hands to his face and smashes them against his temples as if to wipe away this awful visual from his mind.

 

     He doesn’t speak. So, I do. “Ricky, are you okay?”

 

     His disoriented cerulean blue eyes remain glued to the ground. His voice cracks as he continues. “Her pants were down to her ankles and her shirt was halfway off.” His breathing ramps up again. He looks up, past me. His body stiffens. I imagine a memory like this could haunt a sibling for a lifetime. For if I saw my brother like this, it would torture me for mine.

 

     “She kept crying, ‘Help, Ricky, help me!’ She was crying and screaming, and I said, ‘Get off of her!’” His breathing surges, frantic, panicked, in and out, like a ticking time bomb. “I pointed the gun at him, and then he started laughing. He said, ‘That thing probably ain’t even loaded.’ Then he put his legs on top of my sister and yelled in her face, ‘Shut up!’” Ricky looks back at me, every feature on his face carved into pure torment. “Then he SMACKED my sister across the face.” Swaying his head again, desperate to shake away the memory, he quietly squeaks, “I couldn’t watch that anymore. I pointed the gun at him.” 

 

     Ricky raises his pointer fingers, morphing them into the shape of an imaginary gun, transfixed by the memory. He sets his eye on something in the distance. The only sound I hear is a faint siren in the distance. Is this a foreshadow of what’s to come? He grips his fingers around a makeshift trigger. Then, “BOOM!” He snaps his fingers back and shoots the gun.

 

     “BANG!” The pretend gun jolts again. 

 

     “I shot it again. BANG! BANG!” The fake gun rattles in his hands. He stares off for a moment, his good eye focused on something nobody can see, but him. He lowers his pretend gun, and his face goes blank. Neither of us speak.

 

     Then, Ricky breaks the silence. “Blood went everywhere. I shot him two more times to make sure he wasn’t going to hurt her. Then he fell to the ground, dead. My sister ran over to me and started hugging me and crying. Then she got real quiet and whispered, ‘He was going to rape me, Ricky.’”

 

     Ricky’s body looks as if he’s just run a marathon, limp with exhaustion, but he continues. “The police came. I was arrested and tried as an adult.” He stops and stares past me again, his good eye glossed over with a glaze, his bad eye lost in a loop. “They charged me with second-degree murder.” 

 

     I drop the pen gripped between my fingers, aghast by his response. “What? How could they do that? How—” 

 

     Ricky cuts me off. He opens his mouth bit by bit, “My parents testified against me. They said I was crazy and dangerous, and they made up all this bad stuff about me. They convinced the judge I needed to be locked up. The judge believed them, and they wouldn’t let my little sister testify. It was just their word against mine.”

 

     A deep-rooted heaviness sits in my gut. “Ricky, why in the world would—”

 

     “They wanted me gone because they didn’t want another mouth to feed. They were always getting mad at my sister and me, saying they couldn’t wait to get rid of us because we were using up all their money.” The tone in his voice goes deep and hollow. “That’s when I was sentenced to prison for 15 years.”

 

     I look away to get a grip on my emotions. I have to ask. I have to know. “Is that where your eye got injured? In prison?”

 

     “No, not quite, but it was all a part of it. I got so lonely in prison. Eventually, I turned to the only people who would take me in—a gang. I joined the gang in prison and promised to be a part of it when I was released.

 

     They became my family, so after I was released, I kept my word and stayed with the gang. We mostly stayed in this one home where one of the guy’s mother lived. She didn’t mind us there, didn’t even notice because she was always on drugs.” He slumps his shoulders forward, possibly remembering a mother familiar to his own.

 

     “Life was rough then. I was always one step away from death. Then, one night, during a nightly gang raid, I was shot in the head. The bullet should have killed me on the spot.” He turns to me with a piqued alertness, like a deer in headlights. “The doctors said I was lucky to be alive. They couldn’t believe I lived, but my left eye would be crossed the rest of my life. When they told me I should have been dead, that was my wakeup call. I said, if I go back to that gang, it’s only a matter of time before I get killed.” 

 

     He scratches his head, full of brittle, dry hair. The uneven ridges in his nails reveal a man who constantly bites them. “But I’ll admit, it gets really lonely out here when you’re on your own. Sometimes I think about going back to the gang just to have a family out here, but then I remember how it was. Always having to hide and steal things. You’re not safe anywhere; if it’s not another gang, it’s the police. And that life, of always running, it starts to wear on you. You can’t do it without being on drugs, but the drugs mess you up. It’s just a bad cycle.”

 

     Ricky has lived such a weighted life, a little boy whose life was robbed from him at fourteen, but I can’t help but notice he has such a lightness about him as he speaks. It’s intriguing and astonishing all at one time.

 

     Ricky informs me he has been on the street for years. He confesses when he’s really low he does drugs, which I infer might be in his system now, but he doesn’t tell me if they are. This story is heart-wrenching, but I must return to another question pressing inside of me. 

 

     “What happened to your sister?”

 

     He smiles. “We talk every few weeks when I gather enough change to call her from a pay phone. She’s done good for herself. She’s got a great job and everything. She’s the only relative I still talk to, but we don’t see each other in person.”

 

     “Why?” 

 

     “She wanted to, but . . .” He shakes his head abruptly from left to right. “I feel like I’m just a criminal.” He starts to talk very fast again, like every letter is in a race with the other. “I’ve gotten five misdemeanors, aggravated assault, and auto theft. I just get so mad about things that have happened in the past, and when I get mad, I don’t care, and I will do anything. But I’m trying to stop that. I feel real bad about myself a lot. It’s hard to be around good people when you feel real low about yourself. That’s why I don’t see my sister in person. It’s too hard. We met up once, a long time ago, and I’ll never forget how she looked at me. She was just so sad, and I . . . I couldn’t stand to see that look again.”  

 

     Ricky resituates himself in his sneakers, so beaten up it’s as if he walked across the country and back in them. His crisp Southern twang returns. “I’ve been through a lot of things, but I can’t complain.” 

 

     This response catches me completely off guard. My mouth hangs open. For, I concur, if there is anybody who has a right to complain it is Ricky.

 

     “I’m blessed to have friends. God knows how much I love good friends, and He gave me so many. Even if they’re homeless or not, doesn’t matter to me. Good friends help me get out of my head when I’m low. So, I can’t complain.” A toothy grin spreads across his face. He points to me. “Like you! You’re not homeless, and you sat here and listened to me. You’re my friend.” Inviting smile lines round up around the corners of his mouth. His sincerity in his willingness to find gratitude pulls at my heartstrings as the words ring over in my mind.  

 

     He can’t complain. 

 

     For a moment, I feel as if I am looking at 14-year-old Ricky instead of the 40-year-old one standing in front of me. The little boy whose life was robbed from him when at 14 he walked into a prison cell and didn’t come out until 15 years later. This man, tortured with trauma and neglect—and sentenced to 15 years of prison after defending his sister from being raped, whose youth was robbed from him, never getting to be outside, no high school experience, forget prom, how do you think about college when you’ve been forced to live in a 6x8 prison cell for almost two decades of your life? Not to mention, suffering a near-death accident resulting in permanent use of his right eye and now living on the streets—can’t complain.

 

     Ricky's record is bleak, with fifteen years in prison and five misdemeanors, it's been nearly impossible for him to get a job. But if people knew what he had done, would they hire him? What he did was done out of love, not hate, and yet while employers have constantly turned him away, he has still chosen to find the light in the dark, the good in the bad. And while his anger at times has gotten the best of him, I notice his spirit is tender and warmhearted. The contrast of it to his dismal life story is unassuming.

 

     I think about Ricky’s words again. He can’t complain.

 

     I once read that gratitude is the act of recognizing and acknowledging the good things that happen. And while I’ve read books about how to be more positive, done gratitude journals, and even bought a few home decor magnets reminding me to, “think happy thoughts,” “smile tomorrow could be worse,” and “be grateful,” nothing has ever solidified the meaning of gratitude like my conversation with Ricky. 

 

     As I write this chapter, I recall a text that came in from a friend the other day. “Sarah, we have to get together soon! You're one of the most positive people I know!” It was a sweet text, but I know I wasn’t always this way. In fact, I come from a long line of complainers, the opposite of being grateful. My mother is a master of it. It starts with the weather. It's always wrong, too muggy and hot, or rainy and dreary. My father could also excel in this arena, but with him it was finances. There was simply never enough. It started with the outrageous price Starbucks charges for a cup of coffee and then spiraled down to the unfathomable gas prices. 

 

     These days, when my parent’s patterns seem to seep back into my own world view, and I find myself annoyed with another sweltering summer day, or frustrated I just spent a whopping $7 dollars on an iced coffee with oat milk because apparently there is a $1 charge for a splash of oat milk, I stop myself, and remember Ricky. His bright spirit, wholehearted gratitude, and refusal to complain.

 

     Then, I look up at the sun and thank God for its warmth. I take a sip of my iced coffee and delight in its full-bodied flavor, and the rich, creamy texture that came from that $1 dollar splash of oat milk. As I reframe my thoughts to find an appreciation for where I am and what I have, I can feel my frown lines diminishing, and my smile lines embedding deeper around the corners of my mouth, just like Ricky.
 

     As I think of Ricky, I am reminded of something else. That perhaps the most significant male heroes in our world look more like Ricky, a scrawny, pencil-thin man with ill-fitting clothes and a wandering eye. I further infer that maybe people living on the street have a more admirable definition of a hero than we’ve been taught. Perhaps, a true hero, the bravest ones out there, are those that have found the courage to affirm the good things in this world, when they could easily not. Someone like Ricky, with the most gut-wrenching life story I’ve ever heard, who chose to be grateful.