More than anything I remember his voice and the back of his head. But of course I did, since I spent an entire semester staring at his uneven hairline and its various permutations as the weather changed. I got the impression that he shaved his own hair because whenever he came in with it shorn it was sort of patchy. Oftentimes he wore a baseball cap that covered most of it BUT not his scraggly hairline. Oh, the many times I wished I could ask him if I could shave it to make his scalp and neck more distinguishable.
I guess you could say that his voice was similarly scraggly. I don't think he was a regular smoker but I had never seen him refuse a cigarette if one was offered, and you could really tell if you listened to him. His voice was full of uncertainty, very tentative, and cracked a lot. I don't mean to say that he was going through puberty but that he sounded like he rarely spoke-- which was true. Whenever he did speak it sounded like he had just woken up and hadn't had a chance to have a proper cough to clear his throat and chest. He wasn't shy or unintelligent, he just seemed to have a "speak softly and carry a big stick" way about him. His voice was crackly like static on kiddie walkie talkies, like the stiff groan of the binding and the paper when turning the page of a new book, like Pop Rocks with none of the sugar (or high fructose corn syrup, whatever they use to make it sweet).
The rest of him is pretty nondescript: he was probably average height, 5' 6" or 7", a little on the lean side, maybe 150, 160 lbs., brown hair, brown eyes (I think), some Irish-Italian-American mix.
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