Julio shook his hand and smiled. “You’ve been pretty busy around here, man. I’ve been busy, too,” he commented. It was a little too chilly out to wear no shirt that night, so Julio wore a black sweatshirt with black jeans.

Ivan looked over his neighbor’s low haircut and thought again about Lucina’s comments on cutting his hair down.

“Hey, man, how long have you had your hair cut low like that? How long can it grow?” Ivan asked him out of the blue.

Julio grinned and said, “My hair would grow all the way down my back if I let it. But I don’t feel like dealing with my hair that much every day. It kept getting way too dirty in the landscaping business. Too much flying dirt, and plants, trees, cut grass. It’s a lot easier to wash all that shit out if I keep it low. Plus it makes me look like a badass. More macho, you know.”

Ivan said, “How do you think it would make me look?”

Julio stopped and stared at him. “Ahh…I don’t know, man, those funny-colored eyes of yours would probably pop out more or something.”

Ivan nodded. “So you think they would stand out more?”

Julio took another drag from his cigarette and nodded back to him. “Yeah. You would have nothing else to look at,” he answered with a chuckle.

“And what if I put a diamond stud in my left ear?” Ivan asked him next.

Julio looked at his ear and imagined it. He smiled and said, “That would be pretty cool on you. Especially if you bought one of those diamonds with the colors and shit in them. Like…like those blue and yellow diamonds and shit. That would go real well with your eyes. But me and my dark eyes, I might as well get a hard white diamond.”

He asked Ivan, “Why, are you trying to change your look now or something? What would the people at your job say?”

“Man, fuck the people at my job,” Ivan snapped. “I’m just thinking about me right now.” It just came out that way. He figured Julio thought too much about authority.

Ivan’s raw response made his neighbor laugh.

Julio said, “Hey, man, that’s the way you gotta be sometimes. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

Just as Julio said that, his wife poked her head out from their apartment door.

“Papi, are you coming in to bed soon?”

Julio looked irritated. “Yeah, I’ll be in in a minute.”

His wife paused inside the doorway. “Okay, but you said that before, thirty minutes ago.”

Julio said, “Yeah, but it’s still minutes, it’s not hours. I’ll be there. Damn, I’m catching a smoke out here.”

His wife looked ready to say a few more things, but then she looked at Ivan and decided not to.