Why it might be hard to identify with Hi:
- He’s a loser. He’s a baby-stealer.
Connect
- He’s got a scar, which always helps us believe in the reality of a character. He wears distinctive Hawaiian shirts. He has a unique, unexpected metaphor family right away, telling Ed, “You’re a flower, a desert flower.” Later he uses the unique word “motherscratcher.” He certainly has opinions, “Wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House”
Care
- Hi keeps getting arrested. We feel for him when an inmate snarls at him. When he falls in love, he can say he “finally felt the pain of imprisonment.” Even when he gets out and gets a job, he says “Most ways, the job was a lot like prison.” When he finds out he can’t have children, the gynecologist showing them female anatomy smiles at them, showing no sympathy for their pain. He says, “I preminisced no return of the salad days. The pizazz had gone out of our lives.” We share his exasperation and embarrassment when he can’t keep control of the babies. We feel for him when Ed tells him, “Don’t you come back here without a baby.”
Commit
- During a robbery, he cocks a shotgun like a badass. We admire his brazenness hitting on Ed while she’s booking him. At his job, he’s drilling holes in sheet metal, which is always bad-ass.
Five Es
- Eat: Not at all
- Exercise: Well, he runs into and out of stores.
- Economic Activity: “Sometimes your career’s gotta come before family.”
- Enjoy: Has a lot of sex with Ed.
- Emulate: He tries to emulate a clean-living family man. He tries to take the place of Nathan Arizona.
Rise above
- He decides to put family ahead of his crime career after all. “I couldn’t help thinking at a brighter future lied ahead.” “That ain’t me anymore.”
High five a black guy
- He bonds enough with his cellie to hear, “When there was no meat, we ate fowl, when there was no fowl, we ate crawdads…”
Kind:
- He’s very caring towards Ed.
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