Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  We tiptoed through a back corridor, dodging more sleepers en route to the bathroom.

  The repulsive appearance of the bathroom sparked initial thoughts of seeking alternate methods of maintaining my hygiene. My nostrils were still filled with the stench of the sleeping area, but it didn’t block an entirely different odor from seeping in. There was no way I could use those facilities. A thin layer of grime lined the already green walls, and the floor was spotted with patches of filth. Open stalls meant we were forced to endure the humiliation of relieving ourselves in front of our shelter mates. Two of the toilets, in fact, were covered in plastic (thus deemed unusable), and the other two didn’t even have seats. No seats? Where am I supposed to sit?

  The sinks were the cleanest part of the bathroom, although you couldn’t see yourself very well in the splotchy mirrors, so it later came as no surprise that the serious shavers brought their own mirrors.

  The showers—four of them in one room—were an even more unpleasant extension of the bathroom. The mildew on the wall nearly changed the tint of its color, and the floor was covered with spent Band-Aids and soap chips ground into the already grungy floor. I knew right away that I would be showering with my shoes on until I could afford shower slippers. I concluded that the shower room hadn’t been cleaned—probably ever.

  Yep, the inside appearance of the shelter didn’t match the immaculate exterior that had greeted me two hours prior. The bathroom had been neglected for quite some time, and as disgusted as I was by the shelter as a whole, I had already come to terms with the fact that it would be my home until I could bank enough money to move out. And I was okay with that. After all, my alternative—sleeping outside and bathing who knows where—was far less appealing and certainly less secure. This was my home, and I was ready for it.

  I lucked out when Sarge found me an empty mattress where I could sleep for the night. Before I went to bed, he looked at me and said, “You look hungry.” He summoned me to the kitchen, where he tossed a few frozen chicken tenders in the microwave. He also scored me some potato salad and orange juice.

  Freddy J., whose mental illness had kept him at the shelter for thirteen years—far longer than the one year maximum that the shelter permits to other residents—was having trouble sleeping, so he joined me at the table. Despite his noticeable mental deficiencies, he was the nicest person I met during my tenure at Crisis Ministries. I inquired about life at the shelter, but he was more interested in talking about life on the outside, so we compromised and talked about the latest movies we’d seen. He only liked Kung Fu, and I liked everything except Kung Fu, so most of our midnight meal was consumed in silence.

  Although brief, my encounter with Freddy J. was my first with a fellow shelter resident. On his way out of the kitchen, he turned to me and smiled gently.

  “Welcome to Crisis Ministries.”

  TWO

  EASYLABOR

  Wednesday, July 26

  “All right, Kevin Parker! Out! Get the hell out! You, sir. Out. Get the hell out.”

  It was almost 5:30 A.M., and this was Ann, the overnight front desk attendant at Crisis Ministries, making her third go-round of attempting to wake up the sleeping stragglers. Everybody got to hit the snooze button once, but if you weren’t up after that, you were going hungry until lunchtime. And it was looking like Kevin Parker didn’t have much of a shot at breakfast.

  “I’m up, I’m up. Jesus Christ. Why does it have to be like this every morning?”

  But it was too late. Ann was sending two others out the door with Kevin, and she was on the hunt for more. She wasn’t one to mess around.

  Most of the guys found it difficult to wake up before the sun every morning, while a few saw it as an advantage in occupying a vacant bathroom. Anxiety had rendered me sleepless for much of the night, and I could tell that it wasn’t going to be easy to rise at 5:15 A.M. on a daily basis.

  Nevertheless, I was up. My mattress was tossed on the stack, my sleeping bag was rolled up, and I had even managed to sneak in to rinse my face before they raised the kitchen gate to serve breakfast. A shower was not at the top of my list of priorities, since I wanted to be on the front lines to get a feel for how the breakfast system worked. And besides, a shower wouldn’t do me much good without soap, a towel, or even a change of clothes.

  The breakfast du jour was scrambled eggs, sausage links, grits, and toast. Royal treatment. I can get used to this. It didn’t take long, though, before I was warned that that day’s meal was an anomaly. “Most days we just get hardboiled eggs and cereal, but we got volunteers this morning,” a guy in front of me said. I went back for thirds. And then fourths. Who knew when I would be eating again.

  It was Wednesday, and I was scheduled to attend orientation at 8:30 A.M. along with three other men who had arrived the previous evening. Orientation was required for all new arrivals as a way to get everyone acquainted with the shelter, go over various requirements, and then assign a caseworker for us to meet with on a regular basis. Aside from determining who my caseworker would be, I couldn’t imagine that there was much that Sergeant Mendoza hadn’t already told me about the shelter.

  As I was finishing the last bite of my morning meal, a guy walked in and shouted, “Who wants to work? Van’s outside!”

  Well, you didn’t have to ask me twice. That’s what I was there for. I asked Ann if it would be possible for me to skip out on orientation and postpone my tuberculosis (TB) test until the next day. I wanted to work. Impressed by my vigor, she sent me out the door with my promise that I would attend orientation the following day.

  I hopped in the van marked “EasyLabor: Work Today, Pay Today,” and we were off. I was almost certain that this was one of the labor agencies that Sarge had warned me against, but I didn’t take the time to do any investigating. Even with unfavorable wages, “work today, pay today” sounded very appealing.

  The driver swung us around onto Huger Street and down King. We arrived at a small white-brick building branded with the same sign as the side of the van. The twelve of us who had crammed in the van emptied out like clowns spilling out of a tiny car at a circus and into the building to see what type of work was being offered. The large front room was bordered with chairs and a table in the middle. A pot of old coffee sat on the table untouched. As a new worker, I was required to fill out a form that struck me as less of an application than a data sheet petitioning my essential information—name, address, telephone number, social security number. I had two of the four. I inquired about the shelter information with another guy, but he said that none of that mattered. “Just write down whatever. They’re not gonna contact you.”

  Blue-collar, temporary labor agencies, as I was going to find out over the course of the next week, are the pit of the employment industry. One might assume that they are out to create a mutually beneficial joining of their clientele—the employee to the employer and vice versa—but that was not my experience at all. For unskilled labor, EasyLabor receives a set price from a patron—generally around $10 an hour per worker—and they in turn send the patron as many workers as they need. These can be for any variety of second-rate jobs, ranging from construction cleanup to landscape maintenance and washing windows to more skilled labor involving framing houses and masonry. And the work is not limited to organizations that happen to be short on labor for the time being. Anybody can order workers from the labor agency if they need help with monotonous chores around the house or heavy lifting or whatever.

  In return, we (the workers) get a raw deal. We don’t receive anywhere close to $10 per hour. The average pay for unskilled jobs at EasyLabor is between $6 and $6.75 per hour, but after taxes and a one-dollar check processing fee and this fee and that fee, workers usually walk away with $4.50 tops. Forget benefits or any other perks. The operation is advantageous to both the patron (they get rather inexpensive labor, and they don’t have to worry about insurance and other miscellaneous costs) and EasyLabor (they get a fat chunk of the action), but the worker—j
ust as Sergeant Mendoza had suggested—gets screwed.

  The kicker is that there’s always a surplus of labor. Walk into any blue-collar labor agency in Charleston at around 9:00 A.M., and you’ll see an assembly of people who didn’t get sent out for the day. The attraction of just showing up and working and getting cash at the end of the day is, to some people, superior to working a real job. True, some of the laborers are temporarily unemployed, and some are working while they have days off from their permanent jobs, but still others simply come to work a few days a week whenever they need cash. If they don’t feel like working, there’s no need to call the boss faking an ailment or yet another death in the family. They just don’t go.

  The lone clerk at the front desk, Angela, was announcing that she needed one more person to go to James Island to work for the waste disposal department. I happened to be near the desk, so I asked her how much the job was paying. Aggravated by the question, she looked through her paperwork and said, “Five ninety-five. You want to go or not?”

  It hit me that nobody ever really asks how much a job is paying. Some workers are picky about going on certain jobs (one lady had told Angela, “I ain’t doin’ nuh-in’ that got anything to do wih’ fish”), but few really care how much the job is paying. After all, the unskilled jobs through the agency all pay around the same.

  “Do you think any better-paying jobs are gonna come up?” I asked, equally as persistent as I was annoying. She would have ignored me except that I was breathing down her neck. I was a gnat at her picnic.

  “Maybe, maybe not. You can hang around if you want.”

  Since it was my first day, and I didn’t yet understand how the system worked, I decided it would be best for me to go ahead and be a garbage man for the day. How bad could it be? Sure, simple tasks like taking out my own trash had always proved challenging, but this would be better than doing nothing, and any money I could net on my first day would be significant for shopping for essential goods that night. Likewise, a day off would keep me a day away from attaining my goal.

  “Nah, I’ll take it,” I told her, and off I went with two other guys who had been working on the same ticket for a week.

  The EasyLabor van breezed through the cross-town connector and over the picturesque view of the Ashley River, dodging car after car of caffeine-injected commuters noticeably blasé with the morning herd. We made three other stops before ours, and by 7:30 A.M., I found myself standing in front of an unmarked metal building watching men in orange jumpsuits glide feverishly in and out, hollering orders left and right, as they stocked their garbage trucks with water coolers and other vital components.

  The other two guys and I approached the supervisor, and I introduced myself. He was blunt. “I only need two people. I told Angela just to send me two people.”

  No elaboration. No apology. No, “But I’ll see if I can send you somewhere else.” To his credit, though, he could have sent me along as an extra worker (on the taxpayer’s dime) just because I happened to be there, but he didn’t. Somewhere along the line there had been a miscommunication, and I was the one that was going to suffer as a result.

  The supervisor called back over to Angela who said she would send the van back momentarily. I waited for the next thirty minutes by the bushes in front of the waste disposal warehouse. I was beginning to get antsy when a car pulled up and a younger woman who appeared to be in her twenties like me asked if I was Adam Shepard.

  “We got another job to get to. And we’re already late. Hop in.”

  Conveniently, EasyLabor was short one worker on a construction job that happened to also be on James Island. Cicely, my partner for the day, and I had trouble finding the place in the backwoods of a hidden residential community, but I didn’t care. I was happy just to be working.

  We arrived at a construction site where ten or so workers were already busy laying foundation on one building and putting up drywall on another. For a residential community, I couldn’t believe the size of the buildings they were constructing. In later conversation with fellow workers, I learned that one was the main house and the other was the pool house, parts of an estate that were being built for a big-shot attorney from New England who had won a large settlement in a case with a tobacco company. Behind the layout sat a scenic inlet, which later turned out to be off limits for swimming during lunchtime.

  “Big Bob”—whose name I learned from the tattoo etched on his right bicep—was the foreman of the project, and he didn’t hesitate to greet us with a snarl. His white beard blew in the breeze, and his eyes squinted when he spoke to us. Intuition told me that he probably spent the holiday season at a shopping mall quizzing kids on their Christmas lists, but it was July, and he wasn’t playing Santa. “You’re late. You friggin’ people from EasyLabor are always late.” We were supposed to be there at 7:30 A.M., and it was now almost 8:30.

  He handed us off to one of his workers who showed us what we would be doing for the day: cleaning up the work area. The site was cluttered with discarded concrete forms from the foundation that had just been poured, and our job for the day was going to be to stack them to the side according to their size: short and skinny, long and skinny, short and wide. At first glance, it looked like enough work to last maybe two hours, contingent upon Cicely’s work ethic, but I didn’t have the nerve to stretch it into a full day’s work as it appeared some of the other guys were doing with their tasks. I watched one guy who was sitting on the rear stoop of the big house puffing on a cigarette, evidently quite delighted with his ability to get away with his masterminded one-two style: work one minute, rest two.

  By 9:30, it didn’t matter, however, since Big Bob showed his face sparingly to supervise. It was a typical southern summer day with the temperature in the nineties and the humidity making it seem even hotter. He had retreated to his F-150 pickup truck to hang out in the air conditioning, which made it easy for everyone to work at his or her own pace. And that wasn’t at all a bad situation, since Big Bob was a very poor manager anyway. He would come out, bark orders, and then go back to the air-conditioned comforts of his truck. Nobody respected him. They would obey his instructions while he was around, but once he turned his back, they were right back to doing it their own way. Ironically enough, Big Bob had (by his own admission) earned the right to be lazy after years of his own hard work.

  We finished stacking the concrete forms by 10:00 A.M., at which point they had found plenty more work for us to do. We cleaned up miscellaneous trash, removed nails from boards, and filled empty holes with dirt. We broke for lunch at the neighborhood Piggly Wiggly, a southern grocery store chain, at 12:30, and Cicely and I split a lukewarm chicken dinner with green beans. I was already beat. The work was tedious, to be sure, but the heat was really starting to get to me. Cicely was in Superwoman mode, never stopping for a single break, and I surely wasn’t going to be the one to interrupt that trend. The last thing I needed was Santa hollering at me. I fought fatigue, and by 3:00 P.M. we were done.

  Big Bob gave us a full seven hours even though we had worked from 8:30 to 3:00 with a half-hour break for lunch in between. “Y’all can come back and work for me anytime you’d like.” A full-time job, which he probably wasn’t offering, sounded appealing at first, but the one arena I had hoped to avoid on a permanent basis under the downpour of humidity in the South was construction. We thanked him and left.

  On the way back to EasyLabor to collect the day’s allowance, I asked Cicely why she chose to work so hard. After all, the biggest reason that we finished each task early was because of her remarkable efficiency. She had outworked me on pretty much every project, which didn’t bruise my ego too much since she had been working throughout the summer with EasyLabor, and she was used to the hot days working outside.

  “The harder I work, the more praise I receive back at EasyLabor. And if they like you, you get put on better jobs and maybe even a permanent ticket.”

  I assumed that first day’s ticket with McMaster’s Construction was an excep
tion to that rule, but I got her point: EasyLabor had a reputation to uphold, and they did that by sending out their best workers to the best (often less back-breaking) jobs.

  We arrived back at EasyLabor sooner than many of the other workers. My payment options were to receive a check (succumbing to the billion-dollar check cashing industry until I could set up a bank account) or, for a $1 fee, I could receive my payment in the form of cash via EasyLabor’s ATM machine. I opted for the latter—a choice I hated to make, but I needed the cash right away to go to Family Dollar.

  After taxes, a couple of minor fees, the $1 ATM fee, and the staggering $5 I had to pay for the trip to and from the job ($2.50 to the van and $2.50 to Cicely for the ride home), I netted $28.61 on the day. My share of lunch had cost me $3, so now, with the $20.27 left over from my initial fund, I had $48.88 to spend on the necessary items I intended to buy. On our way out, Angela remarked that she had plenty of jobs for the following day, but I remembered that I had to attend orientation at the shelter, so I was going to miss out. Before heading to her home on the north side of town, Cicely dropped me off up the street from EasyLabor at Family Dollar, where I made my money count. All of it. I bought six pairs of underwear, a six-pack of socks, six white undershirts, a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush, toothpaste, an eight-pack of Ivory soap, shampoo and conditioner, a towel, a washcloth, a roll of toilet paper for emergencies, and a week-long supply of an assortment of potted meat and crackers that I would eat for lunch. Even though I had to skip working on Thursday in order to attend orientation at the shelter, and I was unaware of the weekend’s work schedule at EasyLabor, I now had the resources to survive for a while.

  Walking the dilapidated backstreets of Eastside Charleston en route back to the shelter, I began to ponder a few things. After my initial meeting with Sarge, the only thing that I had disagreed with was his advice that I avoid befriending anyone. “You might think you know somebody, but you don’t,” I remembered him saying. Well, fair enough, but isn’t that true anywhere? I knew before I even hopped on the train for Charleston that I was going to need a companion on my journey. Could I accomplish my mission solo, dodging in and out of people’s lives virtually unnoticed? Sure. Did I want to? Nope. I knew that having somebody to hang with would not only make things easier, but it would also make my life more interesting outside of the confines of achieving my goals. Sharing the day’s endeavors and goals and dreams with a friend was more appealing to me than tallying my bankroll after dinner.