Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  I had arrived back at the shelter an hour and a half early for check-in, which was not enough time for me to get down to the library to e-mail my parents, who were waiting to hear about my safe arrival. However, it left me plenty of time to try to get to know a few people.

  Quite a crowd had already assembled in preparation for the 7:30 check-in. The spread was mixed. Loners sat by themselves off to the side, while established cliques stood around talking about news, the day’s happenings, and the other established cliques. I figured the loudest talkers were the ones that ran the shelter life on the inside, so I resolved that it would be valuable for me to meet a few of them. Unfortunately, the loudest talkers were also the least approachable, and they seemed to look at me—the new guy—as more of a nuisance than a prospective acquaintance. My problem was more than likely in my icebreaker, but I couldn’t be sure. I just didn’t know what to say. During high school, I had struggled when approaching cute girls, but I did not suspect that I would have the same problem in conversing with homeless men.

  Enter Marco Walten.

  Marco—who, as it turned out, had been in and out of the shelter for two months now—was experiencing the exact opposite of my dilemma. He knew darn near everybody.

  “Hey, Marco, what up, homie?”

  “Hey, Marco, my man, how was work?”

  “Hey, Marco, I saw Alyssa today. She was asking about you.”

  “Hey, Marco, your shoe’s untied. Oh, gotcha! Ha, ha.”

  “Hey, Marco! Hey, Marco!”

  He was the king of the shelter, a social chameleon who could talk to just about anybody from any background about pretty much anything. Although the camera flashes were absent, he walked through the shelter yard like a rock star on the red carpet. And he was a smooth talker, too, the type of guy that could sell a used motorcycle to a wrinkled man in a wheelchair.

  Marco was short and bald with a noticeably athletic physique, and he had an unkempt goatee. Over time, I would learn that, despite his ability to schmooze, his entire persona, beginning with his eye contact, was very genuine. When he flashed that contagious smile of his, his conversation partner knew that it was time to smile, too.

  And now he was coming over to me. He picked me out, I assume, because of our obvious closeness in age. I was sitting on the sidewalk with my back leaning against the brick building, at this point quite removed from the crowd since I had yet to engage in any conversation worth continuing. I had somehow managed to meet the three guys in the yard that didn’t want to talk (except to tell me to leave them the hell alone), so I decided it would be best for me to retreat to my own corner until dinner.

  But there was Marco, the Marco, on his way over to meet me, the loneliest man in America.

  “’Sup?” he asked, rhetorically.

  “’Sup?” I replied. So far we had the makings for quite the primordial conversation.

  “I’m Marco Walten. Who are you?”

  “I’m Adam Shepard. I just got in town from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I don’t really know anybody.”

  “Really?” he asked, glancing at the empty space around me, surely sympathizing that sitting alone on the stoop of a homeless shelter is perhaps as bad as it could possibly get. “You ain’t kiddin’. What brings you to Charleston?”

  I went on to tell my fabricated story on exactly how I had come to find myself in the city that some describe as the pride of the South. I had surpassed opportunities to go to college after high school in order to stay home and take care of my mom. She had acquired quite a taste for amphetamines, and rehabilitation attempts had been unsuccessful. At the age of twenty-three, I had decided that it was time for me to either get busy making a life for myself or continue on the road to nowhere. My father, who had left my mom, my brother, and I when I was five, had remarried and was now living in Savannah, Georgia. We spoke on the phone on birthdays and holidays, and we had seen each other just three times in the past eighteen years. As I saw it, now was an opportune moment to rekindle my relationship with him. I was excited to start school at the local community college, work, and enjoy a new life in Savannah.

  “And then reality set in.”

  My fabricated father knew I was coming. He had all of my train information. In fact, he had even purchased my ticket, which was scheduled to arrive in Savannah the previous night just before 11:00. I had called him and left a message when I was in Wilson, North Carolina, to let him know that the train was running late. In Charleston, I called him again to update him on the schedule. And he was drunk.

  I knew that my father had been struggling with alcohol, but I wasn’t quite sure how that would affect our rapport. And I certainly didn’t expect that it would affect us so soon.

  On my phone call from the Charleston train station, he had essentially told me that he didn’t want me to come. It wasn’t a long conversation. In fact, it was quite plain. “Don’t come. I don’t want you here. I won’t be there to pick you up, and if you come to my house, I won’t let you in.”

  Wow. I didn’t even know how to respond. I hung up the phone and found my way to the shelter. That simple.

  It was a great story, one I had been concocting for two days, and as I was going to find throughout my stay at the shelter, absolutely imperative to have. Everybody had a story. In fact, mine wasn’t even that impressive compared to many of the rest. It was our way of being accepted into the group. It gave us something to talk about, a way of relating to one another. It put us on the same playing field.

  Hey, we all come from different backgrounds, most of which weren’t normal. We’re all messed up. Now, we can either get out or not.

  It’s also the reason why we rejoiced when someone got out of the shelter and into their own living quarters. One of us was getting out. It’s always sweeter when you overcome adversity to achieve something than if you are handed your fate on that metaphorical silver platter.

  In the long run, as I said, my fictitious story paled in comparison to many of the real-life stories that I would hear over the course of my stay at Crisis Ministries:

  Leo had followed a girl to Charleston from Los Angeles. When he got here, he met her husband, gunfire was exchanged, and now he was at the shelter until he could earn enough money to get back to the West Coast.

  Rico, divorced and picking up the pieces from a life gone awry, had been struggling with a crack-cocaine addiction and admitted that the area around the shelter was not exactly prime territory for reform. He wanted to improve his lot so that he could be a better father to his eight-year-old son. Two weeks prior to my arrival, he had walked to Charleston from Georgetown, about fifty miles away.

  Billy had hitchhiked to Charleston from his home just outside of Chicago. He didn’t have any friends or family in Charleston. He was thirty-two and escaping his previous life, one that included a bitch of a wife, parents who didn’t care, and a handful of dead-end jobs. The only thing that followed him to the shelter was a felony weapons charge. His intention was to work and save money and fly to Spain to live for the rest of his life. “Just as soon as I learn Spanish,” he told me later.

  “Easy E,” who would become a good friend of mine throughout my stay at the shelter, also had a drug problem, which he managed to keep under control better than some of the other shelter residents. Easy wasn’t a typical shelter resident, though. He had worked in Manhattan’s financial district and made a lot of money, but he longed to escape the cold weather, so he came to Charleston with his brother to start a painting company. In the end, his brother had squandered all the profits to a gambling habit, and now Easy was left to start over with nothing. He had an advantage, though. He was very talented, handy with any tool you put in front of him. He worked for EasyLabor, but he always went out on skilled tickets that paid at least $10 an hour. He didn’t need to live at the shelter, but he didn’t mind the conditions, and as he later told me, “The price is right on rent.”

  And the list went on. Robert, the leader of the clean-up crew; Carlton, who never
failed to get on Ann’s last nerve; “Can George” from Cuba who made enough money to support himself at the shelter by collecting cans from the trash; Smitty, a local man who went home to Summerville to see his family every weekend but didn’t have a full-time job to support them for the rest of the week.

  Wasn’t my story their story? Wasn’t their story my story? Weren’t we all in the same situation, stronger because of our past and working our way up from nothing or, if we so chose, remaining stagnant?

  Marco was fascinated by my story. He created his own ending when he told me how things would have worked if he had been in my position. “Shit, I’da taken my ass right down to Savannah and told my dad what the business was. He woulda let me stay, I can promise you that.”

  And he wasn’t all talk. He was having problems of his own with his father in Charleston, but he wasn’t taking crap like I apparently was. He lived with his father downtown on Spring Street, but he came to the shelter a few nights a week when he was too exhausted to deal with each night’s impending confrontations. But, more often than not, he would merely walk into his father’s house, they would argue, and then he would go to bed. It was not an ideal relationship by any means.

  “It wasn’t always like that, though,” he explained. “I come from an ordinary, middle-class lifestyle, but my parents divorced when I was thirteen, and everything went downhill from there. Dad took off for Charleston; Mom remarried.”

  After high school, Marco worked a series of jobs that didn’t hold any potential for the future. At twenty-three, he came down to Charleston to live and work with his father, who soon developed an attitude problem, which was followed by an alcohol problem, which was followed by an addiction to crack-cocaine. Marco had been in Charleston for eight months, but he hadn’t quite found a place to fit in.

  “I hate it here,” he said. “I mean, it’s nice and all, good people, all this history and shit. Maybe it’s my dad. I dunno. I just can’t get in the right groove.”

  He didn’t have the resources to get out, but even if he were to acquire the resources, he wasn’t sure what would be waiting for him if he went back home to Michigan. He was struggling to ignite that fire in his belly that could potentially catapult him out of his present situation. He talked about school and getting an apartment and other ambitious pursuits, but the fact was that he had worked six different jobs since his arrival in Charleston, and he wasn’t happy with his latest at a pizza parlor.

  And I think that’s why we hit it off from the beginning. We were both at the bottom, and we had come from similar backgrounds. Sure, mine was fabricated, but I played the part well, and besides, if we were going to work our way up together and enjoy each other’s company in the process, our friendship would evolve into much more than our storied past. Forget where we came from; we were more concerned with where we were going.

  The morning clean-up crew at the shelter was permitted to enter a half-hour early—a benefit that only three people had played to their advantage. By 7:30 P.M., the line stretched out the front gates. Marco and I were close to the front of the line, which was more important than one might think: although everybody who arrived before 9:00 was admitted, first in got mattresses; last in got to sleep with the roaches on the cold tile floor.

  The check-in process was rather uneventful. We told the desk clerk our name, he or she gave us a meal ticket, and then we went inside to pick out a mattress and a plot of the room to occupy for the evening. Then it was on to the dinner line.

  On paper, there were no assigned mattresses or even assigned spots to sleep, for that matter. But it turned out that it was going to be more difficult than I thought to find a post for my mattress since the choice locations were controlled by the shelter’s regulars. Three times I was told to move, and three times I dragged my mattress away amid a cloud of laughter.

  Finally, I found a place to sleep in the front corner of the shelter nearest the fire exit. Nobody liked to sleep there because of its close proximity to the hustle and bustle of Meeting Street on the other side of the windows, so I was left to fend for myself in my own little nook. Even Marco avoided the opportunity to sleep near his new friend when he chose to set up camp in the dining room. I reasoned that dinner scraps fallen short of the mouths of my shelter brethren would be ideal bait for the unruly army of insects that I preferred not to accommodate. But Marco didn’t really seem to mind.

  Dinner for my first night was spaghetti with meat sauce, bread sticks, and salad with Italian dressing. I learned to appreciate these simple dinners more than ham or meatloaf or chicken, since there was always an abundant supply. Meatloaf could run out quick, but more often than not I could keep going back for spaghetti until I was so full I had to roll to bed. We were human garbage disposals. The shelter rarely stored leftovers, but they didn’t throw food away either. They served until the dishes were scraped empty.

  I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept well the night before and coupled with the demanding construction work, I knew it wouldn’t take long for me to pass out.

  I rolled out my sleeping bag and placed my gym bag filled with my personal belongings next to my mattress. I remembered what Sarge had said about keeping our valuables with us at all times, so as I was going to bed, I tucked my prized possessions—my journal and my currently empty wallet—deep into my sleeping bag. I had less money than when I started, but as the lights went out, a smile of gratification crept over my face. I knew at that moment, more than any other during my time in Charleston, that my wallet would fill up. I knew that I was going to succeed. Now more familiar with my surroundings, I knew what I had to do to make it happen. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I had a plan, and now it was just a matter of putting my plan into action. And I couldn’t wait to start.

  THREE

  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR

  Thursday, July 27

  “Ha! Y’all wanna play with me? Y’all mothers are crazy! This is like a sport to me! I love this! Ha! Everybody out! Everybody get the hell out!”

  Ann was great. She didn’t care about anything. Whether we liked her or hated her, she didn’t care. Actually, she’d probably prefer that we grew to hate her so that we would get our acts together and get out of the shelter sooner as opposed to later.

  But that didn’t necessarily matter to us at that moment. Ann was kicking us out. Not just Kevin Parker. Not just one or two people. Us. Everybody.

  Just like many mornings to come, nobody had taken the initiative to grab a mop and clean the floor. Everybody, including myself, knew it had to be done on a daily basis before we could eat breakfast. It was supposed to be like clockwork: wake up, gather our belongings, stack our mattresses, and clean the floor.

  But it never went that way.

  Ann had an advantage, though, an ace in the hole. She knew when she could kick us out and when she couldn’t. If we had volunteers cooking a gourmet breakfast, she wasn’t going to kick us out because the food would get wasted. If the menu was cereal and hardboiled eggs, she wouldn’t hesitate to send us out the door.

  And that’s how things seemed to be headed on this Thursday morning—not the way some of us wanted to start our day.

  Where is that mop? Give me the mop. I’ll clean the friggin’ floor.

  But it was clearly too late. As soon as Carlton was headed out the door, we knew it was time to go. He had pushed Ann’s buttons so many times that he knew when to keep pushing them, just as he knew when it was time for us to accept our fate. Out the door we went.

  My second day in Charleston had the makings to be a wash. Ann had forced us all out the door by 6:00, so I had two and a half hours of idle time to wait for orientation. I napped on the concrete outside the shelter, uncomfortable as it was, until the sun rose over the trees. Then I read the brochures I had picked up from inside the shelter on sexually transmitted diseases, drug abuse, and anxiety disorders. I also did my best to study the bus schedule, which I knew was going to be my main source of transportation for the coming months.

>   Twenty or so of the other guys meandered about the shelter grounds with no particular place to go. Unhurried, a few raked leaves or swept cigarette butts off the brick walkways. I couldn’t help thinking that this is where it happened—this is where people disappeared, fell off the map. Younger runaways, still full of potential, were lost in the fray; thirty-somethings, reaching the realization that things just hadn’t gone as planned; older guys who had been my current age—full of such promise—when I was just a baby running around in diapers. They were me once upon a time.

  Contrary to my expectations, Ms. Evelyn’s orientation was not a waste of my time. I was bored at the beginning as she covered many of the same topics that Sergeant Mendoza had covered in his orientation: rules; how to cope with being homeless; how residing at Crisis Ministries was a privilege and not a right; and how most men who were starting over on their own stayed at the shelter for an average of four to six months, with a limit of one year. But I perked up when she began to detail the wide variety of resources that Crisis Ministries had to offer.

  It was incredible.

  There was a legal team prepared to represent selected cases pro bono.

  The nurse was in every day from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. to treat our aches and pains, and, more importantly, there was a team of doctors who came in every Wednesday night to examine people with chronic health issues. If we needed additional assistance, we would be recommended for further medical services provided by the Medical University of South Carolina in downtown Charleston.