Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  Two psychiatrists were also on board to help guests who might be suffering from a mental illness.

  Special programs for veterans were organized with the Ralph Johnson Veterans Administration Medical Center downtown, one of the premier VA hospitals in the country.

  And most importantly, each guest would be assigned to a social worker that would help us to identify what exactly had gone wrong in our lives and what type of plan we needed in order to return to a self-sufficient lifestyle. We would set goals and meet with our caseworker on a regular basis—weekly or biweekly—to monitor our progress.

  The system came as a shock to me. I had never expected that it would be so complex and ambitious. I could tell early on that Crisis Ministries was not like the shelters where I had volunteered in the past or the shelters that I had heard about. They had an established regimen to aid its residents in getting out and on our own. They didn’t judge us for our fall into homelessness, but at the same time, they hated to see us in that position.

  Noticeably absent, though, from the laundry list of offerings at Crisis Ministries were programs involving education. Through our caseworkers, and with the aid of the newly established Clemente Program, we could arrange to get our GED or enroll in the Associate’s Degree program at Trident Tech, but what about those people that didn’t understand the importance of such credentials, I wondered? Wasn’t a lack of education one reason that many people lagged behind in the first place? Later I learned that shelters like the Helping Up Mission in Baltimore mandate that enrollees are working on some form of education, and they have one of the lowest return rates of all the shelters in the country, so wouldn’t it be advantageous for Crisis Ministries to adopt a similar program?

  After the group meeting, Ms. Evelyn met with each of us individually to discuss our situation and to assign us a caseworker. In my meeting with her, she gave me three pairs of socks, a water bottle, a towel, and a bar of soap. She also provided me with vouchers to get a state identification card free of charge, a discount bus card that I could use to ride the bus for 50¢ instead of $1.25, and a letter to give to the Department of Social Services, affirming my homelessness and allowing me to apply for programs such as food stamps. Then she handed me a coupon for the Goodwill store that I could exchange for two pairs of pants and two shirts.

  I tried to tell her my story about my druggie mom and my alcoholic father, but she wasn’t interested. “Save it for your caseworker,” she told me as she signed a series of papers for me. It wasn’t her job to lend a therapeutic ear but rather to merely get me jump started in the right direction.

  Ms. Evelyn keyed my essential information into the computer and then followed with a tutorial about meeting with my caseworker. Kazia, to whom I was assigned, was working on her master’s degree in social work at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She made the ninety-minute commute to downtown Charleston every Wednesday afternoon to meet with her assigned shelter residents. That was the only opportunity I would have to meet with her each week. If I missed that time and Kazia felt that I was not making a concerted effort to better my situation, I could be evicted from the shelter for a period of time that she deemed appropriate.

  After my meeting with Ms. Evelyn, I waited in the lobby for the nurse to call me for my TB test. I had the opportunity to speak with a gentleman in a wheelchair who was new to the shelter. He was also new to the wheelchair. Two weeks prior, he had been run over, literally, by a drunk driver while crossing the street in North Charleston. He had bruises and scrapes and scars on his arms and face, and a series of teeth were missing from his upper gum line. He offered to show me his badly mangled legs, but I declined, preferring to just take his word. Of course, the driver of the car had never stopped to make sure he was all right, so there was no telling who hit him.

  He had arrived at the shelter on Monday. Without the ability to work and without health insurance, he didn’t have the means to provide rent or food. So there he was at the shelter with hopes that he could receive the medical services he desperately needed, as well as legal assistance. It was just one more of the shelter’s many tragic tales. One day he was standing upright, walking independently with a self-sufficient lifestyle. The next, he was at the shelter in a wheelchair, at the mercy of the staff at Crisis Ministries. Another innocent victim of circumstance.

  “But I’m alive,” he told me with a surprisingly enthusiastic smile. “Shit, a lot of ’em don’t make it, so at least I got that goin’ for me.”

  The nurse called my name.

  In the treatment room, she explained more about why everyone was required to take a TB test. I learned that the sometimes-fatal airborne disease tuberculosis has become more and more of a serious health risk since the 1980s, especially in enclosed settings that promote its spread, such as prisons, hospitals, and homeless shelters. The disease is very difficult to cure, but Crisis Ministries manages to keep the problem under control by testing its guests before they have lived in the shelter for very long. The process began with an injection in the forearm. Within five days, we were required to come back to see if there were spots on our arm around the injection site. No spots and we were allowed to stay, but positive results meant that arrangements would be made for treatment, and we would be prohibited from residing at the shelter. The process was quite simple and took less than two minutes. I would have to come back on Monday so the nurse could inspect my forearm for spots.

  After the poking and prodding was over, it was almost lunchtime. A swarm of hungry shelterees and other people from the surrounding neighborhoods had assembled behind the building to be led into the men’s shelter kitchen, which also doubled as the soup kitchen for the city of Charleston. The mid-day meal was open to everybody, and the long line that stretched around the building made me happy that there were separate lines for shelter residents and the rest of the community.

  We still had to wait ten minutes until the doors opened for lunch. The topic of conversation surrounded the next day’s “Free Ride Friday.” One Friday each month during the summer, the Charleston Area Regional Transit Authority (CARTA) offered complimentary rides on all of its bus routes throughout the city. CARTA’s generous gesture gave Charlestonians an opportunity to discover the efficiency of the bus system while hitching a free ride around town. And naturally many of the shelter residents, myself included, were excited about that. Well, all of us except one lady who didn’t hesitate to protest, “Shit, it ain’t even really worth it. That bitch be jam-packed with a gang of muthafuckas just ridin’ around in circles all day tryin’ to keep cool. Them buses be smellin’ sum’m awful on ‘Free Rod Fridee.’”

  Lunch, it turned out, was the best meal of the day. It was always comprised of a combination of whatever the volunteers had worked hard to whip up in the kitchen and the food that Linda had accumulated in the Crisis Ministries truck from area restaurants. That first day’s meal included chicken breasts, crab legs, meatballs, green beans, rice, salad, cornbread, and our choice of sweet tea, water, or soda. When I went back through the line for seconds, they had added pork chops and potato salad to the menu in lieu of the crab legs, which had disappeared rather quickly. For me, it was a bit unfortunate that lunch was the most varied meal of the day, since I was hoping to have a job as soon as possible that would prevent me from attending the soup kitchen.

  And that’s precisely where I was headed. The sooner I could find a stable job, the sooner I could get out of the shelter and into my own place. And I wasn’t one to waste any time. At around 1:30, I was finished making runs through the lunch line and was ready for an afternoon siesta. Since that clearly wasn’t an option, I elected to hunt for a job. I had my Goodwill voucher, but since I was out of money, I couldn’t afford to get there. While my supply of white undershirts would last several days, I was going to have to live with my original pair of pants for another day or two.

  I wasn’t sure where to begin in my job search, so I began walking down Meeting Street toward the heart of downtown. I f
illed out applications at the neighborhood grocery store and Kentucky Fried Chicken, but neither had a need for extra baggers or chicken fryers. Management was cordial but noticeably removed from the idea of hiring yet another body to take up space behind the counter.

  A longer walk down Meeting (past the Charleston Museum, the oldest museum in the United States) brought on an entirely different atmosphere crammed with chic hotels and elegant restaurants. A man at lunch had mentioned that Hyman’s Seafood was always hiring cooks and dishwashers. “My boy Garcie works there, and he don’t even got no legs,” he had told me. I didn’t have any cooking experience, but I could wash dishes with the best of them, so I filled out an application.

  No interest.

  Maybe Sticky Fingers was short on wait staff. “Uh, come back in about a month. Maybe we’ll have something.”

  Moe’s Southwest Grille? Nothing.

  My faith was fading, but I remained fearless. I filled out applications at a few hotels. Forget the stereotypes that said that females were usually the ones doing the housecleaning. I didn’t mind vacuuming floors and cleaning toilets.

  Embassy Suites? Nada.

  Charleston Place? “We just hired two new workers, but check back soon.”

  I even tried the famed Francis Marion Hotel at the corner of Calhoun and King, and they told me I didn’t even need to bother filling out an application. They weren’t hiring. “We got a waiting list,” the front desk attendant explained. “And that list is long.”

  It was summer, the tourist season! Wasn’t anybody hiring?

  Just before 6:00 P.M., I decided to postpone my job search until the weekend. It was Thursday, and I still hadn’t contacted anyone to let them know I was safe. Penniless, e-mailing from the Charleston County Public Library was my only option for communication.

  Hidden among the adjacent banks and federal buildings, the architecture of the main branch of the Charleston County Public Library shows downtown’s blending of the old with the new. In contrast to other parts of historical downtown Charleston, where many homes and other buildings have remained standing since before the Great Earthquake of 1886, the Main Library—built in 1998—matches a new era of construction also evident in the surrounding buildings.

  But none of that was important to me at the time. I needed a computer. The librarian instructed me to fill out the Internet user agreement form before he led me upstairs to the reference section, which housed one of the library’s two main computer areas.

  And I recognized half of the people there! The library was filled with guys I had seen at the shelter who were spending their free time on the computers looking up sports scores or surfing the Internet for the latest news. One guy, Larry, was even searching for jobs online through the Post and Courier’s Web site (http://www.charleston.net). I was embarrassed. I had been trudging through downtown Charleston for hours, filling out applications, when what I really needed to be doing was searching online or, at the very least, making phone calls. Welcome to the modern era, Shep. Pounding the pavement was perhaps one way to go, but there was a far more efficient system out there that I could use to weed out the employers that were not interested in hiring me. (Looking back, I realize that I should have followed Sergeant Mendoza’s initial advice and headed over to Lockwood Boulevard to the employment agency. There, at the government’s One-Stop center, I could have filled out a profile on the computer for employers to view and searched the listings of a slew of vacant job positions.)

  Larry showed me how to fill out a profile on Charleston.net, but my research time was cut short when it came time for us to make the half-hour trek up Meeting Street back to the shelter.

  We arrived just in time for check-in. I arranged my mattress in my corner at the front of the shelter and got in line for a dinner of chicken, rice and gravy, and green beans—a common meal prepared by men from the shelter when we lacked the volunteers from area churches.

  And then began a rather eventful Thursday night.

  First, at dinner I became acquainted with a few of the fellas. Up to that point, pretty much everybody, except for Marco and Larry, treated me as more of an annoyance than as someone they could accept as one of their own. I had always been awkward and out of place in social settings, and, for reasons unbeknown to me then and now, my goofiness was working even more against me at the shelter. It wasn’t too much of a problem for me in my current endeavor, but I thought it would be rather boring to go through my entire journey as “the outcast.”

  So, I was sitting at one of the dinner tables, quietly munching on a dinner roll, playing the part of the geeky kid in third grade that never got bullied but didn’t have any friends either. Everybody was leaving me alone. Marco wasn’t there, so I was left to fend for myself. Several of the guys somehow knew my name, which was convenient for them, because they were talking about Adam’s apples.

  “Hey, man,” one of the guys said, thankfully interrupting my peaceful dinner. “You have an Adam’s apple, don’t you?”

  “Um, yeah.” From the sly looks being shot my way, I could tell that this conversation was somehow leading down the road to mockery, but I had no choice but to play along.

  “And your name is Adam, isn’t it?” he asked, giggling like a schoolgirl.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, how does that work? Do you still call it your Adam’s apple?” His peers were joining in giggling.

  I was a bit confused, but I retorted, with a deadpan, straight face. “Actually, no. I don’t have to. I just refer to it as ‘my apple.’ And interestingly enough, my parents refer to it as ‘your apple’ when they’re talking to me and ‘his apple’ when they have friends over for wine-and-cheese gatherings.”

  They loved it. As strange as our discourse had been for me, they laughed hysterically as if it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. We joked about it for another two minutes. Adam’s apples! We joked about Adam’s apples!

  And that was it. Just like that, I became accepted, part of the group. I began to learn people’s names and where they came from and how they came to find themselves at the bottom of the social chain. I discovered aspects of Charleston that were general knowledge, and I discovered unique things about the town that one can only learn about on the streets. I heard stories of war, lost love, and crime that didn’t pay. I heard about times of triumph and trying times where $16-an-hour jobs disappeared to the production lines of Mexico and China almost overnight. They taught me where to sleep if I ever got kicked out of the shelter for three days for a rule violation, and they told me where to go for the cleanest restrooms in town. One guy even showed me how to remove the cork from the inside of an empty wine bottle (inflate a plastic grocery bag inside an inverted bottle and pull it out quickly), a trick that had won him a host of bar bets in his previous life.

  They took me in under their collective wings that night during dinner. They were the teachers, and I was their apprentice. They talked and talked, and I listened. They didn’t care about me, and I didn’t care about me either! I was eating it all up. I learned more that night than I had during my last semester in college.

  From that point, there was no refuting that I was in. They didn’t judge me, just as I didn’t judge them. You were either a part of the “in” group or not, either working your way out or being a passive member of society, preparing to grind it out for the rest of your life. I wanted “in.”

  Later that night I took my first shower since my arrival in South Carolina. For the first two days, my attitude had been, “Screw it. I’m not going out to the clubs and bars trying to pick up chicks, so why do I need to shower?” But then I really started to smell myself, and I decided that my personal hygiene did not deserve to suffer at the hands of my own disregard. There was no denying my pungent body odor and, just like one of the guys Jerry said to me later, “If you can smell you today, then somebody else already smelled you yesterday.”

  I wasn’t sure how the shower system worked, so I took all of my belongings with me.
In fact, I hadn’t felt comfortable leaving my gym bag anywhere out of my sight, so I had kept it with me at all times. I removed my shoes only to take off my socks, but since I had already made the conscious decision that my bare feet shouldn’t touch the grimy bathroom floor, I put my shoes back on.

  While other guys would walk in the shower with a bar of soap and walk out and air dry or use a shirt to dry off, I came a little more prepared. From my shopping spree at Family Dollar the day before, I had soap, a washcloth, a towel, shampoo, and my counterpart in the shower room swore that I was probably one of the only guys in Crisis Ministries’ history to use conditioner. But what could I say? I like the way Garnier Fructis’s active fruit concentrate penetrates my roots and fortifies my rebellious, frizzy hair, enhancing its natural curl and shine.

  I took a long shower. I wasn’t tired, so I wasn’t in a hurry to get to bed, and there wasn’t a line of people waiting to bathe since most of the guys that took showers had already done so earlier in the day.

  Not that I wasn’t brimming with confidence and enthusiasm before, but that clean feeling made me feel much better. I opened the packages of socks and underwear and shirts that I had bought, and, although I still had to put on the same pants I had been wearing since I left Raleigh, I felt rejuvenated.

  I had planned on reading before I went to bed, but they turned the lights out early, so my only option was to watch TV. Since the TV only had two channels (and those didn’t even come in very well), people brought DVDs to watch with Carlton’s DVD player. Nobody really seemed to mind what the movie was, and although we usually had a wide selection from the assortment that people owned or checked out from the library, we didn’t have much trouble agreeing on which one to watch.