Scratch Beginnings

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Scratch Beginnings Page 9

by Adam Shepard


  For the first time, I went to bed without a concrete plan for the following day. While it wasn’t an aggressive approach, it would give me the opportunity to wake up and go with the flow. I had the freedom, financially, to ride the bus around all day long scouring for jobs, and now that favorable circumstances at O’Charley’s and the car wash had relieved a lot of pressure in finding a job, I didn’t have to go about my search with such anxiety. I would still go on an ambitious hunt, but I could carry the attitude that no matter what, I would be working a steady job by the following Monday. Although I was fortunate to be working with George on Sundays, hopefully my shit-shoveling days were behind me.

  SIX

  HUSTLE TIME

  Tuesday, August 1

  “Hey, Adam. Don’t you think it’s ’bout time for some new pants?”

  While he had tried to present his criticism of my attire in a half-joking manner, his point was well taken. My pants were getting to be repulsive. Ten minutes of scrubbing them down in the shower the night before hadn’t removed the dirt stains that had accumulated, and the foul smell acquired from a week’s worth of action seemed to be a permanent fixture. I knew they were in need of a good washing (in a real washing machine), but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. But when a homeless man remarks that it’s time for a new pair of pants, you get to thinking that it might be time for a new pair of pants. So before I even thought about where to spend my Tuesday—my one-week anniversary at the shelter—I headed to the Goodwill for some new threads.

  There was no denying that the No. 10 bus was becoming my greatest ally. It picked us up right there in front of the shelter and then ran from downtown all the way up Rivers Avenue, right through the middle of Charleston. Anything we needed was along the way at some point: medical care, all types of shopping centers and malls, the county’s community college, and even the Department of Social Services, where I would go two weeks later to get food stamps. And best of all, a No. 10 bus came every half hour, so we would never have to wait long at the stop.

  I don’t care who you are, the Goodwill is for you. Rich, poor, fat, skinny, ugly, pretty—everybody can find something at the Goodwill. Everybody. It’s like a huge, year-round White Elephant exchange. Donate what you don’t want, receive a slip for a tax refund, and then go in to buy something that you do want for only about $3. It seems like everything is $3 or less. Shirts—polo or button down? $3. Shorts? Pants? $3. Shoes? $3.50, but still. And most of it is name-brand stuff that has been passed on by people who have grown out of the style or the sizes. They even have furniture and lamps and weight sets and negligees and hardcover books for a buck, and the list goes on and on.

  I was spoiled on my first trip to the Goodwill. Not only did I have my free voucher—good for two pairs of pants and two shirts—but I also happened upon the grand opening of a new Goodwill Outlet Store on Rivers, which was decked out with a wide selection of apparel from other area stores to go along with the recent donations they had received from the generous citizens of Charleston.

  It didn’t take me long to pick out my clothes. I even thought about splurging for a couple extra pairs of pants and shirts, but the timing didn’t seem right. Who did I have to impress? As long as my pants could remain free from stains and odors, I didn’t care if I got caught wearing the same outfit every other day. That’s what all of my new friends were doing.

  In any event, I knew that I would be returning to the Goodwill many times throughout my time in South Carolina and probably even after that. The money I would be saving at the Goodwill would mean more money to put toward a car or a place to live or furnishings. (Indeed, I would shop at the Goodwill for the duration of my time in Charleston and beyond. Five months later, I went out with a beautiful radio DJ in Charleston, and I looked good. Really good. GQ level style. Khaki slacks, button-down dress shirt, blue blazer, and loafers. I’m talking name brand stuff. Total cost of the entire outfit? $14.96. She stopped returning my calls—all of them—but I can assure you it had nothing to do with my attire.)

  Perhaps out of laziness, but more out of my desire to save money, I rode the bus back down Rivers Avenue to the shelter for lunch at the soup kitchen. While filling up on greasy pork chops and gristly chicken legs, I had the opportunity to speak with a fellow named John, who ate at the soup kitchen every day but didn’t reside at the shelter.

  “They hirin’ at Fast Company,” he said, opening the conversation.

  “Pardon?”

  What? Pardon? Who says that?

  Really, who? Words like “pardon” could diminish anyone’s credibility in any social setting, let alone a homeless shelter.

  “You the one tryin’ to get a job, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Fast Company. It’s a moving company up there by the airport. They hirin’. You can prolly get a job no problem.”

  Ah, moving. Why hadn’t I thought about that before!

  I knew that challenging labor would be rewarded with higher pay, and I had never been one to shy away from a challenge. Shoveling shit excluded, how much more challenging could it get than hauling chairs and dressers and boxes around all day?

  “They start you out at eight dollars an hour, but you can get a raise real quick if you know what you’re doing. You know how to move furniture?” Every time he spoke, he had a mouthful of a medley of mashed potatoes and green beans stuffed in his mouth, so I would miss a word or two every now and then.

  “Oh boy, do I,” I retorted. My brother and I had completely destroyed my parents’ furniture over five moves throughout the course of their divorce, but we had dragged dressers and rammed sofas through door frames, rather than taking the time to carry the pieces with care. “Wait. Why? You gotta have any experience to work for them?”

  “Well, I’da thought so. But then my boy went down there and they hired him on the spot. He ain’t have no experience. They just said here you go, and they gave him a shirt and sent him out on a crew.”

  Eight dollars an hour? No experience necessary? It’s exactly what I was looking for!

  “And the tips,” he continued. “Some days them boys bring home more in tips than they make by the hour on the move. They move all them rich people and shit.”

  I asked him why he hadn’t gone down there to check it out.

  “What’r you, nuts? You think I’m gonna move furniture all day? Ha! Hell no! That shit’ll tear your body up. I got me a good job down at the paper factory. Don’t hardly gotta work at all. Just gotta put up with that God-awful smell.”

  By that time, we’d both nearly consumed our weight in pork chops and chicken legs, and I didn’t feel like going anywhere that required walking. But I was too excited to sit around and let my food digest. This was the break I had been waiting for.

  Southeastern summers are the worst. Hot and humid, sunup to sundown, every day. And rarely does the shade of the swaying palm trees peppered throughout the city provide much relief. I had spent the day merely walking around doing a few errands, and I was sweating my teats off. I could only imagine what it was like for the people that had to work outdoors on that Tuesday. By early afternoon, it was 103 degrees. Not “feels like 103 degrees” or “Hmmm, must be sum’m like 103 degrees out here today.” No, 103 degrees. Thermostat says 103. “Feels like” 130.

  It was a good thing that I got an early afternoon start on my quest to locate Fast Company, because their office was set off the beaten path. Even if I had known where I was going, I couldn’t have found it without difficulty. And since I wasn’t really familiar with any of Charleston, let alone the area around the airport, it took me two and a half hours by bus and foot to get there through bushes and over fences. I was in Vietnam, attempting to attack the enemy’s headquarters all by myself. I was trying to find a shortcut, but it only prolonged my expedition. Exhausted when I arrived, I asked to speak to a manager.

  “He’ll be back in a bit,” Amy, one of the receptionists, told me. “Is there something I can help you with?”

/>   “I’m tryin’ to get a job. As a mover.”

  She looked my slender frame up and down, as if to say, “What exactly do you plan on moving? Lamps? What are you gonna do when you have to lift something heavy?” But she was polite, keeping her personal feelings to herself.

  “Oh, well, you can fill out one of these applications, and Curtis will get back to you as soon as he can,” she said.

  Super. Another application. Just what I needed. The odyssey to find Fast Company had been far from an easy stroll uptown, and now I was left filling out yet another application. I always hoped to speak with the manager firsthand, but my options at Fast Company were limited.

  I filled out the application. Critical information, work history, education history, military history, references.

  Do they ever even look at these things? When it comes down to it, aren’t our willingness to work and the fact that we walk upright simply matched with job vacancies?

  Curtis didn’t arrive back at the office before I left. Amy tossed my application on a stack of what appeared to be sixty of the same application packets and announced that Curtis would call me as soon as he had the opportunity to look over my information. Ugh. Riiiiight.

  ’Kay, thanks. ’Preciate it. I’ll just go home and wait by the phone. Tonight? You think he’ll call tonight? Or should I stay home and keep the phone by my ear tomorrow, too?

  I felt frustrated and unfulfilled. Another application. Another afternoon chalked up to the job search.

  I did a little back street exploring and found a shortcut through the woods and along the train tracks, back to Rivers Avenue. At least if I did get the job at Fast Company, I would know a much easier way to get there in the mornings after catching the bus from the shelter.

  The five o’clock hour was approaching as I passed by the stop for the shelter and rode the bus on to the library to search the classified ads on the Internet and to check the profile I had set up at Charleston.net.

  Nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing! No responses to the queries I had posted with prospective employers and no new postings for jobs. With low expectations, what I had anticipated to be an easy job search was proving to be much more complicated. I decided that the hour-and-a-half-or-longer one-way trek by bus to O’Charley’s was not going to be worth the pay, and even the opportunity waiting for me at the car wash had left me wanting more. I knew that once I had a job, holding on and working my way up would be the easy part, but was $6.50 an hour as good as I was going to find?

  The excitement at the shelter continued on Tuesday night. In fact, now that I think about it, the shelter was exciting every night. Between catching up on the day’s happenings and watching as new guests tried to blend with the shelter veterans, every night brought a new experience and new drama. All it would take was somebody cutting in line or somebody inciting an argument on the wrong subject, and before we knew it, half of the shelter would be offering their opinions. And we loved excitement. We could be sparked by anything. If Jimmy somehow finagled his way through the line to get seconds before everybody else was served their first meal, you better believe that somebody would find out and then everybody would end up telling Jimmy what they really thought about him.

  But most intriguing was the fact that it didn’t matter what the subject was. If a guy stated, “Kittens are cute,” sure enough, someone would support him just as someone else would interject with, “Kittens are a bunch of pussies.” Dinner in particular would never be served without some argument or incident. But I suppose that confrontation was what kept us going, kept us free from the monotony and boredom of the everyday life of going to work and then coming to live at a stinking homeless shelter. Imagine that. Imagine waking up every morning at a homeless shelter, and then off to some dead-end job, only to have to look forward all day to returning that same evening to the same stinking homeless shelter with the same stinking men. Confrontation, interestingly enough, served as an outlet to keep us sane.

  And the humor. Those guys were some of the funniest, wittiest guys I’d ever met in my life. It was the most bizarre thing. One minute, two guys would be barking at each other about the last dinner roll or a bar of soap or the war in Iraq or whatever, and the next minute they would gang up on some other guy, making fun of the way he sounded when he snored or a word he had pronounced incorrectly. “Ephipany? Ha! Did that mother really just say ephipany? I got an ephipany for ya. You’re a dumb ass.”

  Yeah, humor kept us going. I could pretty much count on getting a good laugh in every night. Larry never introduced himself to the new guys as a garbage man; he was “the chief sanitation engineer for truck number six of the James Island Department of Waste Disposal.” Philly, notorious for always borrowing money, would walk up to an unsuspecting newcomer and say, “Hey, man, do I owe you a dollar?”

  No.

  “Oh, a’ight. Cool. Say, got a dollar I can borrow?”

  We would all erupt in laughter at things that might not be funny to outsiders, but to us—deprived men refusing to be deprived of our dignity—it was hilarious.

  One night stands out as distinctly comical. After dinner, Marco and I were playing gin rummy with a couple of other guys (and earning no respect; Spades was considered the only worthy card game at the shelter). A guy came by with a fresh new pair of denim jeans, relaxed boot fit. He was marketing them like they were the hot new thing and that any prospective buyer was catching the deal of the decade.

  “They’re hot! They’re hot! Get ’em now! Just three dollars!”

  Some people ignored him while others laughed at his attempt to be a nickel-and-dime hustler just like the rest of us. Five minutes (and two rummy losses) later, the same guy came through the common area.

  “They’re hot! They’re hot! Get ’em now! Just three dollars! Size thirty-eight.”

  Still no sale, although one guy inquired if he had any other sizes.

  “What size do you wear?” he asked.

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Well you’re in luck! I’ll be right back.”

  He came back a minute later with the same pair of jeans and a belt, a worthy attempt at selling them as one size fits all.

  Still no takers, but he was persistent, convinced that he was offering the deal of a lifetime. A few minutes later he was back with one last round through the common area.

  “Relaxed fit, boot cut! They’re hot! Last chance! Just marked down! Two ninety-nine plus tax!”

  He never sold the jeans, but I found that deals like that would come along nearly every night. Two weeks after my arrival at the shelter, I got a brand new pair of Adidas sneakers—crispy, still in the box—for $7. Tax included. They were a size or so too big, and they looked like snow shoes on my feet, but I learned that you can’t be picky on the size when you’re catching a deal like that.

  And then there was the cigarette trade. The cigarette trade was huge for me. Everybody smoked. People would line up for smoke breaks like they were getting tickets to a Red Sox–Yankees playoff game. It was the only time that we were allowed outside of the shelter walls after check-in. While I was one of the few nonsmokers at the shelter, even my lack of desire to start didn’t hinder my judgment that participating in the 9:00 and 10:30 smoke breaks was a key ingredient in my social agenda.

  So I purchased a carton of Mavericks for $6 from “Cigarette Man.” (Even though I never caught a few guys’ names, some guys were only known by the product that they pushed. Throughout my two months in the shelter, there were always three or four guys—either in the shelter or waiting outside the shelter before check-in—selling products at a huge discount. We all knew—or could find out—where to go if we wanted DVDs or clothes or bulk cigarettes on the cheap.) With a pack of cigarettes in hand, I would always be able to answer “yes” when someone asked me if I had a cigarette. While the secondhand smoke was perhaps just as harmful to my lungs, I sacrificed for five or so minutes at a time as I would have the opportunity to speak with my new friends. Aside fr
om dinnertime conversation, smoke breaks with the fellas from the shelter were the most vital link to understanding where these guys had come from. It’s where I really got to know Leo and Rico and Billy. It’s where I heard about Larry’s day on the garbage route and his struggles to get out of the shelter. It’s where everybody talked about (nay, argued about) current events in the world of politics and beyond. Everybody had a story to tell, and over time, it became clearer that nobody minded talking.

  But the cigarette trade wasn’t just about my being taken advantage of on a nightly basis. Realizing that I would need to slow down with my generosity, I followed suit with everybody else in the shelter and started charging the guys to whom I had already given a cigarette. The going rate for a cigarette was 25¢. For whatever reason, everybody always had a quarter, but they rarely saved up to buy a full pack. So as time passed, when they came to me, they would either come to buy or trade. Two cigarettes could be traded for one 50¢ discount bus pass (good for a one-way ride on CARTA; they were given to us by our caseworkers based on need), or three cigarettes could be traded for a can of Coke. Early on, I became a hustler just like everybody else. While it didn’t work quite as much to my advantage financially as I had expected, I got to know many people in the process.

 

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