by Adam Shepard
And it was so genuine. If there’s one good thing about being homeless, it’s the realness of the relationships. We were homeless! There was nothing we could offer each other financially, so we knew that whatever friendships we were able to muster came without ulterior motives. And I liked that. If the guy I was talking to knew that I was homeless, then he knew that I didn’t have anything other than good spirits and good conversation to bring to the table. I could carry on the conversation knowing that it wasn’t going to end with, “Say, Adam, got a few bucks I can borrow?” I was one of them and they knew it.
The 10:30 smoke break on my first Tuesday night in Charleston marked the first time in my life that I had ever seen any hardcore drug: I saw a guy holding two rocks of crack-cocaine in his hand. At first I didn’t know what they were—they looked like over-sized bits of Chiclets gum—but then I saw him make a trade off with another guy, and I was able to draw my own conclusion. Frightened almost, I was filled with feelings difficult to put into words. I was remorseful and angry and, for some reason, guilty, all at the same time. I hadn’t even touched the rocks, but I felt so ashamed that a drug trade had happened right there in front of me. Wow. Right there in front of me.
But that’s how it works. I’d read plenty of articles and books and seen movies. It’s one thing that drugs are everywhere in the media, but not until you see it firsthand or until someone you know is affected by a hardcore drug like crack that you really start to realize the reality of it all.
Wait a minute. Hold on a second. Was that…? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Holy shit. That was crack!
Even the stories I’d heard up to that point were taken with a grain of salt. Easy E’s drug addiction was just that: an illegal, life-sacrificing drug addiction. I hadn’t taken it seriously. “Those streets. Man, I tell ya, those streets are crazy. Hey, would you mind passing the ketchup?” I never took what I heard as serious as it really was. I’d read plenty about guys like him. Good life, faces adversity, turns to drugs as a means to vent his frustrations. But, for whatever reason, it wasn’t until I actually saw those two crack rocks in that guy’s hand that it hit home, that it began to really register with me as a real threat.
And it didn’t help my mental state after witnessing the transaction that crack is the worst drug of them all: highly addictive, inexpensive, and easy to manufacture. It’s just too easy. For $5, crack will get you as high as Ben Franklin’s kite and wanting to go back for more a half hour later. You can’t get enough. You have to have it. So you smoke it or inject it in your body for a week and then you find yourself hooked. And that’s that. Not much you can do from that point. Prolonged use means severe personality disturbances, inability to sleep, appetite loss, and paranoid psychosis, all symptoms that I would see plenty of during my seventy days in the shelter. Crack ruins lives before people even realize they’ve been ruined.
Seeing those two crack rocks sitting so nonchalantly in that guy’s hand, wishing that Sarge had poked his head outside by chance to witness the exchange, also brought home my preconceived notion that many of these guys had more than just a problem that a swift kick in the behind could cure. I knew going into my project in Charleston that alcohol and drugs and mental disorders ran rampant on the streets and in the homeless shelters of America, disorders that require rehabilitation and medicine and counselors. The only revolutionary discovery I was able to make for myself was that a lot of those guys with those problems didn’t even seem to really want help. They were content with the release that drugs and alcohol gave them. A five-dollar high was worth much more than facing the difficult task of going through a rigorous rehab program. Forget the chemical imbalances that these drugs create in the user. In a completely sober state of mind, a lot of guys didn’t even want to quit. While some looked forward to their weekly meetings with their case managers at Crisis Ministries, others dreaded the idea of having to meet with them. All they wanted to do was get high to ease their pain. Some wanted help; some wanted out. But others had already given up.
On a smaller scale, don’t a lot of us have similar problems? The guy smoking a cigarette while chewing a stick of Nicorette gum; the adulteress going out with other men, justifying that it might help her become a better mate to her husband; or the obese man ordering a diet soda to go along with his bacon double cheeseburger combo meal. What are we justifying, really? Do we even want help? Are we trying to kid ourselves into thinking we care, or do we know, subconsciously, that the fact is we really don’t care?
One shelter resident, “Hustle Man,” who I truly grew to appreciate and respect during my tenure at the shelter, told me one day, “Adam, y’know, I love ‘heron.’ I love it. I know it’s bad, and I know that it might get me killed one day, but I love it.” He loved it! With a completely rational mind, he had no intention of quitting, ever. And that’s not even the crazy part. He was the most ambitious guy I met during my whole journey! He would wake up in the middle of the night, every night, so that he could be out in North Charleston by 4:00 A.M. selling copies of the Post and Courier to cars passing by. He would be up at 3:30 on Saturdays and Sundays. He would buy a shopping cart full of the local newspapers for a quarter apiece from the printer and sell them for fifty cents. And the tips: “On weekdays, I walk away with an extra thirty or forty bucks a day in tips,” he told me. “Weekends: sometimes close to a hundred.” In tips! And he could make his own hours. “I sell when I want and leave when I want.” He was well-grounded and business savvy. And consciously addicted to heroin.
I saw Hustle Man several months after I had moved out of the shelter, selling those same newspapers on his same street corner. I bought a paper and asked him how everything was going. Hell, he looked good. And you know what? He’d kicked the habit. “I was injecting all of my profits into my body,” he told me with a laugh. “A friend of mine bought a house two months ago. I was buying heron. I had to quit that shit.” Just like that. Bing, bam, boom. One day he’s got a needle in his hand, and the next day he’s making a life-changing decision. Maybe his story was unique—going through a month-long bout of intense rehab to kick his habit—but then again, aren’t all stories of overcoming adversity unique?
Every night I checked the tack board next to the front desk where Harold or Ann would post the phone messages they had received throughout the day. If an employer called, we were not allowed to take the call, but the front desk receptionist would take a message so that we could return the call later.
For the fifth night in a row, I had no messages. Nothing from Fast Company and nothing from any of the ten or so paper applications that I had spread throughout the Charleston area to go along with the profile I had set up online. Nothing. Nada. Interesting, right? On paper, my previous life had been erased, and there I was struggling along to find a job just like so many other people in Charleston and across America. Was I in over my head?
Maybe the job market was weak, or maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place. Maybe we were in a recession. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. The availability of jobs was irrelevant to me. I just needed to get one.
SEVEN
JOB HUNTING 101 WITH PROFESSOR PHIL COLEMAN
Wednesday, August 2
“I’m ’bout to get me a job. Shit. Y’all muthas can do whatever you want today, but I’m ’bout to get me a job.”
Phil Coleman, one more of the resident nutcases at the shelter that nobody really paid much attention to, made his intentions known that Wednesday morning. He had his mind made up, and he wasn’t going to accept anything less than coming home that evening with a job. He didn’t even seem to care what his job was. He just wanted one.
“That guy, Phil,” the gentleman next to me said with a hushed tone. “He’s had like fifty different jobs. He always has a different job. People say he can do anything—plumbing, painting, electrical work, masonry, frame houses. Everything ’cept keep a job.”
“Okay, Phil,” one guy said with a smirk. “You go get that job, buddy.”
As easy
as Phil made it sound, I had other plans. I decided that it would be a good idea for me to spend a couple of days punching the clock at EasyLabor so that I could pocket a few dollars while I continued to wait to hear from prospective employers. Even though it wasn’t what I was looking for, my fallback option at the car wash relieved both the pressure and anxiety that had come with the job hunt. If I had other job offers by the weekend, great. If not, I would make the most of my situation at the car wash.
Angela sent me out on a construction clean-up job downtown on Wednesday, a job that she knew would have me back at the shelter by 5:00 for my meeting with Kazia. It was a big day. After eight hours under the sun, I walked back up to EasyLabor to pick up the $38 I’d earned, and then I headed over to the shelter to meet with Kazia.
Kazia, just like everybody else, operated on her own schedule, at her own pace. My 5:00 appointment time simply meant that I had to be in the lobby ready to meet with her by then. She’d get to me when she could. Anticipating her running late and showing up at 5:15 was not a gamble worth taking. If, by some miraculous feat, she was running on schedule and I wasn’t there to meet with her, the consequences could be serious.
So I waited until 5:25 or so when she was finished with her other “clients” and it was my turn to take the chair. She was earnest in the way she introduced herself—“Hi, I’m Kazia. I’ll be your caseworker for the duration of your stay here at Crisis Ministries”—but she didn’t need to tell me anything about herself. The shelter walls could speak, and they had already told me all about her. She was the best caseworker at the shelter.
Her office, which I suppose she shared with other interns throughout the course of the week, was well-lit by three lamps and an overhead light, and it was furnished with a desk, two chairs, and a couch. She was noticeably organized, which probably wasn’t too much of a task for her since she carried all of her notes and her computer with her wherever she went.
Whereas my future meetings would be mere check-ins to make sure everything was going well for me, my initial meeting with Kazia was more like a no-holds-barred therapy session. I told her all about my struggles, relaying my story on how I had come to find myself in such dire circumstances. She appeared a bit skeptical at times when it came to hearing about my druggie mom and my alcoholic father, only because I hesitated with my speech when she asked me questions that I was unprepared to answer.
“What kind of drugs was your mom addicted to?”
“Um, meth. Yeah. Methpham—Meth.”
“Who’s looking after her now?”
“My brother. Erik. He’s my brother. He’s looking after her now. He’s, um, twenty-two. Just got out of the army. Marines. He just got out of the Marine Corps.”
I wasn’t very good at lying, but it wasn’t her job to judge, rather to help me outline a plan to get out and on my own.
Unfortunately, the two people from the Career Services Department at the shelter were out of town on business for the week, so I would not have the opportunity to meet with them until they got back, at which point I would hopefully be employed. But if I wasn’t happy with my job at the car wash, I could always use the shelter services as a plan B. In the meantime, Kazia and I had plenty more to cover. We went through all types of budgeting techniques (which was easy for my time in the shelter since I didn’t really have any regular expenses other than the bus and an occasional meal) as well as tactics that I would need to get back on my feet. My situation was a bit atypical of her other clients, since it was my first shot at independence. Up to that point, according to my story, I had never lived alone or outside the confines of my mom’s reach, so Kazia and I spent extra time on basic concepts, like where to go for proper medical care in the event of an emergency. Medicaid was out of the question since I wasn’t a single mother (single men rarely receive those benefits, I was told), but she gave me a step-by-step tutorial on what I would need to do to receive food stamps.
“We’re here to help, Adam. I can promise you that,” she said. “But the fact remains that if you don’t take some initiative, you’ll be stuck in here like a lot of these other guys.” Her speech was energized, and her tone sounded unrehearsed as if she said what she meant and meant what she said.
Though she was only six months or so into her employment at the shelter, she had heard countless stories of repeat visitors to the shelter, guys who did what it took to get out for a month or more but didn’t have the preparation needed to stay out. It was a vicious cycle that had claimed many victims, and it was the most frustrating part of her job. Otherwise, she appeared to love what she was doing. While her friends were doubtlessly accepting high-paying jobs as accountants and managers and attorneys, she was doing something truly worthwhile. She was making a difference.
She shuffled me out the door as she called in her next appointment. It was only 6:00, so I had time to make it down to the library for a quick half-hour session on the computer, just enough time to check up on current events and to confirm the continued lack of response from the local job market.
I hadn’t seen Marco the night before, but I caught up with him when I got back to the shelter. He appeared disheartened.
“What’s up with you?” I asked.
He smacked his lips. “Man, I ain’t goin’ to school. They ain’t givin’ me any money.”
Since he didn’t file a tax return, his financial aid hadn’t gone through in time, so he couldn’t register for classes until the next semester. He wasn’t as angry or agitated as he was dispirited.
“It’s ridiculous, dog,” he told me. “I’m finally tryin’ to do the right thing—go to school, work hard, all that. I’m finally tryin’ to get my life on track, Shep. What the fuck?”
I really thought he was going to start crying.
But there was no time for that.
Suck it up, buddy. Just like the rest of us.
He would just work for the rest of the year, until it was time for him to start school in January. He started talking a bunch of gibberish about how he might move back up to Michigan to live with his mom and start his life over—again—something he didn’t want to do, but things simply weren’t working out for him like he had planned in Charleston. He was growing to like his new town if he could only find some source of inspiration to get him motivated. He wasn’t any more pepped up when I told him that I was planning to start at the car wash on Monday. “Dude, six fifty an hour? That’s like slave labor. You can find something better than that.”
At dinner Wednesday night, I met a man named James who had fought through a bitter divorce eight years prior, in which his wife got nearly all of his assets—house, furniture, car. Everything.
“I was hurtin’, man,” he said. “Hurtin’ real bad. I was stayin’ with my ma.”
Forty-two years old and living with his mom for support, he took some time to save enough money to get out and on his own. Revived and poised to conquer the world, he got his own place.
“And then my ex came back to me. Said she was struggling herself, that she loved me, and that she wanted to give it another chance. So I did.”
He and his wife got back together and began to build a life again. Things were going great. Then, another divorce.
“I’m not the only guy I know that has lost his hat, ass, and overcoat in a divorce. I am the only guy I know that has lost his hat, ass, and overcoat to the same woman. Twice.”
Nearing fifty, his pride was one of the many things he lost in the second divorce. So, he came to Crisis Ministries to get back on his feet.
The services provided by Crisis Ministries, though, weren’t what helped James get his swagger back. It wasn’t even his case manager. It was a fellow resident at the shelter.
“This guy had been staying at the shelter for almost a year, and his time at the shelter was running out. One day he pulled out his wallet and showed me an assload of money. I’m talking ’bout thousands of dollars in cash.”
The guy had been saving up all of his money for almost a year.
He had a steady job, family, and friends, but he wanted to make sure that he never had to resort to that lifestyle again. He wanted out and he wanted to stay out. His lack of expenses at the shelter enabled him to save up to pay for the down payment on a duplex in North Charleston, in which he would live in one side and rent out the other. Putting up with the shelter for a year had put that man in a position that he would never be one or two paychecks away from living at the shelter. He had security. He was prepared to confront financial disaster.
While James had no intention of staying at the shelter for a full year, it was that man’s attitude that fueled a completely different approach to living.
“I always had to have a fancy car with chrome rims and nice clothes. If you can afford it, cool. But if you can’t, you don’t need that shit. Right now, I just want my own restaurant.”
He had brought up a good point about society in America as a whole, not just the homeless shelter. A lot of us spend our lives living beyond our means. We rack up credit card debt and spend money on material items and vacations that we can’t quite afford. We splurge for a private-school education for our children, but then we offset it when we buy them the latest, mind-numbing video-game system and all of the cool games to go along with it. And we live in luxury homes and condos that we can’t even enjoy, because we have to work overtime to cover the mortgage payment. Why? Because we don’t know any better? Or are we compensating for a life that we didn’t have growing up? Couldn’t we be putting our money toward more worthwhile pursuits, like James intended to do with his own restaurant?
There was one other story that James told me that night. He had met a lady while he was living in Jacksonville several years before. She was homeless and in desperate financial need. Social Services had taken her children, and she needed to prove that she could support them before they would hand the children back over to her.