Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  As much as I would have loved to have returned to the shelter buoyed by encouraging toasts of congratulations for getting hired by the moving company, it was an announcement that I reserved for the select few that I had come to know well during my stay at the shelter. While many people would surely be happy that I got a job, they would also harbor some jealousy that they remained unemployed. I didn’t want to create any uncomfortable feelings. Besides, they would find out sooner or later anyway. I did, however, seek out Phil Coleman to thank him for his pep talk the night before.

  “Shit, ain’t nuttin’, kid,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and raising his eyebrows. “Now we just gotta hold on to these jobs.”

  Friday also marked the day that I started to see Marco on a more sporadic basis. For the two months that I lived at the shelter, my experience with Marco was always up and down. Which Marco is going to show up today? One day, he would arrive at the shelter for dinner, full of life, talking about his ambitions and how we had to get an apartment together, and the next day he would be distant, as if he didn’t even really know what he was aiming for anymore. More often than not, I could see where he was coming from. He was bummed about living at the shelter. He hated it. He tried to stay out as often as possible with friends or girls who he’d met along the way. And who could blame him? The atmosphere at the shelter had a way of dragging people down. Sure, we were there for each other, some of us cheering on the next guy as he sought a better situation, but that didn’t do much for the overall mood. The fact remained that we were conscious of our standing as homeless men, the filth at the bottom of life’s social structure.

  I spent the weekend preparing myself to begin work on Monday. On Sunday, I continued what would become a tradition of working for George downtown. Some Sundays he would only assign me two or three hours of work, and other Sundays, he would have a list that would take me six hours to complete. But I never started working until at least 11:00 A.M., as George would rise late, groggy-eyed from the previous night’s leisure activities. That second Sunday that I worked for him, he had me continue to pull weeds from the same rocky foundation on which I had worked before. The work that I did for George was always tedious, and the sun always shone directly on my back throughout the entire day, but it always came with a fat $10-an-hour paycheck.

  On Sunday evening at the shelter, I had a very illuminating conversation with Leo, the guy who had followed the woman from Los Angeles only to be confronted by her husband when he got here. He was very down to earth and had a good head on his shoulders. He saw his stay at Crisis Ministries—as brief as it was—as more of an adventure than a way of life, an opportunity to see a part of the United States that he hadn’t seen before. He had even toyed with the idea of staying on the East Coast for a bit but said that it wasn’t nearly as exciting as life on the left side.

  “I know a lotta stuff, Shep. I mean a lot. I’m working with genius capabilities. That’s prolly why my head is so damn big: it’s jam-packed with knowledge. Humble? Not so much. Savvy? Absolutely. Let me tell you a little bit about what I know about society as a whole.

  “There are three kinds of people, and I’m not talking about just in the shelter. I’m talking about in general, three kinds of people.” He told me the three kinds of people are:

  those that go to school and educate themselves and go on to live professional lives;

  workaholics, who spend their entire lives breaking their backs, laboring to make somebody else rich; and

  the lazy, those people that don’t do anything with their lives. They crawl from job to job, paycheck to paycheck, somehow finding satisfaction in scraping by.

  “I don’t have a problem with the first two,” he said. “They’re making an honest living. But those lazy people? They’re ridiculous. They piss me off. They’re up to no good. And the worst part is that they drain the life out of everybody else.”

  “I’ll give you an example,” he continued. “You ever seen crabs in a pot? When one of them climbs to the top to try to get out, all the other crabs grab him and pull him back in. Misery loves company. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

  He went on to explain his view that we live in a society that allows everyone the freedom to do what he or she wants with his or her life. “If you want to make something of yourself, you can do it,” he said. Conversely, if you want to be a bum, you have the freedom to be a bum. America allows us that choice.

  “But, you also gotta understand something, Shep,” he continued. “Some of the people in the lower class start out behind. We all have the same freedoms, true, but those of us born into poverty don’t necessarily have the guidance.” Many people, he reminded me, are not fortunate to grow up with two loving parents and a backyard and somewhere to go after school. They grow up on sketchy sides of town, and their social activities are limited to whatever their friends are doing after school, which usually aren’t very legitimate activities.

  “But, I’ll tell you this,” he said. “There comes a time for everybody that it’s time to grow up. I mean, look at me. I came from a broken home. Mama’s got six kids. No daddy. Maybe the lights will turn on today; maybe not. Eatin’ mayonnaise and pickle sandwiches. I started out less fortunate than most people, and I lived my life accordingly. Streets, drugs, violence…all that. But then I turned twenty and realized that it was time to shape up or I would be in prison or dead just like everybody else I knew.”

  Leo loved talking just as much as I loved listening. And he really loved using big words. He would add extra emphasis whenever he would say a word like irreverent or eradicated and his eyes would light up with delight, as if to say, “Yeah, eradicated. That’s exactly what happened. It got eradicated. Man, I’m smart.”

  It was fascinating to meet some of those people at the shelter. Sure, Crisis Ministries had its fair share of laggards and old, bearded men with whiskey on their breath, just like the hobos I had imagined, but what about the other guys like Marco and James and Rico and Easy E, who had been dealt a crappy hand of cards, but really, genuinely cared about getting their life back in the right direction? While I had anticipated meeting a wide variety of people and confronting all kinds of attitudes, it was still a bit of a surprise to meet guys like them, just as it was a huge surprise to obtain lessons in social science from Leo, who never finished the tenth grade. I wondered—and would never know for sure—why a guy like Leo could be so grounded, while other guys, many from the same circumstances, were lazy or had given up.

  So, there it was. It had taken me ten days, but I had a job, and I was finally to the point where I could rest easy. True, I had less than a hundred bucks in my pocket, but I had the job for which I had been anxiously waiting. While the argument could be made that my project had only just begun, I knew that time was the only thing standing between my goals and me. Discipline and patience would get me there. As I laid my head on my sleeping bag’s built-in inflatable pillow that Sunday night, with the restlessness of a five-year-old preparing for his first day of kindergarten running through me, I prepared myself for the leisurely part of my project: working and saving money.

  Then again, if you know anything about moving furniture, you know that my life was going to be anything but leisurely.

  NINE

  “FIRST AND LAST DAY”

  Monday, August 7

  For my first twelve days in Charleston, I had been carrying all of my belongings with me in the gym bag that I had brought to begin my journey. It was starting to be a hassle, but there wasn’t much else I could do. During one of my first days at the shelter, I tried to leave my belongings on top of the lockers while I worked my way around town, but Ann confiscated my bag. I got my bag back, but not without a fierce scolding. “Next time, it’s mine,” she said, her eyes slant. “For keeps.” That lady was an animal.

  So on Monday morning, I checked back with her for about the fifth time to see if she had any lockers available yet. And she did. So for $1 a week I rented my own personal space where I could
keep my valuables—which weren’t necessarily valuable—safe throughout the day.

  Some days the shelter served as a labor agency of its own. Guys would stand around the shelter yard waiting for someone to come by soliciting the help of two guys to help load a U-Haul or do yard chores or paint. People knew they could get cheap labor from the guys at the shelter just as the guys at the shelter were more than willing to work any cash job they could find. In fact, a few guys made pretty good money doing that every day. And if no one had come by to pick them up by 9 or 9:30, they would walk to the open-air market downtown to help the merchants unload goods from their cars and vans for $10 a pop. They could make $20 or $30 in the morning and then double their wad in the late afternoon by helping the merchants load the goods back in their cars. And during their few hours off, they could panhandle or take a nap. It was a pretty cavalier lifestyle.

  But by the time I had figured out how those guys were earning extra cash, I already had a permanent job. The No. 10 bus came at 6:15 A.M. and every half hour after that for the remainder of the day. I would catch the bus, travel thirty minutes up Rivers Avenue, get off, and walk a quarter-mile along the train tracks. From there, it was a hundred-yard jaunt through the woods to get to the Fast Company office. On my first trip through the woods, I nearly stepped on a three-foot snake resting in the grass, but it didn’t deter me from committing to take that same route every day. Maybe I couldn’t tell the difference between a copperhead and a garter snake, but it was still worth the risk. As far as time and economy were concerned, I had come across the most efficient system. And since I had stopped by the bus system’s headquarters on Thursday to get my discount bus card—for which anyone with low income was eligible—I could ride the bus for just 50¢ each way.

  I decided to take the 6:45 bus. That would get me at Fast Company just before 7:30 A.M. and well before Curtis’s required 8:00 arrival time. If I could show them that I was willing to be early, and do whatever else they asked of me, it would more than likely lead to my rise in the ranks of the hierarchy of movers and perhaps lead to assignments on better moves.

  At least that’s what I hoped after I saw the first move to which I was assigned. One bedroom, one living room, one dining room. Piece of cake. Two-story house to an apartment on the third floor. Hmmmm. That added a little flavor to the cake.

  “Old Man Jimmy,” the fifty-six-year-old Fast Company legend who had been moving furniture since he was thirteen and had trained all of the movers at Fast Company that were any good looked over my move and made an outright declaration: “First and last day! Everybody see the young buck here? Today is his first and last day.”

  One bedroom was no problem. One living room? One dining room? No sweat. But, the second floor is no joke when it comes to hauling furniture. The third floor, especially on your first day, is suicide. Everybody laughed when Old Man Jimmy made the announcement, but I didn’t say anything. I just smiled right along with them. Those steps didn’t stand a chance at beating me. I had been waiting for the first day of my new job since I arrived in Charleston, and nothing was going to get in my way.

  Fast Company, which specializes in local moves within the Charleston area but also services out-of-town moves throughout the entire Southeast, has a revolutionary way of charging for their moves, a system that has been copied by other moving companies over the years. Two men are sent out on the smaller jobs at a rate of $89 per hour plus a one-time $89 travel charge. For the bigger moves, a third man is sent out for an additional $21 per hour. This saves the company the hassle of having to go out on estimates, and it gives the customer a pretty good idea of how much their move will cost. With other moving companies charging by the piece or by weight, on-site estimates became a burden, and even then, there was no telling how much their move could total. Charging by the hour was efficient for everybody.

  More importantly, as I would find out, Fast Company had built their reputation by not only being safe and inexpensive, but also, as the name implies, being the fastest company in town.

  For my first day, I was assigned to work with Sammy and Bruno. While most of the thirty-two movers at Fast Company worked on permanent crews, Sammy and Bruno chose to come in and work with different people every day. They knew that it would give them a better chance of going out on a consistent basis, and, contrary to others’ preferences, they didn’t care who they were sent out with.

  Although short, my first day at Fast Company did not go by without excitement. Curtis had instructed Sammy to let me drive, putting me behind the wheel in a walk-before-you-crawl type situation.

  “He’s not gonna learn how to drive that thing from the passenger side,” Curtis announced. “Might as well go ahead and let him get his feet wet.”

  Which was fine with me. I had always been an active learner: more do, less watch. I had come out of the womb jumping rope and reciting times tables, so I figured I was ready for anything. Unfortunately, however, to my passengers’ dismay, it turned out that I was a slow learner when it came to driving moving trucks. Expectations were low, and I wasn’t even meeting those. I was tripping over “the bar” that I had so pompously told Curtis I had set. There was nothing I could do. Believe me, I wanted to be a good driver. I’m a perfectionist, and I hate when I’m slow to catch on to things. But that truck No. 2 was an enigma. I would have rather worked on solving the Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. I knew right away it was going to take a while to get the hang of driving it. Whereas riders on the other trucks could sit back and relax on the way to and from their moves, our situation for that first day was different. Bruno took the window seat and control of the radio, while Sammy, with his long legs, squeezed in the middle and kept a very attentive eye on the road, constantly requesting that I go “just a little slower around the curves” or “maybe move a little bit more on this side of the double yellow line.”

  I wasn’t embarrassed, though. Well, that’s a lie. Yes I was. While they had already known what they were getting into with my inexperience, and even with Sammy’s upbeat, understanding attitude I still felt so unfit to be driving that truck.

  But things started to look up when we got to the move. First of all, the young lady we moved was beautiful. Gorgeous. Shannon O’Bannon. I’ll never forget that name—one of those names that makes you want to dance and sing, maybe sit down and write a nursery rhyme. Which, in fact, Bruno was doing in between trips in and out of the house.

  Shannon O’Bannon had a fat fanny, whose rumps were soft as dough.

  Everywhere that Shannon went, the boys were sure to go…

  She was twenty-five, younger than the typical Fast Company customer and was already divorcing her husband, whom she had caught cheating.

  “That mother fucker.” She pepped up real quick. “I hired one of those private investigators like you see on TV, and we installed cameras and microphones all over the place. We followed him around in the undercover van for three days. I got that bastard good.”

  Well, that explained the cheating, but she was still beautiful. My first thought when we arrived at the move was that if I got to wake up and look forward to moving people like her, then my job might not be so bad after all.

  Shannon O’Bannon also didn’t have a lot of stuff, which was another perk on my first job. She was moving out of the house and into her own one-bedroom apartment. She had moved all of the little things herself—a concept that some customers understood saved them time and money—so we just had to get the big items. We cleared the upstairs bedroom and then moved out all of the dining room and living room furniture from downstairs. Sammy and Bruno were shaking a leg. They were much less interested in teaching me how to move furniture than getting to Shannon’s third-floor apartment and getting the job over with.

  “You gonna grab something heavy, lanky?” Bruno joked.

  They had me loading nightstands and side tables onto the truck, while they “two-manned” the sofas and dressers. Which I didn’t mind. I would have plenty of time to pick up the tricks of the tr
ade as time passed.

  In an hour we had everything loaded up and we headed over to Shannon’s new place, twenty minutes away in West Ashley. As dramatic as I could make the unload sound, it wasn’t. Sure, it was the third floor, but we had three guys, and she didn’t even have that many pieces of furniture. Her bulky sleeper sofa was a chore to lug up the stairs and through her front door, but we got that out of the way early so everything else was rather simple. It took an hour to unload the truck and take care of the bill. She tipped us $25 for the three of us to split.

  If there was one good thing that I discovered I had going for me as a mover, it was that I didn’t stop. Sure, I wasn’t terribly strong, and I didn’t really know how to use the dollies to my advantage when carting furniture to and fro, but that didn’t necessarily matter to Sammy and Bruno. I kept going and they loved me for that. Maybe it took me an extra moment or two to get the right grip on a dresser, but I could carry my end of it up the stairs, and as soon as we placed it in the apartment, I skipped back down to pick up another piece.

  “Shoot, man, take a break every now and then,” Sammy would say.

  But I couldn’t. It’s how I had always worked. Not that I was some tough kid with something to prove, showing that I had what it took. It wasn’t that at all. It was just that I knew that as soon as I took a break, it was all uphill from there. I would become lethargic. I would start dragging. I wouldn’t be able to get back to the same pace as before. Once I started, I had to keep going until the truck was empty or I would be no good.

  So, in the end, I survived my first day of my new career as a professional mover. It was my last day with Sammy, though. Drivers worked together only on rare occasions when Fast Company was short on moves, but Sammy would be gone before we would have that opportunity. Curse of truck No. 2.