Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  And that change was so very important, because nobody cared about me. I mean truly cared about me. I was on my own, and that was the first tangible realization that I made while I was in the shelter. At first, it was disheartening. When I was young—eleven, twelve, fourteen, eighteen, even twenty-two years old—people were pulling for me. They admired my potential on and off the basketball court, which was enough fuel alone to keep me going. Forget the confidence that I had in myself, I could rely on others for encouragement. At twenty-four, easing out of the “potential stage” and alone in Charleston, it was a completely different situation. I was in the driver’s seat, and there were no passengers. I didn’t have family or friends in Charleston to fall back on, and I didn’t have people alongside me cheering, really pulling for me. If I succeeded, super. “Good for you, Shep.” If not, eh, whatever. Of course, Kazia and the shelter staff were there for me as were my fellow shelter mates, but pass or fail, I was just another person to them. If I succeeded and moved out of the shelter, there was another guy coming in to fill my spot. If I failed and remained at the shelter, there was still another guy coming in with whom I would have to fight for attention. They would do what they could to support me, true, but there were a hundred people that they had to worry about, and there was nothing special about me, which turned out to be a great situation. Stroking my ego wasn’t going to do any good. Handing me $20 might feed me for a few days, but it wasn’t going to get me out of there. “Teach a man to fish….” I was able to learn from the mistakes that Rico and Easy E had made in their lives, and James and Phil Coleman and Kazia offered me guidance, but if I was going to make it out, I was going to make it by my own initiative.

  And then, naturally, I started to hit a few bumps in the road. Of course I never expected my odyssey to run smoothly, but I also didn’t expect to have so many issues to deal with at once.

  At the end of my sixth week in the shelter, I saw Marco for what would turn out to be the last time. I had been worried about him for the duration of my time in the shelter. As I mentioned, he would stay out of the shelter for two or three nights and then come to the shelter for the next two or three. I wasn’t worried about his safety or ability to cope with life on the streets. Marco Walten could take care of himself. But I could see that he was falling into a funk, that he was losing the spirit that had made him so appealing to me during those first couple of weeks that I knew him.

  So during my sixth week, he came into the shelter for his last night, declaring that he was moving to another, more “upscale” shelter down the street, the Pentacalli Mission.

  “They charge seventy dollars a week, but it ain’t a dump like this place,” he declared. “They have beds and closets for each person.”

  They had a large room in the lobby with sofas and a big screen TV, and most importantly, residents could come and go as they pleased throughout the day. The Pentacalli Mission was more like a youth hostel. To me, the $70 trade-off wasn’t worth it, but Marco had had enough of the emotionally draining atmosphere at 573 Meeting Street.

  Of course, we didn’t mean for it to be the last time we would see each other. But, even after exchanging contact information with the understanding that we would meet with each other whenever possible to make sure that we were still on course to get a place together, I knew that it was probably the last time our paths would cross. We just weren’t on the same plane. I tried to kid myself into thinking that I would be living with him at some point in the near future, but it didn’t work. I knew the deal. Marco was out of my life, forcing me to steer course in another direction for a living situation. And I wasn’t happy about that.

  To make matters worse, despite what I thought had been a good start, Shaun was starting to get on my nerves. Big time. He was just so irritable—about everything. Everything on the job was a burden to him, from the furniture to the customers to the hot dogs that he bought at the gas station in the morning. I tried to tell him that those were the same hot dogs that the gas station had sold to him the day before, but he still bought them, and he still complained. After a while, he didn’t even want to get along. It was like he wanted to be irritable. Shaun was frustrated with his life, in general, between issues with his girlfriend and the fact that he was paying $40 a night to rent a sleazy hotel room since he wasn’t disciplined enough to save enough money to get an apartment. And bringing that stress to work was starting to affect our chemistry. I wasn’t sure how much longer Shaun and I could last as a team, but I was sure that I didn’t have the power at Fast Company—just yet—to make demands about who my partner would be. If they sent me out with Shaun, they sent me out with Shaun, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Then, bump in the road number three. Four days after Marco moved out of the shelter, I went on a long move with Shaun to Columbia, a couple hours west of Charleston. The move was supposed to be small—load up a two-bedroom, drive it to Columbia, unload, drive back—but the lady we moved had a heap of stuff, much more than she had mentioned on the phone, and, of course, her apartment in Columbia was on the third floor instead of the first, as the moving sheet had said, so it ended up taking us all day. I dropped Shaun off at his hotel room and pulled into the Fast Company yard at 11:25 P.M., exhausted from a day of driving and hauling sofas and mattresses and boxes up the stairs. The No. 10 bus had stopped running, so my options on getting back to the shelter were really limited. I could have called a cab, but the cabs in Charleston take forever to get to you, and it would have cost me at least $15. I could have made the very ambitious walk downtown, but by the time I got back to the shelter, it would have been time for me to hop on the bus to come back to work.

  So I grabbed a couple of moving blankets from the back of the truck, and I slept outside. It was a very enlightening experience. Just me and the stars. And an occasional stray cat. My body was filthy from the dust and sweat of the move, and I was hungry as hell. And that’s when it really hit me: there were people out there sleeping under the stars just like me. For real. Not just for one night, not for some game or some audacious project they were working on. Penniless, hungry, and down and out, they either couldn’t get to a shelter or they had chosen the streets instead. But they were out there. I knew all of this before I had lain down on my oh-so-uncomfortable makeshift bed that night, but that’s when I really understood. Just as my experience seeing crack-cocaine in person had made everything so real, sleeping outside was opening my eyes as well. I mean, I was frustrated and scared and filled with anxiety, and I was only out there for one night! Just for one night, to be sleeping outside without a shower or a meal, I could only imagine what it must be like for the crushed spirits laying their heads down on park benches and under busy overpasses and in sleeping bags in hobo camps throughout the United States. People who would be doing the same thing the next night and the next night and the next. People who had grown up with such ambition and were now hopeless and discouraged. They had given up, either blind to the aid available at places like Crisis Ministries or shunning it all together. There I was, camping out for a night in the midst of my crazy little adventure, and there they were, wondering what they were going to have to do to get breakfast the next day.

  But we trudge on, and that’s what I was trying to do. Trudge right along. My finances were coming together nicely, but for whatever reason, I still felt like I was in such a rut, like I wasn’t getting anywhere. Marco was gone and Shaun was really starting to try to break me. He knew that my options were limited as far as choosing my own partner, so he knew that he could abuse me. He stopped buckling his seatbelt, and he started throwing his cans out the window again, but I knew better than to get on him. After all, I was just a toothbrush away from a brutal ass-kickin’. He would tell me about his difficult life at home, but I didn’t really care to hear it. All of us have problems to deal with.

  What about my problems, Shaun? Shoot, you don’t see me coming to work bitching and complaining and ruining your day.

  But I couldn’t say anythi
ng to him. I was prepared to ride it out until I felt comfortable enough to make the decision to confront Curtis about switching teammates or until I was forced to make that decision.

  On Thursday, seven weeks after my induction to Charleston’s homeless, I came back to the shelter to find a message waiting for me on the tack board: Call Curtis from Fast Company. ASAP.

  Terrific.

  Curtis only answered the phone when one of his girlfriends was calling, and he rarely called anybody, so the fact that he was calling me at the shelter meant serious business. I didn’t have any idea what he could have been calling about, since he knew that I was going to be showing up to work by 7:30 every day.

  What could be so important that it couldn’t wait until the morning?

  “The money from your move yesterday is missing,” he told me when I called. “I got your clipboard and I got the receipt and I got your keys, but there is no cash.”

  It had been my first cash move since I started working for Fast Company. Most of our customers paid by check or credit card, but occasionally, a smaller move would be paid for with cash. And the cash from my move was missing.

  After the move, I had rolled the money up in the receipt, and I had put the money inside the clipboard. We got back to the office after the 5:00 closing time, but Curtis was still there, so I gave him everything. As I handed him the clipboard, there had been an innocent misunderstanding between the two of us, where I thought he knew the receipt and the money were inside, but he didn’t. I left, and he put the clipboard in the pile with the rest of the empty clipboards. The next day, all of the clipboards went out.

  So I knew that I didn’t have the money, and I knew Curtis wasn’t the type of guy who would take the money. Jed, the owner, figured that the money went out the next day with another crew and that their Christmas bonus had come early. I had even been nice enough to gift-wrap the cash in the receipt for them. There was no way for us to find out who had it, and Jed didn’t really care. He just wanted his money. Jill, the office manager, split the blame evenly on Curtis (the truck supervisor) and me (the driver in charge of the move) and decided that we would each have to pay $143.50. It was an expensive lesson for both of us, but for me it was even more of a devastating blow, since I was really working my way into a position where I could move out of the shelter soon.

  In the end, I didn’t read much into the case of the missing loot, since there wasn’t much I could do about it anyway. Worrying about it would only add to the stress that I was feeling in so many other areas of my life, so I went to the bank, withdrew the money, and paid Jill the $143.50.

  Interestingly enough, the one person that was keeping my spirits up was the bus driver in the morning. No joke. Every morning when I boarded the bus, there he was with a huge smile and a “Good Morning!” At 6:45 A.M. And the bus ride would always be filled with funny comments as he conversed with regular customers or picked on somebody for his or her choice of attire or not giving their seat up for a lady. I was excited just to have the free copy of the Post and Courier, but he made the trip even more worth the inexpensive fare.

  One short week and I had experienced enough drama and turmoil to last my entire year. Mentally, I had been prepared to deal with whatever came my way, but that didn’t erase the fact that I had been so high on life seven days before, and then, just like that, I was left picking up the pieces, wondering if I was ever going to get out of the shelter.

  But I knew that in the pendulum of life, the momentum would have to swing in my direction eventually. And my pendulum was preparing to swing back my way.

  ELEVEN

  MOVIN’ ON UP

  Tuesday, September 26

  Or so I thought.

  It was my first move downtown, and my first experience learning that moving downtown was kind of like an arranged marriage—you hope for the best, you never really know what you’re going to get until you get there, and then, one way or another, you’re totally overwhelmed.

  Or, you break your toe.

  I was on the move with a random guy, Phillipe, since Shaun had some other important business to deal with. According to the sheet, the move would be a two-bedroom, one living room, one dining room, and one home office. Usually, that would have been a three-man move, but Phillipe and I, tough guys that we were, told Curtis and Jill that since they were short on movers for the day, we could handle it ourselves.

  Huge mistake. After about three hours and my sixth trip down the stairs carrying toiletries and hanging clothes, I started to slow down—a first in my moving career. I was so pissed off. It was one of those rare moves where the customer was grossly unprepared. That lady hadn’t packed anything. Not a single thing. Some in-town moves can be way different from moves that go across state lines, and I was coming to that brutal realization. “Hell, we’re only going twelve minutes away, honey. We don’t need any boxes.”

  Generally, I wouldn’t have minded since we were getting paid by the hour and the less prepared the customer was, the more hours we received. But that move was an exception to the rule. Mentally, if not physically, I thought I was actually starting to become a real mover—a power mover—and I didn’t have time to worry about petty stuff, like packing the nooks and crannies of a house. Little items or little pieces of furniture were a burden to me. “Here, man, carry this nightstand. I’m gonna grab this dresser.” My head had begun to swell in my short stint at Fast Company, which is pretty funny, since I really wasn’t even that proficient a mover.

  So, anyway, there I was, doing my best to stay focused, thinking of what kind of system I could rig up so that we could just toss that lady’s crap down the stairs to make things go quicker. She was on the phone making real estate deals, and she didn’t seem to care at all about the ridiculous job to which she had sentenced us. In fact, she was totally oblivious to it. One time when I was passing by her, she told the person on the other end of her phone conversation to hold on, and she asked me, “Hey, Adam, do you know how long you guys are gonna be, because I have an important meeting to get to?”

  “Well ma’am, if you hold on just one second, let me load this desk lamp and these baking sheets onto the truck, and I’ll take a walk through and see what kind of estimate I can make.”

  But I didn’t make an estimate. I couldn’t. That move was just too unpredictable, and I tried to explain that to her. “There’s just no telling, ma’am.” She walked away in a huff, and so did I.

  But in the process of my huff, I bumped into some lawn chairs leaning up against the wall, which knocked over a hundred-pound steel plate that was also resting on the wall. And I couldn’t move my size thirteens out of the way quick enough. The steel plate fell directly on my right big toe, crushing it.

  I’m not sure which was more impressive: the flamboyant dance that I did immediately afterward as I jumped around the room in pain or how colorful my toe had turned when I removed my shoe and sock at the end of the move.

  That’s right, at the end of the move. Man, I wish I hadn’t finished that move, but there really wasn’t much of a choice. I could have called for reinforcements, but that would have been so much of a hassle and, in the process, I would have been whisked to the wayside as just another regular mover.

  Besides, when I came downstairs to tell Phillipe that I thought I had broken my toe, he just said, “Yeah, man, that sucks. Owwie. My toe hurts, too. Hey can you hand me that chair right there?”

  So I hobbled around for the rest of the day, each step more painful than the last. I would have thought that I would eventually become desensitized to the pain, but that was not the case. It kept hurting, throbbing. We finished the move at 7:30 that evening, and Phillipe dropped me off at the hospital on his way back to the shop. I sat in the waiting room for three hours showing off my toe to the kids running around, and then the doctors took X-rays to determine that I had, in fact, broken my big toe. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and pain medication and explained that I would have to keep the toe elevated for five days. It was
going to cost Fast Company $825 just for that feeble advice alone, forget the follow-up visits.

  I had been so ready to move out of the shelter, to “move on up,” but instead I was destined to be stuck in there until I was back on my feet. I was banking all of my money (more than $1,500, in fact), so I felt I had a comfortable security net in the event that I was faced with any kind of hardship, like losing my job. I had been working with George every Sunday, and he mentioned that Mickey, his close friend who I had met briefly when I buried his dead dog as one of my chores, had a room in his house downtown that he would rent me for $100 a week. “The room is a bit less than exciting, but it’s a pretty nice house, and you’ll have the run of the kitchen,” he said. I was sold. I figured that I could live there for a couple of months while I looked for something more permanent. The monthly rent would be about the same, if not just a few bucks more expensive, than staying in the neighborhood by the shelter, so I reasoned that it was the best all-around deal that I was going to find.

  But my financial stability was only one of the reasons that I was ready to get out of the shelter. As much as I knew I was going to miss the shelter—the camaraderie, the excitement, the bizarre conversations, and the food—it was such a drag to have to come back to the shelter to be around guys that didn’t share my same motivation. Several of them had done their part in telling me the direction I needed to be headed, and the time had come for me to hit the road.

  On Friday, September 22, my sixtieth day at the shelter, I had given Harold, the front desk worker, my two-day notice.