Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  “Two days? Super. Thanks for the notice, Shep.” He picked up a pen and pretended to write. “Shepard…two days…got it. You’re all set. Hopefully we can get somebody in here to fill your spot.”

  As a practical matter, he didn’t care if I stayed for two more days or two hundred, but we had become friends over the previous couple of months, so I figured he’d like to know what I was up to.

  “You’re gonna do a’ight, Shep,” he said. “Just stay out of trouble, and you’re gonna do a’ight.”

  I was planning on it. Out of trouble and on course. That’s where I was, and in two more days I would have been living in Mickey’s attic-room downtown, free to come and go as I pleased and free to finally sleep without a chorus of snorers in the background.

  But then I got hurt. Which was natural and expected, I suppose. Why should anything go as planned? And just like that, my daily routine had shifted from exciting to mundane. I would wake up in the morning, eat breakfast with everybody else, and then go back to bed until lunch. After lunch, I would go back to bed until dinner. After dinner, I would go back to bed until breakfast the next day. For five days straight. I would hold off going to the bathroom as long as possible since my foot throbbed painfully every time I brought it down from its elevation. I ran out of reading material early on day two, so I spent the remaining time just lying there, looking at the ceiling with my foot elevated on top of my gym bag. It was hell on Earth, a character builder like none other. I would have rather been outside doing something, anything, than cooped up in that place for five days straight. The only good thing about my injury was that I got to hear more war stories about guys who had been injured on the job: accidents at the paper mill, falls from second floors, and missing fingers. One guy showed me a huge scar above his knee that spanned half of the circumference of his thigh where he had almost cut his leg clean off with a chainsaw. I looked at my toe, and then I looked at his leg. And then I looked back at my toe. “Sissy,” I told him, pointing to my injury. “I bet your leg didn’t turn that color, did it?”

  And each war story that I heard would end with the narrator exclaiming, “Wait, were you wearing steel-toed boots? Cuz you shoulda been wearin’ steel-toed boots. I’da been wearin’ steel-toed boots.”

  Following the doctor’s orders was the easiest part of my injury since I wanted to be out of there as soon as possible. I took my medication and stayed on bed rest for those five days. Fortunately, Fast Company was able to survive those days without me, and when I went back five days after the injury, boss lady Jill was very accommodating about my injury. “I’ve got plenty for you to do,” she said. The doctor had informed me that I still wasn’t going to be allowed to move furniture for two to three weeks after my release from bed rest, so Jill put me to work around the office for twenty-five to thirty hours per week. She had me answering phones, filing paperwork, and performing other paltry office duties, but I didn’t hate it.

  In hindsight, as I recollect my broken toe experience, I realize how fortunate I had been.

  What if this had happened to one of my buddies who had been washing dishes and had no money saved up at all?

  What if his boss wasn’t as tolerant? His injury would be covered by insurance, sure, but what would happen if he were let go?

  What if I had broken my leg instead of a toe and I was sent home for two months instead of two weeks?

  What if that experience happened to a working mom, and time off with a meager workers’ compensation check sunk her financially or she was unable to get her kids to and from daycare?

  I suppose that these type of “what if” questions lead to even more questions than answers, and that the chain has to be broken off at some point. It happened; I hit a roadblock. Okay, now what do I do? I could complain about my situation and feel sorry for myself or I could get back on the horse. If nothing else, I was discovering that life just simply isn’t fair, but the difference emerges among the people that accept that ideal, embrace it even, and bask in the unsung glory of knowing that each obstacle overcome along the way only adds to the satisfaction in the end. Nothing great, after all, was ever accomplished by anyone sulking in his or her misery.

  Office work at Fast Company provided a short enough release for me to take a recess from heavy lifting, but a long enough break for me to be rejuvenated and ready to get back to work.

  And I was excited to get back out in the field. Even better yet, without Shaun. While I was laid up in the office, Jill received an anonymous letter from a customer complaining about Shaun’s drinking on the job. The customer wrote that Shaun’s antics were unprofessional and embarrassing for the company and that some sort of action should be taken. Jill had evidently had enough of Shaun’s mouth around the office anyway and receiving a letter like that warranted his immediate dismissal from the company. After nearly two months my partnership with Shaun came to an end. Some guys would miss him and others didn’t think twice about his dismissal. But I suppose that’s how it is in the moving business and so many other blue-collar service industries where many guys are expendable. It was a revolving door. One guy out, another guy in.

  Before I returned to moving furniture, though, I moved out of the shelter. And I wasn’t the only one. Marco was gone. James was getting out soon, and so, at least according to his own intentions, was Larry. Even Easy E and Rico had left on Sunday night, bound for a six-month drug rehab program in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sponsored by Battalion Baptist Church.

  There were so many personalities in the shelter, and I had met them all. The good guys and the bad guys. The aggressively angry and the eerily mellow. The drunk and the sober. The lazy and the energetic. Those who felt blessed by the Lord and those who cursed him for their plight. Those who would give you their last bar of soap and those who would try to steal it from you. I had feasted and showered and laid my head next to them all.

  I packed my bags on a Monday night, my birthday. It was my most memorable birthday ever. Somebody found a cupcake and a candle in the kitchen, and they lit it and wished me a happy birthday. No singing. No balloons. No funny hats or party favors. Just plenty of well wishes. It was an emotional moment for me. I could only hope, as I packed my belongings to move out the next day, that the guys in there understood what an impact they had made on my life. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to leave the familiar atmosphere of the shelter, going into a situation where I would once again be alone and among the unknown, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the spirit that I was taking with me. Several guys in the shelter had really aggravated me with their lethargic behavior, but other guys had inspired me to sail onward. And that was the legacy that I was carrying with me as I moved downtown to Mickey’s attic-turned-bedroom.

  And it was good that I was taking a solid morale with me down there because the accommodations were almost as bad as the shelter. I had my own room, which was great, but that room was a fourteen-by-fourteen cell with ceilings that were shorter than I was. I had to bend down to walk about the room, bumping my head at least once every couple of days. The previous habitant, from several years before, had left a futon mattress on the floor, so at least I had a place to lay my sleeping bag. It was cleaner, to a certain extent, than the shelter, but the bathroom that Mickey had added upstairs at some point over the years hadn’t been cleaned in quite some time. So I cleaned it and dusted and mopped the floor in my room, and I prepared to call it home for two months. Mickey’s four-story house was just like each of the other unique, elegant houses squashed together throughout the bottom of the peninsula that had been standing since before the Civil War. Though old and rickety, the first three floors were lavish and very homey, complete with elegant furnishings and splendid artwork. Even though I was confined to either the kitchen or my hole in the wall on the fourth floor, I was grateful to have some place to stay that I could consider my own, and I was now even more compelled to continue my steady progression upward. Avoiding complacency, I was cruising through my project quicker than I had imagined I wou
ld.

  On Wednesday morning I woke up and left the house at 6:00 A.M. so that I could make the thirty-minute walk to the bus stop. My toe was still tender, but I was more than ready to get back to moving. The doctors told me that the tenderness would go away eventually as the remaining cracked bones in my toe filled in. In five or six more weeks, I would have full mobility. They could tell that I was going to lose my toenail eventually, but I wasn’t worried about that. It had been overgrown anyway.

  I got to the shop that Wednesday morning at 7:15, happy to be back in uniform and ready to tackle whatever kind of move they wanted to throw at me. At that point I didn’t really care who they stuck me with or where they sent me.

  And that’s when I met him.

  For everything that was said about him, Derrick Hale didn’t look like anything special to me. Considering all of the hype I had heard about what a sensational mover he was, I was expecting a seven-foot tall monster with a good three hundred pounds of muscle. He wasn’t this stoic character, though, like those you see in movies—without emotion, just a lot of power. Nope. Quite the opposite, actually. Five foot eight, 160, normal build. He was, well, normal looking, just like any other guy that I had seen running around Charleston.

  But the fact was that there was nothing normal about Derrick Hale. After less than three years on the job, he had catapulted himself to the top of the list as the guy that everyone wanted to work with. He was legendary, the best, irrefutably, and nobody, not a single person that I had encountered at Fast Company, had said anything different. JB was stronger, DeWayne “Too Tall” McGovern was faster on his feet, and Old Man Jimmy could pack the truck better. But as far as the total package—strength, quickness, stamina, and knowledge—Derrick Hale was far and away ahead of the rest. Which made it even more of a mystery that I had been assigned to work with him on my first Wednesday back on the job.

  I figured I would always be a small timer, working one-and two-bedroom moves throughout the duration of my time at Fast Company. Which was fine with me. I was doing well, and I was certainly on course to reach my goals in my specified time frame. But everything changed on that Wednesday, my first day back on the trucks in three weeks. Derrick’s driver, too, had quit (“That weak cat couldn’t lift a four-drawer filing cabinet” was the ultimate put down, the humor being that Hercules himself couldn’t lift a four-drawer filing cabinet), and we were more or less thrown together at the last minute for the move that day—a three-bedroom move in Park West, Mount Pleasant’s largest neighborhood. By chance or mistake, he was assigned to work with me. As much as I would love to say that Derrick had heard that I was starting to learn the trade pretty quickly and that I was a good listener and that I was a good catch as a driver, that wasn’t the case at all. He didn’t have a clue who I was. Even though I clearly stood out with my floppy hair and tall, gangly frame, he still hadn’t paid any attention to me during my initial eight weeks as a mover. There was a pecking order at Fast Company, which was determined by our performance on the job, and after eight weeks on the job, I was still a bottom feeder.

  So while I was expecting Mr. Hard-ass, he, again, defied my rumored images of him by treating me like we were long-lost buddies who had been separated for years and were finally reuniting. We talked about my life, where I was from, what I did for fun, and how my skinny legs and abnormally large shoes made me look like Ronald McDonald. We talked the whole way to the job. It was unbelievable. I was on edge the whole time, captivated by a combination of stories and the mere thought that I was actually sitting in the same moving truck as Derrick Hale himself. I learned about him, and he learned about me. There I was, sitting alongside the greatest mover at Fast Company, and I felt like I belonged. It was a remarkable feeling.

  Once we got to the job, though, we buckled down. Which is not to say that we didn’t joke and socialize throughout the day, but things were certainly more serious when we were on the job. We had work to do, and all three of us did it. (Mike, another renowned mover at Fast Company, was out there with us too, but I was invisible to him.) We wrapped the furniture, carried it out, loaded it on the truck, and drove to the unload. Our process was fluid, without hesitation. Every room was full, so it was a large move, but we knocked it out in six hours.

  “I like you, Adam,” Derrick had said on the way to the unload, surprisingly early in our partnership. “Don’t take it to heart, cuz I like everybody, but you’re a’ight with me.”

  Derrick was more than “a’ight” with me. Working with him was so different than my experience with Shaun. Sure, Derrick was a marvel to watch, carrying a dryer or a recliner or three boxes of books onto the truck at once, packing them in, and then going back for more. And he would literally jog from the truck back into the house to pick up another piece. His style of moving was very remarkable, no doubt, but what struck me most about him was his modesty. Shaun walked and talked like he was something pretty special; Derrick didn’t. He was the best, and he knew he was the best, but he also knew that his work spoke for itself. He didn’t stop to take long breaks, and he surely didn’t slow down after he started. He was friendly to the customer, but he didn’t waste time with idle chitchat as other guys that I had worked with would do.

  In fact, he and I didn’t talk much on the job on that day. He didn’t boss me around, and he didn’t explicitly teach me anything. Nothing. I’m not sure if he was sizing me up to see how I worked or if he figured he wouldn’t be working with me again anyway, so why should he bother, but either way, I was anxious all day long. I couldn’t tell if my technique was good or bad, but as the day wore on and the more I saw him working, the less confidence I had in my own feeble moving abilities. At that point, I was more qualified than when I had started at Fast Company, but I was starting to doubt the tactics that Shaun had taught me. Derrick was carrying two pieces to my one, which, even considering both his dominance and my bum toe, was still ridiculous. I couldn’t hang with him, but I still found comfort in the fact that nobody else could either.

  Perhaps all of this may seem like it couldn’t have really been that serious, like I’m being dramatic in my description of Derrick. After all, who the hell were we? We were movers! We were nobodies! Most of us had dropped out or barely graduated from high school, and we were destined to be blue-collar workers for the rest of our days. But that’s just it! That’s what was so special about Derrick and several of the other guys that I met at Fast Company and in other areas of Charleston. Nobodies, like Derrick and Mike, were difference makers, legends in their own world. They were providing a service that was so very necessary, and they were very good at what they were doing. There was a huge contrast, in attitude and otherwise, that separated guys like Derrick (who took their job seriously, wanted to excel, and wanted to be proud of what they had accomplished) from the guys who you could tell were coming to work just to make a few bucks to pay their rent. Moving furniture was so much more than that to guys like Derrick and Mike. They were professionals, seasoned veterans who had made sacrifices to put themselves in a position to do things that no one else could do. They were average guys performing above average feats.

  But, then again, so were many other people I met along my trip in Charleston and in my life in general. It’s like in the movie Castaway where Tom Hanks’s character returns from being on the island for five years and is in shock at the massive food platters at a party, a lighter, the pocket knife—ordinary things. I was in shock.

  And that’s how I felt about the bus driver, too.

  I decided that Friday would be the last day of riding the bus, as I planned to car hunt over the weekend. I didn’t know the bus driver on a personal level, nor did I think I would have cared so much about his services, but I did. He was like many other people in my life, but this time I decided to acknowledge him. So I wrote him a note:

  Dear Mr. Bus Driver, whose name I don’t know and whose path I will never cross again in my life:

  It’s incredible how insignificantly significant guys like you an
d I are. It’s interesting how in the grand scheme of life, we have the power to wake up and make a difference in the world. Or not. You and me: a regular old bus driver and a regular old mover.

  Every day, Monday through Friday, I ride your bus, and every day, Monday through Friday, you get my day started off right. You greet every rider with a smile and a “Good morning” and you proceed to brighten everybody’s day with common conversation or witty comments. It doesn’t matter who gets on your bus or how long they ride, when they hop off your bus, with a regenerated hop in their step, their demeanor has inevitably changed for the better.

  You do that. You! Otherwise irrelevant and unimportant in this crazy, self-indulgent world of ours, you find some way to be selfless. It isn’t fake and there surely aren’t any ulterior motives behind your actions. After all, you aren’t going to benefit financially by being a great guy. You aren’t going to get tips from the clientele that ride your bus. As a matter of fact, you’re going to get your same paycheck regardless of what kind of attitude you bring to work.

  But are you even really that special? I mean, you don’t do my taxes, you can’t represent me in the courtroom, and you can’t operate on me if I tear ligaments in my knee. You’re not a big shot, and you don’t bring home a six-figure salary. You’re just, well, a normal, run-of-the-mill kind of guy.

  Except that you’re not normal. Which is the reason I’m writing to you.

  I’m writing this note to you because I’ve ridden other buses, and I’ve had other bus drivers. Some are cordial and some are not. Some smile and some don’t. Some have an extra quarter lying around if we’re short on fare and others are penny-pinchers. Some can’t wait for the workday to end, while others, like you, represent what is naturally good about our society today.

  We are so very necessary, guys like you and I. After all, without us, who is going to drive buses or move furniture? Who is going to fix cars or serve breakfast to those doctors and lawyers and accountants?