Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  The crazy thing is that there are millions of people like you around our country! Just as there are millions of people with poor attitudes who wake up with selfish intentions, there are people like you, who wake up with the purpose of making a difference in somebody’s day. They’re everywhere: bankers, construction workers, retail employees, landscapers, and roofers; doctors’ assistants, dental hygienists, restaurant managers, and used car salesmen. Well, bad example, but you get the idea. The simple fact is that some people will go through their lives virtually unnoticed, while others, like you, will be remembered.

  And I would just like to say “Thank you.” Thank you for making a difference in my life, however small you think that difference may be.

  Today is my last day riding your bus. Chances are, I will never see you again, but at the same time, I want you to know that I will never forget you.

  Cheers,

  Adam Shepard

  As I handed him the letter and exited the bus on that Friday morning, I really felt good about what I had written. My letter to the bus driver was applicable to so many people. There are many reasons that America is the greatest country in the world, and guys like the bus driver represented that. He—just like everybody else—had a right to a place in our society. He belonged. I could have made copies of that letter and started handing them out to people that had made a difference in my life in my two months in Charleston; people that had made a difference in my life since I had had the capacity to retain memory; people who had really shaped me to be the person that I had become; people who had made a difference maybe just once; and people that had been major factors in my growth: family, friends, bosses, coaches, and teachers. Average people performing above average feats.

  I told Jill and Curtis that I would need Saturday off so that I could go car hunting. I had stocked up on cereal, milk, and orange juice, and I had prepaid a month’s rent to Mickey, which left me with just shy of $1,750 in the bank. I wasn’t sure what kind of car I would be looking for, but I knew the price: $1,000. Spending a grand of my money on a car would leave me with enough money in the bank for a couple of months of insurance and about $400 in the event that something went wrong with my new automobile.

  If there was one thing that Max at Max’s Made-Over Motors had going for him, it was that I wasn’t going to be shopping around. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the time or the patience to hunt for a good deal, rather I figured that I was taking a gamble by buying a car for $1,000 anyway, so there wasn’t much of a difference between the lemons I was going to get at Max’s versus the lemons I would get anywhere else.

  I didn’t know much about the operation of automobiles either. After a test drive, I planned to take any prospective buy to a transmission specialist who could give me a diagnostic test for $50 and determine if the transmission was in good condition. The only repairs that would totally break my bank account involved the transmission. The emergency money that I had set aside could cover a busted water pump or a new timing belt, but if the transmission went, I would probably have to sack it and buy another car.

  Max wasn’t around, but Jimmy Jr. (Max’s son, he told me), took me around the lot of about twenty or so cars to help me find one to take for a test drive. I settled on a silver pickup truck with a $900 price tag on the windshield. I hopped in and told Jimmy Jr. that I was going to take it to “my transmission guy” and that I would be right back.

  “Hold up, are you kiddin’?” he asked, a funny, contemplative look plastered on his face. “You think you’re just gonna drive that truck off the lot?”

  I was clearly unfamiliar with the system of taking cars for a test drive, and Jimmy Jr. was really intrigued that I thought I was simply going to drive away in his pickup truck. He looked at me for a second, confused almost to the point of laughter. Then, he laughed.

  “You can’t be serious. Where you takin’ it, did you say?”

  “To my transmission guy, up there at Willis Transmission Specialists.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this. My pappy is gonna kill me.”

  Because he knew that I was serious about buying a car, he let me take it, but I wasn’t gone long. I didn’t drive a half a mile away from the lot before I realized why the truck was priced at $900. Whenever I shifted from first to second or second to third, the car would hesitate for a moment and then kick into gear. I didn’t know what kind of problem that was, but I knew that I would at least like to own the car for a little while before it had a problem like that. So I returned to the shop for my second choice, a beautiful 1988 GMC Sierra S-15 pickup truck. Black, without a scratch on its exterior.

  So that was the one I ended up taking to the transmission guy up the street from the used car dealership on Rivers Avenue. It took him fifteen minutes to hook it up to the computer, return no codes, and determine that the transmission was in good shape. Which was all I needed to hear. It was driving fine, and besides a host of aesthetic problems on the inside (passenger side window stuck in the “down” position, driver side window stuck in the “up” position, sun visors missing, leather interior torn to shreds, dirty floor mats, no radio, just to start the list), I wanted it. I didn’t care that it would repel the ladies or that it could only seat about a person and a half comfortably. That baby got eighteen miles to the gallon and had a reputation for running forever.

  But I didn’t tell any of that to Jimmy Jr. I got back to the dealership and put on my serious, negotiating face.

  “Well?” he asked. “What’d them boys say?”

  “Shoot, man. They said it was a’ight. They wouldn’t buy it, but I might still be interested.” If nothing else, I had just dropped $50 for the diagnostic test, so I wanted to see what kind of deal we could work out.

  The S-15 didn’t have a price tag on it, but I assumed that it would be right around the same price as the first pickup truck I had taken for a test run. In any event, those prices are just a starting line for us consumers to work down from anyway.

  “How much are you askin’ for that guy, anyway?” My disposition was so nonchalant.

  “That’n there, we’re askin’ fifteen hundred.”

  Ha! I thought, before I realized he was serious. How was I ever going to work my way down to a grand from that?

  “Man, that is a little high for me,” I said, straightening my disposition. “There are so many things wrong with it on the inside. Y’know, windows and the radio missing and all. I think I can spare about seven-fifty.”

  Wow. Get a load of that aggressiveness, huh? Using the windows and radio as leverage, I had cut the price in half. But my face didn’t show it. If we were playing poker and I was holding a straight flush, he wouldn’t have known.

  “Seven hundred and fifty dollars?” He looked at me with the same look as he had when I started taking the first pickup off the lot. He laughed at me again. He really did think I was kidding. I didn’t mean to but he was clearly insulted, as in, “Get the hell outta my face before I sic the dogs on yer ass.”

  But I persisted. “Yeah. I mean, is that too low?”

  “Too low? Boy, you’re at the wrong place to try to make deals like that.”

  “Well, why don’t you just give Mighty Max a call and see what he says.” Mighty Max? Ha. It was going to be a long weekend for me and my wise-guy attitude.

  “I’m gonna call ’im. And I’m gonna give ’im yer offer, but he prolly gonna hang up on me.”

  But Max, good ol’ Mighty Max, didn’t hang up. We negotiated back and forth through his son Jimmy Jr. and after a lot of huffing and puffing and shrugging and hard thinking on both sides, we settled on $1,000.

  In hindsight, though, I wondered if Jimmy Jr. was even on the phone with his dad or if there even was a Max at the helm of that dealership. I wondered what was really wrong with that truck that he was letting it go for $500 below his asking price. Chances are I had been played just as bad as I thought I was playing them. Probably worse.

  But none of that mattered. We’d made the deal,
and both sides were happy even though we both kept shaking our heads, swearing we were giving away the deal of a lifetime. I got my truck for the price I had set out to spend, and Jimmy Jr. unloaded another automobile off his lot. We did the paperwork, and I drove off in my new ride—a huge stride toward what I had set out to accomplish.

  I hadn’t worked with Derrick on Thursday or Friday, and by the weekend I had discounted the idea that I would ever get to work with him again.

  But that turned out not to be the case. I was assigned to work with him and Mike again on Monday. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. On Thursday, Derrick told me that he thought it would be a great idea if we formed a crew. Forget a poker face; I couldn’t hold back my enthusiasm. I acted as if I had just been given a promotion, and I was giving my acceptance speech. “Oh, man. That’s great. I promise I won’t let you down.” I’m pretty sure I hugged him. It wasn’t embarrassing, though. By that fourth day working together, Derrick and I were on the same wavelength. Even though I was the driver and theoretically the head of the crew, we both knew who the boss was, and he knew that I would pretty much do anything he asked. We had hit it off from the beginning, and it was looking like ours was going to be a long-lasting relationship.

  Working with Derrick was like starting over again at Fast Company, except more challenging. I had to unlearn everything that Shaun had taught me (which wasn’t necessarily wrong, just less efficient), and then learn the way Derrick did things. His system. Fortunately, Derrick was very patient with me, recognizing that I really wanted to learn his profession, and that no matter how bad I was and how many mistakes I made, I would work hard in the process. Identifying the limits of my capabilities early on, he found ways to take full advantage of my strengths. He could tell that I wasn’t particularly strong (“Man, that’s all you got?” he would say), but he also knew that I had the stamina of a Kenyan in the Boston Marathon. I could work all day long without stopping. For the first month or so, he and Mike would take care of the pieces that were terribly heavy, but as time passed, I began to get stronger.

  Getting to know Derrick was way different than getting to know Marco. I can tell now that my relationship with Marco was doomed from the beginning. It had been too good to be true. Too convenient, too soon. I had gone looking for a Marco, any companion I could find that would satisfy my need to have someone to talk and relate to, and when I found him, I became so attached that I wouldn’t let go until I had to. Marco, as it turned out, couldn’t have cared less either way.

  But my relationship with Derrick was different. It was very real. Neither one of us needed the other, and we certainly hadn’t gone looking for each other. Indeed, I was content on small moves with whomever they stuck me with, and Derrick was fully capable of doing most of the moves by himself. But then we met and worked together, and everything changed. The chemistry between us—which, I discovered, was so utterly important in the moving business—was established from the beginning. He knew that I was going to work hard and keep my mouth shut, and I knew that he was going to show me how it was really supposed to be done, in turn exploiting my full potential as a professional mover.

  With Derrick on my team, or vice versa, there was no more time for child’s play. Just as I was getting used to cruising down I-26 in truck No. 2, I was moved to truck No. 4—still a stick shift, but bigger, with a twenty-six foot storage van. Ninety percent of our moves were three bedrooms or better, with an occasional two bedroom thrown in the mix when Mike had to take a day off. My moving experience was jumping to the next level. No more twenty to twenty-five hour workweeks. All of our moves lasted at least six hours, with quite a few going eight hours or longer. It made for an exhausting day, no doubt, but that is what I had asked for when I came to Charleston—the full blue-collar experience. And there was no question I was getting it.

  TWELVE

  WORKERS’ CONSTERNATION

  Thursday, October 26

  Bigger moves meant more hours and bigger tips. I was cashing in. I was glad that Phil Coleman had deterred me away from the car wash. I still would have been doing well there, with an hourly wage plus tips, but I would have been doing the same thing day in and day out: wax on, wax off, fifty times a day, all week long. Of course, I would have done it, and I would have done it with a smile on my face, but I wouldn’t have had the same experience that I had moving furniture.

  Working as a mover was great. It offered me the escape from reality that I needed. Even though moving was probably one of the more stressful jobs I could have chosen, it was fun to be out and about doing a different job every day. Every day was different than the next. Different moves, different personalities.

  Some of our moves were downtown, in the heart of Charleston, where the (perhaps widening) gap between economic classes appeared more evident on every trip; others were in country towns like Eutawville or Pinopolis, where it might take residents twenty minutes to ride into town just for gas and groceries.

  Some customers were bright and cheery; some were all business.

  Some were completely disorganized, while others had every box and each piece of furniture coded by number or color corresponding to where it was supposed to be placed at their new house.

  Some bought us lunch and offered us beverages throughout the day; others wouldn’t have cared if we passed out from dehydration on their front lawn.

  And I loved meeting new people. For most of the day, I wasn’t “Adam Shepard, the loner” or “Adam Shepard, the guy who recently moved out of the homeless shelter.” I was “Adam Shepard, Mover Extraordinaire.” My crew and I would sweat and socialize at the same time, all the while making one-day friends in the process. After all, our customers—every one of our customers—were more privileged than we were. While many of the guys at Fast Company lived pretty exciting lives, our experiences were much different from those of the people that we moved. They didn’t have to break the bank for weekend trips to Myrtle Beach or to go out to dinner at elegant restaurants downtown. They traveled to Europe and Australia and Southeast Asia. They had sailed to the Bahamas or made long treks by bicycle or hiked the Appalachian Trail. And their children would go to prestigious universities, schools like Clemson or Winthrop or somewhere out of state, during which time they would study abroad in far off lands like Italy, France, or Russia.

  Once in a while, more out of ignorance than disrespect, our customers would show their superiority. One day early in my moving career, I had a conversation with a customer whose son had worked as a mover on weekends for a while.

  “Said it was the hardest work he ever did,” she said.

  “Well, he wasn’t lying,” I replied. “What does he do now?”

  “Oh, his back started bothering him. He’s got a real job now.”

  But, more often than not, lines of respect went both ways. Just as we were in awe (and a wee bit envious) of the houses that we moved, many of our customers admired the occupation that we had chosen to make our living.

  And it was great to be appreciated. There was absolutely no prestige in any of the jobs that I had performed in my first couple of weeks in Charleston, but moving was different. People were impressed to see us performing tasks that they couldn’t or wouldn’t do. And it wasn’t just the children watching our every move with looks of reverence, exclaiming, “Wow, look at him lift that all by himself, Daddy.” More often than not, the customers themselves would end up looking at me sometime throughout the day, saying, “Wow, look at Derrick carrying that all by himself. Shouldn’t somebody grab the other end?” Recliners, huge coffee tables, solid oak headboards, bookshelves—it was mind boggling the things that the guy could lift.

  And Trinitrons. Ugh, Trinitrons. Even in the wake of the popularity of featherweight plasma home theater systems, Sony’s grossly overweight Trinitron televisions were maintaining their market share. Trinitrons were our worst nightmare, infamous for their awkwardly heavy design. I would have rather wrestled with any fifty-two-inch projection TV than dealt with a twenty-six-inch
Trinitron. They were that heavy, and so unnecessary. The manufacturing company must use the Trinitron as an outlet to dispose of all of the unused parts at the manufacturing plant. “Say, uh, Marshall, we won’t be needing any of these iron scraps. Just melt them down and toss them in one of those Trinitrons.” I can’t tell you exactly how much those things weigh, but I can tell you that it was a rough way to start the day. We would arrive at a house and do a walk-through with the customer to see what exactly we would be moving—sofas, tables, desks, bookshelves, refrigerators, dressers, armoires. No problem. The weight was more evenly distributed on those pieces and with the assistance of special dollies, we could two-man them out the door. But then we would spot a Trinitron, and a collective sigh would pass over the room. One of us would throw out some sarcastic wise-crack to try to ease the discomfort, but there was no escaping the fact that somebody—two somebodies if Derrick wasn’t in “He-Man Mode”—was going to have to carry that beast out the door.

  But Derrick, in all of his glory, never made me look bad. If anything, he made me shine. My awkwardness made it clear to all of our customers who was the veteran and who was the rookie on our team, but at the same time, we complemented each other nicely. With the dollies and the efficiency of the furniture wrapping system, we could each clear a room by ourselves. Derrick would wrap and clear one room, while I was wrapping and clearing another room, while Mike was wrapping and clearing another room. If one of us needed a hand with something, we would call for assistance, and then everybody would get back to working on his room. Our nearly flawless efficiency was putting a smile on the customers’ faces, and, as I said, a happy customer meant bigger tips.

  It was good that I was putting those extra dollars in my pocket. In addition to putting a good amount of it in the bank, I was able to eat, purchase car insurance ($350 when I prepaid for a year), pay Mickey the weekly rent, and keep my truck fueled.