Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  And pay speeding fines.

  With nine speeding tickets already to my credit (which is particularly impressive since I didn’t even own a car for four years in college), there was one main reason that I bought a pickup truck: I wasn’t going to get pulled over. I mean, really, how many times do you see a pickup truck on the side of the road with blue lights flashing behind it? Pretty much never, unless there’s a gun rack in the window and Billy Ray is wanted on suspicion of some drug charge. But that was me on the side of Rivers Avenue on the last Sunday morning in October, just two weeks after I had driven my truck off of Max’s lot. It had started to drizzle, and since rolling up the window was a two-hand operation, I simply lost track of how fast I was going.

  At first, I was kind of happy that my truck was even capable of speeding. “Atta boy!” But then the officer handed me the $128 speeding ticket—no warning, nothing—and things got a little more serious. I tried to tell him that it would never happen again, and yadda, yadda, yadda—sob stories that he had heard a thousand times—but it was too late. I would join him in court in mid-November.

  When I got to court, I petitioned the judge to let me do community service in lieu of paying such a hefty fine, but he wasn’t interested in negotiations. I paid the fine and determined that I would simply have to slow down.

  Which wasn’t hard to do, since, aside from work, I didn’t have anywhere to be. With Marco gone and my only other friend Derrick married, my social life was maintaining its status on suicide watch throughout the duration of my stay at Mickey’s house. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since I was staying focused. I wasn’t even upset with the fact that my life had become so mechanical, since I knew that once I was living in a more permanent setting, I would have plenty of opportunities to hang out and stay out late. Besides, in those early days on Derrick’s crew, I was usually so beat after a full day of work that I didn’t have the desire to go out. Generally speaking, after a move, I would go home, write in my journal, read, eat, and go to bed. I did, however, find myself missing the companionship from my days at the shelter.

  Jed, our fearless leader, was rarely around. He would come into the office for an hour or so after the trucks had gone out in the morning just to check on things and then spend the day out of the office, golfing or riding his Harley or assessing damage that we had done on our moves.

  And he was growing a bit weary of doing damage assessments. With winter approaching and Fast Company booking fewer and fewer moves with each passing week, many of the guys started to get lackadaisical and careless. They started grinding out hours (going slow or performing superfluous tasks on the job so that they could extend their time on the clock and make up for the hours they weren’t otherwise going to be getting) and apparently taking less care in carrying pieces out the door. Jed had had enough.

  So, he scheduled a meeting with us on a Tuesday in mid-November. “Be here at eight o’clock on the dot.” We were there, and let me tell you, he let loose. He was livid beyond livid. At first I thought he just needed a hug, but it was more serious than that. That man had a lot of built up anger, and he used that meeting to let it all out. Occupational therapy. And we were all there (on time, front and center) so that we could be present for his tantrum. At one point I thought I was back in my basketball-playing days at Merrimack College and it was halftime and Coach was giving us his thoughts on how we were playing. There were papers flying, fist pumps, foot stomps, and cursing. Lots and lots of cursing. At times I couldn’t even comprehend what Jed was saying: his sentences were a mere run-on assembly of different tenses of the “F-word,” his assurance that we understood how angry he really was. And it was working. He sure got my attention anyway.

  Jed didn’t single anyone out, though. He didn’t need to. We all knew who was responsible for Jed’s displeasure. Grundy had run the roof of the truck into a low lying tree branch ($2,700), Elseto had been scratching the hell out of hardwood floors (almost $4,000), and Michie’s crew was averaging about three damaged pieces per week. (Elseto was the only one who was fired after the meeting, but Grundy later came to terms with the fact that the moving business wasn’t for him.) But, rather than embarrass anybody in particular, Jed addressed us as a whole. After all, he felt we all needed to shape up or ship out.

  You don’t like the way we run things around here? You don’t like the people you work with? You aren’t happy with your paycheck or the fact that you don’t have a laundry list of benefits? Fine! Get the hell outta here! I’ll run one truck if I have to!

  Jed was passionate about one thing: getting paid. Which was respectable. So what if he made our salaries several times over despite never having to lift a single piece of furniture? He had earned it! With a college education and smart decision-making, he had earned the position that he had attained in life. Good for him. But at the same time, it seemed like he had little or no compassion for what we were going through.

  “Shit, that mother ain’t never lifted a piece of furniture in his life,” one of the guys told me later. “He don’t know what it’s like for us out there.”

  And he was right. It wasn’t easy for us out there. Moving was hard work, stressful as hell. Carry the buffet out to the truck and come back in for the two-piece China hutch. And then come back for the dining room table and chairs. And then, and then, and then—it seemed endless at times. Ninety-five percent of our moves were local, so it wasn’t like we were taking these moves cross-country where we could work hard for four hours and then drive for three days. We worked hard for four hours, drove fifteen minutes, and then worked hard for another three.

  If nothing else, Jed’s outrage made us tighten up a little bit, but at the same time, it wasn’t like Michie’s crew was messing up on purpose, and Grundy certainly hadn’t meant to damage the roof of the truck. “Hey, look. A tree branch. Think I can knock it down?” It wasn’t like that at all. Mistakes were happening—probably more than normal—and Jed simply meant for us to start focusing a little more.

  But few cared about what Jed had to say. While we new guys, who were hearing his quarterly speech for the first time, were totally captivated by his words, the guys that had been at Fast Company for any extended period of time could be seen giggling in the corner or staring into space. They’d heard Jed’s rant a half-dozen times, and they knew enough by then that things would change for a while and then go back to the way they were. New rule changes (“Be at work by eight o’clock or else!”) might last a week, but then guys would resort back to strolling into the shop at 8:30, and no disciplinary action would be taken. Be at work by 8:00 or else what, Jed?

  Why, though? Why no respect? Because things weren’t like they used to be, like they were when Sherman (Jed’s dad) ran the shop.

  “It was so different back then, man, when Sherman was here,” Victor, a six-year Fast Company employee, told me. “We were a family.”

  Life with Sherman was more tolerable. He made the guys want to get up in the morning and go to work. There is stress in every profession, but in moving, as you can imagine, the stress is multiplied. Every day, we would roll out of bed thinking, “Man, another day of wrapping and lifting and climbing. Damn.” That’s what we did, six days a week, and it wasn’t fun. Some of us did what we could to make it fun, but at the same time, there was nothing easy about what we were doing. Sherman’s Fast Company, the Fast Company of yesterday, eased that stress. Jed’s Fast Company, today’s Fast Company, only added to it.

  “Sherman was there for ‘his boys,’” Victor told me. “If we came back to the shop having been stiffed on the tip, he would slip us twenty or thirty bucks under the table. We were shooting hoops and putting steaks on the grill in the afternoon.”

  But when Sherman died of cancer in 2005, and Jed took over, animosity sprung up around the office. Fast Company’s reputation suffered, which meant fewer moves, which meant even more animosity at the office. It wasn’t just Jed’s fault, though. He was trying. A little. On slow days, he might have Jill let
movers work around the office or send an extra guy out on a two-man move (at the company’s expense) just so they could get hours. He would also organize company outings to local hockey games and restaurants and bowling alleys to try to strengthen the chemistry among us, but it just wasn’t the same. He wasn’t doing enough at the office. He wasn’t there.

  “But it’s even more than that,” another guy offered. “With Sherman, if a customer accused us of damaging something, and we said we ain’t do it, by God, we ain’t do it! He would back us one hundred percent to the point that he would start threatening the customer. ‘Dammit! My boys ain’t do that! I’ll see your ass in court.’ It ain’t like that with Jed. He just cares about making that paper.”

  Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying we needed more money, or we were itching for a health care plan (although both of those would have been fantastic). In fact, not many people that I met during my tenure at Fast Company complained about what they were getting paid. They were just mad at the lack of hands-on leadership. They didn’t feel like they belonged to anything. They felt abused. They were robots, sent out to make money for the big boss man, go home, and return and repeat the next day. It was a vicious, destructive cycle, and it hurt the overall morale.

  In later conversations, I discovered that even Jill, Jed’s mom, felt wholeheartedly that Jed wasn’t around enough to run a successful business. “Eight-to-ten,” she told me. “He needs to be here in the morning to see the boys off, and then he can go do estimates or damage assessments or play golf or whatever.” The proof could be found by comparing the Fast Company in Charleston with the one in Myrtle Beach, which was owned by Jed’s brother, Frankie. Frankie wasn’t paying his employees near what Jed was paying us. But, Frankie was there, having man-to-man contact with his workers. He would take them out to lunch or hang out with them outside of work. He knew the right buttons to push to keep his employees pumped up, motivated to want to work hard. The morale was at a whole different level than ours.

  On the other hand, I can tell you the exact moment when I knew that I had become an official member of the Fast Company crew, the moment that I came to have a sense of acceptance.

  The pecking order around the shop was separated by one’s reputation as a mover. If you were a good mover, then you were a good guy. If you were a bad mover, then you still might have been a good guy, but you were sentenced to the bottom of the hierarchy where you were showered with idle small talk or ignored altogether. (Bad movers, by the way, were either rare at Fast Company, or they were assigned to moves where they had to work with each other. The scheduling system was such that the worst movers were weeded out via their own discovery that they simply didn’t belong at Fast Company.) For several months that was me, but I had stuck with it, thus earning a bit of respect. And one day I came into the shop, and everybody had a good laugh at my expense.

  The topic of conversation surrounded my work attire. Guys at the shelter had already given me plenty of flak about my man-purse, the only tote bag available at the time at the Goodwill, and now it was Fast Company’s turn to get on my clothes. From the waist up, I looked normal, donning the standard work shirt that everyone was required to wear on the job. But then there were my shorts, which had, well, earned their name. I had bought about five pairs from the Goodwill to wear on the job, and I got what I paid for: not a single pair of them extended below mid-thigh. And there we were, in the shop, and anybody and everybody was taking shots at me and my sense of style.

  “Shep, Daisy Duke called. She wants her shorts back.”

  Laughter.

  “Shep, shouldn’t you be wearing something on top of your boxers?”

  Laughter.

  “Dog, you know what we used to call those in prison? ‘Catch me-bang me shorts.’”

  Roaring laughter. (Thereafter, my shorts became known as the “catch me’s,” as in, “Hey, Shep, lookin’ good in those catch me’s, Buddy.”)

  They said I looked like the UPS man. Even the secretaries (Amy and Wendy) and Jill were having a good time.

  So, of course, the UPS guy made an early morning delivery to the office the following week, and of course that man’s shorts extended down below his knees. Straight gangster. It was great. It was as if it was meant to happen, as if the chain of events of me being made fun of and his subsequent delivery with his long shorts were supposed to happen. Everybody loved picking on me for my shorts, and I joined right in. I was in. Just as I had climbed the ranks at the shelter (albeit much quicker), that was the week that I discovered that I had become “somebody” at Fast Company. From that point on, I was one of the guys, privileged to join even the most intimate conversations. I never went shopping for new threads, though, partly because they had become my trademark, but mostly since they were so comfortable. I was so agile in those things. I could bend and stretch and move every which way possible. (Although, in January, I did split a pair of shorts—right down the back and right in front of the customer—when I was setting down a TV.)

  But just as I came to be accepted by some people, I was having a difficult time dealing with others. Namely, Mike.

  Mike was a legend in his own right. Years before, before Curtis had been named Truck Manager, the two of them had worked on the same crew together. They had Mount Pleasant on lockdown—Rivertowne, Snee Farm, Belle Hall, and Dunes West. Every day was a request move for the two of them in the most premiere neighborhoods. Word had gotten around town that those were the two that you wanted to move you. They were Fast Company. Their third man was irrelevant. The two of them were the best.

  But just as Fast Company’s reputation began to founder with Sherman’s death, so, too, did the “Mike and Curtis Duo.” With a weak back, Curtis was promoted to the office to aid in trying to resurrect what had once been Charleston’s number-one local moving company, while Mike jumped from crew to crew, growing more and more bitter every day.

  And he was using me as a means to discharge that bitterness—every day on nearly every piece that we would carry together. “Shit man, don’t carry it like that! What the hell are you doing? You just aren’t cut out for moving.” I tried to let his outbursts slide, but then the customers started to feel uncomfortable about the way he was acting, so I had to step in. I approached him on the side, and told him that he would have to shape up a bit. He couldn’t keep treating me like that. Fine, I was a terrible mover. “You and Derrick are the best, Mike. Everybody knows that. I want you to teach me your ways, but you can’t treat me with such condescension, especially in front of the customers. It’s bad for business.”

  He agreed, but things didn’t change, and Derrick told me to make a decision.

  “You gotta choose, bro,” he told me. “I’m cool with you both, but I can’t work with the two of y’all together no more. It’s him or me.”

  In perhaps the easiest decision I’d ever made in my life. I went directly to Jill and told her that I didn’t want Mike on my crew anymore. “I know I’m still a nobody in the grand scheme of things here, Jill, but at the same time, I just can’t keep working with him. For two months I’ve been putting up with it, only because I was happy to have Derrick on my crew, but I just can’t deal with it anymore.”

  It turned out that I wasn’t the only one. As a matter of fact, I had lasted longer than most of the other people Mike had worked with. He had burned bridges with most of the drivers at Fast Company, which was a shame, since he was such a great mover.

  On the outside looking in, what I had done could have been considered a manipulative, egocentric move. After all, learning to work with different people was a part of life, right? Screw Derrick and his “him or me” proposition.

  But it’s not like that in the moving business. Moving is not an equal opportunity occupation. That’s how people were getting hurt, sent home with scarred shins, broken fingers, and strained backs. And hernias. Shortly after the new year, Chad, who was super strong and fully capable of carrying whatever was put in front of him, got twisted up on an
armoire and tore a hole in his abdominal wall (“The worst pain I ever felt in my life,” he said) simply because he wasn’t on the same page with the guy that was on the other end. He was out of work for a month (and a month shorter than the doctor had prescribed). Two guys clashing in the moving business was a recipe for disaster, and Derrick’s proposition finally gave me the opportunity to get somebody else.

  But we didn’t get anybody else in particular. We would have a different guy ride with us every day. Didn’t matter who.

  “You wanna work? Cool. C’mon.”

  “Uh, they haven’t hired me yet.”

  “Eh, whatever. Let’s ride.”

  A couple of times we even picked up a friend of Derrick’s on the way to the customer’s house, and once in a while we would do three-man moves by ourselves. It was crazy. One day, I was dropping pieces and falling off the truck ramp and scraping walls, and the next day I was a legit mover, carrying heavy pieces, clearing rooms by myself, and scraping walls. Customers that were looking at us at the start of the day like, “Um, where are the real movers? Y’know, the big guys?” would have ear-to-ear smiles on their faces at the end of the day when we would beat their estimated time by two or three hours. Derrick and I were even getting requested every couple of weeks.

  The best part about it, though, wasn’t getting rid of Mike. I would have dealt with him forever, as long as Derrick was out there with us. The best part was the fact that Derrick, rather than taking the easy road and jumping ship, wanted to stay with me. And that was awesome. Some crews had been together for years, and some crews would only last two or three months before they dissolved. And it was looking like Derrick and I were going to last.

  After Thanksgiving, my predetermined two-month window to live at Mickey’s place downtown was nearing its end. I could have stayed there forever if I wanted to (I know Mickey loved getting $100 a week for his otherwise vacant attic), but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted something more permanent, with a bed and my own kitchen and a living room. Maybe even a community pool and a tennis court and a nice view of the Cooper River. Finding a roommate was going to be the easy part, though. I did a little research at the Web site www.roommates.com and found a horde of people in the Charleston area looking for people to live with.