Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  But just as I had compiled a hefty list of prospective roommates, Derrick told me all about Bubble Gum, and my roommate search came to an end.

  THIRTEEN

  WINTER WITH BUBBLE GUM

  Saturday, November 25

  After Thanksgiving, my project continued on its evolutionary path, but it also began to shift to more of a cultural one. Especially after I met my new roommate.

  He got the nickname “Bubble Gum” when he was a kid. One of his cousins told him that his puffy cheeks made him look like his mouth was stuffed with bubble gum, and the name stuck. But now people only called him that when they were mad at him, like a mom using her son’s entire name for emphasis. Everybody called him BG.

  He was Derrick’s cousin, and he had arrived unexpectedly at Derrick’s front doorstep in mid-October from their native Kingstree, about an hour from Charleston. Kingstree is a rural, backwoods town with its own flavor and atmosphere where one can always find excitement at places like Mirage—soul food restaurant by day, dance club by night. But just as Kingstree’s social scene is hot, the center of all of the surrounding country towns, the economy is cold, not offering much in the way of jobs or opportunity. Everybody has his or her own business and everybody’s business is in the red. BG had grown tired of working as a cook at his aunt’s restaurant, and he was looking for a change of scenery, the type of change that Derrick had experienced when he came to Charleston three years prior.

  Just like Derrick, BG had an average physical appearance. He wasn’t tall or muscle-bound or extremely athletic. He did have a perpetual look of contemplation on his face, though, like he was always looking for something intelligent to say. Sometimes he even mumbled to himself, regardless of who was around. Often, very often in fact, I would wonder what was going through his head during idle moments in conversation.

  BG was on the hunt for a roommate. He didn’t care who, and neither did Derrick. Derrick just wanted him out. He had given BG until December to get on his feet and find another place to live, so that his two-year-old daughter could have her room back.

  Enter me.

  From the moment that I met BG two days after Thanksgiving, we had a love–hate relationship—from which most of the love would be expended in the first forty-eight hours. We were so much alike—stubborn and contentious—so we were at odds from the beginning. But even though we didn’t exactly hit it off, being roommates was such a convenient opportunity for each of us. He needed a roommate, I needed a roommate, and the duplex next door to Derrick needed occupants.

  We went down to the realtor’s office to check on the availability, and the agent seemed stunned by our inquiry.

  “Wait, you mean four oh nine B Pine Hollow, like over in Cedar Manor?” she asked.

  “Yep, that’s the one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Oh, wow. Have you been inside yet?”

  You know it’s bad when even the realtor is skeptical about one of her own properties. Boy was I having bad luck with living quarters. The shelter and even Mickey’s attic were necessary, but I had dealt with those conditions with the optimistic notion that I could find something halfway decent by December. But it wasn’t looking good.

  Four oh nine B Pine Hollow was a step down, once again, from where I had been living. It had been on the market for four months since the previous tenants—a family of grizzly bears, I believe—had moved out. There were roaches and piles of trash everywhere. The linoleum in the kitchen was ripped and the stove was rusted. There were holes and stains on the carpet throughout, and the walls were in dire need of a paint job. It looked like Mama Bear had let Baby Bear loose in the house with a jug of cherry Kool-Aid and a box of crayons. It was horrendous. I couldn’t imagine that anybody would seriously consider renting that place.

  They were desperate to rent the property, which was great, because we were desperate to find one. It gave everybody a little breathing room. We told the realtor that if she went easy on the credit check and supplied us with paint, we would have that place looking habitable again. It was a deal fit for everybody, although I spent most of the negotiation process hoping and praying that BG had a tangible plan for how we were going to actually implement the masterminded makeover that we were so gallantly proposing to the realtor.

  After reaching an agreement, but before we could move in, there was a lot of work to be done. The only problem, though, was that BG was handy—super handy, like the fellas that have their own TV shows on Sunday mornings—and I wasn’t. It wasn’t a huge problem, except that BG wouldn’t let me forget how handy he was and how handy I wasn’t.

  “Dog, I gotta ask you. What the hell are you doing?”

  I was patching the drywall.

  “Oh, Jesus. Shep, please, I’m beggin’ you. Grab a paint brush and go over there in the corner. I got everything else.” He waved his hand around the whole apartment, signaling that he was going to take care of everything except that one corner to which I had been assigned.

  I think he wished I had given him $100 and just left him to perform all of the renovations himself. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing patching the drywall, but I wasn’t good at painting either. Since the realtor hadn’t provided us with carpet protector, I would spend ten minutes painting and then a half hour scrubbing white paint off the carpet. I hated it. As imperative as it was, I hated all of the work we were putting into that hideous place, but I really hated painting. BG knew what he was doing, though, and I didn’t, so I had to comply.

  Derrick came over to deliver cookies from his wife and to pick up my slack, which helped to expedite the process. After one weekend of nonstop work, we had that place gleaming. It was great. Our own place. Even the things we couldn’t fix, like holes in the carpet, we strategically planned to cover with furniture. We had it all mapped out.

  My bedroom (the master) was in the back of the duplex, and I paid proportionately more for it. Our rent was $600, so I told BG that I would pay $325 and he could pay $275, and he agreed enthusiastically. I could have gotten off with a much better deal than that, but it was fair for everybody. I wanted the bigger room, and he was saving for a car, so it would give him a chance to put a few extra dollars in the bank.

  Moving in was an unexciting affair, though. We hardly had anything. He had a bed, and I had a bed that I had scored from a move, but other than that, we just put our clothes in the closet, and dreamed up the interior plan for our new place.

  “We’ll put a sofa here and a sofa there and a TV there,” he told me.

  “Yeah, yeah. And we can put a china cabinet here, maybe a bookshelf or something on that wall.”

  “Or no, wait. China cabinet there and a wine rack over there.”

  We weren’t being sarcastic. We were serious, and our plan was certainly plausible. BG was going to start working at Fast Company, too, so we would both have access to furniture. Before, Derrick and I had been turning down the used TVs and furniture that were being offered to us almost daily by our customers, or we had been taking them to the pawnshop. (“If it ain’t broke, sell it to somebody.”) Now that we had a place to put things, BG and I could start accepting the pieces for our own. Beautiful pieces. If you’re ever trying to furnish a house or apartment, go work as a mover. Derrick’s place and his sister’s place around the corner were both filled with hand-me-downs from customers, so BG and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before our place would be filled as well. And we were right. Within a month, 409B Pine Hollow was fully furnished with a beautiful cream-colored sectional sofa, a maroon sleeper sofa, a fifty-five-inch projection TV (which cost $300), a bookshelf, a dining room table (although we never got chairs), and a china hutch. In my bedroom, I had two nightstands, a dresser, a TV, a bookshelf, and a huge desk—all free and all in December. None of it matched, so our house looked thrown together, but individually each piece was beautiful.

  Even my bedroom came together nicely. I had picked up a wide variety of interior decorating tip
s from the customers we had moved, so I was pretty much a pro. I hung pictures, and I put candles and a clock over my desk. I splurged for a $65 burgundy and white bedspread set, which was complemented by the matching burgundy lampshades and white candles that I put on top of my nightstands and a burgundy and white rug that I bought from Target. My bathroom—from the towels to the shower curtain to the candles—was a sea of Carolina blue and white. It was immaculate, pristine. The whole place. We should have called HGTV to come film the entire process of restoration. With BG’s expertise and my moral support, we were cruising. After the New Year, we would acquire rugs and side tables to finish off the living room. Later, even after our place was completely outfitted, BG continued accepting pieces, so our kitchen and back porch filled up with sofas and cabinets that we never used, but he didn’t feel right letting them go to waste.

  BG’s street smarts—particularly in his own mind—far outweighed his lack of academic expertise. He hadn’t finished high school, but that didn’t matter much to him. He was still right. About everything. All the time. Even when somebody would say he was wrong, he knew he was wrong, and there was clear, concrete evidence that he was wrong, he still fought for his point. “I’m tellin’ you, man, I been around more than you. I seen more than you. I know what I’m talkin’ about.” Even on those rare occasions that he was downright 100 percent wrong, he would discount the argument altogether. “Dog, why you even worried about it? It ain’t that serious.”

  In an effort to prove his point, he loved incorporating clichés into his arguments. Unfortunately for him, though, he would frequently misuse them or create his own philosophical rendition, leaving his audience even more confused. When he would talk about not counting something valuable before you have it, he would say, “Ha! See. That’s what you get when your chickens done hatched, but you ain’t count ’em yet.” Or one time, we were talking about turning a minor issue into a major one, and he said, “Shit. You already got plenty of molehills. You might as well build your own mountain. You know what I’m sayin’?” Hmmmm. Derrick and I would ask him if he really meant “make a mountain out of a molehill,” but he would just shrug it off. “Y’all don’t get it. Never mind.”

  Apparently, he had plenty of people that did get it, though. BG had a thousand friends, and most of them lived in our neighborhood. I know, because there was always somebody knocking on our door, at all times of the day. “Is BG here? No? Mind if I come in and chill until he gets back?” Everybody loved BG. In social settings, he was fun and easygoing and always good for a laugh. BG and I could sit around and have the most ridiculous discussions, and in the end he would have me lying on the couch curled up in laughter.

  With that said, however, the first month with BG was tough. We weren’t on the same page as far as getting the place squared away. I had a few extra dollars that I wanted to put toward communal items like dishes, pots and pans, cleaning supplies, and decorative items for the living room, but he didn’t want to splurge. He was a cheapskate, he knew it, and he didn’t care. So, I had to buy everything, which wasn’t a huge deal beyond the fact that I had wanted to get us in the habit of pulling our own weight. I should have fought harder in the beginning, because for the duration of our time as roommates, I was always the one buying paper towels or dish liquid, and he was always the one “borrowing” toilet paper or a glass of milk. He would spend $15 a day or more on cigarettes and beer and lottery tickets, but he never had a bar of soap.

  BG was having a tough time working his way in with the management at Fast Company. His attitude was varied. One week he was on fire, going in to the shop ready to work, but then the next week he was a completely different person.

  And that’s how it was with so many of the guys at work. Rarely did a day go by without some sort of drama at the shop in the morning.

  Some of the guys had a good attitude, while others fueled the two-way turmoil between the management and the employees.

  Some guys got in to the shop early, got their work orders, and hit the road. Others arrived at the shop close to 9:00 A.M.—the time when we were supposed to arrive at the customer’s house. Others, still, would be on the schedule and wouldn’t show up. No call, no message; just wouldn’t feel like working that day.

  Some came in uniform, ready to work, while others constantly tested the system.

  What was Jed going to do? Fire them? Not a chance. It would cost him more money to fire a mover, hire a new one, and then train him than it would to just accept the lack of respect that he was getting from certain employees.

  Derrick was always looking out for BG, so, after a while, in mid-December, he invited him to join our crew at Fast Company. BG wasn’t getting the hours he wanted by floating around from crew to crew, and since he knew that he would get sent out pretty much every day with us, he jumped at the opportunity when Derrick offered it to him.

  And it was awful from the start. It’s tough to work and live together, spending nearly all of your waking moments with somebody. It was good that Derrick was there to keep us separated, but the moving experience, in general, wasn’t the same as before. Derrick and I had been on a roll, and when BG came in, he started to get in the way. Talent-wise, he was a good mover, but his work ethic was poor. Terrible. There Derrick and I were, running around loading pieces on the truck, and there was BG, loafing from the truck to the house. He didn’t care. Hell, the slower he went, the more hours he got, and he knew that his own cousin wasn’t going to get rid of him, no matter how unhurried he was.

  So, for the next two months, it was Adam and the Kingstree boys—one day at a time. Things weren’t the same and Derrick knew it. He swore every day that he was either going to kick BG into high gear or kick him off the crew, but in reality he was helping BG get as many hours as possible. I never hid my discontent, but at the same time I couldn’t be mad at the hours we were getting, even in the slow season. Derrick knew he was doing me wrong, and he went to Jill to tell her to give me a raise, so by the middle of December, I was making $10 an hour and gliding through the winter on cruise control just like everybody else.

  Our place was vacant for the twenty-fourth through the twenty-sixth of December. BG went to be with his brothers and his mom in Kingstree for Christmas, while I headed up Interstate 95 to Raleigh where I was greeted with confounded surprise.

  First, my friends and family, who I had not seen in five months, discovered—and made their feelings known to me—that not all movers are husky. I tried to tell them that muscle-bound movers are that way because they lifted weights or because they had recently completed a three-year stint upstate where they had been doing hundreds of push-ups and pull-ups and sit-ups in their prison cell every day. But they didn’t want to hear it. They figured I was going to come home having gone through a Hulk-like transformation, but that just wasn’t the case. As a matter of fact, with my rigorous lifestyle and poor diet, I had actually lost weight, so I was even scrawnier than I had been before I departed for Charleston. Nobody was impressed.

  Second, my pops was grossly disappointed in my attempt at growing a goatee, something I had been working on since I had entered the shelter in July in an effort to try to fit in. Whereas the beards donning the faces of the some of the other guys with whom I had been associated could have made very generous donations to Locks of Love, my facial hair was scraggly and sparse. I was a victim of genetics, and my pops told me that my face just looked dirty.

  Finally, I realized how serious my current project really was, and how immersed in it I had become. Bound for Raleigh late in the evening of December 23, I had left my furnished duplex in Charleston wearing my new clothes, driving my new truck home for the two days that Fast Company had given me off. I paid for gas and food with money, new money that had come from my new life, all having sprouted from my $25 seed money. Months prior, in July, I had given all of my personal belongings—clothes, furniture, books, everything—to my brother, and after my year was complete, I would go on with my life with the money and goods t
hat I had acquired in Charleston. It was an eye-opener. It’s so satisfying to look back after one, two, ten, or forty years at what you’ve accomplished. “Man, those were the good ol’ days.” These! Right now! These are the good ol’ days. I was savoring every moment, the roots of my future. Who knew if I would succeed in achieving my predetermined goals or not, but that didn’t matter so much to me. Thinking back to my first night in July when I stepped off the train in North Charleston, I realize how naïve I had been, how I didn’t know how to get there, necessarily, but I knew where I was going. Just me and a dream. In the end, though, isn’t it really more about the journey, the process; about setting goals, finding something you’re passionate about, and giving it all you’ve got? Isn’t it, as BG would say, about “shooting for the stars; even if you miss, you’ll land on the moon”? (Or as Les Brown would say, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”)

  After the New Year, my life really started to take shape. With a truck, a furnished apartment, and forty-hour workweeks, I was well ahead of where I thought I was going to be after just five or six months.

  We all have our vices, though. For some, it’s alcohol or drugs. Maybe gambling or adultery for others. Fortunately, I was able to keep mine—the greasy buffet at Mama D’s Dirty South Barbecue on Dorchester Road—under control by eating there just once a week on Sundays. For the most part, in fact, my new eating habits were a huge change for the better. I was preparing my own breakfast and packing sandwiches and trail mix for lunch. I was really starting to save money, and I was eating right at the same time. BG would inquire about the dinner recipe for the evening, and then he would shake his head and take off for Burger King or Arby’s, so the kitchen was mine to concoct whatever kind of creations I could come up with. If there was one distinct advantage I had in completing this project, it was that I could eat chicken and Rice-A-Roni® for every meal, every day. I love it and there’s not much I can do about it. I mean, what’s not to like? Chicken is chicken and can be cooked ten thousand different ways, and Rice-A-Roni is just absolutely delicious. For about a dollar, I could whip up two generous portions of “the San Francisco Treat,” one for now, one for later. Sure, I could have saved a few bucks if I had purchased a fifty-pound bag of white rice with my new Sam’s Club membership, but there is simply no way to substitute for those flavor packets inside the box. They’re unequaled. Spanish Rice, Parmesan and Romano Cheese, Beef, Whole Grain Roasted Garlic Italiano, Chicken and Herb, Fried Rice—there are like a hundred different flavors. Joined with a new chicken recipe and a can of corn or green beans, every night was a feast. And that wasn’t even the best part. In just one box of Broccoli Au Gratin Rice-A-Roni (unquestionably the best flavor), I was getting a healthy serving of carbohydrates, thiamine, and folic acid. All that and nearly 100 percent of my daily value of sodium! You can’t beat that.