Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  I was quickly learning the value of a dollar, too. Early on, living at 409B Pine Hollow, I realized why my youth had been filled with scoldings from my mom to “Close the door or I’m gonna forward you the electric bill! What are you tryin’ to do, air condition the great outdoors?” On January 9, the electric bill came, and it was crazy. Crazy to the tune of $209 for our two-bedroom duplex, just for the month of December. BG was already sensitive to spending a dollar on anything he didn’t deem absolutely necessary, so he was particularly annoyed when we got the electric bill. He spent the entire month of January making sure all of the doors and windows were shut tight and lights were off in the house. I liked where his head was at, but at times, it was getting to be a little too much.

  “Dog, what did I tell you about keepin’ the lights on?” he asked me one night.

  “Dude, I’m cookin’ dinner in here.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Them lights cost. Cook during the day. I tell you what, we’re just gonna each start paying for every time we have a light on. I’m gonna keep track.”

  So, he walked around with a notepad for the next two days before he realized that his math skills weren’t up to par. But we understood what we had to do. We started smartening up about our energy usage, and by the end of January, our bill was back down around $125 where it was supposed to be. As a matter of fact, we were conserving across the board—water, laundry detergent, dish liquid, toiletries. Everything costs, and we did everything we could to keep our costs down.

  My only big splurge was a gym membership at East Shore Athletic Club, which, at less than $43 per month, was well worth it. I had access to nautilus and cardio equipment, free weights, racquetball, pool, sauna, whirlpool…everything. Aside from lifting furniture, which was made so much easier by Fast Company’s method of wheeling pieces out the door, I hadn’t done any kind of physical activity with my upper body in six months, and it was starting to show. My arms were thinning out, and my belly was getting pudgy, and, more important, I didn’t feel good. (Interestingly, though, my legs and back were as powerful as they had ever been.) The gym offered me an outlet, away from the stress of the real world, if only for forty-five minutes or an hour and, moreover, an opportunity to start to buff up for the summer.

  Which was important, because after the New Year, my social life started to catch fire. Well, kind of. I gave LD’s—the dance club where BG was a member—a try, but I was all but banished (mostly laughed at) after just one trip at the hands of my sub-par dancing abilities. It turns out that somewhere along the way, somebody decided that dancing (“grinding,” the kids call it these days) should be confined to one’s movement of just his or her hips with limited movement of the rest of his or her body. Screw that. If I’m going to bring it, I’m coming with everything. Head to toe. So, I was banished to the downtown area—not by any means a boring place to hang out—where my dancing skills would be more widely accepted. That is, I could blend in with much bigger crowds that wouldn’t much notice my arms flailing about or my robot-like movements to and fro, although some of my moves were still weeded out over the weeks at the hands of their own unpopularity. (My favorite series was virtually eliminated on the spot when a very attractive girl told me—half-joking—that it looked like I was doing aerobics.) I was never a heavy drinker, which would have only improved my deficient dancing skills, I’m sure, so my weekend excursions weren’t expensive, but, at the same time, they were a very necessary escape from the tension of my daily life.

  BG could fix anything, which turned out to be our bonding point, the time we really got along. It was his time to show off. If anything needed repair, he was right there, on the job, ready to fix it. His abilities were useful around the house when the dishwasher was broken or the toilets were backed up beyond the help of a plunger or we had to install the washer and dryer set that Derrick had rented to us for a year.

  Even better, his handyman skills particularly applied to automobiles, which turned out to work very well for both of us. He was always short on cash, and my truck was always making a different noise. There was a noise for speeds under thirty miles per hour, a noise for speeds over sixty miles per hour, and a noise for the speeds in between. Squeaks, rattles, thumps. Here a noise, there a noise, always a noise. More than once, the lady at the drive-through at Taco Bell made me turn off my truck so she could hear me place my order.

  But BG could always diagnose the problem, usually just by the sound.

  “Ah, shit, man. That’s your motor support. I can fix that. No problem.”

  “Cool.”

  “For fifty dollars.”

  And he would fix it. No problem. I mean, I could have been forking over much more than $50 at a time to make each repair, but I didn’t need to. It was money well-earned on his part and money well-spent on mine.

  On the flip side, he rarely cleaned the house. The only time he would clean was every other weekend when he had a girl coming over to hang out. She didn’t know it, but she was getting the royal treatment. Our place would be disgusting before her arrival, after I had pretty much given up being the only one vacuuming and mopping and washing dishes and taking out the trash. But then one day I would come back from the store, and all of a sudden there was BG in the kitchen, sweating, working harder than he ever did at Fast Company.

  “Adam, can you give me a hand, man. Quick. Sheena’s coming over in like a half hour.”

  Our place would be spotless for the next week or so until I grew tired, once again, of keeping the place maintained, but then BG would make plans with another chick, and he would get back to washing and mopping. I even thought about paying a girl every now and then to come hang out with BG, just to keep the place clean—kind of like a maid service—but I didn’t need to. BG was doing quite well for himself moving furniture by day, skirt-chasing by night.

  It was good that he had an entourage of women in his life, because he was somehow always getting himself into a pickle with at least one of them. My all-time favorite BG experience happened in early February. He was talking on the phone with Marisol, one of his girls from Kingstree, and he was “spittin’ crazy game.”

  “So, wassup, girl, all fine and shit. You gonna come over or what?”

  It didn’t appear that she was in the mood for an eleven o’clock booty call, but BG was fighting hard nonetheless. He was putting in a lot of work when a beep came in on the phone.

  “Hey, girl. Hold on one second. I got another call comin’ in. I’ll be right back…Hello?”

  It was Sheniya, his main girl.

  “Oh, wassup, girl. All fine and shit. You gonna come through tonight or what?”

  He spent thirty seconds or so feeding the same lines to Sheniya that he had just been feeding to Marisol. This was classic already, but his woes were just getting started. When he clicked back over, Marisol asked him who was on the other line.

  “Oh, that was just my bro, checkin’ in. Y’know. Family business.”

  “Really?” she said. “Interesting. So that wasn’t Sheniya, and you didn’t just tell her…”

  Marisol recited the exact conversation that BG had just had with Sheniya. BG glanced, confused, at his phone and then he glanced at me with the same look.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Ah, damn,” he said.

  Instead of hitting the “switch” button on the phone to click over, BG had hit the “link” button, thus turning the call into a three-way conversation. Marisol had heard everything, and there wasn’t much he could do from that point. For the first time in his womanizing career, BG was stuck. He spent the rest of the night trying to talk his way out, including putting me on the phone to vouch for his character, but Marisol didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t ever want to talk to him again.

  Until a day later, when BG cooked her dinner. Then everything was good. And the house was clean.

  Acts like that kept me constantly amazed at the unpredictability of living with BG, in an environment that I wasn’t used to. Each stage in
the previous six months had brought on something new and different, something unexpected. Each progression upward had brought on new opportunity, new people, new attitudes, new conflict, and new resolutions. I mean, I never could have guessed when I first agreed to room with BG that there would be a direct correlation between his sociability and the cleanliness of our house. That was startling to me, but at the same time, it was his way of life. We had to compromise on so many levels. Just as he had to get used to me cooking dinner at night with the lights on, I had to get used to him forgetting leftovers in the microwave. We made sacrifices so that we could get along, and for the most part, we did. We had felt out each other’s personalities during the month of December and by January, we knew how to handle each other.

  FOURTEEN

  CULTURE SHOCKED

  Wednesday, January 24

  The greatest part about moving was the end of the day. As is the case in so many professions, it was so gratifying to look over what we had done. Every day, after settling the bill, we would hobble through the house to the truck, exhausted, with a smile on our faces. “We did that?”

  Even after the moves where we only moved three pieces—especially after the three-piece moves, actually—the gratification would still be there. Three-piece moves were always the most burdensome, particularly since two or three would typically be assigned in one day. Nobody called Fast Company to move a few pieces unless those pieces were massive: ten-foot, two-piece bookshelves, fireproof file cabinets, safes, pianos, and armoires.

  One time, Derrick and I got sent out on the “two-hour mini” from hell to move one piece (a bulky 375-pound oak and leather desk) down three flights of stairs and up another three. I was perturbed and confused at the same time. Why oak? Why not pine? Pine is grossly underrated, at least from a mover’s point of view. Lightweight, durable, stylish. And leather? I want to meet that man, the man that looked at a cow and thought, “Well, I do need somewhere to put my computer.” But, in the end, after you move a desk like that up the stairs, without a scratch on it, it’s worth it. You feel superhuman, like one of those Russian behemoths you see on TV competing to be the strongest man in the world. You want to strap an eighteen-wheeler to your back and pull it down the street and then carry one hundred-kilogram anvils up the stairs—in each arm—for absolutely no reason other than to say, “Look at what a beast I am.” Egos thrive (or die) in the world of moving. Even with Derrick carrying his end of that desk up the stairs with ease and me wobbling around like a newborn colt testing my land legs, it was still quite fulfilling.

  And so were the longer moves. Generally, our moves would average around eight hours, but every now and then, one would go eleven or twelve if we were sent out to Kiawah or Seabrook Island, where we would move one mansion around the corner to another, newly constructed mansion. Those moves usually required two or three trips, even with the way Derrick strategically packed the truck tight and to the ceiling.

  But then came the eighteen-and-a-half-hour move, the move that marked my rite of passage as a mover.

  We were on Daniel Island, which is truly a world all its own. Live there, stay there. Jan Sully, or “Mizz Sully,” had what we call in the moving biz “an assload of stuff.” When we did the walk-through, we couldn’t believe it. You could tell from the looks on our faces that we didn’t know how we were ever going to be able to complete that move. Her house had room after room after room. Her kitchen was larger than our apartment, and the master bedroom had a living room. And each room was loaded with boxes and furniture and mattresses. Then, when we went outside by the pool, we were greeted by enough lawn furniture to host a party of fifty of her friends’ closest friends. It was incredible.

  “Well, ma’am, this is a monster move,” I told her. “It’s going to take a good bit of time.”

  She laughed at me. One, single, hardcore, sarcastic laugh. And then she led us to the garage.

  I wasn’t upset at the fact that her two-car garage was filled to the ceiling. I wasn’t upset that she could have furnished a nine thousand square foot house (which she had done, in fact, when she lived in New Jersey, “just two houses down from Terrell Owens,” the football star) with everything she had crammed into her current four-thousand-square-foot dwelling. I wasn’t even upset that she had gotten her full money’s worth on the tall wardrobe boxes by stuffing the bottoms with shoes and linens. I was just upset that she was so much like my own mom, unable to throw anything away, ever. “Oh, dear, can’t throw that away,” Mizz Sully would say. “That was the first (enter item of your choice) that Gerald and I ever bought. Sentimental value, you know.” I could understand photo albums and pictures that her daughter had drawn when she was four years old. Her son’s first baseball mitt or a pair of his baby shoes. Fine. But this lady had taken it to another level. She had saved every shirt, blanket, dish, and book that she had ever come across. She had six garden hoses. I couldn’t believe all the stuff she had.

  And most of it was in mint condition, untarnished. She had $13 less than God, and she wanted to make sure we knew it. “Guys, please, please, please. Be careful with this. It cost twenty four hundred dollars. It can’t be replaced.” She would have loathed raising me. “See, that’s why we don’t have nice things,” was my mom’s tagline. Mizz Sully’s lawn chairs had a higher resale value than my pickup truck, and her indoor furniture was all antique and pretty much in its original condition. I even felt bad washing my hands with the elegantly designed bar of soap in the bathroom.

  It didn’t help my mental preparation for the day that I was with two guys that I had never worked with. Derrick was house-shopping with his wife, so he had taken the day off, but he had already achieved his rite of passage as a mover. The summer before my arrival, he had completed a twenty-four-hour move—a full day, literally. The lady he moved had started crying, telling him that she absolutely had to be out of the house before the next morning, no other option, so they had worked straight through the night until 8:30 the following day. Now, it was my turn.

  The first truckload was a cinch. We took mostly boxes from the garage and the lawn furniture and headed over to Mizz Sully’s new place—five minutes away—where most of the boxes went into the garage and the lawn furniture went around back. No stairs on the first trip. The ensuing loads weren’t going to be as easy, though. On the way back to load up the second round, we rode in silence. We couldn’t believe what we were facing, that we had just only begun. Most of the rest of her stuff was heavy, and we were not excited about it.

  But, then something crazy happened. Almost miraculously, we got in “the zone.” All three of us, at the same time, five minutes into the second load. It was as if all of our minds telepathically connected and said, “Welp, this crap ain’t gonna move itself, fellas. Might as well get going.”

  We got into a mode where we wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. We were moving independently of our own objective thought. It was as if our bodies were there, moving, but our minds were elsewhere, lost. We knew what we had to do and we did it—subconsciously, for the rest of the day. From noon until 3:30 A.M., we moved Mizz Sully’s belongings with only one short break for dinner. I was so out of it by 3:30 that I was still ready to go back for more. My body had been shut down for hours, numbed to the effects of heaving furniture, and I knew that I wouldn’t feel it until the next day. I knew about “the zone” from playing sports, and Derrick and I had even gotten into “the zone” on moves before but on a much smaller scale. We would be carrying so many pieces at such a fast pace that an hour or two would become a free flow of energy, a free flow of boxes and wood and appliances. But the eighteen-and-a-half-hour move was a different level, the longest job of my moving career. And I was very grateful that I had that experience. Every move I did after that was a picnic, a walk in the park compared to that move. Every time I would be struggling to fight through a move that I just didn’t want to be on, I would just think back to Mizz Sully’s house. “Could be worse.” It was similar to moving when it rained: ra
iny days sucked, but they made us appreciate the sunny days even more; bad tips made us appreciate the good ones; carrying a piano or a Trinitron TV made everything else appear feather-light. The gratification from completing Mizz Sully’s move would last a long time. Derrick had been telling me about his twenty-four-hour move for quite some time—how he had taken only one fifteen-minute break, napping on the bathroom sink, and how he had to call a few of his friends at midnight to replace the other guys on the move—but I didn’t really appreciate the full effect of his stories until I had one of my own to tell.