Scratch Beginnings

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Scratch Beginnings Page 21

by Adam Shepard


  By the time the three of us got back to the shop after 4:00 A.M. and hobbled home by 4:30, we only got a couple hours of sleep before it was time to go back to do it all over again. At least I didn’t have to warm up the truck the next morning.

  I got sick in February. Really sick. Looking for a cultural experience without going abroad, I had eaten five ninety-nine-cent tacos from one of the van-restaurants on the side of the road on Rivers Avenue, and the ingredients evidently hadn’t met many of the same health regulations that a normal restaurant would. My whole body hurt for a week straight, but mostly my entrails were turning somersaults. It was the biggest setback of my entire journey, only because it lasted seven days, and I didn’t have any way to get treatment. I probably should have been laid up in a hospital, or, at the very least, at home resting, but I couldn’t afford to miss work. I didn’t have a family physician, obviously, or health insurance, and one trip to a doc-in-a-box cost $95 plus whatever I would have to pay for antibiotics, none of which was a feasible option. (It wasn’t until a month later that I learned about the free health clinic.) I loaded up on Maalox and other over-the-counter medicines—necessary expenses that chipped away at my savings account—and I ate everything that the Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies3 at Barnes and Noble told me to. By day four, all of my symptoms had pointed directly to having a stomach ulcer—the result of my consumption of some harmful Latin-named bacteria—so at least I knew what I had to treat. Nevertheless, it was a painful experience that had me falling behind on our moves. Way behind. Derrick tolerated it for two days but then had me work with somebody else until I felt better. No sympathy.

  BG saw that I was hurting, so he gave me a few days off from our constant bickering. But at the first sign of my feeling better, we picked up right where we had left off.

  We always argued. It was like a sport to us, our recreational activity. Literally. That’s how we burned calories at night. If we weren’t bickering, then something wasn’t right, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing since everything was out there, in the open, no holds barred. And 99 percent of the time, our feuds were so trivial, anyway, that we never took each other seriously.

  “Man, BG. What is this? I just bought this box of Frosted Flakes yesterday. How’s it empty already?”

  “Chill, Shep. I was hungry and I couldn’t get to the store.”

  “Right. But the whole box?”

  “Dog, why you even worried about it?”

  “I’m just sayin’, I just hate that you eat all my food, all the time. Sandwiches, chicken, cereal. But, whatever. Just forget about it. You need to save your money anyway, so you can afford to buy wholesale packages of Chap Stick for your big-ass lips.”

  “My lips, huh? Dog, look at your ears. Dumbo. Yo’ goofy ass got the biggest ears I ever seen in my life. Them bitches are like satellite dishes. Shit, go stand by the TV and see if you can fix some of that static.”

  Such was our conversation, at least once a day. We would then retreat to our neutral corners for a couple of hours until BG needed a favor.

  “Hey, man, can I borrow your truck to run up to the gas station right quick?”

  “Sure, here’s a dollar. Grab me a Mountain Dew.”

  “Cool.”

  I wondered which gas station he was going to, though. Maybe the one down in Savannah. He would be gone for at least three hours—usually more like five—and that would tick me off even more, so our dissension would begin anew upon his return. It was a relentless cycle, but somehow it was never very serious. Quick to quarrel, quick to make amends.

  In spite of our clashes, BG and I were still becoming friends. His life had been so much more interesting than mine, and I loved hearing about it. Especially his time in jail. His stories frequently started with, “Shoot, this food is a’ight. But it ain’t as good as the food up at Effin’ham. They feed you right up there.” Or, “Man, I remember this one time up in Kingstree…” Unlike a lot of people he knew—like Derrick, who had served twenty-four months—he had never done any hard time in prison. Even BG’s brother was serving hard time for an arson conviction. He had gotten into an argument with a lady who had made prejudiced remarks, and he told her he was going to burn down her flower shop. So, he did. But BG knew better than to make stupid decisions like that. His violations were always minor—getting locked up for driving with a suspended license or for beating up his stepfather “in self-defense” when BG heard he was assaulting his mom. Or my favorite, the time he went to Bike Week up in Myrtle Beach, which was jam packed with the biggest and baddest motorcyclists on the East Coast riding the biggest and baddest motorcycles in the world. BG rented a moped, and was “actin’ a fool” on the strip. Among thousands of men showing off their hogs, there was BG showing off his moped. “I was lucky the cops got me befo’ one of them Billy Badasses did,” he told me. BG had a personal relationship with mischief, which had left him with many stories to tell and many more to create.

  It seemed like that was the case with everybody in our neighborhood. Everybody was up to something. There was so much culture and flavor in our house just about every night. And you pretty much always knew what everybody was thinking, since few people held anything back.

  That’s how it was when I met Bonesy, a friend of Derrick and BG’s who lived eight houses down from us. He was always showing up at our front stoop asking for a favor. He was a loudmouth with a heavy Brooklyn accent, just as wide as he was short, who had a reputation for speaking his mind. His speech, somehow, was eloquent and scholarly almost, but with a gangster twist. “Dog, I gotta tell ya. I just believe that you didn’t think through the ramifications of your actions beforehand. Nah mean?” (To which BG would reply, “B, what’d I tell you about using words like ‘ramfications’?”)

  I’ll never forget the first time I met Bonesy. I had a monstrous cold sore on my lip, which everybody else was politely ignoring, but Bonesy wasn’t so kind. And once he got going, he didn’t stop until he was tired of listening to himself talk.

  “Dog, what the fuck is that on your lip? Son, please, tell me. I gotta know. That shit is real aggressive. You get in a fight? You burn yourself? It looks like it has a mind of its own. I feel like we should distinguish it as a separate body part or at least give it a name. Do you put a leash around it and take it for a walk when you wake up in the morning? I don’t know whether to sit down and write an ode to it or grab a fly swatter and try to kill it. It doesn’t bite, does it? BG, go get some bug spray. I wanna pop it, but I don’t want to catch that shit, too. It’s not airborne is it? Dog, if I was your roommate, I’d have you quarantined. I was gonna try to bring some broads over tonight, but you can forget all that. You need to just buy some medicine and go to your room for a few days until that shit disappears. Unbelievable. That thing is real aggressive. And look right there. I think it’s having babies. Damn. That sucks. An entire herpes family on your lip. Dog, go to your room…”

  He continued without taking a breath but, lost amid a cloud of laughter, I couldn’t absorb the rest of his tirade. By the end, BG had literally fallen over, partly at what Bonesy was saying and partly at the shock on my face from being introduced to him in such a manner. One of the guys that had come over with Bonesy was looking at the ground, merely shaking his head. “Aaaaats Bonesy!” Everybody needs a guy like him in their life, to keep things honest, and I was happy we had him as a part of the crew. He was the guy that would say what everybody else was thinking and, ironically, didn’t care what anybody else thought.

  The biggest surprise of my time in Charleston was how happy we were. Of course we all had bills and family issues and other stress to deal with, just like everybody else in the world, but we—Derrick, BG, and whoever else was around—always found time for good times. We couldn’t afford the luxuries of going out to eat at elegant restaurants during the week or going to theme parks on the weekend, but we found happiness in simple pleasures. I’ve already mentioned my dancing escapades downtown, which became, at least by the looks I
would get, more of a spectacle than anything else. “Who’s the tall, lanky kid, and why is he moving around like that?” But there was still plenty of fun to be had on the north end of town, like trips to the pool hall or to shoot hoops in Ferndale. Or push-up competitions where we would just put a movie on and go back and forth doing push-ups until we couldn’t lift our arms (I’m still the champ, D, and you know it). Or card games like “Dollar Tonk,” which may sound pretty harmless, but you can lose your money real quick if you don’t know what you’re doing.

  When an unsuspecting newcomer came over, I would get them with the “bread trick,” betting that they couldn’t eat two pieces of white bread in a minute without drinking water. They would always swear that they could perform the impossible feat, and I would always win back the money that I had lost in cards.

  There I was, living on a different side of town than I was used to, living in an environment that I wasn’t necessarily used to, and I took a step back, for a moment, long enough to see the smiles on the people’s faces around me. Wal-Mart employees, welders, electricians, landscapers, people with their own car-detailing businesses—lots of people with their own car-detailing businesses. Maybe we were just “getting by,” but most of us were doing our best to keep our spirits up, finding little bits of inspiration to keep us going. Our moving customers, surely, were thinking, “Could be worse. I could be moving furniture for a living.” I was thinking, “Could be worse. I could be broke.” The people that were broke were thinking, “Could be worse. I could be locked up.” Not sure where the people in prison were getting their inspiration, though. Nevertheless, many of us in the free world had our sights set. Some of us had goals, plans for the future, and some of us didn’t. Some of us wanted out and some of us were living day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck. But all of us were making an hourly wage, and all of us were able to find our own level of happiness. A few of us, though, were able to maintain our discipline—distinguishing wants from needs and sacrificing what we wanted now for what we wanted later—while others couldn’t. BG was struggling to find that discipline, but Derrick had it all figured out. He had known for quite some time what he wanted and in March, he got it.

  He had been house hunting for about five months or so. He was participating in a nonprofit organization called the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA, https://www.naca.com/), which helps make the dream of buying a home a reality for those with faulty credit or those who can’t afford the closing costs and the ten percent that is usually required as a down payment. NACA walks its participants through the tedious process of purchasing their first house, a process that can typically be quite overwhelming for most people. Derrick went to every meeting and caught on quick. At the start, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Five months later, he was quoting interest rates to me and showing me which neighborhoods were ripe for the picking in the real estate market.

  I would say Derrick was about a year (eighteen months without a program like NACA) ahead of where I wanted to be. He had qualified for a house—his first true investment—and by the end of March, he was living in it. His very own (brand new!) home. Seventeen-hundred square feet, two stories, with a patio in the back for grilling and a fenced-in yard for his two-year-old daughter to play. No longer throwing his money away to a landlord, he had a tangible asset to his name. His monthly payments would build up equity in his house, and with the market looking like it was going to take a turn upward, who knew what its value would be in four or five years? Derrick had kept his sights on the American Dream and there was no question that he was getting there.

  Considering the initial goals I had set for myself before I began, my project had been finished on January 11, thirteen days shy of my six-month anniversary in Charleston. I had put away $2,514.36. Sure, rolling up the driver side window on my truck wasn’t easy, and I used a flathead screwdriver in lieu of an ignition key, but it started. And, at the hands of the lone perk of my job as a mover, my apartment was furnished. I was done, complete—but at the same time, I wasn’t. I was just beginning. I wanted to see how far I could go. I had built a nice foundation, but there was so much more I could accomplish by July 24. There was no reason for me to turn back.

  Why do I need to start drinking Dr. Pepper now, when I’ve been doing just fine with Dr. Thunder so far?

  Is it really worth it for me—still “down here” in economy class—to shop at Lacoste and Eddie Bauer when I can look just as good in far less expensive clothes by shopping at the Goodwill or, when I get a good tip, Marshalls?

  I was still always looking for ways to save money, always on the hunt for a deal. “Two for a buck? I’ll take ’em!” I didn’t care what it was. Pork and beans became a new food group to me just because it was always on sale at Food Lion. If the price was right, I could find a use for it. I was a scrooge, greedy. My money! Get your hands off. I’d worked hard, and I was surely going to see to it that I continued to be wise with what I earned. After all, is this really where I wanted to be? If nothing else, I had merely ascended into poverty—certainly not out of it—so I wanted to continue to save, making plans the whole time for what I would do with my loot: How I could invest it to make it so much more valuable to me. One can do a lot with $2,500, so I could only imagine the possibilities in July after I accumulated six more months of paychecks. Night classes at Trident Tech? My own moving truck? An entirely different trade altogether? That’s what kept me going: the idea that I had a better lifestyle in sight.

  I’m not moving furniture forever. I can promise you that.

  As the frost (yes, there is frost in South Carolina) began to subside, and spring blossomed, I was hitting a groove. Derrick was no longer our neighbor, which sucked big time, since he was my main source of entertainment, but I was getting my fill of him at work, and BG was doing more than his fair share of keeping things exciting at home.

  With four months left in my project, I could only imagine that I had reached the height of my experience in Charleston and that I would cruise through the summer lifting furniture, scaring girls with my dance moves, and continuing to save money in preparation for my future life plans. But I was wrong. Nothing I had done in my life had prepared me for April’s cultural lesson.

  FIFTEEN

  FIGHTING FOR RESPECT

  Sunday, April 1

  The month of March had flown by quicker than I thought it would, so I was prepared for the same thing in April. A little excitement or drama here and there, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

  But then the differences between BG and I really began to surface.

  He was getting on my nerves, and it was starting to become more and more serious as time passed. It was growing to be a bit more than a few wisecracks back and forth about each other’s facial features. And usually it surrounded the use of my truck. I didn’t mind feeding him once in a while or letting him borrow some laundry detergent. I didn’t even mind when he borrowed my truck—“borrowed” being the operative word, implying that he would ask first and thereafter return my truck within the agreed upon time and in the same condition as it had been before. But that was rarely the case. He would take my truck and be gone for hours, unaware (or perhaps, indifferent) to the fact that I might need to use it. Twice he even returned it with dings on the hood and once it came back with the front fender bent into a forty-five-degree angle as if he had run into a pole. Every time, though, he didn’t have a legitimate answer for what had happened or why he had my truck for seven hours longer than we had agreed. “Shoot, it was like that when I left,” he would say.

  So, as time progressed, I saw the need to develop a few war tactics to maintain the security of my truck. My comments about having a little consideration when it came to borrowing my truck—the truck I fueled and insured, the truck I had bought—had fallen on deaf ears. BG was going to learn a lesson, and I was going to be his teacher.

  The first eighteen or so times that he had been tardy on returning my truck, I had gone easy on him. “Do
n’t do it again,” I would say, and he would agree. But then it would happen again and again and again, and after the nineteenth time, I had had enough.

  He had borrowed my truck at 7:00 P.M. to run to Auto Zone to pick up a new tail light since mine had burned out. Nice guy, right? At 10:30, he was still there. Unfortunately for him, I knew it was karaoke night at LD’s, and since LD’s was only about a mile from our house, I walked up there just to satisfy my own curiosity. And lo and behold, there it was, my little truck, an eyesore parked so innocently among some of the shiniest cars in Charleston.

  So, I “stole” my truck from BG, drove it back home, and parked it around the corner where he wouldn’t see it. He came home just after midnight, tired from walking, and woke me up from my pretense slumber on the couch.

  “Adam, dog. Somebody done stole your truck, homie.”

  “What?” I asked, groggy-eyed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your truck. It was at LD’s, but it ain’t there no mo’.”

  “Jesus, BG. I thought you were just going up to Auto Zone. What the hell?”

  “I know, man. I’m sorry. Karaoke night, you know.”

  “Oh, man. Karaoke night?” I wasn’t happy, and he was getting a little nervous. “That’s pretty interesting. But not my problem.” I rolled back over to go back to sleep. “I don’t care where it is. You took it. Now, go find it.”

  So he walked back up to the LD’s parking lot and back, to make sure it wasn’t there. He had been quite intoxicated before, so he thought his eyes may have been playing tricks on him.

  Nope.

  “Shoot, man,” he said when he returned nearly an hour later. “Everybody around knows you can start it with a screwdriver, so it was probably one of them.” He started making phone calls. Bonesy. Vurt. Fonz. Rabbit. Nobody knew what he was talking about.

 

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