Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  “Well, Shep,” he said, finally apologetic. “I reckon we gonna have to call the police.”

  So I stopped him there and told him where the truck was. Happy that nobody had stolen it, he got the point that I was trying to make, that he needed to have a little more consideration for me and my truck. Whew. Case closed.

  Until three days later, when he took it, again.

  He had gone to Sheniya’s house even though he told me he was running to Burger King to get some food. I knew he was there, because I heard him making plans ahead of time. “A’ight, I’ll be over there in a minute, girl…Hey, Shep! I’m taking the truck to grab a burger right quick. I’ll be right back.”

  I didn’t have anywhere to go or anything important to do, so I watched a movie and took a nap and prepared to exact my revenge. After he’d been gone four hours, I called him on Sheniya’s phone. I knew how sensitive he was about the energy bill, so I played on what appeared to be his lone weakness.

  “BG, check this out. Dog. I’m gonna tell you what’s going on over here at four oh nine B Pine Hollow. Everything electrical in our house…I’m turning it on. I’m talkin’ everything. Lights, radios, TVs, microwave. Everything. I’m gonna go run the washing machine with no clothes in it. I’m gonna open the fridge door and keep it open, and I’m gonna turn on the garbage disposal in the sink. I might even borrow some appliances from the neighbors. It’s gonna be like Chuck-E-Cheese’s in here. When you come home with my truck, we’ll turn everything off.”

  And then I hung up. I even turned the AC down to fifty degrees and opened all of the doors and windows. The electricity meter out back was spinning like a vinyl record, and I had a huge smile on my face. Sure, I had to pay half of the energy bill, too, but I was willing to fork over a few extra dollars for one more attempt at proving my point.

  And he got it. He came rushing home and told me that he was sorry and that it wouldn’t ever happen again.

  Until four days later, in early April.

  By this time, my tolerance was empty and so was my bag of tricks. I had run out of options, and I didn’t know what to do. Refusing to allow him to borrow my truck was perhaps an option, but I really needed the tradeoff for his automotive skills to keep the truck operable.

  It was just after 4:00 in the afternoon, BG had been gone with my truck for two hours, and I was growing antsy. It wasn’t helping that I was watching a replay of Maury’s “April Fooled! Is It a Woman or a Man?” TV show, and I had guessed wrong on an embarrassing six out of eight so far. BG was gone with my truck, and he hadn’t even lied to me about borrowing it by declaring that he had to run up the street real quick. He had simply taken it.

  So I waited and waited, the temperature of my blood rising with every passing moment. My leg started shaking and I didn’t even realize it. A hundred thoughts were running through my head, all surrounding how I was going to get BG to understand that he couldn’t keep using my truck without permission.

  When he came home and walked through the door, I just sat there, staring at him, deadpan, like a psychopath. Derrick was with him, right outside the front door, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  “Adam, listen, I know you’re mad, but, check this out, I had to go pick Derrick up.” He looked at Derrick. “Tell ’im.”

  Derrick stepped in the doorway. “It’s true,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. Evidently, they had made the detour by our house to give Derrick the opportunity to vouch for BG’s character in the whole matter.

  I just kept staring at BG. I didn’t know what to say, but neither did he.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, dog. Somebody had to get ’im, and I was the only one available.”

  Staring, blood boiling. Later I would discover that he was lying anyway, that they had been shooting pool for the last couple of hours.

  “Look, I know you’re mad, Ad, but just don’t even worry ’bout it. It ain’t gonna happen again.”

  And that’s when I got up and walked over to him. “You’re damn right, it won’t happen again, mother fucker.” Eloquently, I pronounced every syllable of every word slowly, with emphasis at the end. I grabbed his shirt by the chest and threw him up against the wall.

  And that’s when I realized exactly what I had done, what an idiot I was. I had known ahead of time that I wasn’t a fighter, but for some reason, it just hadn’t registered at that moment. Before that night with BG in early April, my record as a fighter stood at a disgraceful one out of four, and that was in my neighborhood, the suburbs—Heather Hills—home of some of the worst fighters in the history of fighting. We were such bad fighters that people actually got bored watching us fight at school. “Eh, this sucks. Let’s go back to class.” And I was a particularly poor fighter. Even my one win had come from one lucky, sneaky punch, but none of that was clicking in my mind that night with BG. I was just really, really mad. That’s all. My other efforts thus far had been in vain, and I didn’t know any other way to get my point across to him.

  But BG had other things on his mind, like whooping my sweet ass. I swear I think I saw his eyes light up after I grabbed him, like, “Oh, hell yeah. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, baby! Let’s do this!”

  So we did. In less than five seconds, he had stuck his leg behind mine and tripped me down onto my back. From there, it was all downhill for me. He put his left hand around my neck and just started wailing on me with his right. Remaining neutral, Derrick jumped in to try to break it up. He didn’t care about motive or who had started it; he just wanted us to stop.

  But BG wasn’t stopping. He would have gone all night long, especially since he had the upper hand. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu techniques I had picked up watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship on TV were not working like I had planned. I was no match for BG, and I knew it before he even started swinging on me. Fighting was a sport for him. That is how he had grown up. He and his friends would beat the hell out of each other in the afternoon and then have sleepovers that same night. BG had grown up settling disputes with his knuckles, whereas I had grown up talking things out or seeking creative means of revenge. Fighting? We might wrestle a little if things got really, really, really serious, but that was rare.

  That night, though, BG didn’t care much about our histories. He was completely immersed in the present. Thankfully, just as he was getting warmed up, Derrick finally peeled him off of me and sent him out the back door.

  “Go outside! Go! Get the hell outta here, BG! Goddamn. You’re gonna kill ’im!”

  As much as I could exaggerate about the blood on the ground, I don’t need to. It was everywhere—puddles of it, literally, on the ground, and splotches all over the walls. And unless he cut open one of his knuckles on a blow to my face, none of it was BG’s. Most of it had come from my first fall to the ground when the back of my head had hit the corner of the windowsill in the front foyer and split open. The knockout blow. It didn’t help matters that I was an over-bleeder, either, probably a hemophiliac. Little cuts had always needed an embarrassing number of bandages when I was growing up or the blood would have just kept coming, so you can imagine the effects of a deep gash. Later, BG told me that he thought Derrick’s fruit punch had exploded all over the ground.

  So, there I was, standing idle, right outside my front door, looking directly into the eyes of Derrick Hale, my hero, blood dripping down my neck. I was panting, gasping for breath like I was the one that had just gotten the workout.

  “Damn, man,” Derrick said. “What the hell was that? You ain’t have to fight ’im. I understand where you’re comin’ from, but damn, you ain’t have to fight ’im.”

  I looked down at all the blood on the ground and on my shirt. I touched my forehead and felt a bump. I licked my bottom lip and tasted blood. I took a second to ponder what had just happened.

  To hell with this.

  So I dodged Derrick and ran back through the house where BG was unlocking the door to get out. And I jumped on him. With all fours. If you’re still tryin
g to measure my fighting capabilities, there you go. I fight like a monkey.

  Once again, he flipped me over and started pounding me. Derrick wasn’t going to be so kind this time, though. He ran through the house, unclasping his jewelry along the way. “Y’all muh’ fuckas gonna make me start swinging on both of y’all,” he declared. His eyes were lighting up just like BG’s had when I pushed him.

  I don’t know if BG was taking it easy on me on round two or not, but he didn’t come at me as hard. I think he saw the blood spilling out of my head and onto the kitchen floor and walls and probably felt bad. Wow. He felt bad, so he took it easy on me. I had really wanted to teach him a lesson that night, teach him that my truck was my truck, but the tables had turned dramatically away from my favor. I would love to tell you that I underestimated him because of his indolent moving abilities, that his lethargic attitude shifted the odds in my favor, or that the last couple of months spent weightlifting and doing push ups played to my advantage. Nope. None of the above. It was David versus Goliath except we were about the same size, and BG didn’t stop after the knockout blow. So, nothing like David versus Goliath, actually. More like Cain going after Abel, but I lived to tell the story.

  And the entire debacle had been in slow motion, too. At least my end. People that get in fights will tell you, as they reminisce, “Man, I’m not sure exactly what happened. It was all such a blur to me.” Ha. Not me. My fight with BG was in slow motion, like The Matrix. I remember everything, blow for blow. I remember it like a dream, a nightmare, where I was almost incapable of fighting back, as if my arms were being held back by some invisible force.

  But it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t slow motion, and my arms weren’t being held back. It was real, fast, and I was just a lousy fighter.

  In the end, after I cleaned the blood off the ground and touched up the walls with paint—both tasks that I performed within an hour after the fight—my biggest injury was the back of my head, which surely required stitches, but I refused to give BG the satisfaction of telling his friends that he had sent his pansy roommate to the hospital. I showered and walked around with a towel for the next two days until the gash stopped leaking.

  Later that night, Derrick called to make sure I was all right, relaying the message from BG that I had more fight in me than anybody else he’d whooped in the past. I took that as the compliment it was meant to be, although it was surely an exaggeration, especially considering the fact that I got in maybe half of a blow. Later BG refined his comment by telling me that I was one of the elite class of his victims that had come back for a second round.

  BG spent the night at Derrick’s, and we didn’t talk for three days. When we finally did break the silence, we both apologized—me for throwing him against the wall and him for pummeling me like he did. And then he apologized for stealing my truck all of the time. “I didn’t really know it was that serious to you,” he told me.

  In any event, it was incredible how my relationship with BG grew from there. We were like best friends. He asked me before he borrowed my truck, and he started returning within the time limits I set. He even started taking out the trash on a regular basis and buying groceries. Once, he brought home a pizza for us to share. No toppings, but it was the gesture that counted. Maybe he was just feeling bad for what he had done to me, but I didn’t care. We both had learned a lesson or two, and, as a result, we had a little more compassion between us.

  Maybe the change came since we decided it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to work together anymore at Fast Company. Working and living together was taking its toll and we knew it. So he went to work for another crew, leaving Derrick and I with a different guy every day.

  So that was it! By the middle of April, BG and I were building the foundation for a brand-new relationship and we were rolling. He was giving his paychecks to Derrick (his bank), and I was continuing to save money, too. BG was even on the hunt for a second job. (He inquired at LD’s about being a bouncer, but they laughed at him. “Be serious, B. You? A bouncer? Ha!”)

  As the season continued to roll toward warmer months, we were loving life, all of us, together, taking on the world. But just as my friendships really began to blossom, my time in Charleston reached its abrupt and unexpected conclusion.

  SIXTEEN

  ONE LAST MOVE

  Wednesday, April 18

  My parents’ health was the main reason that I had restricted my project to the Southeast rather than heading out west to Texas or Colorado or California, or up north to Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. Both of them had cancer (my mom, lymphoma, and my dad, prostate cancer) when I had left in July, and I wanted to be close in the event of an emergency. Lymphoma, when caught early, is generally not one of the more serious forms of cancer; however, Mom had a very rare T-cell lymphoma, which turned out to be quite aggressive. And the chemotherapy took its toll. Her hair was gone and her energy was drained, but her will was unscathed. Luckily, they had caught Mom’s cancer early enough, so it was treated before it had the opportunity to spread away from her lymph nodes. By December, six months after the onset of the disease, she had gone through the necessary treatments, and the cancer was in remission. My pops—armed with a new diet and workout routine—also had his situation well under control. Even though I had to follow their situations from afar, things were looking up.

  But then, in March, my mom’s cancer returned and with even greater aggression. Mom would have to go through high-dose chemotherapy treatments (twice, since the first one would be interrupted by a series of infections that needed to be treated with antibiotics in the hospital) and then she would have to go through a very intense stem-cell transplant. After all of that came the tough part, the recovery process, which was said to be just as difficult as the actual treatment, since it was anticipated to be long and tedious.

  My mom is a fighter, with a vibrant spirit at every battle. She’s never really asked for anything from anybody. She is always giving, always looking out for the interests of others. When I was in high school, my friends didn’t come to my basketball games to see me play; they came to hang out with my mom. She’s that kind of person. And for the first time in her life, she needed help, support from those who loved her most.

  Nothing in my life had prepared me for her sickness the first go around, where she fought through the treatments like a champ, so you can imagine how taken aback we all were when the cancer returned. Joanie Shepard—a woman filled with optimism and spirit, the most independent person in the world—actually needed assistance. It was a new situation to me. It was the first time in my life that I had ever witnessed someone close to me suffering. My Uncle Donald, who had passed away in January during my time in Charleston, was perhaps the lone exception, but even he had died with a smile on his face after eighty-four fruitful years of living.

  Mom had a job prior to her lymphoma, but the unemployment benefits ran out during the first round of treatments. With the second round, finances were going to be tight. My father and brother lived in Raleigh and were able to look after her—running errands, taxiing her to and from the hospital for tests and treatments, and the like—but my parents were divorced, so my mom didn’t have a crutch to lean on for financial support. The only thing standing between her and broke was a meager disability check and an even more laughable savings account.

  That’s where I came in, perhaps the ultimate irony of my entire project. With each of us working hard enough just to support ourselves, my brother Erik and I had to come together to provide financial support for our mom. I was to head home to Raleigh, where Erik and I would split the costs on a three-bedroom apartment to look after my mom, to essentially do what I was doing in Charleston, except now it was for real, beyond the scope of my project. I was being called home to Raleigh, where I would work for the local branch of Fast Company, and then as a wheelchair attendant at the airport for as long as it took for my mom to become self-sufficient and ready to go on with her life as her own, new person. When she was better, I would head
to New York or California where I would have the freedom to begin to use my college degree in search of my own passion.

  Unfortunately, I would have to start over on the bottom rung at the Fast Company in Raleigh. Each franchise is independently owned and operated, so while it would be rather easy for me to get a job there based on my experience, my salary would not transfer. By April, I had worked my way up to $11 an hour at the Fast Company in Charleston, but in Raleigh, I would start over and have to prove my worth to the company once again.

  At the end of April, with my time at Fast Company in Charleston coming to an end, I began thinking about how well I had done, how I had stacked up as a worker. Was I average or above or below? How would my peers grade my moving abilities?

  I figured many of the guys at the shop would probably give me a “C,” since most of them hadn’t had the opportunity to work with me for longer than a day or two, and since they mostly knew me by my catch-me shorts and horrendous truck-packing abilities. (Of the three times that Derrick had me pack the truck on small moves, he had to take over twice after seeing that we weren’t going to be able to make it on one trip. The other time, we drove to the unload with the back doors open and a dog house strapped over the edge.)

  The management (Jill and Jed) would most certainly give me an “A” since they didn’t care if I was an efficient mover or not. As long as I was coming into the shop in the morning ready to work and in uniform and returning in the evening without a damage report, I was gold to them.

  The customers would also rate me pretty high, I think, but there again, the grading scale was pretty slack. They would give high marks to any one of the guys at Fast Company who were delivering their furniture from one house to the next without a scratch on it. The customers couldn’t tell if we were fast or slow. By their standards, every mover was fast.