by Adam Shepard
On the other hand, Derrick’s rating of my moving skills was a tricky guess. He would surely tell his buddies that I was a “D-minus,” just to be a bad-ass, but with extra credit for my improvement as a reckless driver over the months, he would probably consider me to be about a “C+.”
A “C+.” Yep, that’s probably what I was, if that. I was average—not terribly strong, not terribly quick, not terribly knowledgeable. All I had going for me, really, was my ability to listen and my stamina, the fact that I could work all day with only a jug of water and a bag of trail mix as fuel. Derrick brought the best out in me, no doubt, but even then, I still couldn’t hang with him. I was just another guy in the shop, fighting to make a living while dragging behind Fast Company’s finest.
I packed my belongings on the last Sunday in April and prepared to leave Charleston. I thought about what I had done, what I had accomplished, and the challenges to come. I was not, by any means, looking forward to moving furniture in Raleigh. One might have imagined that after my nine months in South Carolina, I would have grown used to the difficulties of moving furniture every day, unaffected by the tediousness of the job and the sore muscles and joints that followed in the evening. But that wasn’t the case at all. It had been incredibly demanding on my body, increasingly so with each passing day. My back would burn in the morning when I woke up, and my legs would follow suit in the afternoon. There was no immunity to it, no moment when things would “click,” and my body’s defense mechanisms would ward off the aches and pains of bending and lifting. At least if there was, it hadn’t happened to me yet.
So there I was, the bed of my pickup truck packed with boxes of toiletries and wall decorations and lamps and bags of linens and clothes, ready to hit the road to begin life anew, again, with new people and challenges to meet and new ambitions to pursue. While paying monthly expenses and buying food and fuel and funding my own social agenda, my bank account and cash on hand totaled just under $5,300 from wages and tips, more than enough to finance whatever my next dream would be. I was pumped. I looked at what I had done, and I looked at what I had experienced. From my first night on the streets of Charleston to living in the shelter to working with Shaun at Fast Company and then finally working my way up to join Derrick’s crew and live with BG, I was proud of what I had accomplished. But, in truth, I really looked forward to tomorrow. In the future, no matter where I stood financially, I could rest easy knowing that things were going to be okay.
Look at what I’ve done with $25. Imagine what I can do with $5,000 and the money that I’ll continue to earn as I complete my project.
The coming months wouldn’t be easy, but I was happy to be able to care for my mom, no matter where my financial situation stood.
I knew that Derrick’s future was bright. I didn’t have to see his beautiful house or his whopping bank account to know that. He had that killer instinct, the hardworking aura that showed that he was ready to meet, head-on, any challenge that stood in his way.
The last time I saw Derrick was the Saturday night before I left for Raleigh. He was having a belated housewarming party, and he invited a few people over for food and drinks. In his world, a “few people” could easily turn in to busloads, which it did. As soon as word got out around Kingstree that Derrick Hale was having a party back in Charleston (free food and drinks everybody!), his house was full of people. For me, it was uneventful, not exactly my scene. I showed up, had a hot dog, and talked with his wife. Derrick was preoccupied in the garage, shooting dice with his friends. He shook my hand in passing to the bathroom but quickly returned to his game. I left the party shortly thereafter, a very undramatic exit.
After I got back to Raleigh, Derrick and I would exchange stories of our moving woes over the phone. Working without Derrick, even for just a short time, would turn out to be one of the more difficult experiences of my life. Aside from the emotional drain of dealing with my mom’s illness, I had to work with a different Fast Company crew every day—guys that didn’t have half of the expertise or work ethic as the movers in Charleston but, interestingly, were still getting paid over $1.50 more per hour. Forget moving with Derrick. I was spoiled rotten having had that opportunity. That summer in Raleigh before I moved on to work as a wheelchair attendant at the airport, I even grew to appreciate, and miss, the days moving with BG.
I was pulling for BG, but I couldn’t be certain what the future held for him. Fifty dollars at a time, he had nearly emptied the account he had been keeping with Derrick and was back to squeaking by, paycheck-to-paycheck. If nothing else, his expenses were declining, though, since he was filling my vacant spot with two other guys. After hearing that I was leaving, he had put the word out among his cronies that he needed a new roommate until our lease was up in December, and in just a short time he had received a huge response from people that wanted to move in. So, he picked the two closest to him (Vurt and Jaime) to move in and split all of the expenses three ways instead of two. Vurt would sleep on the couch and Jaime would sleep in my old room. Jaime had been living at a hotel, so I sold all of my furniture to him for $80, which turned out to be a sweet deal for both of us. I didn’t have to haul it home, and he would have a little something to begin his own new life, a jump start, just like Crisis Ministries had given me at the beginning of my journey.
On that final Sunday, though, before I hit the road with everything I owned riding along with me, I had one last stop to make: Mama D’s Dirty South Barbecue. I couldn’t resist one final trip there, but I also wanted to take BG out to lunch and tell him who I really was. My “outing” to Derrick three days prior had been met with unemotional indifference. After all, I was modeling my project after a lifestyle in which he had already proven successful, so, if anything, I had been learning from him.
Unfortunately, after BG and I packed the truck, there was no room in the front seat for him to fit, so we exchanged our last good-byes outside in the driveway. Leaning on the bed of my truck, I took the time to explain to BG how I had come to arrive in Charleston, what my project had been all about. I explained that I had started with virtually nothing and was now heading back to Raleigh with, well, something. We discussed how I had done it—with thrifty spending and aggressive saving—and I told him that he was ahead of where I was when I started. With a little patience and discipline, he could accomplish the same things that I had. I told him that if he wanted out of this lifestyle, he could get there; it all started with a little goal setting and a few budgeting techniques and then it would sprout from there. I told him that it would be a shame for him to be scraping by for the rest of his life when he had the potential—I know it—to do so much better.
His reaction, similar to Derrick’s, was anticlimactic, since, again, I was living a story based on a lifestyle that he had been living since birth.
“Wait. So, you ’bout to put me in a book?” he asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“You gonna write ’bout how I whooped yo ass?”
The conversation was two-sided and never uncomfortable either way. He admitted that he had made some questionable decisions with his social life and that he could probably tighten up in some areas. He told me that he knew what he had been doing was wrong, and he knew what he had to do to change direction. He loved his friends, he said, but he knew that their up-to-no-good influence was wearing on him.
I told him I believed in him and that I was going to miss him and his exciting, mischievous behavior. I told him to be good to all of his girls.
And then I shook his hand, hopped in my truck, stuck the screwdriver in the ignition, and drove toward the next step in my life.
EPILOGUE
A YEAR LATER:
A Didactic Look at What I Learned and
Where I Go from Here
So there it is. My 365-day climb from nothing to something; my 365-day experience in a culture that I had only observed from afar prior to living in Charleston.
I want to say that my year flew by as quickly as I have written
, but that wasn’t the case at all. Nearly every day seemed to pass by in slow motion. I could have written another hundred pages filled with war stories from the guys at the shelter: stories about the guy who got stabbed outside the shelter with a six-inch blade and came to the soup kitchen the next day showing off his wound; stories about the move where we had to dodge dog bombs throughout the entire house; stories about the move where the customer backed into the mailbox, pulled forward, and got out, again leaving his car in reverse and sending it back into the mailbox; stories about out-of-town moves to Florida and Virginia and the side move where I accompanied Brooklyn Bonesy (a narcoleptic pothead) to Tennessee; more woes and good times with BG; the crack-ring bust in our neighborhood. And the list goes on.
If you had asked me in July of 2006 what I had the potential to accomplish during this project, I would have told you what I thought I could do, but indeed, in the end, I exceeded my own expectations. I had no idea what to expect in Charleston, and I must say it was quite a learning experience. When I began, I could never have guessed that I would have the experiences that I had or meet the people that I did. I didn’t imagine that homeless shelters like Crisis Ministries offered the services that they do, and I certainly didn’t imagine that guys like Marco and Phil Coleman and Easy E and “Hustle Man” even existed in those shelters. I had assumed that everybody would be old, hairy, and smelly.
And later, outside of the shelter, I had no idea that guys like Derrick and BG, having come from the same rural hometown with limited opportunity, could have such different attitudes about life. Although I speculated, I never would have imagined that the cultural differences between BG and I would lead to such drama, and I certainly had no idea that my time in Charleston would end so abruptly. I was clueless.
But, in the end, what did I really learn about the vitality of the American Dream? What conclusions am I able to draw on the persistence of poverty in America? What am I able to take away from my experience? And most importantly, where do we go from here?
For starters, I learned that we are the product of our surroundings—our families, our peers, and our environment. If a child grows up among poor attitudes, zero ambition, and parents that say, “I ain’t got no sugar,” then he or she is probably going to one day have a poor attitude, zero ambition, and is going to say, “I ain’t got no sugar.” Many break out, of course. There are countless stories of PhDs and corporate executives and attorneys that have broken free from the reins of the lower classes in spite of their humble beginnings. It happens all the time, but the odds are most certainly stacked against them. I consider myself even more fortunate now than when I began my project: my parents are educated and loving and they showed me the way. Now, more than ever, I understand that things could have been much different for me in my life. I was lucky.
I learned that life is a bitch. Everybody faces adversity. Everybody. Nobody is immune. I met—and lived alongside—poor people in Charleston who were miserable and others who were delighted with their lives. By the same token, I’ve met millionaires in my life who have found true happiness just as I have met millionaires who are some of the least happy people on the planet simply because they don’t know how to handle their wealth or, worse, they have never even had the opportunity to discover what happiness is in the first place. Adversity attacks at every level.
Yeah, life is a bitch for sure. Or actually, let me rephrase that: life can be a bitch. It’s all about how we look at things. Moving furniture sucks. Breaking your toe or suffering through seven days of diarrhea sucks. I would have loved a day off, time to relax and rest, maybe a vacation. But that is unrealistic. Good times abound, but time off is a poor investment if you live at the bottom. There are plenty of ways to have fun, plenty of ways to look at our lives as more than just tolerable. All the while, we have to be more focused, keeping our eye on what we really want to do with our lives: move up. Or not. We’re either on a mission or keeping our flight grounded. Either way, we are the pilots.
More than anything else over the course of my project, I grew to appreciate, even more than before, that we live in the greatest country in the world. America is more fertile and full of more opportunity than any other country. We are the eminent superpower of the planet. Can you imagine the results if I had done my project anywhere else in the world? You think I would have had quite the success if I would have started in Asia or Eastern Europe or Latin America? You ever been to Guatemala? Wow. You want to talk about poor people with little opportunity? They live in huts, grow their own food, and drink unsanitary water. Their economy is so bad that they immigrate to Mexico in search of more favorable circumstances. So, in spite of all the whining and complaining that goes on in our country, I’d say we’re doing all right.
Perhaps the ultimate irony of my project is that the American Dream has evolved into so much more than financial ambition. It used to be that a European sold all of his possessions and sailed to Ellis Island with $100 in his back pocket and a dream in his head. He worked hard in a factory, got married, and had 2.3 kids. His children worked hard and got an education so that their children could have a better life. And on and on and on and well, here we are.
But today, the American Dream means so much more. Coupled with the ideal that you have the freedom to work hard and accomplish what you want in your life, it’s about finding happiness and solace in your present lifestyle. This is a fact. I know it, because I saw it. Just as I met people that would rather own a Cadillac with shiny chrome rims than a home, I met people who didn’t care about their car or their furnishings or where they lived; they knew they’d have all of that one day, and they were driven by that satisfaction and that motivation. Some are happy now and are on a quest to stay that way. Others, in search of unworthy pursuits, are after a happiness that they may never find.
Why? Mainly, because so many of us don’t have five-year plans on how we are going to better our lot over time rather than search for quick fixes. A five-year plan is invaluable. It gives us a sense of purpose in our present lives, the peace of mind every day that what we are doing has a purpose, a means to an end. A five-year plan doesn’t have to be set in stone but should be an amendable draft that serves as a guideline for our future. A fat savings account, a house, a business, a management position. Knowing what we want and setting the gears in motion gets us up in the morning and keeps us going throughout the day. “In five years, I’m going to be doing bigger and better things.” Exactly. Now, go do it.
Some people do have five-year plans. I met a guy when I was working at RDU Airport who went grocery shopping every two weeks at BJ’s Warehouse and bought all of his food for that time period. He never went out to eat, always packed his meals, or cooked them at home. Why? “I did a little experiment a few years ago,” he said. “My wife and I save six hundred dollars a month this way.”
Unfortunately, few of us take ownership of our lives. We live in an “It ain’t my fault” society. Nothing is our fault. Ever. We’re fat because of our genetics, we suck at math because we had a bad teacher, and we’re cheating on our wives because they aren’t putting out like they used to. It has nothing to do with the fact that we aren’t eating right or exercising, that we aren’t doing our homework, or that we aren’t pulling our own weight in our marriages. It’s everybody else’s fault. It ain’t ours.
And that’s the biggest difference I noticed between the people who appeared happy and those who didn’t—those who I could tell were working their way up, like Derrick, and those that were “lifers,” like Shaun. Derrick knew what he had to do and he didn’t make excuses to cover his mistakes. Shaun, always the victim, walked around like somebody owed him something.
It’s a pretty simple concept, actually: one day, you’re twenty and full of potential, and the next day you’re eighty, submerged in a world of reminiscence. Are you proud of those last sixty years, or are you looking back with a chip on your shoulder, mad that you could have done a little more?
The bottom line is t
hat we have a lot of work to do. Attitudes need to change, big time, on both fronts: the livelihood of the poor is at stake just as is the livelihood of the higher ups. We’re only as strong as our weakest link, right?
In the end, though, where do we turn for help? Whose responsibility is it to offer assistance to those in need?
Well, everybody’s.
I’ve already made an attempt at pointing out that those at the bottom can work harder to do their part. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. There’s nothing revolutionary about that aspect of my story. That’s just life. Some people get it done; others don’t. Some people merely have a dream, while others have a vision of turning that dream into reality. Some people put ten percent of their paycheck in the bank, and others buy lottery tickets and beer. I read a story recently about a guy that went to a financial advisor with $42 when he was twenty-eight. “I don’t know what to do with this money,” he said. “But I want you to show me.” He saved all of his extra money every month, and thirty years later, he retired as a millionaire.
But what about everybody else? What about government programs? Surely, current welfare programs just aren’t cutting it, but what is the alternative?
To begin with, we need to acknowledge that our system is flawed and that we can be doing better. There isn’t one fix-all answer out there, but there are steps that we can take to begin to appease the cycle of poverty. A friend of mine from Ohio—Neil Cotiaux—offered me those steps:
More free classes on parenting skills are needed to help create a better environment for at-risk infants and young people.
The government must step up its commitment to clean, safe, affordable housing in new and innovative ways. Too much is spent on defense and not enough on domestic programs. Affordable housing needs additional support from both the legislative and executive branches at the federal and state levels. Home ownership education programs for first-time home buyers appear in good supply, but the stock of accessible housing needs work.