I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [13]
Once you got inside, though, it was pretty clear that we weren't exactly living the dream. The front door opened into a small living room where we had a bunk bed pushed against a wall. There was one little bathroom, a small kitchen, and a tiny bedroom. Nine of us were living in a house that was less than five hundred square feet.
I learned later that in most houses, people have their special places around the kitchen table, and when the family sits down to eat together, the food on your plate belongs to you; the food on somebody else's plate belongs to them. That wasn't the case with us. We didn't have a kitchen table. When my mother bought groceries, she would make normal dinners, just like any other family, but there weren't any rules on how we ate. We would all just jump on whatever food was around, and if you weren't quick enough, you lost out. The same was true with those bunk beds in the living room. They belonged to whoever happened to be the first ones to fall asleep there that night. We looked out for one another when we were out on the street, but at home it was every man for himself.
Whenever our clothes started to get dirty, one of us kids would fill up the bathtub--we never owned a washing machine that I can remember--and would scrub them by hand with a little soap before rinsing them and hanging them up to dry. You washed your own clothes and we all did our best to keep ourselves as clean as we could.
I don't remember exactly how long we lived in that house, but I remember turning seven there, so I think it was at least six months, which was a long time in one place for my family. And as nice as it seemed at first to have some open areas to play, it turned out that our neighborhood wasn't really the best place to be running around outdoors. Across the street was an empty field that was actually just a dumping ground for people who didn't want to pay for garbage removal, and then a little farther beyond that you could see a big truck farm, where all kinds of eighteen-wheelers would park to collect their loads and then drive off to wherever they were headed. The air always smelled like diesel and you could hear the high-pitched sound of the brakes squeaking whenever they pulled up or drove away. Sometime after we moved away, that truck farm was bought and cleaned up by one of Memphis's biggest businesses, Federal Express. It's now a much nicer-looking facility. It's funny to think about that now, since FedEx was one of the major financial backers of The Blind Side movie, and here, one of its trucking hubs is just a few hundred yards from one of the places I remember most clearly from my childhood.
It's hard to imagine that that little house could have looked any rougher than it was when we lived there, but I visited it recently while writing this book and I was shocked by how small it felt, even with the walls kicked in--because now it's just an abandoned crack house. I had to duck going through each doorway, and my head was just a few inches away from the ceiling, which is the only thing about the house that is still pretty much intact. The wall that divided our part of the duplex from the one next door is all gone and the sheetrock in each room has been smashed to pieces. All of the plumbing has been stripped out of the walls and there are empty bottles of Colt 45 thrown around the floor. The yard is full of old trash and broken glass that's been grown over by kudzu. When we lived there, my brothers and I tried to at least keep our little patch of grass clean.
But two things were still exactly how I remembered them: the back door leading out of the bedroom and the tire shop on the corner. I'll always remember them because they were major players on the day my world was turned upside down.
CHAPTER THREE
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