I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [30]
Things get a little fuzzy for me for a while as far as trying to remember exactly when and why we moved to certain places. I remember that this was when we ended up staying in a shelter for a few months while my mother tried to straighten herself out yet again. Then for a while we were in a housing project called Alabama Plaza, which was a bunch of old brick apartment buildings and a couple of townhouses that were all kind of smashed together. There, the main activity was to sit outside in lawn chairs and just wait for something to happen. Whether it was a fight or an arrest or a car chase, something was always going down, and you wanted to have a front-row seat for whatever it might be.
After it became clear that I couldn't bum or steal enough food to stay full, I decided to try selling newspapers again, like I had done when I was living with Velma. She used to take the kids in her care down to get bundles of papers on weekends and then have us stand on street corners selling them in order to make a little money. I had been a pretty good little salesman working for her, so I decided to give it another try. Each Sunday morning, I'd go down to the Commercial Appeal and get a couple bundles of newspapers, then sell them roadside at various intersections. Typically, I could make about seventy to eighty dollars, but on a good day I could pull in even more. That was enough to buy dinner for a week and sometimes even new clothes if I'd managed to outgrow what I had.
I loved the feeling of being able to do something for myself. Every week I was out with my newspapers and just about every week I sold them all. Then I could face the rest of the week knowing that I wouldn't be hungry. It became my Sunday morning routine to get up early and be out on the corner around six o'clock. Eventually, I even got promoted to one of the best corners in the area because the newspaper knew they could trust me to show up and work hard. Other people would get bored and wander away before they had finished selling their stack, but I was determined to stick it out. I made a game out of it, telling myself that if I left before the last paper was sold, I'd lose.
One day, when I was fourteen, a scary-looking neighborhood guy came up to me and said, "I know you know what this is." He was right. I did. I could see that he had a gun in his pocket--it was a mugging.
"Where's the money?" he asked. He was acting totally normal so that the cars passing by had no clue what was going on. It just looked like a man talking to a kid on a corner, but he definitely meant business.
"It's in my coat over there," I told him. It had been a warm morning and I'd taken my coat off as I walked up and down the street. I figured if I could get just a few steps ahead of him, I could take off running, but he must have known what I was thinking.
"If you run away, I'll blow your back out." The way he said it, I could tell he meant it. So I walked over to my coat slowly and pulled out the money. I was just finishing up, so I had a lot--there was about a hundred dollars in my coat because it was such a nice day and a lot of people were out. I carefully took it out and handed it over to him. He took the money and ran away.
I was pretty depressed, but at least I knew I had about twenty or thirty dollars in my jeans pocket, and he'd been too dumb to ask if I had anything else. It was going to be a hungry week.
THE DCS EVENTUALLY FIGURED OUT where I was (or maybe just finally noticed that I was no longer in their custody) and they started up with their visits again, though this time they didn't try to take me away because my mother didn't give them a chance to. From my running away adventures in foster care, she had learned the rules of the system and ramped up her refusal to let the caseworkers in the house. The caseworkers obviously knew exactly where I was, which was right on the other side of the door, or maybe just hiding in the bedroom; but the law said they couldn't come in without a court order, and so long as they showed up empty-handed, my mother