Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [15]
In the long run, as I said, my fictitious story paled in comparison to many of the real-life stories that I would hear over the course of my stay at Crisis Ministries:
Leo had followed a girl to Charleston from Los Angeles. When he got here, he met her husband, gunfire was exchanged, and now he was at the shelter until he could earn enough money to get back to the West Coast.
Rico, divorced and picking up the pieces from a life gone awry, had been struggling with a crack-cocaine addiction and admitted that the area around the shelter was not exactly prime territory for reform. He wanted to improve his lot so that he could be a better father to his eight-year-old son. Two weeks prior to my arrival, he had walked to Charleston from Georgetown, about fifty miles away.
Billy had hitchhiked to Charleston from his home just outside of Chicago. He didn’t have any friends or family in Charleston. He was thirty-two and escaping his previous life, one that included a bitch of a wife, parents who didn’t care, and a handful of dead-end jobs. The only thing that followed him to the shelter was a felony weapons charge. His intention was to work and save money and fly to Spain to live for the rest of his life. “Just as soon as I learn Spanish,” he told me later.
“Easy E,” who would become a good friend of mine throughout my stay at the shelter, also had a drug problem, which he managed to keep under control better than some of the other shelter residents. Easy wasn’t a typical shelter resident, though. He had worked in Manhattan’s financial district and made a lot of money, but he longed to escape the cold weather, so he came to Charleston with his brother to start a painting company. In the end, his brother had squandered all the profits to a gambling habit, and now Easy was left to start over with nothing. He had an advantage, though. He was very talented, handy with any tool you put in front of him. He worked for EasyLabor, but he always went out on skilled tickets that paid at least $10 an hour. He didn’t need to live at the shelter, but he didn’t mind the conditions, and as he later told me, “The price is right on rent.”
And the list went on. Robert, the leader of the clean-up crew; Carlton, who never failed to get on Ann’s last nerve; “Can George” from Cuba who made enough money to support himself at the shelter by collecting cans from the trash; Smitty, a local man who went home to Summerville to see his family every weekend but didn’t have a full-time job to support them for the rest of the week.
Wasn’t my story their story? Wasn’t their story my story? Weren’t we all in the same situation, stronger because of our past and working our way up from nothing or, if we so chose, remaining stagnant?
Marco was fascinated by my story. He created his own ending when he told me how things would have worked if he had been in my position. “Shit, I’da taken my ass right down to Savannah and told my dad what the business was. He woulda let me stay, I can promise you that.”
And he wasn’t all talk. He was having problems of his own with his father in Charleston, but he wasn’t taking crap like I apparently was. He lived with his father downtown on Spring Street, but he came to the shelter a few nights a week when he was too exhausted to deal with each night’s impending confrontations. But, more often than not, he would merely walk into his father’s house, they would argue, and then he would go to bed. It was not an ideal relationship by any means.
“It wasn’t always like that, though,” he explained. “I come from an ordinary, middle-class lifestyle, but my parents divorced when I was thirteen, and everything went downhill from there. Dad took off for Charleston; Mom remarried.”
After high school, Marco worked a series of jobs that didn’t hold any potential for the future. At twenty-three, he came down