Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [19]
He had arrived at the shelter on Monday. Without the ability to work and without health insurance, he didn’t have the means to provide rent or food. So there he was at the shelter with hopes that he could receive the medical services he desperately needed, as well as legal assistance. It was just one more of the shelter’s many tragic tales. One day he was standing upright, walking independently with a self-sufficient lifestyle. The next, he was at the shelter in a wheelchair, at the mercy of the staff at Crisis Ministries. Another innocent victim of circumstance.
“But I’m alive,” he told me with a surprisingly enthusiastic smile. “Shit, a lot of ’em don’t make it, so at least I got that goin’ for me.”
The nurse called my name.
In the treatment room, she explained more about why everyone was required to take a TB test. I learned that the sometimes-fatal airborne disease tuberculosis has become more and more of a serious health risk since the 1980s, especially in enclosed settings that promote its spread, such as prisons, hospitals, and homeless shelters. The disease is very difficult to cure, but Crisis Ministries manages to keep the problem under control by testing its guests before they have lived in the shelter for very long. The process began with an injection in the forearm. Within five days, we were required to come back to see if there were spots on our arm around the injection site. No spots and we were allowed to stay, but positive results meant that arrangements would be made for treatment, and we would be prohibited from residing at the shelter. The process was quite simple and took less than two minutes. I would have to come back on Monday so the nurse could inspect my forearm for spots.
After the poking and prodding was over, it was almost lunchtime. A swarm of hungry shelterees and other people from the surrounding neighborhoods had assembled behind the building to be led into the men’s shelter kitchen, which also doubled as the soup kitchen for the city of Charleston. The mid-day meal was open to everybody, and the long line that stretched around the building made me happy that there were separate lines for shelter residents and the rest of the community.
We still had to wait ten minutes until the doors opened for lunch. The topic of conversation surrounded the next day’s “Free Ride Friday.” One Friday each month during the summer, the Charleston Area Regional Transit Authority (CARTA) offered complimentary rides on all of its bus routes throughout the city. CARTA’s generous gesture gave Charlestonians an opportunity to discover the efficiency of the bus system while hitching a free ride around town. And naturally many of the shelter residents, myself included, were excited about that. Well, all of us except one lady who didn’t hesitate to protest, “Shit, it ain’t even really worth it. That bitch be jam-packed with a gang of muthafuckas just ridin’ around in circles all day tryin’ to keep cool. Them buses be smellin’ sum’m awful on ‘Free Rod Fridee.’”
Lunch, it turned out, was the best meal of the day. It was always comprised of a combination of whatever the volunteers had worked hard to whip up in the kitchen and the food that Linda had accumulated in the Crisis Ministries truck from area restaurants. That first day’s meal included chicken breasts, crab legs, meatballs, green beans, rice, salad, cornbread, and our choice of sweet tea, water, or soda. When I went back through the line for seconds, they had added pork chops and potato salad to the menu in lieu of the crab legs, which had disappeared rather quickly. For me, it was a bit unfortunate that lunch was the most varied meal of the day, since I was hoping to have a job as soon as possible that would prevent me from attending the soup kitchen.
And that’s precisely where I was headed. The sooner I could find a stable job, the sooner I could get out of the shelter and into my own