Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [30]
But I suppose sometimes you just have to toss those feelings to the side and look forward to the next day. And I was really looking forward to my first Sunday working downtown with George, the guy I had met at the construction site on Friday.
FIVE
SUNDAYS WITH GEORGE
Sunday, July 30
I was quickly catching on to the system at the shelter. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t hear Ann’s wakeup call until her second time through when some of the other guys were up and stacking their mattresses, but I would still have plenty of time to brush my teeth before I grabbed a mop to clean the floor. I was convinced that the reward of checking in a half hour early at night to shower before everyone else was well worth ten minutes of sloshing a mop from one end of the room to the other in the morning.
Sundays were everybody’s favorite day. Several guys talked about Sunday starting on Wednesday. For some, it was the end of a long week of hard work, and a chance to finally catch up on a day of relaxation. For others, it was merely another day of relaxation. For just about everybody, though, it was Church Day. And Omelet Day. And Free Clothes Day. All rolled into one. Battalion Baptist Church would send a shuttle to the shelter beginning at 8:00 every Sunday morning and ending whenever the shelter’s front stoop was empty. Before the morning service, the homeless folk were served three-egg omelets loaded with bacon, sausage, tomatoes, peppers, and cheese and were given a bag of donated clothes to take with them back to the shelter. Every Sunday morning, shelter-ites would stand outside the shelter, waiting for the shuttle, giddy with anticipation, and on Sunday afternoon they would return from church with looks of satisfaction stretched across their faces (except Rico, who would walk out of the ser vice every Sunday without fail, stomach full, clothes in hand, after all of the homeless people in attendance were, according to him, “Demeaningly asked to stand up and be recognized”).
But church wasn’t for me. Not that Sunday. The rusty shovel and garbage bags that George handed me as soon as I arrived at his house downtown were substituted for my Bible. And when he led me around back to the courtyard where his dog had been doing his business for the duration of the summer, I knew right away that I was going to be earning every penny of the $10 an hour that he said he was going to pay me.
You know the expression, “You better go to college or you’ll be shoveling shit for the rest of your life”? It is a job that everyone aspires to avoid, a figure of speech that is never supposed to materialize into reality. But it does, and for me, it had. I chuckled to myself, amazed that it was really happening to me. There I was, alone, standing before nearly seventy mounds of dried, brittle dog dung in George’s “Courtyard O’ Shit,” wondering if that was where dreams went—to be defecated right along with Sparky’s morning meal. I knew when I began my journey that life wasn’t going to be easy, that I would have to be prepared to perform a wide variety of jobs in order to earn cash, but I had never forecasted this.
If you’ve ever shoveled shit, then you know, and if you’ve never shoveled shit, then you still know: as far as jobs go, it doesn’t get much worse. There’s no way to add glitz or glamour to it. Shoveling shit is shoveling shit. But as much as I really, really, really did not want to spend my Sunday picking up piles of poop, I never once thought about dropping the bag and leaving. Who would? Ten dollars an hour, cash! It was baffling to me that none of the other guys had showed up to claim their piece of the action.
So I shoveled. And shoveled. Dodging one mound to pick up another, I realized that there was no secret to this job, no way to conceive a more efficient system that would get the job done quicker. I just had to drudge through it. Scoop and toss, scoop and toss.