Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [39]
The five o’clock hour was approaching as I passed by the stop for the shelter and rode the bus on to the library to search the classified ads on the Internet and to check the profile I had set up at Charleston.net.
Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing! No responses to the queries I had posted with prospective employers and no new postings for jobs. With low expectations, what I had anticipated to be an easy job search was proving to be much more complicated. I decided that the hour-and-a-half-or-longer one-way trek by bus to O’Charley’s was not going to be worth the pay, and even the opportunity waiting for me at the car wash had left me wanting more. I knew that once I had a job, holding on and working my way up would be the easy part, but was $6.50 an hour as good as I was going to find?
The excitement at the shelter continued on Tuesday night. In fact, now that I think about it, the shelter was exciting every night. Between catching up on the day’s happenings and watching as new guests tried to blend with the shelter veterans, every night brought a new experience and new drama. All it would take was somebody cutting in line or somebody inciting an argument on the wrong subject, and before we knew it, half of the shelter would be offering their opinions. And we loved excitement. We could be sparked by anything. If Jimmy somehow finagled his way through the line to get seconds before everybody else was served their first meal, you better believe that somebody would find out and then everybody would end up telling Jimmy what they really thought about him.
But most intriguing was the fact that it didn’t matter what the subject was. If a guy stated, “Kittens are cute,” sure enough, someone would support him just as someone else would interject with, “Kittens are a bunch of pussies.” Dinner in particular would never be served without some argument or incident. But I suppose that confrontation was what kept us going, kept us free from the monotony and boredom of the everyday life of going to work and then coming to live at a stinking homeless shelter. Imagine that. Imagine waking up every morning at a homeless shelter, and then off to some dead-end job, only to have to look forward all day to returning that same evening to the same stinking homeless shelter with the same stinking men. Confrontation, interestingly enough, served as an outlet to keep us sane.
And the humor. Those guys were some of the funniest, wittiest guys I’d ever met in my life. It was the most bizarre thing. One minute, two guys would be barking at each other about the last dinner roll or a bar of soap or the war in Iraq or whatever, and the next minute they would gang up on some other guy, making fun of the way he sounded when he snored or a word he had pronounced incorrectly. “Ephipany? Ha! Did that mother really just say ephipany? I got an ephipany for ya. You’re a dumb ass.”
Yeah, humor kept us going. I could pretty much count on getting a good laugh in every night. Larry never introduced himself to the new guys as a garbage man; he was “the chief sanitation engineer for truck number six of the James Island Department of Waste Disposal.” Philly, notorious for always borrowing money, would walk up to an unsuspecting newcomer and say, “Hey, man, do I owe you a dollar?”
No.
“Oh, a’ight. Cool. Say, got a dollar I can borrow?”
We would all erupt in laughter at things that might not be funny to outsiders, but to us—deprived men refusing to be deprived of our dignity—it was hilarious.
One night stands out as distinctly comical. After dinner, Marco and I were playing gin rummy with a couple of other guys (and earning no respect; Spades was considered the only worthy card game at the shelter). A guy came by with a fresh new pair of denim jeans, relaxed boot fit. He was marketing them like they were the hot new thing and that any prospective