• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

On a smaller scale, don’t a lot of us have similar problems? The guy smoking a cigarette while chewing a stick of Nicorette gum; the adulteress going out with other men, justifying that it might help her become a better mate to her husband; or the obese man ordering a diet soda to go along with his bacon double cheeseburger combo meal. What are we justifying, really? Do we even want help? Are we trying to kid ourselves into thinking we care, or do we know, subconsciously, that the fact is we really don’t care?

One shelter resident, “Hustle Man,” who I truly grew to appreciate and respect during my tenure at the shelter, told me one day, “Adam, y’know, I love ‘heron.’ I love it. I know it’s bad, and I know that it might get me killed one day, but I love it.” He loved it! With a completely rational mind, he had no intention of quitting, ever. And that’s not even the crazy part. He was the most ambitious guy I met during my whole journey! He would wake up in the middle of the night, every night, so that he could be out in North Charleston by 4:00 A.M. selling copies of the Post and Courier to cars passing by. He would be up at 3:30 on Saturdays and Sundays. He would buy a shopping cart full of the local newspapers for a quarter apiece from the printer and sell them for fifty cents. And the tips: “On weekdays, I walk away with an extra thirty or forty bucks a day in tips,” he told me. “Weekends: sometimes close to a hundred.” In tips! And he could make his own hours. “I sell when I want and leave when I want.” He was well-grounded and business savvy. And consciously addicted to heroin.

I saw Hustle Man several months after I had moved out of the shelter, selling those same newspapers on his same street corner. I bought a paper and asked him how everything was going. Hell, he looked good. And you know what? He’d kicked the habit. “I was injecting all of my profits into my body,” he told me with a laugh. “A friend of mine bought a house two months ago. I was buying heron. I had to quit that shit.” Just like that. Bing, bam, boom. One day he’s got a needle in his hand, and the next day he’s making a life-changing decision. Maybe his story was unique—going through a month-long bout of intense rehab to kick his habit—but then again, aren’t all stories of overcoming adversity unique?

Every night I checked the tack board next to the front desk where Harold or Ann would post the phone messages they had received throughout the day. If an employer called, we were not allowed to take the call, but the front desk receptionist would take a message so that we could return the call later.

For the fifth night in a row, I had no messages. Nothing from Fast Company and nothing from any of the ten or so paper applications that I had spread throughout the Charleston area to go along with the profile I had set up online. Nothing. Nada. Interesting, right? On paper, my previous life had been erased, and there I was struggling along to find a job just like so many other people in Charleston and across America. Was I in over my head?

Maybe the job market was weak, or maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place. Maybe we were in a recession. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. The availability of jobs was irrelevant to me. I just needed to get one.

SEVEN

JOB HUNTING 101 WITH PROFESSOR PHIL COLEMAN

Wednesday, August 2

“I’m ’bout to get me a job. Shit. Y’all muthas can do whatever you want today, but I’m ’bout to get me a job.”

Phil Coleman, one more of the resident nutcases at the shelter that nobody really paid much attention to, made his intentions known that Wednesday morning. He had his mind made up, and he wasn’t going to accept anything less than coming home that evening with a job. He didn’t even seem to care what his job was. He just wanted one.

“That guy, Phil,” the gentleman next to me said with a hushed tone. “He’s had like fifty different jobs. He always has a different job. People say he can do anything—plumbing, painting,