Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [47]
He had a solid point. Sure, guys were getting hired through the Career Services Department at Crisis Ministries, but I couldn’t imagine that many guys were receiving calls at the shelter for applications that they had filled out throughout the city.
Yep, crazy Phil Coleman, a guy that most people ignored, had the secret. Be assertive. That’s it. Make the manager see it as a mistake not to hire you. “Take me or leave me. Whatya think? I need an answer, cuz, uh, I have another appointment in about fifteen minutes.” Something would come along, and when it did, it would be a hell of a lot better than $6.50 an hour. And after I had a job, it was just a matter of disciplining myself enough to keep that job and save the money that I needed to achieve my financial goals.
Scrapping the whole car wash idea altogether and armed with a brand new, Phil Coleman-esque attitude, I had the entire weekend to go out and start schmoozing the managers and owners of any companies I could find.
And Curtis from Fast Company was going to be my first target.
EIGHT
PUT UP OR SHUT UP
Friday, August 4
The shelter was supposed to be repulsive. That’s the only way it could be. It couldn’t be comfortable or clean. They couldn’t call a plumber every time one of the commodes was out of order or call an electrician to fix a broken light in the hallway. There was a reason Ann and the other shelter employees were stern in their approach to us. There was a reason we didn’t have cable TV, and there was a reason that many of our rights and freedoms were checked at the door: they didn’t want us there. For our own good, they wanted us out.
Can you imagine how the conversation would go if the shelter was an appealing place to live? Or how many people would come to live there?
“Hey, dude, where do you live?”
“Oh, over there on Meetin’ Street. Y’know, at the homeless shelter.”
“Oh man. I hear it’s nice down there. Very pleasant. I’m thinking about moving there for a few months myself. Y’know, take a little vacation from paying bills and what not.”
It’s unrealistic for the shelter to be accommodating. Nobody should look forward to living at the shelter. They should come “home” thinking, “Man, I’m sick of this hole. I gotta do something to get out of here.”
And, as I was beginning to discover, that was how most of the shelterees felt. While some had become complacent, and others were disgusted yet accepting of the conditions, many longed to be free from the realities of such a dehumanizing world.
Some guys would even make their feelings known, publicly or privately. At breakfast Friday morning, one guy came in with his face all balled up and, without addressing anyone in particular and without providing cause for an outburst, he said, “I hate this place. I hate living here, and I hate all of my roommates.”
You can imagine the excitement in the dining room after that. Everyone started screaming at him at the same time, and he was screaming right back at them. They surrounded him like a pack of wild dogs preparing to attack their morning meal. But they never would. Outside the shelter, all bets were off, but inside the shelter, physical confrontation, which was punishable by immediate expulsion from the shelter, was substituted with heated arguments.
Yep, it was another Friday, another great day to do great things. Some people throughout Charleston had already switched their mental buttons to “off” by Friday and couldn’t wait for the weekend to really get started, but that wasn’t me. With everybody else going into shutdown mode, Fridays were my day to stand out and really make things happen, to get the gears turning.
But this Friday was different. Sure, the birds were chirping and the sun was shining