Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [50]
As much as I would have loved to have returned to the shelter buoyed by encouraging toasts of congratulations for getting hired by the moving company, it was an announcement that I reserved for the select few that I had come to know well during my stay at the shelter. While many people would surely be happy that I got a job, they would also harbor some jealousy that they remained unemployed. I didn’t want to create any uncomfortable feelings. Besides, they would find out sooner or later anyway. I did, however, seek out Phil Coleman to thank him for his pep talk the night before.
“Shit, ain’t nuttin’, kid,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and raising his eyebrows. “Now we just gotta hold on to these jobs.”
Friday also marked the day that I started to see Marco on a more sporadic basis. For the two months that I lived at the shelter, my experience with Marco was always up and down. Which Marco is going to show up today? One day, he would arrive at the shelter for dinner, full of life, talking about his ambitions and how we had to get an apartment together, and the next day he would be distant, as if he didn’t even really know what he was aiming for anymore. More often than not, I could see where he was coming from. He was bummed about living at the shelter. He hated it. He tried to stay out as often as possible with friends or girls who he’d met along the way. And who could blame him? The atmosphere at the shelter had a way of dragging people down. Sure, we were there for each other, some of us cheering on the next guy as he sought a better situation, but that didn’t do much for the overall mood. The fact remained that we were conscious of our standing as homeless men, the filth at the bottom of life’s social structure.
I spent the weekend preparing myself to begin work on Monday. On Sunday, I continued what would become a tradition of working for George downtown. Some Sundays he would only assign me two or three hours of work, and other Sundays, he would have a list that would take me six hours to complete. But I never started working until at least 11:00 A.M., as George would rise late, groggy-eyed from the previous night’s leisure activities. That second Sunday that I worked for him, he had me continue to pull weeds from the same rocky foundation on which I had worked before. The work that I did for George was always tedious, and the sun always shone directly on my back throughout the entire day, but it always came with a fat $10-an-hour paycheck.
On Sunday evening at the shelter, I had a very illuminating conversation with Leo, the guy who had followed the woman from Los Angeles only to be confronted by her husband when he got here. He was very down to earth and had a good head on his shoulders. He saw his stay at Crisis Ministries—as brief as it was—as more of an adventure than a way of life, an opportunity to see a part of the United States that he hadn’t seen before. He had even toyed with the idea of staying on the East Coast for a bit but said that it wasn’t nearly as exciting as life on the left side.
“I know a lotta stuff, Shep. I mean a lot. I’m working with genius capabilities. That’s prolly why my head is so damn big: it’s jam-packed with knowledge. Humble? Not so much. Savvy? Absolutely. Let me tell you a little bit about what I know about society as a whole.
“There are three kinds of people, and I’m not talking about just in the shelter. I’m talking about in general, three kinds of people.” He told me the three kinds of people are:
those that go to school and educate themselves and go on to live professional lives;
workaholics, who spend their