Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [65]
To make matters worse, despite what I thought had been a good start, Shaun was starting to get on my nerves. Big time. He was just so irritable—about everything. Everything on the job was a burden to him, from the furniture to the customers to the hot dogs that he bought at the gas station in the morning. I tried to tell him that those were the same hot dogs that the gas station had sold to him the day before, but he still bought them, and he still complained. After a while, he didn’t even want to get along. It was like he wanted to be irritable. Shaun was frustrated with his life, in general, between issues with his girlfriend and the fact that he was paying $40 a night to rent a sleazy hotel room since he wasn’t disciplined enough to save enough money to get an apartment. And bringing that stress to work was starting to affect our chemistry. I wasn’t sure how much longer Shaun and I could last as a team, but I was sure that I didn’t have the power at Fast Company—just yet—to make demands about who my partner would be. If they sent me out with Shaun, they sent me out with Shaun, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Then, bump in the road number three. Four days after Marco moved out of the shelter, I went on a long move with Shaun to Columbia, a couple hours west of Charleston. The move was supposed to be small—load up a two-bedroom, drive it to Columbia, unload, drive back—but the lady we moved had a heap of stuff, much more than she had mentioned on the phone, and, of course, her apartment in Columbia was on the third floor instead of the first, as the moving sheet had said, so it ended up taking us all day. I dropped Shaun off at his hotel room and pulled into the Fast Company yard at 11:25 P.M., exhausted from a day of driving and hauling sofas and mattresses and boxes up the stairs. The No. 10 bus had stopped running, so my options on getting back to the shelter were really limited. I could have called a cab, but the cabs in Charleston take forever to get to you, and it would have cost me at least $15. I could have made the very ambitious walk downtown, but by the time I got back to the shelter, it would have been time for me to hop on the bus to come back to work.
So I grabbed a couple of moving blankets from the back of the truck, and I slept outside. It was a very enlightening experience. Just me and the stars. And an occasional stray cat. My body was filthy from the dust and sweat of the move, and I was hungry as hell. And that’s when it really hit me: there were people out there sleeping under the stars just like me. For real. Not just for one night, not for some game or some audacious project they were working on. Penniless, hungry, and down and out, they either couldn’t get to a shelter or they had chosen the streets instead. But they were out there. I knew all of this before I had lain down on my oh-so-uncomfortable makeshift bed that night, but that’s when I really understood. Just as my experience seeing crack-cocaine in person had made everything so real, sleeping outside was opening my eyes as well. I mean, I was frustrated and scared and filled with anxiety, and I was only out there for one night! Just for one night, to be sleeping outside without a shower or a meal, I could only imagine what it must be like for the crushed spirits laying their heads down on park benches and under busy overpasses and in sleeping bags in hobo camps throughout the United States. People who would be doing the same thing the next night and the next night and the next. People who had grown up with such ambition and were now hopeless and discouraged. They had given up, either