Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [70]
Before I returned to moving furniture, though, I moved out of the shelter. And I wasn’t the only one. Marco was gone. James was getting out soon, and so, at least according to his own intentions, was Larry. Even Easy E and Rico had left on Sunday night, bound for a six-month drug rehab program in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sponsored by Battalion Baptist Church.
There were so many personalities in the shelter, and I had met them all. The good guys and the bad guys. The aggressively angry and the eerily mellow. The drunk and the sober. The lazy and the energetic. Those who felt blessed by the Lord and those who cursed him for their plight. Those who would give you their last bar of soap and those who would try to steal it from you. I had feasted and showered and laid my head next to them all.
I packed my bags on a Monday night, my birthday. It was my most memorable birthday ever. Somebody found a cupcake and a candle in the kitchen, and they lit it and wished me a happy birthday. No singing. No balloons. No funny hats or party favors. Just plenty of well wishes. It was an emotional moment for me. I could only hope, as I packed my belongings to move out the next day, that the guys in there understood what an impact they had made on my life. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to leave the familiar atmosphere of the shelter, going into a situation where I would once again be alone and among the unknown, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the spirit that I was taking with me. Several guys in the shelter had really aggravated me with their lethargic behavior, but other guys had inspired me to sail onward. And that was the legacy that I was carrying with me as I moved downtown to Mickey’s attic-turned-bedroom.
And it was good that I was taking a solid morale with me down there because the accommodations were almost as bad as the shelter. I had my own room, which was great, but that room was a fourteen-by-fourteen cell with ceilings that were shorter than I was. I had to bend down to walk about the room, bumping my head at least once every couple of days. The previous habitant, from several years before, had left a futon mattress on the floor, so at least I had a place to lay my sleeping bag. It was cleaner, to a certain extent, than the shelter, but the bathroom that Mickey had added upstairs at some point over the years hadn’t been cleaned in quite some time. So I cleaned it and dusted and mopped the floor in my room, and I prepared to call it home for two months. Mickey’s four-story house was just like each of the other unique, elegant houses squashed together throughout the bottom of the peninsula that had been standing since before the Civil War. Though old and rickety, the first three floors were lavish and very homey, complete with elegant furnishings and splendid artwork. Even though I was confined to either the kitchen or my hole in the wall on the fourth floor, I was grateful to have some place to stay that I could consider my own, and I was now even more compelled to continue my steady progression upward. Avoiding complacency, I was cruising through my project quicker than I had imagined I would.
On Wednesday morning I woke up and left the house at 6:00 A.M. so that I could make the thirty-minute walk to the bus stop. My toe was still tender, but I was more than ready to get back to moving. The doctors told me that the tenderness would go away eventually as the remaining cracked bones in my toe filled in. In five or six more weeks, I would have full mobility. They could tell that I was going to lose my toenail eventually, but I wasn’t worried about that. It had been overgrown anyway.
I got to the shop that Wednesday morning at 7:15, happy to be back in uniform and ready to tackle whatever kind of move they wanted to throw at me. At that point I didn’t really care who they stuck me with or where they sent me.
And that’s when I met him.