Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [78]
With nine speeding tickets already to my credit (which is particularly impressive since I didn’t even own a car for four years in college), there was one main reason that I bought a pickup truck: I wasn’t going to get pulled over. I mean, really, how many times do you see a pickup truck on the side of the road with blue lights flashing behind it? Pretty much never, unless there’s a gun rack in the window and Billy Ray is wanted on suspicion of some drug charge. But that was me on the side of Rivers Avenue on the last Sunday morning in October, just two weeks after I had driven my truck off of Max’s lot. It had started to drizzle, and since rolling up the window was a two-hand operation, I simply lost track of how fast I was going.
At first, I was kind of happy that my truck was even capable of speeding. “Atta boy!” But then the officer handed me the $128 speeding ticket—no warning, nothing—and things got a little more serious. I tried to tell him that it would never happen again, and yadda, yadda, yadda—sob stories that he had heard a thousand times—but it was too late. I would join him in court in mid-November.
When I got to court, I petitioned the judge to let me do community service in lieu of paying such a hefty fine, but he wasn’t interested in negotiations. I paid the fine and determined that I would simply have to slow down.
Which wasn’t hard to do, since, aside from work, I didn’t have anywhere to be. With Marco gone and my only other friend Derrick married, my social life was maintaining its status on suicide watch throughout the duration of my stay at Mickey’s house. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since I was staying focused. I wasn’t even upset with the fact that my life had become so mechanical, since I knew that once I was living in a more permanent setting, I would have plenty of opportunities to hang out and stay out late. Besides, in those early days on Derrick’s crew, I was usually so beat after a full day of work that I didn’t have the desire to go out. Generally speaking, after a move, I would go home, write in my journal, read, eat, and go to bed. I did, however, find myself missing the companionship from my days at the shelter.
Jed, our fearless leader, was rarely around. He would come into the office for an hour or so after the trucks had gone out in the morning just to check on things and then spend the day out of the office, golfing or riding his Harley or assessing damage that we had done on our moves.
And he was growing a bit weary of doing damage assessments. With winter approaching and Fast Company booking fewer and fewer moves with each passing week, many of the guys started to get lackadaisical and careless. They started grinding out hours (going slow or performing superfluous tasks on the job so that they could extend their time on the clock and make up for the hours they weren’t otherwise going to be getting) and apparently taking less care in carrying pieces out the door. Jed had had enough.
So, he scheduled a meeting with us on a Tuesday in mid-November. “Be here at eight o’clock on the dot.” We were there, and let me tell you, he let loose. He was livid beyond livid. At first I thought he just needed a hug, but it was more serious than that. That man had a lot of built up anger, and he used that meeting to let it all out. Occupational therapy. And we were all there (on time, front and center) so that we could be present for his tantrum. At one point I thought I was back in my basketball-playing days at Merrimack College and it was halftime and Coach was giving us his thoughts on how we were playing. There were papers flying, fist pumps, foot stomps, and cursing. Lots and lots of cursing. At times I couldn’t even comprehend what Jed was saying: his sentences were a mere run-on assembly of different tenses of the “F-word,” his assurance that we understood how angry he really was. And it was working. He sure got my attention anyway.
Jed didn’t single anyone out, though. He didn’t need to. We all knew who was responsible for Jed’s displeasure. Grundy had