Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [86]
So, for the next two months, it was Adam and the Kingstree boys—one day at a time. Things weren’t the same and Derrick knew it. He swore every day that he was either going to kick BG into high gear or kick him off the crew, but in reality he was helping BG get as many hours as possible. I never hid my discontent, but at the same time I couldn’t be mad at the hours we were getting, even in the slow season. Derrick knew he was doing me wrong, and he went to Jill to tell her to give me a raise, so by the middle of December, I was making $10 an hour and gliding through the winter on cruise control just like everybody else.
Our place was vacant for the twenty-fourth through the twenty-sixth of December. BG went to be with his brothers and his mom in Kingstree for Christmas, while I headed up Interstate 95 to Raleigh where I was greeted with confounded surprise.
First, my friends and family, who I had not seen in five months, discovered—and made their feelings known to me—that not all movers are husky. I tried to tell them that muscle-bound movers are that way because they lifted weights or because they had recently completed a three-year stint upstate where they had been doing hundreds of push-ups and pull-ups and sit-ups in their prison cell every day. But they didn’t want to hear it. They figured I was going to come home having gone through a Hulk-like transformation, but that just wasn’t the case. As a matter of fact, with my rigorous lifestyle and poor diet, I had actually lost weight, so I was even scrawnier than I had been before I departed for Charleston. Nobody was impressed.
Second, my pops was grossly disappointed in my attempt at growing a goatee, something I had been working on since I had entered the shelter in July in an effort to try to fit in. Whereas the beards donning the faces of the some of the other guys with whom I had been associated could have made very generous donations to Locks of Love, my facial hair was scraggly and sparse. I was a victim of genetics, and my pops told me that my face just looked dirty.
Finally, I realized how serious my current project really was, and how immersed in it I had become. Bound for Raleigh late in the evening of December 23, I had left my furnished duplex in Charleston wearing my new clothes, driving my new truck home for the two days that Fast Company had given me off. I paid for gas and food with money, new money that had come from my new life, all having sprouted from my $25 seed money. Months prior, in July, I had given all of my personal belongings—clothes, furniture, books, everything—to my brother, and after my year was complete, I would go on with my life with the money and goods that I had acquired in Charleston. It was an eye-opener. It’s so satisfying to look back after one, two, ten, or forty years at what you’ve accomplished. “Man, those were the good ol’ days.” These! Right now! These are the good ol’ days. I was savoring every moment, the roots of my future. Who knew if I would succeed in achieving my predetermined goals or not, but that didn’t matter so much to me. Thinking back to my first night in July when I stepped off the train in North Charleston, I realize how naïve I had been, how I didn’t know how to get there, necessarily, but I knew where I was going. Just me and a dream. In the end, though, isn’t it really more about the journey, the process; about setting goals, finding something you’re passionate about, and giving it all