Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [88]
Which was important, because after the New Year, my social life started to catch fire. Well, kind of. I gave LD’s—the dance club where BG was a member—a try, but I was all but banished (mostly laughed at) after just one trip at the hands of my sub-par dancing abilities. It turns out that somewhere along the way, somebody decided that dancing (“grinding,” the kids call it these days) should be confined to one’s movement of just his or her hips with limited movement of the rest of his or her body. Screw that. If I’m going to bring it, I’m coming with everything. Head to toe. So, I was banished to the downtown area—not by any means a boring place to hang out—where my dancing skills would be more widely accepted. That is, I could blend in with much bigger crowds that wouldn’t much notice my arms flailing about or my robot-like movements to and fro, although some of my moves were still weeded out over the weeks at the hands of their own unpopularity. (My favorite series was virtually eliminated on the spot when a very attractive girl told me—half-joking—that it looked like I was doing aerobics.) I was never a heavy drinker, which would have only improved my deficient dancing skills, I’m sure, so my weekend excursions weren’t expensive, but, at the same time, they were a very necessary escape from the tension of my daily life.
BG could fix anything, which turned out to be our bonding point, the time we really got along. It was his time to show off. If anything needed repair, he was right there, on the job, ready to fix it. His abilities were useful around the house when the dishwasher was broken or the toilets were backed up beyond the help of a plunger or we had to install the washer and dryer set that Derrick had rented to us for a year.
Even better, his handyman skills particularly applied to automobiles, which turned out to work very well for both of us. He was always short on cash, and my truck was always making a different noise. There was a noise for speeds under thirty miles per hour, a noise for speeds over sixty miles per hour, and a noise for the speeds in between. Squeaks, rattles, thumps. Here a noise, there a noise, always a noise. More than once, the lady at the drive-through at Taco Bell made me turn off my truck so she could hear me place my order.
But BG could always diagnose the problem, usually just by the sound.
“Ah, shit, man. That’s your motor support. I can fix that. No problem.”
“Cool.”
“For fifty dollars.”
And he would fix it. No problem. I mean, I could have been forking over much more than $50 at a time to make each repair, but I didn’t need to. It was money well-earned on his part and money well-spent on mine.
On the flip side, he rarely cleaned the house. The only time he would clean was every other weekend when he had a girl coming over to hang out. She didn’t know it, but she was getting the royal treatment. Our place would be disgusting before her arrival, after I had pretty much given up being the only one vacuuming and mopping and washing dishes and taking out the trash. But then one day I would come back from the store, and all of a sudden there was BG in the kitchen, sweating, working harder than he ever did at Fast Company.
“Adam, can you give me a hand, man. Quick. Sheena’s coming over in like a half hour.”
Our place would be spotless for the next week or so until I grew tired, once again, of keeping the place maintained, but then BG would make plans with