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Is it really worth it for me—still “down here” in economy class—to shop at Lacoste and Eddie Bauer when I can look just as good in far less expensive clothes by shopping at the Goodwill or, when I get a good tip, Marshalls?

I was still always looking for ways to save money, always on the hunt for a deal. “Two for a buck? I’ll take ’em!” I didn’t care what it was. Pork and beans became a new food group to me just because it was always on sale at Food Lion. If the price was right, I could find a use for it. I was a scrooge, greedy. My money! Get your hands off. I’d worked hard, and I was surely going to see to it that I continued to be wise with what I earned. After all, is this really where I wanted to be? If nothing else, I had merely ascended into poverty—certainly not out of it—so I wanted to continue to save, making plans the whole time for what I would do with my loot: How I could invest it to make it so much more valuable to me. One can do a lot with $2,500, so I could only imagine the possibilities in July after I accumulated six more months of paychecks. Night classes at Trident Tech? My own moving truck? An entirely different trade altogether? That’s what kept me going: the idea that I had a better lifestyle in sight.

I’m not moving furniture forever. I can promise you that.

As the frost (yes, there is frost in South Carolina) began to subside, and spring blossomed, I was hitting a groove. Derrick was no longer our neighbor, which sucked big time, since he was my main source of entertainment, but I was getting my fill of him at work, and BG was doing more than his fair share of keeping things exciting at home.

With four months left in my project, I could only imagine that I had reached the height of my experience in Charleston and that I would cruise through the summer lifting furniture, scaring girls with my dance moves, and continuing to save money in preparation for my future life plans. But I was wrong. Nothing I had done in my life had prepared me for April’s cultural lesson.

FIFTEEN

FIGHTING FOR RESPECT

Sunday, April 1

The month of March had flown by quicker than I thought it would, so I was prepared for the same thing in April. A little excitement or drama here and there, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

But then the differences between BG and I really began to surface.

He was getting on my nerves, and it was starting to become more and more serious as time passed. It was growing to be a bit more than a few wisecracks back and forth about each other’s facial features. And usually it surrounded the use of my truck. I didn’t mind feeding him once in a while or letting him borrow some laundry detergent. I didn’t even mind when he borrowed my truck—“borrowed” being the operative word, implying that he would ask first and thereafter return my truck within the agreed upon time and in the same condition as it had been before. But that was rarely the case. He would take my truck and be gone for hours, unaware (or perhaps, indifferent) to the fact that I might need to use it. Twice he even returned it with dings on the hood and once it came back with the front fender bent into a forty-five-degree angle as if he had run into a pole. Every time, though, he didn’t have a legitimate answer for what had happened or why he had my truck for seven hours longer than we had agreed. “Shoot, it was like that when I left,” he would say.

So, as time progressed, I saw the need to develop a few war tactics to maintain the security of my truck. My comments about having a little consideration when it came to borrowing my truck—the truck I fueled and insured, the truck I had bought—had fallen on deaf ears. BG was going to learn a lesson, and I was going to be his teacher.

The first eighteen or so times that he had been tardy on returning my truck, I had gone easy on him. “Don’t do it again,” I would say, and he would agree. But then it would happen again and again and again, and after the nineteenth time, I had