Scratch Beginnings by Shepard Adam W
Author:Shepard, Adam W. [Shepard, Adam W.]
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2008-10-14T09:00:00+00:00
It was funny, too, how different people had different views of the shelter. When I would work with George on Sunday, he would lower his voice and look around and say things like, âSo, you still stayinâ over there at the, yâknow, the shelter?â Ha. âYeah, man. Iâm still there. And you donât have to treat it like it is so taboo.â Conversely, I would be riding the bus and a shelter mate sitting across from me would holler something, without even caring who was listening, like, âHey, Shep, whatchya think weâre gonna have for dinner tonight at the shelter? I hope itâs Robertâs meatloaf. His meatloaf is God-damned out of sight!â We didnât care what people thought. We were walking our own made up fine line with absolutely no pride left on one side and an overabundance of pride on the other.
Which, of course, didnât mean we werenât hungrier every day to get the heck out of that place. Truthfully, I could have made plans to move out of the shelter pretty soon after I had landed a job, just like Larry was doing with the two-bedroom apartment that he was planning to move into the following Friday. One-bedroom apartments with the Housing Authorityâwhere a lot of homeless guys made their transitionâwere $150 down and thirty percent of oneâs paycheck per month, or I could rent a room from âHonest John,â who worked at the corner Quickie Mart, for $95 down and $95 a week, cash. Either would be a feasible first step out of the shelter, a step that many people from the shelter were making, but it wasnât exactly what I wanted to be doing. I wanted something more concrete and certainly something more secure. The area around the shelter represented an environment that seemed to inhibit progress rather than promote it. The year before my arrival in Charleston, the Post and Courier reported that a group of local gangsters had used a housing project right around the corner from the shelter as one of the backdrops in a homemade rap music video. They carried assault rifles and showcased drugs and heaps of cash in the presence of children that appeared to be younger than ten. The lyrics displayed their rebellion against the police and their defiance of the law. The DVD, which became infamous almost immediately after its publication, became a great investigative tool for local police and led to the arrests of many of the men that appeared on screen, most of whom already had outstanding warrants. It was big news for a year. Yeah, the area around the shelter was exciting, no doubt, but not the kind of excitement I was looking for. The whole point of what I was doing was to crawl my way out of that lifestyle, so I planned to hold out for a better situation.
So I resolved to stay at the shelter as long as I needed to, until I could find a secure place to live either by myself or with Marco.
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