Question

I wasn’t concerned with what everybody else was doing or with what they thought about me. My life was a blank canvas, and I had the freedom to create whatever kind of masterpiece I wanted to create. The confidence that came with having nowhere to go but up gave me the opportunity to really just let loose and be myself. And that was one of the greatest feelings I had ever experienced.

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, “So, you still stayin’ over there at the, y’ know, the shelter?” Ha. “Yeah, man. I’m still there. And you don’t have to treat it like it is so taboo.” 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, “Hey, Shep, whatchya think we’re gonna have for dinner tonight at the shelter? I hope it’s Robert’s meatloaf. His meatloaf is God-damned out of sight.” We didn’t 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, didn’t mean we weren’t 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 Authority—where a lot of homeless guys made their transition—were $150 down and thirty percent of one’s paycheck per month or I could rent a room from “Honest John,” 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 wasn’t 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 prevent progress rather than promote

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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 of their music exhibited their rebellion against the police and their unwillingness to obey 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 Omar.

But Omar still wasn’t showing his face very often at the shelter. In fact, I hadn’t seen Omar since Friday, and I wouldn’t see him again for two more weeks after I started my job. I would come home to the shelter after work every day with high hopes that he would show up, and every night my hopes would be shot down. I would literally watch the door for him to come home. I was a dog waiting for his master to return. I missed that guy. A lot. I mean, I’d only known him a short time, but he was already working his way into being an integral part of my life. As independent as I tried to believe I was, the truth was that I needed Omar. This wasn’t my story, my project. This was our project. Adam and Omar’s story. A companion like Omar would make my life so much more livable, especially since we had connected on so many levels, and, most importantly, we had a plan. I felt like he was letting me down, like he didn’t care about me or our plans or what we could accomplish together. I began to realize that maybe he was all talk.

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But I did my best not to think about that. Besides, I had plenty to keep me entertained. Like TV. Although I appreciated film, I had never been much of a television watcher. I would watch it if it was on or if there was some special event or maybe there was a show that I would really get into for a month, but I was always so busy with other pursuits. In the confined world of the shelter, though, the television was one of the things that kept us amused and connected to life elsewhere.

There was no question that COPS was everybody’s favorite show. No doubt about it. At 8:00 pm, when COPS appeared on one of the two channels that came in with minimal static, everyone in the shelter crowded around. It was routine. Everybody was loud and obnoxious during dinner, but when COPS came on, we all fell silent. There was important business to tend to.

But we didn’t watch TV’s original reality show like I used to when I was a kid. Growing up, I used to love watching that show so that I could see what idiots there were around the nation and find satisfaction in the fact that no matter how crazy I thought I was, I was more stable than those people.

Nope. We watched it in a completely different light. We cheered for the suspected criminal the whole way through. It didn’t matter what the accusations were, and it didn’t matter who was on the other end. We always cheered for the guy the cops were after. Guys would be huddled around the TV set, hollering, “Go mother fucker! Shit. Go! Hop that fence! Go! Go! Ah. Ah. Ah, damn, they got ’im. Again. They got ‘im again. He shoulda hopped that fence like I said. Damn. They always get ’im.” And they would always give the criminal the benefit of the doubt. After a long chase, the cops would dig in the suspected criminal’s pockets and find some illicit drug or whatever and the guys at the shelter would look around at each other and murmur, “Shit, that’s bullshit. You know that’s bullshit. They planted that on him. He ain’t have that on him before. They put it there. So their stupid TV show can get ratings.” And they were serious, too. Every night we

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would watch, every night we would pull for the criminal, and every night he would be dragged away in handcuffs.

But we didn’t always need the television for entertainment. Somebody was always around to stimulate our attention. If it wasn’t one guy creating mischief around the shelter, it was another guy. Every night there was something new. It was great. And once one guy got going, it was easy for everybody else to follow suit. We would have some of the most intriguing debates I’d ever been a part of. Sometimes intellectual, sometimes philosophical, sometimes political, but always insightful. And everybody always had at least his two cents to put in. Usually more. Even guys who normally remained silent and in their own world would offer their input from time to time. I can remember one night we were talking about the war in Iraq, a frequent topic of conversation. We were going back and forth on the various issues knowing that none of us were necessarily right and that nobody was going to change anybody else’s mind. Then this guy, Davey Dizzle, who sat, ate, and then slept in the same corner every night and said about two words per day and never bothered a soul, said, “You know what we need to do? We need to just drop a God-damned bomb on all them mothers and call it a day.” We all just looked at each other in absolute puzzlement, I’m talking almost terrified, like, Wait a sec? Dizzle? Did Dizzle just speak? And did he just say that we should drop a bomb on all of ’em and call it a day? Even Brian Brizzle—Davey’s twin brother and the resident loudmouth—had a shocked look plastered on his face. We all sat there for a moment, speechless, and let it sink in before we picked up our discussion right where we had left off. But the point had been made: everybody had a voice at the shelter.

And most guys didn’t wait for their turn to speak. They would just come over to you and start a conversation. Guys like Mustafa Frederick. If there is one person from the shelter that I will never forget, he’s the one. He was the kindest, gentlest young man that I met at the shelter and probably during my entire stay in Charleston. He

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was about 5’4“ and his muscles were chiseled like those on a statue of an ancient Greek god. He always walked around shirtless and he was always doing some form of physical activity. He was respectful to everyone, no matter who it was, and everybody was respectful right back to him. You never would have guessed that he had spent three of his twenty-seven years in prison.

And he was eccentric. Super-eccentric. He always had something fun and new and, most importantly, absolutely insane to talk about. One time he came up to me and told me what he knew about the barracuda. He said something like, “Hey, Gabriel …” (he called me Gabriel, because he said I reminded him of one of the archangels in the Bible) “ … did you know that a barracuda is actually a combination of a fish and a dragon and a hawk? Right now, it can only exhibit its fish powers, because the other two are chained down by the demons deep below the Earth’s surface, but believe me, one day, the barracuda is going to take over the world.”

What? I mean, seriously, what? What was he talking about? I didn’t know. Hell, nobody knew! And we loved it. Anytime Mustafa wanted to add commentary, he was given the floor. Automatically, no questions asked. His remarks usually ended with us either grabbing our bellies in laughter or looking around at each other in absolute disbelief. For me, it was usually both. And he loved it. He loved being the center of attention.

Mustafa and I always talked. He would tell me about his tough times in prison and what he did to relieve the dreariness of everyday life. He became very spiritual throughout his time behind bars (for which he would never reveal his crime). At night in his cell, he clogged the sink, filled it with water, and soaked his Bible. In the morning, he ripped out a page and drained the water into his mouth. The holy water, he said, kept his mind clear while he was incarcerated and enabled him the freedom to be mindful of the evils that got him locked up in the first place. And that’s when I realized that there was some merit behind his insanity. Sure, he had some crazy ideas running around

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in his head, but ironically, that is what kept him mentally sound and out of trouble. His insanity kept him in touch with normalcy. In his crazy little world, he was able to distinguish right from wrong. So who were we to say what a barracuda was or wasn’t or call him a nut for soaking his Bible in holy water when that was what was keeping him from making the poor decisions that had landed him in prison in the first place?

It also turned out that Mustafa’s natural ability to entertain was not limited to the shelter. He would stand down at the corner of Columbus and Meeting Street in front of the Piggly Wiggly throughout the day, every day, preaching. He wouldn’t ask for money and he didn’t pose a threat. He was just there, speaking to anyone that would listen. No one could be certain of the topic of his sermons, but I can promise you it was eye opening. Passersby would cross his path, pausing to listen to his far-out words of wisdom, and then walk off with a snicker, far more puzzled than they had been before. After repeated inquiries about his identification and purpose, the local newspaper did a full spread on him while I was still in the shelter, but it didn’t do any justice to the real identity of Mustafa Frederick. That guy was one of a kind.

Sarge didn’t show up on Monday night and the rumor spread quickly from person to person around the shelter that he had been gunned down on the street a la John Wayne, when in fact, he was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. Either way, a few guys were excited to be free from his constraint for a few days, but the shelter veterans knew that he would probably be back the next day. And he was. I heard he’d even checked himself out of the hospital Arnold Schwarzenegger style—just ripped the wires and tubes off his body and walked out of his room—but nobody really knew if that was fact or fallacy. I just knew that all of the rumors running around spoke of Sarge’s reputation at the shelter.

And I knew that he was back. “Ha! Sarge’s gonna die in this place,

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I’m tellin’ you,” one guy said. “Literally. Here at the shelter. On this floor right here. He’s gonna keel over and die, work himself to death.” And he was probably right. Sarge’s passion shone through every night as I began to wonder if the guys at the shelter truly appreciated what Sarge did or if he was just another security guard to them. Either way, I was grateful to go to bed every night with the assurance that I was protected from the people outside just as I was protected from the people on the inside. If he wasn’t getting any appreciation, he was certainly getting plenty of respect. Most everybody knew that Sarge got his kicks from removing troublesome characters from the shelter. Some would try him by starting a scuffle or smoking in a bathroom stall (a felony in the shelter!), and those guys would earn the right to spend the night either under the stars or in a jail cell.

If nothing else, living in Sarge’s world by Sarge’s rules made people seek creative means of vengeance. I can remember one night, late in my stay at the shelter, when two guys were arguing about a sleeping spot. A new guy had checked in and occupied the sleeping space of a guy who had been staying at the shelter for quite some time. The new guy was raising a ruckus about the fact that there were no assigned sleeping spots (“It says so right here on the Shelter Rules and Regulations”), so he was going to remain where he was. The shelter veteran just stood there and said, “Okay, fair enough.” We all knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. So, when the new guy hit the showers, the veteran went to the dining room and grabbed all of the tables and chairs and stacked them in the new guy’s sleeping area. I’m talking to the ceiling. The new guy was pissed off big time when he got back from the showers, and he actually ended up getting sent out for the night when he wouldn’t calm down. The veteran felt so content with his retaliation that he didn’t even mind sleeping in another spot for the night.

Some guys, though, didn’t care if they got kicked out of the shelter. As a matter of fact, some guys actually preferred to live Odare.

“Odare?”

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“Odare under the bridge! Ha! Man, that never gets old.” I heard that at least fifteen times while I lived in the shelter. It got old.

One of the guys that I had met at the mass baptism, whose path I would cross quite often at the library, was convinced that if you could learn how to survive on the streets, it was better (even safer, he felt) and certainly more liberating than staying at the shelter.

“Ain’t nuttin’ like sleepin’ outside, lookin’ up ’er at the Big Dipper,” he told me.

To each his own, I suppose.

Yeah, there was plenty of excitement to keep me occupied, but all I needed to keep my mind at peace was Fast Company. No matter what happened or what kind of stress I encountered, it was important that I went to work every morning with a smile on my face and a hop in my step, which wasn’t that difficult to do. While it surely wasn’t easy to get amped up about hauling dressers and boxes around all day, I was energized by the idea that my time as a mover, however long it may be, was finite. Every day led me one more step in the right direction, and that was right where I wanted to be.

Question to answer From the above article.

1. How come bus driver made Adam want to write him a letter?

2. How does Shepard show resilience and perseverance in this chapter?