Lee, Columbia, South Carolina, @leafcarrot - 'Earlier this year I had three jobs.
In March, I have zero. There's no return plan. For months, I hike until my bones can't carry me anymore, until I can sleep.
Time passes like a treadmill.
I have no construction experience; Shawn hires me on the spot. He has a felony and can’t get hired on a construction crew. He is independent and underpays himself to snipe contracts from "prettyboys". He feels like a hero for it. He tells me about scams he ran in prison. I watch for cops while he smokes weed in the van at lunch. We melt the rubber coating off copper wires on a bonfire in his back yard. He says America is fair.
At night, I leave the job and march downtown. I watch a crowd break into a country western bar, they line up all the liquor bottles on the sidewalk. A young black man tells a pastor we can’t all be politicians. Some of us have to be in the streets. That night I fall asleep in my clothes, with tear gas and drywall dust forming matted knots in my hair. The sour smell is in my dreams. Dawn, we are painting a child’s bedroom. Shawn asks me if I am a conservative or a liberal. I say “I’m not entertained by rich people’s problems.”
His response to my ideas is always the same: “That’s the problem with you liberals.”'
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