Part 8

Charleston, S.C. is a beautiful city. I was excited to move there. I had visions of myself and my growing belly strolling the beaches at sunset, cooling off in the ocean, reading in the parks, and basically being blissful.

Yeah. Nope.

I will try to get through this part quickly because it still just irritates the shit out of me, and whenever I talk about it, it ends up sounding like a gigantic bitch fest. Here goes:

The day before we were going to start driving from Athens to Charleston, the baby’s daddy decided he should change the oil in my car and check the fluids. I wanted to just take it to Jiffy Lube, but he insisted it would be cheaper if we bought all of the stuff ourselves and he did the work.

As he had never EVER worked on a car before, I was a bit skeptical, but he was insistent. So he did the work, and the next morning we drove my car, stuffed to the gills, out of town with my mom and brother following in a big van with a u haul trailer.

Side note: the reason we were in MY car was that the baby’s daddy had totaled his in a single vehicle DUI accident three months prior.

It was summertime, my car didn’t have a/c, and it also did not have a functioning engine temp indicator. There were some other indicators that also were not functioning, but the temp indicator is the one I remember distinctly because that is the one that would have warned us of the car overheating before it blew up.

It happened right on the border between Georgia and South Carolina, on a boring and desolate stretch of I-20 east. The baby’s daddy was driving, and we suddenly noticed the car started to slow down and make very painful noises. My mom pulled up beside us in the van and my brother leaned out the window yelling that there was smoke coming from the hood, which we had just begun to notice ourselves.

We pulled over and gingerly popped the hood. There was a lot of smoke. There was also a radiator with no radiator cap, or any radiator fluid.

Side note: it didn't even occur to me until years later that this probably would not have happened if I had just taken the car to Jiffy Lube. And that is why it irritates the shit out of me.

We were hopeful – we piled into the van (which was also filled to the gills) and drove to a gas station and got radiator fluid. We drove back to the car and poured it in, waited a few minutes, then tried to start it – nothing.

We went back to the gas station, which happened to also be a service station with a tow truck, and got them to go get the car and bring it in. The tow truck guy said that when he started raising the car to be towed, the recently added radiator fluid came out the tail pipe.

I was too stunned to deal with it, so my mom went to talk to the guy. She said the guy sat across from her at his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a gun, laid it on the desk, and said, “shoot it,” indicating of course that the car was in similar condition to an old horse with three broken legs. Not that I advocate shooting horses...or cars.

Oh my god. We unloaded the car, left it there, piled into the van, and kept going.

Side note: this is actually quite a good metaphorical example of how I lived my life – and still do, to some extent.

I don’t remember being too terribly upset about the car, other than crying a little bit when we started back out in the van with my mom driving, my brother on a cooler in between the front seats, and me sitting on the baby’s daddy’s lap in the passenger seat. All of the stuff in the car packed the already-full van way beyond capacity, and there was no room left for passengers.

That is how we got all the way to Charleston. At least the van had a/c. At least my mom – my MOM for heaven’s sake – was right behind me, and I didn’t end up stranded straddling the line between Georgia and South Carolina in the scorching heat for hours and hours.

I was also almost five months pregnant at this time, and the puking that had started the day after I found out I was knocked up had not subsided. I was sick all the time. Also, I had to pee all the time. Just further considerations contributing to the appreciation of my mom being right behind us when my car blew up.

To this day, there are few situations I can imagine that would be worse than being stranded on I-20 in June while five months pregnant.

Onward ho!

By the time we got to our tiny new home in Charleston, the shock of the trip and circumstances wore off and things started spinning in my brain. One of the first things unloaded from the u haul was my futon mattress (don’t forget I was only barely 19, and futons were perfectly acceptable – even trendy – pieces of furniture at that time). The futon mattress went onto the floor, and I went onto the futon mattress, and I don’t remember much more, if anything, about arriving in Charleston.

What I remember next is desolation. I hated our apartment – it was so tiny! It had orange-ish, yellowish, brownish carpet. It smelled funny. There were only two rooms – not two bedrooms, two actual rooms. There was only one bathroom, right in the middle of the two rooms.

Our location would have been ok if we’d had a car. It was in an area called West Ashley, and downtown Charleston was a bus ride away. The busses came every hour, and the first few times I tried to ride one, I had to jump off at the next stop because the fumes induced more puking.

I felt terribly isolated and lonely. I really just wanted my mom. The baby’s daddy and I got along really well, probably because we hardly ever saw each other and didn’t know anyone else.

I got a job at a gas station about four blocks from the apartment. The heat really compounded the pregnancy sickness, and walking to work – even that short distance – was very difficult. My mom came to visit and brought my bike that I’d had when I was younger. It was purple. I got a gel seat to accommodate my ridiculously sensitive vag (pronounced "va-j" - ridiculously sensitive from being pregnant), and a white basket to hang on the front.

It was awesome. That bike saved me. It was very flat where we were living, and that made riding a bike quite pleasurable. I rode it until I literally could not get on it anymore, at a little over eight months pregnant.

I got really good at consolidating groceries to fit in the basket. We were eligible for food stamps, so grocery shopping (and just eating in general) was not too stressful. The gas station I worked at was actually in the parking lot of the grocery store, so that was pretty convenient. I was able to make frequent, small trips so that transporting groceries was not a big problem.

I could fit two gallons of milk, or two full paper grocery bags, or one gallon of milk and one full paper grocery bag in the basket at one time. I also had a backpack, but that didn’t help much with groceries. Sometimes I would get overly ambitious about what I could manage to get home.

Once, before a shift at the gas station, I got two full paper grocery bags AND two gallons of milk. I put all of it in the cooler at the gas station, and after I was done working, finagled a decent method of transporting everything. I put the two bags in the basket of my bike, and each gallon of milk went into a large garbage bag and tied to each handle of my bike.

This would probably have been a pretty good solution if I didn’t have to ride with my knees way out to the sides to give myself enough room to pedal around my big baby belly. My knees would alternately hit one of the gallons of milk and it would swing way out, knocking me off balance. I would over-correct and then the other gallon would swing way out.

On this occasion, I was also wearing my kelly-green polyester work uniform, as I had just gotten off of work. My route home included some time riding along the highway, and as cars approached me, I wondered what the people driving thought when they saw me.

I wasn’t too concerned about that, though, especially since I usually closed the gas station by myself at one o’clock in the morning, and we lived in kind of a bad neighborhood, and being alone at that time of night scared the shit out of me. I usually rode home as quickly as possible so no one could, you know, get me.

Those milk jugs swinging all over the place seriously hindered my travel time, though. I comforted my nerves by telling myself that if any one was out looking to attack some one at that time in that area, they would be too distracted by how ridiculous I looked to go after me. I made it home safe, feeling proud of my ingenuity and my ability to survive.

That is actually how I made it through most of that time in Charleston, especially when I was riding that bike to or from work. I would think of how I grew up in an upper-middle class town, and of all of the luxuries I had taken for granted (such as multiple bathrooms in one dwelling), and then think about how having none of those things now did not stop me from getting by.

I would also think about how fortunate I was to be pregnant with, and later the mother of, a perfectly healthy baby, to live in a home that was clean and had air conditioning and doors that locked, to never be hungry, and to have my bike, and to work so close to home. It took A LOT of focusing on things like that to get me through that year.

It was really fucking hard.

There were other things that helped, too. Work was pretty interesting, primarily because we sold Busch beer two for $.99 out of a big tub filled with ice. We also sold six packs of Busch beer for $2.99, but it was a lot harder for many of our customers to come up with $2.99 than $.99 at any given time.

As I mentioned before, we lived in a kind of bad area, which meant there were a lot of low-income housing developments within walking distance of the gas station. There were regular customers who would walk up to the store every night from those neighborhoods, starting at about four in the afternoon.

They would get their two beers for $.99, and then go back home. About an hour later, they would come back and get two more beers, and so on and so forth as the evening progressed. Around 9 p.m., they would start to dwindle off, and were probably nice and toasted at home in bed (or wherever) by the end of my shift.

Sometimes one of the regulars would put a couple of cans of beer in their pockets before bringing a couple of more cans to the register to pay. Of course, they only wanted to pay for the two beers they put on the counter. This really bothered me at first, and I even once tried to confront one of the guys, but figured out relatively quickly that there was really no point.

They were usually pretty shitfaced by the time shoplifting entered their routine. Being shitfaced can sometimes make people prone to unexpected bouts of violence, and even though they were always very nice and conversational and friendly to me, I didn’t really want to push any buttons.

Another reason it wasn’t worth it to try and confront the beer-pocketters was because they were so entertaining. They would walk in and really and truly believe that they were being covert when they pocketed those beers. It was better than television to watch.

Aside from the eight hours of standing, the occasional snooty customer, the constant aching in my back, and the nearly constant fear for my very life and for the life of my unborn child, it was a pretty fun place to work.

To be continued…

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