Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (11 page)

The waiting list is typically long for subsidized housing. Eight years in DC, three in Houston. I’ve never seen one under two years. And I’ve never found it worth getting on the list, because I am unlikely to live in the same county and have a two-year-long bad spell. If your income changes while you’re on the list, you’re supposed to call and tell them. Then you’re off the list. Unless you know for certain that you will not be doing any better for at least a couple of years, it’s not even worth filling out the paperwork.

We can do better than this. We choose not to.

—

It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. People tell me to save, not to buy luxuries like basic entertainment or communication or expensive food like hamburgers or pretty much any seafood according to Fox News (Dear
The Daily Show
: More of those segments, please), that those things are reserved for people better than me—read people with disposable income. And to the people who say that, I have only the wise words of Dick Cheney: Go fuck yourself.

If I’m saving my spare $5 a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you who think in calendar quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas prices will spike and you’ll need it to get to work. You’ll get a tear in your work pants that you can’t patch. Something, I guarantee you, will happen in three months.

When I have a few extra dollars to spend, I can’t afford to think about next month—my present-day situation is generally too tight to allow me that luxury. I’ve got kids who are interested in their quality of life right now, not ten years from now. My whole family can be completely content for hundreds of hours for that money. Would some rich people think it was scandalous that a poor person would spend money on a game
system? Probably, but that rich person can go to hell. Escape is the thing I value most, and it’s a thing we’ll sacrifice for.

When it comes to money, I think in value, not in sums. If I run a hundred dollars short, I can call in the loans and get my rent together, or just run up against the grace period for late payments. Or possibly I will be sort of fucked; it depends on whether or not I find a solution to the short-term problem. The only rational thing to do, really, is try to enjoy yourself as much as you can, if this is to be your life.

Here’s the thing: We know the value of money. We work for ours. If we’re at $10 an hour, we earn 83 cents, before taxes, every five minutes. We know exactly what a dollar’s worth; it’s counted in how many more times you have to duck and bend sideways out the drive-through window. Or how many floors you can vacuum, or how many boxes you can fill.

—

It’s impossible to win, unless you are very lucky. For you to start to do better, something has to go right—and stay that way for long enough for you to get on your feet. I’ve done well in years that I had a job I didn’t mind terribly and that paid me well enough to get into an apartment that met all the basic standards. I’ve done less well in years where I didn’t have steady work. The trouble’s been that my luck simply hasn’t held out for long enough; it seems like just when I’ve caught up, something happens to set me back again. I’ve been fortunate enough that it’s rarely compounded, and I’ve stayed at under
sea level for short periods instead of long-term. But I’ve stared long-term in the face long enough to have accepted it as a real possibility. It’s only an accident and a period of unemployment away.

It feels like I’m always climbing up the same hill, always trying to make it to neutral. And I don’t have the stamina of Sisyphus to keep me
going.

Being Poor Isn’t a Crime—It Just Feels Like
It

I
think that I might be a felon. My crime? Moving from Ohio to Utah. We were getting food stamps in Ohio, and I called the state to let them know to shut down our account. We applied for food stamps when we got to Utah and were approved. But it turns out Ohio didn’t actually shut our account. They kept giving us money instead. Utah told us that we needed to call Ohio back, which we did. We were assured that the mistake was fixed. We called back Utah, who told us that we were still Ohio recipients. The state of Utah called Ohio. Three times. After that, our caseworker told us she didn’t have time to deal with those people.

The thing is, it’s no wonder Utah couldn’t get through to Ohio—there’s one welfare office for all of Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati. One. For Cincinnati. That would
be like having one Starbucks for all of Manhattan, or one tiny dog store for all of Los Angeles.

Now, it’s illegal to use welfare benefits if you are not a resident of the state issuing them. So we found ourselves with a food stamp card that had an ever-increasing balance that we couldn’t use. Every time we called, Ohio’s worker would confirm that yes, there was a file in which they could see that we’d been asking them to stop giving us money for months. They’d apologize. None of them could figure out what the problem was. Each of them assured us that they’d fixed the problem.

We used the Utah benefits for a few months, until we got on our feet. And then we got the bill. As it turns out, even though Utah was perfectly aware that we couldn’t help Ohio’s clerical errors, and that we’d spent dozens of hours trying to get them to fix it, the law still holds us responsible for the duplication of benefits and calls it fraud. We were responsible for paying back the state.

Of course I called the state when we got the letter. Our caseworker apologized the entire time she was telling us how completely fucked we were. We’d only just gotten on our feet and we now owed the state more money than we made in a month. Oh, and while we were dealing with that hit, we’d be unable to get any additional help, because now that we were just on our feet, we didn’t qualify for anything.

So it’s no wonder that I don’t have a lot of respect for authority or authoritative institutions. I’m so used to seeing people being punished for things they haven’t done wrong, I’m
pretty much always half sure I’m in violation of a law. And I’m not even being particularly paranoid in saying that—in a country where loitering is considered a crime, cops can pretty much arrest you at will. Refusing to tell cops anything they want to know is also criminally punishable should you run into a cop who’s willing to stretch the meaning of “obstruction” or “impeding.” You don’t have to be robbing a bank to be a criminal. You just have to be poor and down on your luck and fall asleep on a park bench. I was recently on a college campus and saw at least three kids passed out on benches or at tables. I was tempted to call campus security to report the scourge of people resting. It turns out that whether sleeping on a public bench is a crime or not depends entirely on whether you have enough money to look like you have a place to sleep.

Another funny thing: It’s incredibly easy to pick up a misdemeanor while actively trying not to get a DUI. If you walk home from the bar because you’re drunk, or if you stay home in the first place but drink in your front yard, you are publicly intoxicated. Never mind that your front yard is where the afternoon and evening shade are and that you are very clearly just hanging out with your friends who are all of legal age, or that you misjudged and are wasted but can get home safely enough if you simply put one foot in front of the other down the correct roads. The fact that you left your car at the bar knowing that you shouldn’t drive and you don’t have cab fare will not be a mitigating factor. Your one solid bit of judgment that evening will potentially be punished severely.

People seem to be increasingly afraid of the poor—building
gated communities and taking separate entrances—but it’s not like criminal behavior as we think of it has suddenly skyrocketed. We’ve just made more shit illegal. And once you have a criminal conviction, best of motherfucking luck getting a job if unemployment is above zero. I’ve seen people get criminal records for stuff that you really wouldn’t expect. You know that level of criminality where you just sort of shake your head, like toilet-papering a house or jaywalking? It’s still criminal. I worked with a woman whose son, maybe thirteen or so, was in juvenile detention for rapping loudly outside after curfew. Now, I’m not saying it isn’t annoying to have some kid outside being rowdy at midnight. I’m just saying that it’s a bit crazy to send the kid to jail for it.

We have decided to lock people up for social deviancy these days. We tell ourselves that we’re not running debtors’ prisons, that this isn’t Dickensian England, because we rarely lock people up for the simple fact of not having money. Instead, we lock them up for not paying court fines, or because poor people should know better than to be poor publicly, and because the cost of doing routine business in this country is the same whether you’re rich or poor. And for the poor, that cost is way too high.

For example, I’d say my car is registered about three-quarters of the time, because sometimes the $50 it costs to renew the registration is more than I have to spare. At times, that’s been more than a day’s wages for me. And yes, I can go to jail for driving without proper registration. But if I’m too broke to renew, then I better get my ass to work, so I have to drive . . .
and I’m guessing that you see where I’m going with this. In short: I’m fucked. Insurance I’m better about, because my life was upended by an uninsured driver. But I’ve been without it too—insurance companies aren’t like the power company. They don’t negotiate dates and payment plans. If you can’t make your premium, you’ll simply be uninsured until you can.

When I’m driving uninsured—because I have to get to work or buy toilet paper, the only two reasons the car moves in that situation—I take back roads and shop on the edge of town to avoid density and thereby lessen my likelihood of being in a fender bender. That’ll get you sent to jail too, even if you’re willing and able to pay the damages out-of-pocket.

The degree to which an accident or a traffic ticket could destroy my financial security—what little of it I have ever had—has made me a super-defensive driver. I don’t take chances. I drive at precisely two miles over the limit, which is generally the sweet spot of not getting pulled over for speeding. If I drive more slowly than the limit, I worry that I’ll be pulled over for curiosity’s sake.

My policy of avoiding law enforcement is magnified when I’m behind the wheel of the car. It’s my mission to appear as average as possible. Never stand out and never get hassled—unless we’re in Arizona. (My husband is half Puerto Rican. He’s pretty tan. We avoid Arizona like the plague. We’ve no interest in being asked to present his papers.)

So I go out of my way to give a wide berth to police and authority figures in general. There’s no sense tempting fate. I’m sure most of them are lovely people, but I have no reason
to trust anyone who has any sort of power over me. You can never be sure what they’ll judge you for, and judgment has a nasty habit of turning into investigation.

For a long time, I have believed that most people think that poor people are criminals. Sound paranoid? Hear me out: Assuming you work in an office or white-collar environment, does your boss search your bag for stolen Post-its on your way out the door at night? No, I didn’t think so. But I’ve had to surrender my bag at the end of my shift so security could search it and make sure I didn’t swipe a box of pens or something. They did it to everyone, even each other. What kind of message does that send me? That I’m trusted? Or respected? Yeah, probably not. Instead, it tells me that my bosses think that if I have to work this crap job, then I’m definitely a thief. Or that they think I am so underpaid that I might steal out of necessity.

From there, it doesn’t feel like much of a leap to conclude that rich people have written off an entire swath of America as trashy, careless, immoral, and irresponsible. And sure, some of us are. But some rich people are too. And if you had your bag searched every night, I guarantee you that you’d be sorely tempted to steal a few Post-it notes, just out of spite, if only to prove that you were smarter than they were.

—

This is a generalization, and I am once again going to take an opportunity to say that this is me talking; other people will
feel differently about this. But overall, I think that most poor people have too many disasters in their own immediate future to worry about to be concerned about whatever natural or political disasters might be occurring way outside their circle.

I have a hippie friend. She’s been known to dig through my trash for cans and drive them across the country to her favorite recycling center. I think she’s crazy. It’s not that I don’t care about global warming or the environment; it’s that there’s only so far out of my way I’m willing to go. I don’t really have the time or energy to worry about macro concerns.

Overconsumption is a concern for people who’ve made it to regular consumption.

I know people who are poor and environmentalists. It’s not that poverty is guaranteed to make you callous, but being poor means that you are inherently unwasteful. Poor people just can’t afford to buy a ton of extraneous shit and then throw it away barely used. So I don’t really see a need to make the environment My Issue. I tend to eat food that is rejected by other people. (There are places you can buy nearly expired food for cheap.) I don’t buy many things new at the store, because I can’t generally afford it. I shop at thrift stores, where I can buy an almost-working bread machine for $2 and fix a wire. I combine all my errands into a single trip as a matter of course, because running to a store is generally more than a half-hour commitment and I want to save on gas.

I do not care about the whales. I’m unfussed about owls. I could give you a lot of reasons why I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, but it mostly comes down to this: my issue
is people, in the micro. Once we’ve hit the part where my own species is mostly taken care of, I’ll start to worry about African rhinos. Until then, I’ll just keep restraining myself from punching people when they look me in the face and argue that an ecosystem somewhere is more important than homelessness. It’s not unimportant, and I’m glad someone is keeping an eye on those things, but right now it is nineteen degrees outside and there are some human beings that I am more concerned about saving just at the moment.

Poor people are busy keeping a roof over their own heads so that they, too, don’t join the unhoused ranks. And that’s about all that many of us have got time to be concerned about. Environmental concerns, campaign financing, civic engagement writ large—these are luxury worries for people with time and influence.

Do I wish that poor people were a little more politically engaged? Sure. I think that would help, and it sure as hell couldn’t hurt. But I also get why people aren’t beating down the doors of the polling places. For one, we can’t keep track of whether we’re supposed to bring a DNA sample or a urine sample this time to prove our identity and residency. It keeps changing. For another, the hours and polling locations in poorer neighborhoods keep getting cut for some reason. It is definitely not at all a conscious effort to repress the poor (read likely Democrat) vote. At all. Ever. (Dear GOP: You guys might want to police your people. They keep openly saying that your goal is to repress the vote of the poor.)

Additionally, at this point elections are mostly held for the
benefit of people who devotedly follow politics. Everyone else kind of figures it’s a done deal. Most districts are gerrymandered to the point of safety one way or another. Voting doesn’t really enter into it, because no matter who stays home or heads out, more people in X party will vote.

Look, I’m not saying these are good reasons for not voting, but they’re reasons that I can wrap my brain around.

What’s harder for some people to understand is why poor people so often vote against our own self-interest. Even I have a difficult time with that one. Steinbeck said that we’d never be a socialist country because there were no poor Americans, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. A lot of people really do think that way. I was raised by one. My dad talks like he’s part of the top 5 percent. (Spoiler: He isn’t.)

I have a Republican friend and every time we get into politics and the economy, he tells me that I simply don’t understand the American dream. He says it doesn’t make sense to punish the people you’re trying to join. He is fairly certain that in the next decade or two, he will be worried about capital gains. He works at Wal-Mart. He’s nearing thirty. No degree, no real résumé, no particular ambition to do anything. Just a firm conviction that someday he’ll have a fantastic high-powered career doing . . . something. He’s not sure what, only that this is America and anyone can make it. While he’s waiting, he’ll be protecting his future interests at the ballot box.

But voting isn’t always about money. My friend Rachel is a lovely woman. She’s actually kind of a liberal on the money stuff but she’s a strict Southern Baptist. She’s also a firm GOP
voter. She tells me that she’s always been poor, she always will be poor, and it doesn’t really matter to her whether or not the rich people get richer. At least, not in any way that’s really going to affect her day-to-day. Systemically, sure, she’ll give you that the economic policies advocated by her candidates are actually not great for her, but since she lives in a non-union area, it’s much more important to her to have a candidate that’s firm on the Second Amendment and abortion. Those things matter to her, in a real way, every day. She thinks about them, she knows people affected by them.

I tend to think that the economic policies aren’t going to change much no matter how badly we want them to, but I’m sure that all my friends should be able to get married to whomever they wish, and I like the idea that I can get birth control without having to ask the blessing of the Republican leadership. Plus, I can’t stomach supporting people who honestly think poor people are getting the long end of the stick. People that oblivious shouldn’t be in charge of the free world, on principle.