Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (4 page)

We’d never survive otherwise.

—

Once I’m home from my shift, I try not to be short-tempered with my husband, whose fault my bad mood decidedly isn’t. In turn, he tries not to be short-tempered with me. Working at a low-wage job means getting off work and having just enough mental energy to realize what you could be doing with your life . . . if only you could work up the will to physically move.

And honestly, I wouldn’t even mind the degradations of my work life so much if the privileged and powerful were honest about it. If they just admitted that this is simply impossible. Instead, we’re told to work harder and be grateful we have jobs, food, and a roof over our heads. And for fuck’s sake, we are. But in exchange for all that work we’re doing, and all our miserable work conditions, we’re not allowed to demand anything in return. No sense of accomplishment, or respect from above, or job security. We are expected not to feel entitled to these things. Being poor while working hard is fucking crushing. It’s living in a nightmare where the walls just never stop closing in on you.

I resent the fuck out of it every time my schedule’s been cut and then I’ve been called in for tons of extra hours, as though my time weren’t worth anything, just so that my boss can be
sure not to pay me for a minute that I’m not absolutely necessary. I resent signing away my ability to get a second job and being told that I can’t work more than twenty-eight hours a week either.

The result of all of this? I just give up
caring
about work. I lose the energy, the bounce, the willingness. I’ll perform as directed, but no more than that. I’ve rarely had a boss who gave me any indication that he valued me more highly than my uniform—we were that interchangeable—so I don’t go out of my way for my bosses either. The problem I have isn’t just being undervalued—it’s that it feels as though people go out of their way to make sure you know how useless you are.

I’d been working for one company for over a year when I injured myself at work in November and had to go on leave for two months because I couldn’t stand for long. So I wasn’t invited to the company Christmas party. I went as a co-worker’s date and watched as everyone got their Christmas bonuses. I didn’t get one; I was technically not in the managerial position and thus didn’t qualify. The fact that I’d worked the rest of the year didn’t count.

What really got me, though, was when the owner of the company thanked the woman who was filling in for me for working so hard all year. He didn’t recognize me at all.

With unwavering support like that, it’s not really a mystery why I’ve rarely felt huge personal drive to make more money for the people signing my checks. I’m as loyal as they pay me to be, basically. Most of the people I know are the same way. It’s only logical. See, if we perform really well, give it a full 120
percent, we might make shift manager. That’s a whole extra $2 an hour. For that $2 or so, we get to be in the direct line of fire for the profit margins. We get to be held responsible for things outside our control.

And we get to be stuck.

If you’re working at your typical service job, shift manager is about as high as you can get, because for every four or six shift managers, there’s only one general manager position. But let’s say that the company treats everyone so poorly that turnover is high. Then you might make assistant or even general manager, at which point you’ll earn somewhere between $20,000 and $35,000 in exchange for physically punishing, emotionally draining eighty- or ninety-hour weeks. (Salaries in cities are generally higher, but both companies I worked for capped out in the mid-$30,000 range.) I’ll put it this way: As general manager for a chain restaurant, I got eight days of maternity leave after I had my second daughter. Unpaid.

It’s not like we don’t wish for more, but really, what’s the better option? School is an investment that doesn’t make sense for people who aren’t the academic sort. You have to pay cash money for it, you can’t hold down as many hours at work, it’s harder to find work because your schedule’s inflexible, and dear God the cost of textbooks is enough to kill you. Hell, I
am
the academic sort, and for many years school wasn’t a good investment for me. It left me in debt with nothing to show for it.

Before I moved into the service economy, I tried to make a more fulfilling, less backbreaking living working in political
organizing. To be clear: The jobs that I worked at in politics weren’t exactly highly paid either. They were typically in the $8 to $10 hourly range. I laughed my ass off when people went digging through my financial history after my essay on poverty was published and found the Federal Election Commission filings of my political pay. (Pro tip for amateur PI sorts: Those numbers? That’s how much I got for the
whole year
,
not per paycheck. Seriously, how much do you really think they pay someone to knock on doors or coordinate other people doing it?) The dark truth of many fulfilling, creative jobs and industries is that you are expected to accept very little pay at the start, just for the privilege of learning the ropes and working your way up. And that’s fine if you’ve got Mom and Dad helping you. But if not, you tend not to go into those fields. Which means that the people who do go into those fields are often pretty privileged; not many Congressional staffers come out of the lower class.

And it’s not just about how little you are paid in fields like politics. It’s also the stuff you’re expected to do in addition. For example, there are constant training sessions during the off-season. Most of them cost money and are held in Washington, DC. All of my friends who still work in politics went to them. I didn’t. All of my friends who took short-term, low-pay jobs with people who could be mentors are still working in politics. I had to turn those jobs down—the ones I was offered, anyway. Often I didn’t even bother to send in my résumé in the first place, because I knew I couldn’t afford to work
for so little. Mostly, I found myself perpetually stuck on the bottom rung, watching people I’d started out with vault above me because they weren’t doing anything but this and they could afford to take the financial hits while they were paying their dues.

Here’s another thing the poor can’t afford: unpaid internships. I’ve had to turn down offers that might have improved my circumstances in the long run because I just couldn’t afford to work for nothing. Again, the people who can afford unpaid internships are getting help from home—in my world, everyone else has to work for a living. And this means that we’re being cut out of all that potential networking too. That’s at least one reason why I’ve never had much of a professional network—I never had the chance to build one. Accepting an unpaid internship, or one of those internships that basically pays you lunch money, is for people who don’t have to pay the rent.

Because I’ve always been in a take-what-you-can-get situation, I’ve wound up working the sorts of jobs that people consider beneath them. And yet people still wonder why we, working at the bottom, aren’t putting our souls into our jobs. In turn, I wonder about people who think that those who are poor shouldn’t demand reciprocity from their employers. We should devote ourselves to something that doesn’t benefit us more than it absolutely has to? We’re meant to care about their best interests, but they don’t have to care about ours? If you’re going to put as little as possible into my training and wages, if
you’re going to make sure that I can’t get enough hours to survive in order to avoid giving me health care, and generally make sure that I’m as uncomfortable as possible at any given time just to make sure I know my place, then how can you expect me to care about your profit margin?

Remember, you get what you pay for.

You Can’t Pay a Doctor in Chickens
Anymore

E
xcruciating should be defined in the dictionary as an exposed nerve. Once I killed nearly a whole bottle of vodka in the space of a night, and I’m not a frequent drinker. I was at least six shots gone before the pain started to fade into blessed numbness.

It took me a few years of the long slide into poverty to cotton on to the unavailability of anything besides crisis medical care. I’d come from a home in which we went to the doctor when we needed to. Dad had benefits. It never occurred to me as a kid to question it. And it took me a while as an adult to understand that without benefits, which no longer come standard-issue with your average job like they used to, hospital administrators would rather you die on the street than sully their expensive sheets. (And the sheets are expensive. Like the Tylenol. Whole books have been written about that, and I
can’t do the subject justice in a few paragraphs, but don’t think we don’t know that they charge us triple for those lifesaving medications because we are not rich enough to have other rich people negotiate better prices for us.)

Being healthy and being poor are generally mutually exclusive conditions. We all have physical weaknesses, but a rich person gets these tended to before they get out of control. Poor people don’t have that luxury. So it’s pretty enraging to poor people when rich people, who get preventive care and can afford vitamins and gym memberships, look down on us as if we don’t have a clue how to take care of our bodies. We know—we just can’t afford it.

—

Dentistry is one of the things we are most lacking in. And it’s one of the most glaring marks of poverty. I watch the tooth-bleaching ads and cringe, because I know exactly what I’m being pegged as. Incapable. Uneducated. Oblivious. What I should be pegged as: uninsured, and until recently, uninsurable.

I did get some dental surgery once. I had five teeth pulled and a partial denture built so that at least I would have front teeth. I think I was nearly twenty-six at the time. I made an appointment, which took all the force of will I had. I got in the chair at the office, and promptly listened to forty-five straight minutes of the most upsetting, judgmental lecture I’d ever received in my life. This woman, the dentist, decided that I must be on meth. (I’d like to make this point clear: I have
never in my life done meth. Ever. Other drugs, sure, but not this one in particular. It seems to me that because I have failed so much, been weak so often, I am prouder of those things I have managed to avoid. It’s doubly bad, then, to be accused of the things you
haven’t
done.)

Never mind that I had none of the other signs of being a meth addict; my skin, while not exactly in great shape, lacks the
huge fucking sores
you get while on meth. My face, while much slimmer in recent years, isn’t skeletal. I’m sometimes a bit energetic, but I’m never tweaked-out twitchy. In short, calling me a meth user because I have bad teeth is about as valid as calling me a genius because I’m a fast reader.

This dentist had come to her decision, though, no matter what I said. She made a point of telling me that they didn’t make dentures as discolored as I’d need and that I’d have to get used to having everyone see how dark my teeth were in comparison with these shiny white front teeth I’d have on the right side. She told me all this, with her poky metal shit in my mouth, and I wondered whether she was intentionally hitting the sore spots. I’m sure she dispensed actual medical advice at some point, but I stopped listening. Instead, I wondered whether she’d bother to take out all the bone fragments that needed removing or whether she’d just let them heal over and cause me trouble. I wondered how many people came back for this kind of idiocy.

So I had my surgery, got a denture plate in place of my front teeth, and never went back. Call it weakness, call it cowardice, it’d be true. There is a shred of dignity that I will
not let go of. I will not intentionally put myself in that situation again.

And that’s why I don’t like dentists. I have never in my life felt more attacked, more vulnerable, trashier than I did in that dentist’s chair. At least when people on the Internet call you a meth user, you can console yourself with the fact that these people are idiots, as evidenced by the fact that they have nothing better to do than cast aspersions at strangers online. When a dentist does it, drill in hand, it’s impossible not to worry that maybe that person is a serial killer, and fuck that. Not doing it again. Not even risking it. And it’s not like there’s a huge pool of dentists out there who will treat someone like me on a payment plan. I can’t just shop around until I find one with a decent bedside manner.

My denture from that surgery broke about two years later. It just snapped while I was trying to eat a hamburger, separating the plate that fits on the roof of my mouth from the actual visible teeth part. I superglued it together for a while, until it wore down around the raw edges and wouldn’t fit properly. Now I just use a lot of dental paste and try to never consume anything in front of another human.

So that was kind of awful. Worse, my teeth are actually one of the things I can honestly say aren’t my fault. My destroyed teeth are the result of a car accident nearly a decade ago, in which the other driver was drunk and high and had been busted for those things so many times they’d revoked his license. There was no question of liability.

I was in the passenger seat because I hate driving in cities
and always let others take that honor if possible, and my jaw hit the dash so hard I exploded the airbag. Over time it became clear that I had nearly exploded my jaw along with it.

I had car insurance, sure, but it only covered liability and uninsured drivers. (Thank God for
that
extra five bucks in coverage a month!) I needed a car to get to work. So when the insurance company offered me a settlement check, I didn’t think twice about signing the waiver (which, it turned out, meant that I had no right to future damages). I took it and bought another car. I didn’t realize that check would be it—that there was no more money coming to take care of the damage the other driver had done to
me
. I thought they were just separate claims or something. I’d never filed a major insurance claim before; I had no idea what I was doing.

So that’s how I found myself with a mouthful of fucked-up teeth and no resources to deal with them. Truthfully, even if I’d known what that waiver meant, I’m not sure that I’d have made a different decision. If it was a choice between my teeth and my car, I had to choose the car. I could survive with bad teeth, but I’d starve and lose my apartment without a car to get me to and from work. That said, I never would have imagined that dental care wouldn’t be something I’d have access to for nearly a decade.

So I got the car (which turned out to be a lemon,
because of course it did
)
and kept working, and over the years my teeth have continued to decay. I’ve brushed, flossed, rinsed religiously. And the cavities spread regardless. I bought a Waterpik. I bought made-for-TV mouth-cleaning tools.

Nothing helps.

My teeth are, since my story went viral, a thing I now talk about. But until the moment that I went full fuck-you gutterpunk and took them out for the whole Internet’s viewing to underscore the effect of my dental problems, I hid them. I spent years learning to speak with my mouth closed, learning how to fake eat in public when I couldn’t avoid it. I rarely told anyone when my mouth was hurting. It’s not like I have an option now, but there’s nothing that shames me more than acknowledging that I have failed at this too—this basic idea of keeping your own bones and enamel to yourself, of
having
them at all. Nothing is worse than eating in public, because I mostly can’t eat with my broken denture in. I usually eat alone, at night, tearing off bits of food and bolting them down without chewing whenever my stomach tells me that it can’t wait any longer. There is no joy in food for me anymore; it is a necessary evil, something I consume to stay alive but lacking in anything like taste or texture. I don’t eat much.

I’ve lost a lot of weight. People keep asking me how I’ve done it, and I always wonder what I should say. Mostly, I tell them that it’s just losing baby fat now that I am out of my twenties. Sometimes I seriously consider telling them that they really ought to try a nice strong periodontal disease (it does
wonders
for your thighs!).

I don’t smile. Someone found a picture of me smiling from back in 2006, before my front teeth went and a wisdom tooth cracked off. It is one of the last times I smiled on camera, if not
the
last. I don’t allow people to take my picture anymore
because nobody can ever just take a picture. Everyone wants you to grin like an insane person. They will cajole and wheedle and bring the whole group photo to a screeching halt until you finally, shamefully, admit that you can’t, that you don’t want a picture of you like this to exist. Or you have to be an ass, irrationally angry about a seemingly innocuous request. That’ll get you out of it too. I actually don’t mind being in pictures and I wish I had more to remember my friends and milestones with, but I’ve spent the better part of a decade telling everyone that I have a huge aversion, that it’s best not to ask or expect, because I don’t want to deal with the inevitable “Smile!”

Actually, never smiling has had an interesting impact on my life. I can’t repress laughing with my friends, the people who are safe, who can see a broken mouth and not notice it. But among people who don’t know me, about half of my jokes fall flat, because I am not doing the human thing and grinning my way through, making clear that my dry observation is meant to be amusing rather than cutting. So I learned to stop telling jokes, because while I have a lively sense of humor, I can’t properly express it with my face.

It even messes with my relationships. My husband, for obvious reasons, would like to kiss me. I, for obvious reasons, feel like kissing is the anti-sex; once I have been reminded that I have teeth, I cease feeling anything like alluring.

My teeth have become one of my most hated obsessions. I’m constantly reminding myself to keep my fucking mouth shut (which has its side benefits in that never shutting up has
been a problem for me in my life) and to make sure my denture is adjusted properly so I don’t have weird sunken-mouth lips. I have two broken-to-the-point-of-missing teeth that are visible on the right top side, and I use cotton wadding to cover that as far as the basic “something vaguely whitish that has mass” concerns. I worry at my teeth with my tongue, testing which are still sound enough to masticate should I be caught in a rare public eating situation. I take prophylactic ibuprofen so the swelling doesn’t get out of control. There’s no good way to predict the swelling, and once it’s started, the pain isn’t quite the worst, but your productivity is pretty much gone for the day. As soon as the swelling sets in, there isn’t much you can do besides hold ice to your cheek and pray.

When I was in acute pain, before I learned better, I used to go to urgent care or the ER. A lot of urgent cares won’t dispense painkillers. My guess has always been that they assume you’re an addict or a seller. In the ER, I think they figure that the wait and the bills are enough to deter most abusers, so they’ll give you a day or maybe two of real no-shit medicine to get you through a few days’ work. To get any sort of actual medicinal regimen, you have to have an actual doctor, a general practitioner. I don’t have time to chase down a doctor’s appointment when I’m in pain.

So why, I am asked, have I simply not gone to one of the free dental clinics? Well, because they aren’t exactly flinging their doors open. I’ve researched some programs, looking for anyone who could help. Sometimes I am too rich, because I have a job at all. Sometimes I live in the wrong county, and
the grant providing the funds is restricted to residents of the next county. A few times I’ve been unable to take off enough time from work to make it to where the clinic is, much less to do it for the multiple visits required to complete the job. Twice I’ve been told that they don’t do critical cases, only basic cleanings and fillings, both of which are laughably inadequate at this point. So I have carried on, hoping to get dental insurance at some point. What I refused to confront or articulate for years was that it was likely I’d simply wind up being one of those gross people with no teeth. Probably by the age of thirty-five.

But rationality rarely enters into health care. Mostly, at least for me, medicine has been a patchwork of what’s around when I really can’t avoid seeking care for a second longer. And most of my interactions with the health care industry have pretty much made me want to avoid it all the more from then on. ER visits usually involve waiting for hours and then being handed a couple of ibuprofen for my trouble. And the whole time I’m waiting for those ibuprofen, I get to wonder what the bill’s going to come out to and whether I should stay and wait longer or just go home and hope for the best.

—

Look, I’m not stupid. I can
be
stupid, but I’m usually fairly savvy. I can read at a college level. I can do complex math problems given enough time and scratch paper. But I had trouble finding medical care.

Well, scratch that. I have had trouble finding
decent
medical care. It’s why I didn’t have prenatal care for my oldest daughter. I found out I was pregnant in October, days before the last election I ever worked on. I had a suspicion I was pregnant—I mean, that’s why I’d peed on seven pregnancy sticks, all of which had turned out positive. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe the results, since I’d been told so many times that it was practically impossible for me to get pregnant. I made a command decision that all those store-bought tests had to have been defective. So I went to the local Planned Parenthood and requested a blood test. But after the nurse heard about all the tests I’d already taken she just laughed and went straight for an ultrasound. Sure enough, within three seconds she told me that I was already six weeks gone.

I didn’t think about the pregnancy much to begin with; I had a job to finish, then we’d sort out what to do next. I knew that I’d be facing weeks of unemployment after Election Day, and I could sort out prenatal and baby products and such then. The pregnancy prompted our decision to send my husband to school; we’d been thinking about it since he came home from Iraq, and it seemed as good a time as any to have a guaranteed income. The GI Bill, along with paying for tuition, pays a living stipend. It would just cover all of our expenses if we were careful. I could stay home with the baby until I was ready to go back to work, and then we’d be in a decent position until he graduated. The stipend wasn’t so much that we wouldn’t qualify for Medicaid, so the birth itself would be covered.