Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (6 page)

If you want us to be happy to serve you, make it worth our while and be pleasant. Next time you’re in a low-wage place, try walking up to an employee and saying, “I’m sorry to disturb you, I know you have work, but could you tell me where this thing I need is?” I guarantee you,
that
is how you get service from a demoralized staff. Respect their workload. There is no low-wage employer in the world that doesn’t expect a ton of
chores finished in a shift besides customer service. Don’t just expect that millions of people are by nature pleased to grovel at the feet of your twenty dollars. Humans in general aren’t built that way, and Americans in particular. We’re supposed to have a stubborn streak of pride, remember?

—

In Cincinnati, I lived just under two miles from the closest grocery store that carried the sort of formula my daughter could tolerate. She was insanely colicky, so I used to spend my free time walking her around the city, letting the vibration of the stroller lull her into farting an incredible amount before she finally, blessedly, fell asleep. I went to the store most days, buying only what we absolutely needed, because I couldn’t fit much more in the stroller. I still love to wander, because if nobody knows where I am, then nobody can ask me for anything or call me about an unpaid bill. And I get angry out of all proportion when someone disturbs my peace, because it is so rare that I actually feel light and free.

I don’t get much of my own time, and I am vicious about protecting it. For the most part, I am paid to pretend that I am inhuman, paid to cater to both the reasonable and unreasonable demands of the general public. So when I’m off work, please feel free to go fuck yourself. The times that I am off work, awake, and not taking care of life’s details are few and far between. It’s the only time I have any autonomy. I do not choose to waste that precious time worrying about how you
feel. Worrying about you is something they pay me for; I don’t work for free. You don’t get to demand this ten minutes from me too. This is mine, and my family’s.

I actually don’t mind, on feminist grounds, when men tell me to smile. I can see why women would, but I’ve worked in bars and I’ve worked in strip clubs and I’ve learned that you can commodify anything, including sex and pretend love and faked respect and false empathy. “Smile,” coming from a man, is just the opening chatter to me at this point. It is a sign that this particular man has nothing original to say and is probably kind of a dick.

I do mind the smile-on-command directive on class grounds. Listen here, buster. It’s not my fucking job to decorate your world, not unless you’re willing to make it so. Sure, I’ll smile. That’ll be five bucks.

I feel bad about my reactions sometimes, because I can’t always stop them even when they’re directed at someone who’s having the same sort of day as I am. I was once at a store and could not for the life of me find the fucking diapers. I wandered the length and breadth of the place—nothing. I was exhausted, completely finished. Some poor woman who worked there stepped into my field of vision. I meant to ask where the diapers were stocked like a normal human being. What came out instead was “Why did you people hide the fucking diapers?” I couldn’t tell you how that made it from brain to mouth. It just happens sometimes. So when I am on the receiving end of customers’ misery, I’m never sure whether to actually be mad at the customers. Maybe they
tried to be polite and just didn’t have the energy. Because when they were at work, someone else came in, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Maybe it’s because, as I mentioned earlier, I spend a lot of the time depressed. Always have, always will. Give me medicine, I get less upset about being depressed, but the fact of it never leaves. Sometimes I am clinically, trouble-getting-out-of-bed depressed. Other times, I am just low-level, drag-myself-through-my-day depressed. Some people might call me pessimistic because I always expect disaster to occur. But looking at my life, I think that’s bull. When I expect doom? That’s what I call reality.

Mostly, I ignore the depression. I developed a caustic sense of humor. I discovered mosh pits to vent. I listen to seriously angry music. When that doesn’t work, I soothe the emptiness with terrible food and old jazz. If that doesn’t work and I can afford it, I go in and see someone about getting some medicine for a few weeks. That means making appointments any place I think I might be able to get in, assuming that I’ll be turned down for service, and showing up to them all until I find someone who’s willing to do me a solid and give me a week or two of anti-anxiety medicine. If I can’t find anyone to do that, I just sort of check out for a while.

Those times, I can’t get past the part of the day where you’re supposed to put on pants. I’ll stare at the pants. I will tell myself to put on the pants. I will get stern with myself about them. And then I’ll lose a few hours to a discussion with myself about how much I actually really do deserve all the
punishments I will heap upon me if I do not put on the pants. When I zone back in again, the sun will be down and it will blessedly be time for bed again.

Sometimes I can convince my boss that I have a terrible flu. Sometimes I just don’t show up, and those times it’s half and half whether I’ve got a job to go back to; it depends on how understaffed they are. Sometimes I haven’t been employed in the first place.

Not all poor people are chemically depressed, but a lot of us are situationally depressed at any given time. And that’s because our lives are depressing. I realize that might at first sound simplistic, but I don’t think it’s a lot more complicated than that.

When I think of myself and all the poor people I know, there is only one person who I would have called irrepressibly sunny. Her name was Melissa, and she seemed indefatigable. Nothing, and I mean not eviction, not being without electricity, not being called names—nothing brought this woman down. She once told me that even when she felt terrible, she liked being a bright spot. I’d known her for six months when her kid got in trouble and the school intimated that it was because she wasn’t doing enough for him. And that’s what finally broke her. She got into a terrible funk, withdrawn and silent unless you forced something out of her. She started noticing all the things that were wrong in her world, and that was the end. She was one of us.

That’s the worst, watching someone lose hope. I’m not swelled with it personally, but I always like to see people who
aren’t only pretending to be in a good mood, people who are truly optimistic about life. Those people are contagious, even to a curmudgeon like me. It’s heart-wrenching to watch that fade, like watching a star die or something. I can’t think of anything poetic and tragic enough to describe it.

—

I recognize that the attitude that I fall into—hell, that I cultivate—as a ward against the instability of being poor isn’t always helpful to me. But it’s not as if I can just go in and out of it, like putting on or taking off my makeup. The attitude I carry as a poor person is my armor, and after so many years of fighting and clawing and protecting myself and my family from impending disaster, that armor has become a permanent part of me.

Take a walk through any impoverished neighborhood. You will hear the word “pussy” a lot. A lot. It’s just how some people talk. “Suck my dick,” a man will say jauntily to his friends. Or angrily to his friends. Or randomly to women passing on the street. “Fucking pussy” is a popular phrase too, as in “you’re a” or “I need some.” Street cant isn’t something that poor Americans came up with magically a year after the Pilgrims got here. It’s a product of environments in which everyone’s always posturing just a bit, just in case. A lot of times it means absolutely nothing.

But there is always the potential that as you are walking down the street, some sort of altercation will erupt within feet
of you. Maybe someone is angry with a cashier because their card was declined, and they start yelling about disrespect and ass-kicking and what they ought to do. Maybe a homeless person will loudly and suddenly commence complaining about whatever it is that is bothering them that day. Maybe a mercurial couple will have a disagreement in their own attention-seeking fashion.

I was sitting in a Denny’s recently, drinking coffee and trying to finish writing a chapter of this book. The table next to me had a few kids, two men and a woman, all under twenty. And the table behind me had two people in it, one of whom took it into his head that he’d been insulted by Table 1 somehow. Next thing you know, everyone’s out of their seats throwing insults back and forth, tossing gauntlet after gauntlet, trying to goad a fight. I wound up taking the aggressive dude outside to smoke while we waited for his friend to grab their food and leave. Someone else talked down the people who really had been confronted for zero reason.

That was a random Tuesday. I’ve been to the same Denny’s more than once, and I expect to just drink my coffee. But you never know when you’re going to be talking down an idiot. It doesn’t happen all the time, and it’s not like most trips to the store aren’t rather boring and mundane. It’s just that it
could
happen at any time in the environments where everyone is always tense and worried and stressed. It
does
happen with some frequency. And it’s best to be prepared for the eventuality.

Being poor in the country requires a toughness. We have to be capable of changing our own damned tires and putting
shims on a starter. We chop wood and catch or grow food. Country poor is not even going to the thrift store, because it’s miles away. It’s getting up and dealing with the animals and the crops (if you have them) before you go to work. It’s expecting at any moment to break down at the side of the road because your truck is so old it doesn’t have a computer in it anywhere. And there’s no public transportation in the country. If you don’t have a working car, you’re hoofing it. Rain or snow.

So yeah, out of necessity poor people walk around being just a bit rough and tumble, a bit sharp-edged. We proudly declare that we are rednecks, we wear boots and have weapons with which to defend ourselves and we are doing well enough on our own, thank you. Or we scream that we are from streets somewhere, that we will take no shit, that our neighborhood doesn’t have a place for weakness in it and it makes us hard like warriors.

It also makes me say “fuck.” A lot. It’s my vernacular as a matter of habit, and I developed it as a defense mechanism. Saying “fuck,” especially as a woman, is the quickest and easiest way to assert that you aren’t to be fucked with, or at least that you’re pretending well enough. It’s a tough word, a vulgar word, something you don’t say comfortably if you’re scared of public disapprobation or muggers.

That’s the upside of it for me. The downside is that it doesn’t go over well when it slips into situations where it’s inappropriate and it might even come across as threatening. I know this affects how I’m treated when I engage with the upper classes, but it’s a habit that’s practically subconscious.

I walk with a tiny swagger. Many people who have lived in the not-so-nice parts of cities do this to varying degrees because it tells people from a distance that we know how to handle ourselves, and that we are streetwise enough to make a challenging target. It’s also unconscious in me at this point. To middle- and upper-class people, it’s one more thing that sets me apart, that sends the unintended signal that I don’t belong in nicer company.

My tough demeanor was at first something I cultivated as a survival mechanism. But after a while it became more natural. It’s a lot like hiding my teeth—I got so good at it that I didn’t notice after a while. I stopped noticing anything, stopped registering things as inappropriate or odd. And I stopped noticing when I was being inappropriate or odd, to the extent that I ever knew.

Looking back, I can see where the crossing of the ways happened. I started to lose contact with the middle class at the same time that I became comfortable in the lower one. You can bridge both worlds, but only if you’re consciously doing it and you’re not too tired. Otherwise you revert. I’m perfectly capable of holding an intellectually stimulating discussion like a human being. But my friends will tell you that they can tell how tired I am by how frequently I replace polite words and phrases with profane or aggressive ones.

And I don’t just have problems with playing the part of someone who gives a shit about the niceties; I have difficulty looking the part. That costs money.

I’m not going to claim that I had sterling self-esteem before
I started seeing my economic status written all over my unmoisturized face. I was an awkward, overweight kid who liked books and chess. I was a nerd who missed the makeup and fashion years. But being poor sucked right out of me what little self-regard I might have had. Rich people complain when they have bad hair days or fat days. I have “fryer grease in my hair” days, and “not a single article of clothing makes me look like anything but shit” days. I’m not even going to bother explaining how bad teeth and bad skin might also get you pegged as less valuable, less worthy of respect. You’re reading a book voluntarily, you’re smart enough to figure it out. But those are only the
big
visible markers. There are a whole lot of small ones. If the average rich person had to walk around for a day wearing a polyester work uniform, they’d need Xanax.

Poverty, or poor, or working class—whatever level of not enough you’re at—you feel it in a million tiny ways. Sometimes it’s the condescension, sometimes it’s that you’re itchy. I don’t think people who have never been poor quite understand that.

I like to use jeans as an example. I just bought my first decent pair, the exorbitant $70 kind. It’s like some kind of fucking miracle. I didn’t know denim wasn’t supposed to be uncomfortable. And I’d heard about jeans making your butt look amazing, but I’d never believed it. The kind you can buy at Wal-Mart come in two styles: mom jeans and low-cut skinny jeans meant for middle schoolers because no grown woman could get into them. Regardless of style, they are heavy, the fabric is the rugged we-mine-coal thickness, and once they stretch across your unfortunate lower abdomen, you’re fucked.
They’ll hide the curves you like and prominently display the ones you’d rather nobody noticed.