Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (8 page)

A balanced diet is one more detail to throw at me, and for years my diet consisted of whatever food at work had become expired for service most recently—sometimes beef, sometimes chicken. And when I got home, I ate dinner only when I was absolutely starving. I ate food that I was craving, because it made me feel better. Healthy food, sad to say, just doesn’t work as well as a pan of brownies when it comes to soothing yourself.

I’ve got way bigger problems than a spinach salad can solve.

A human body doesn’t care if acute stress is caused by almost getting your electricity shut off or by a looming deadline on a million-dollar contract. The reason that poor people wind
up coping in ways that seem pointlessly self-destructive is that all the constructive stuff costs money. I can’t afford to join a gym. I can’t just pay a shrink to listen to me vent. I can’t go shopping or find an acupuncturist or a good masseuse or whatever else it is that the people above me do to cope. I can’t pay someone to make my back relax when I have strained it, and we don’t get to take it easy when it happens if we want to keep our hours at work.

Our bodies are no longer our temples. We can’t afford for them to be. I have agreed, more than once, to let people have parts of my body for money. I have observed, lying on a bed to sell my plasma for twenty bucks, that it’s the modern-day opium den—people languid on medical tables instead of couches, staring at the closest TV or watching in fascination as their own blood is separated in the machine.

But I have only so many body parts I can spare. Only so much blood.

There are millions of us who have had enough of this. We have waited. We have been patient. We have coped. And we’ve survived, which we’ll continue to do. Humans are amazingly resilient.

The question is, how can the rest of the country live knowing that so many of us have to live like
this?

This Part Is About Sex

I
’m writing a chapter about sex, so I’m trying to remember the names of everyone I’ve slept with. I don’t think it’s possible; sobriety hasn’t always been involved. I never bought the idea that sex is actually immoral. God made me human, so I tend to think he doesn’t expect me to act like an angel, if in fact angels don’t mess around. And I really don’t understand why rubbing genitals with someone is immoral. With all the evil in the world, we’re really going to judge people who make each other feel good?

Being poor is isolating. You’re constantly being rude to friends and family because you never have time to talk, never have time to hang out. Never have the money to do anything, not even to reciprocate a birthday present. You don’t ever have anything new happening—no news to share unless you’re getting married or having a baby. You lose the most interesting
parts of yourself to the demands of survival. I got so boring when I was at my worst that even
I
didn’t want to hang out with myself. Why on earth would I invite anyone I liked to come over and stare at walls with me?

For me, sex has been a logical fix for that problem. It doesn’t require conversation, no personality necessary. Just some skill and willingness and a partner with the same two things. It’s catharsis without any baggage or investment. Sex is kind of magic that way; if you tell a woman she is beautiful, and you do it when you are as unguarded as you can possibly be, she will believe you, and it will stick with her. If you tell a man he is wanted, and you do it when you are making that very clear, he will remember your words longer than you do. You can fix people a little bit, plus there are orgasms and cuddling. I couldn’t design better therapy.

Sex is fun. It’s fun for rich people, it’s fun for poor people. But there are two possible reasons for having sex that I think tend to be way more important to poor people than to rich people: 1) The chemical rush of sex is a great way to forget about your problems for a little while, and 2) sex is completely free.

Let’s talk about the endorphin rush first. It’s not just the thrill of an orgasm that I’m talking about. It’s the physical comfort and feeling of a little pleasure in your body. Few things are more isolating than financial desperation. Sure I have my friends to talk to, but while we commiserate about the practical—the unpaid bills or the car troubles—we rarely talk about our feelings. We shy away from them. And when I
come home from a long day at work, it’s a guarantee that my husband has had just as sucky a day. If we want physical comfort and a loosening of the back muscles, it’s only going to happen while we’re having sex.

Given that the reason that I’m often in need of relaxation has to do with the lack of money, it’s an added bonus that sex is also free. Entertainment costs. Movies, bowling, whatever you can think of that nice folks do on dates that don’t involve sex—that’s all a luxury. When you have nothing in your wallet and nothing else to do, sex is really good for killing time. I’ve spent more than one afternoon in bed because it was the only entertaining option I had. Given the choice between a) sex minus boredom, and b) celibacy plus boredom, I think we all know which one is preferable.

—

Wealthier people don’t seem to understand it when some poor person pairs up with some other poor person who maybe isn’t so perfect. Maybe doesn’t have the greatest teeth, or the most steady employment, or the best attitude about the world. They seem to think that for every Julia Roberts, there’s a Richard Gere just waiting to catapult her into respectability. It’s only among the wealthy that most people could potentially model for clothing catalogs. Marry up as a life strategy—sure! In real life, Julia would have married a recently laid-off cab driver.

We choose from what’s available, after all. It’s not like laureates and models are thick on the ground, and Richard Gere
isn’t going to show up to whisk me out of the strip club anytime soon. So I wind up with people who are as flawed as I am; people who work where I do and shop where I do and socialize where I do. It doesn’t lend itself to meeting a millionaire and running off to a happily-ever-after in the Hamptons, or even the suburbs.

That doesn’t mean we’re indiscriminate. We do not simply drop trou and rut like animals upon spotting another human that we might be able to fuck. We have sex for the same reasons rich people do—we are in love, we liked someone’s smile, someone made us laugh. Sometimes they’re cute and there’s a spark.

Of course the kind of cliché downward spiral about poor women is that once things get really bad, they have nothing left to sell but their bodies. That’s probably the worst thing most rich people can imagine a poor person having to sink to. Well, that and starving to death. But don’t we all trade sex for something? Even rich people do that—just ask one of those women you see with a big fat diamond on her finger and a boring and unattractive husband to go with it.

Living rent-free is a pretty good incentive for adding a sexual element to an existing friendship. More than once, someone has offered me a place to live when I needed one, and then kind of let me know we’d be having sex. It wasn’t a power imbalance; it was just an understanding that, value for value, this was the deal. If I didn’t like it, I could leave and no harm done. I could probably still have crashed for a day or two, just
not long-term. It’s sex as currency. Cutting the bills by moving in with someone you’ve only just started dating is less sexual than it is practical. If you have found someone who you get along with, who you enjoy the company of, and it’s likely to last at least a few months, it just makes sense to move in together. There is no shame in it, and nor should there be.

I’ve been in less comfortable sorts of sex-as-barter scenarios at work, but I’ve never had to accept them. I could always quit or get fired. I was young when the offers were made and didn’t have kids to feed or extended family counting on me. I was lucky; it never worked on me because I had other options.

That said, the situation isn’t always as gross as that. Sex, as a commodity, isn’t traded so explicitly and openly as “here is cash, now please fuck me” in all cases. Sometimes, it’s a quid pro quo. Sometimes it’s even between friends. I don’t see a problem with that; it’s a human need, and filling it thus has economic value. Related: If you want to have some fun, ask a free-market religious conservative whether you should restrict prostitution, given that there’s a clear market demand for it.

And look, you can’t blame people for leading with their assets. My occasional forays into the sex industry have convinced me that breasts really are magic. I got bigger tips as a bartender in a strip club when I wore a corset. We all exploit our advantages. There’s something about a corset that turns an otherwise reasonable bar patron into something resembling a monkey. A very well-tipping monkey, to be fair.

The act of putting on a corset is enough to negate any
dental problems, weight issues, or personality flaws. Guys would just see that three inches where a very specific kind of fat folds together and boom—instant idiots.

The girls who actually took their bras off made the real money, relatively speaking—it was more than I made but still not enough. If there was cash within five feet of a topless woman, it was often hers for the asking. The only reason I never did it myself is that while my breasts are big, they’re also kind of wonky. And also I can’t dance. And I would not be able to keep my temper through what I saw those girls deal with. So I kept to my spot behind the bar. Guys actually thought I’d be impressed when they told me that they liked me best out of all the women at the club because real honest women wouldn’t strip, that it was beneath them to like a stripper. Amazing. Some guys will moralize at you
while they’re getting a lap dance
. These guys were conflicted about their own sexual moral systems and they blamed us for it, which led to insanely entertaining scenes of dancer rage. You’d see a girl storming out of the lap dance area and a guy leaving just as mad. And she’d tell you that he’d been rude, demanded some seriously inappropriate, um, dance moves, and then told her she was going to hell. It didn’t happen often, but it was gold every single time.

—

It’s ridiculous to suggest that poor people should behave more appropriately about sexual matters than anyone else does. I
am fairly certain I could walk into any swanky bar and find well-off people who are hoping for a night’s fling. I can say with near certainty that most high-end sex clubs cater to wealthy patrons.

I like to remind people that everyone’s parents fucked. Sex isn’t dirty, isn’t abnormal, shouldn’t be a source of shame. Sadly, we as a society are a bit more conflicted about it than that. And for some reason, we moralize more at the poor about sex than we do at the population in general.

Living in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen sexual health campaigns aimed at slut-shaming us into celibacy. They talk about things like self-esteem and value and all the usual abstinence arguments. They assume that our bodies are a gift that we should bestow selectively on others, rather than the one thing that can never be anything but our own. Even if we do share it, it is ours irrevocably.

These are the bodies that hold the brains we’re supposed to shut off all day at work, the same bodies that aren’t important enough to heal. These are the bodies that come with the genitalia that we should be so protective of? I really don’t understand the logic.

You can’t tell us that our brains and labor and emotions are worth next to nothing and then expect us to get all full of intrinsic worth when it comes to our genitals. Either we’re cheap or we’re not.

Make up your fucking
mind.

We Do Not Have Babies for Welfare
Money

I
never expected to be a parent. I’ve got wonky hormones, and pregnancy was supposed to be a non-option for me; I was as surprised as anyone when I wound up getting pregnant. But once my husband and I had our oldest daughter, we decided we wanted a second child. Our kid needed a playmate, needed to learn to share, needed someone to join forces with against us. My husband’s brother is only a few years younger than he is, and I’m forever hearing happy-childhood-with-Andy stories. As an only child, I have favorite childhood memories of times when I was utterly alone, sitting in a tree with a book. So Tom and I decided that for our child, we preferred the former.

So I never understand it when people want to know why poor people have kids. I don’t think having kids is a money question—why does anyone have a second child, or a third? Because their family feels unfinished. We have two children
now, and we’re done. We feel done. But we didn’t feel that way before our youngest came along. That’s why we had a second child. Why do rich people have kids? Do they sit around looking at their bank statements and decide it’s a good time to procreate? So yeah, poor people get to have kids too. Deal with it.

But what about all those unplanned pregnancies that you’re tut-tutting over? Let’s talk about those first, and the whole subject of birth control. Then we’ll go on to discuss what we do with our babies once we have them.

—

I mentioned that I thought kids weren’t exactly likely for me and my husband. A lot of people in my situation would have taken their chances and skipped birth control altogether. But I had a firm belief, instilled in me by my girl heroes from the 1990s, that I should simply be on birth control on principle. Just in case. It was a feminist act, somehow. And I fucking hated it.

The pills made my moods uncontrollable. My periods came nice and regularly, but they were suddenly insane-flood level instead of anything manageable. I’d switch brands or types of birth control, only to discover some fresh hell.

Did you know that if you forget one crucial pill, just one day, you can wind up pregnant anyway? As it turns out, the odds of medicine working are much lower if you don’t actually
take it. I’m a forgetful person, to put it very nicely. The Pill and I didn’t get along well.

Since I was with one person who had been tested since he’d been with anyone, and as I was in the same situation, I just sort of stopped bothering at all. Call it magical thinking, or trusting vague assurances from doctors, but I really didn’t think I’d wind up pregnant, because I have never had normal lady parts. I also think I’d have been more vigilant if we didn’t have some notions about having kids in the future. I thought maybe we’d adopt some foster kids, actually. We both came from families in which you married and then had kids, and that was likely what we’d do. We were having a lot of fun as a couple and weren’t in any hurry to get to the next step, but in skipping birth control, we weren’t actually risking more than bringing on a planned future.

So that’s how I ended up pregnant without meaning to. Did that happen because I’m poor? Maybe. If I’d had the luxury of having a regular gynecologist who made it her mission to find a reliable form of birth control for me that didn’t mess me up mentally and physically, then I almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten pregnant when I did. And that’s the thing about gynecology in this country—we seem to care about women’s bodies only once they are pregnant.

Just like every other sector of health care, access to family-planning services is heavily dependent on income. But a good portion of the unplanned pregnancies I’ve seen in my circles weren’t the result of an active lack of concern for the outcome
or even access to contraception. Rather, the condom broke, the pills didn’t work, someone miscounted. And then there are people like me who just thought they’d never get pregnant. That all happens to plenty of rich people too. Likewise those cases where the heat of the moment really just sort of blew their brains away for a minute and no birth control got used at all—I don’t think that’s really something you can say belongs to any one group of people.

I’ve got zero trouble walking into a Planned Parenthood clinic. I cannot say the same for a lot of women I know. There’s a stigma attached to walking into a place that a lot of demagogues associate with abortions. I actually enjoyed my brush with the protesters; they kept telling me, “You don’t have to do this” and “You have options.” Since I was arriving at the clinic for my first ultrasound to make sure that the baby was healthy, I had a ball pretending to be outraged that they obviously wanted me to abort my baby. You know how sometimes you leave and you figure they’ll get it in about five minutes, and you have won utterly? I totally got to do that with the protesters.

I’ve actually led a bit of a charmed life when it comes to family planning, at least compared with most poor women. That’s because I don’t give a fuck whether people think I’m a bit of a whore and I’ve generally lived near enough to cities that clinics aren’t too far away. I’ve usually had a car and enough cash to spare. But man, that does not mean it’s easy. First, the fees are unpredictable. I’ve paid ten bucks for a month of pills, and I’ve paid fifty. It depends on the funding of the clinic you visit.

And that’s just the pills; you have to take off work, have a car that’ll make the trip, and pay for gas to get there. In rural areas, it might be a few hours to the closest clinic. Of course, most people have a doctor in their hometown. But they might not have a low-income clinic, and even if they do, it might not do birth control. Some women don’t want to get birth control locally, because we’ve actually been pretty successful at slut-shaming Pill users, as though there’s no use for them beyond their contraceptive value. Lots of women would be ashamed to be discovered as medicated harlots.

I know a woman who has been married for five years. She and her husband are in college, hoping to start a family—just maybe in a few years instead of now. She will not visit a Planned Parenthood in Utah or ask for the Pill from her gynecologist, because she is terrified that someone will find out. And that’s in Utah, where the dominant religion is all for married people using birth control. I can’t imagine what it’s like someplace that whore pills and birth control are synonymous.

Look, it’s not like condoms are superexpensive. But they’re not free, and we don’t run across those bowls that you see on college campuses. And God help you if you’re poor and allergic to latex. Then you just don’t get to have sex.

—

Okay, so for whatever reason—whether you wanted kids or your birth control didn’t work—congratulations, you’re pregnant! Now what?

Here’s a big secret from a poor person: Having a baby is expensive only if you want it to be. Let’s go back to the rich-people-looking-at-the-bank-statement thing: A lot of rich people look for a new house or a new apartment before they even get pregnant. Because, the thinking goes, they must have a nursery, or they must have a second or third or fourth bedroom. God forbid kids should share a room. But kids don’t care. Kids know what they know. Babies are happy in a drawer in their parents’ bedroom, and if kids are used to sleeping in the same room with their brother or sister, then they are happy with the company. Sure they’ll fight over space at some point, but I don’t care how big your house is—your kids will fight over space. So let’s just dismiss the whole idea that kids require a big real estate investment.

The idea of privacy among nuclear family members is actually pretty new. Parents used to share a bed with their kids—
and still expand their families somehow
. If people could manage to perpetuate the species with their toddlers thrashing around in the same space, well, I’m not going to bitch about having to share space too much.

Now let’s get down to the real basics of what kids need. Sure, you can buy disposable diapers or spend forty bucks a pop on bespoke organic cotton for Junior to poop on. Or you can tear up old T-shirts. Babies don’t really even care whether their butts are covered; we do that to avoid the cleaning up that would be needed otherwise. It’s quite satisfying to buy thrift store T-shirts with logos of things you hate for a quarter a pop and tear them up so your baby can do her worst.

What I think people are talking about when they say that kids are expensive is either stuff that’s so unattainable that we’d never have kids at all if we waited for it to come along, or stuff that’s entirely unnecessary. When I got pregnant, I started reading up on the latest in parenting, which I’d really not been paying attention to at all. And I was mostly pretty appalled. There are whole articles in women’s magazines about how to politely turn down hand-me-downs, like this is a major problem for some people. The idea of turning down hand-me-downs is so crazy to me that I don’t even know where to start. Your kid will be able to use this stuff for only a few months. And kids absolutely massacre clothes. My youngest can be sitting in the middle of the living room with nothing in her reach, and within five minutes her clothes can pick up a stain from something that I’m not even sure is in the same room with her. For what possible reason, short of family photos or weddings, would you pay retail for something you can get free or secondhand?

Until your kid is old enough to start begging for toys (and this is one of the reasons why I don’t have cable: no toy commercials, no begging), the only truly essential expenses you have to incur are for food and medical care.

I’ve talked about what it’s like to be impoverished and pregnant, but the bare fact remains that I wound up pregnant and
then
hit full impoverishment. I had to figure out how I’d make it work. What I figured was this: Kids can eat pretty much everything adults can, and they don’t eat nearly as much until they hit puberty. And thank God, WIC would cover formula until we were back on our feet.

I’m not being dismissive of hunger. I have known hungry children. The ones I’ve met have uniformly come from families that were overextended, that had cousins and close family friends crashing in their living rooms, or that had some medical emergency or long-term unemployment. There was always an actual external reason for their hunger. I’ve never met a parent that simply didn’t bother to feed their kid. (I’ve no doubt they exist, but I’ve never met one—I think they’re probably about as common as serial killers and receive as much publicity too.) The key is that it wasn’t the having of the kids that was the backbreaking straw for these families.

Children, themselves, do not actually require much. Two families living on one poor person’s income, though, or one family on no income, is impossible no matter how little they need. It’s ridiculous to make the argument that people should be able to predict every possible downturn in their lives in advance. Poor people are not uniquely psychic. Just like rich people don’t think, wow, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because we might have an acrimonious custody battle someday, poor people don’t decide not to have kids because they think, wow, maybe Aunt Jane will lose her job and have to come live with us with all her kids. And I’m using the extended-family example, but it could be any disaster—illness, whatever. The point is that people don’t plan their lives around certain disaster. People who do are called paranoid.

And there are resources for families so their kids don’t go hungry, ideally. On a daily level, there’s WIC for formula, and
once babies have outgrown that, they’re old enough to eat whatever you’re eating. I’ve heard critiques of that too—that you shouldn’t have kids if you’re not going to feed them a healthy diet (which apparently consists of organic kale and quinoa, because it’s not like poor kids have never seen bananas or apples). What we eat is generally fine for our kids, at least according to the food safety people. And people do tend to buy healthier food when they have kids in the house, from what I’ve seen. I know we do. My kids eat a lot of fruit. A lot. My three-year-old is obsessed with all the different kinds of fruit in the world; we go to grocery stores and she picks it out and we call it a good choice. She eats chicken nuggets and fries, sure, but not constantly. Mostly, she eats a bit of my sandwich or her dad’s noodles or whatever it is we’re making.

I can promise you that I did not buy much fruit before the kids came along. I rarely bought anything perishable outside of the requisite coffee creamer and milk. So yes, believe it or not, poor people do sometimes make smart decisions just for their children’s sake.

Yet hunger is still a real thing. I’ve been there. I didn’t qualify for food stamps at one point because on paper we were said to be getting a living stipend from the VA. I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out and maybe (if you don’t already) you will finally understand why being poor and qualifying for benefits is not the same as being poor and actually getting benefits. I’ve briefly mentioned before that we didn’t get a stipend from the VA that we’d been promised. So here’s what
happened: Basically, we were awarded a certain amount of money through the GI Bill. Because of a paperwork error on the part of the university, the VA never actually mailed us the living stipend I’ve mentioned. And they knew this, and acknowledged this, as did the folks at SNAP to whom we applied for food stamps. However, simply because the government
said
that we should be getting $1,200, we were disqualified from receiving food stamps. Despite the fact that everyone involved agreed that the money was theoretical and that we didn’t actually have it. We eventually got it cleared up, but it was one more thing to deal with.

When I think about that, I hope that the people who want to make sure that they weren’t feeding a single person who isn’t abject are happy. I know I certainly felt better about the state of the country watching my husband being thanked for his service by the people telling him that they’d be rejecting him for food aid. So, dear voters and policymakers who are very, very afraid that a poor person might illicitly have a decent steak for their birthday: Thanks for the months of ramen.

I have the solution to hungry children in America. Nobody wants to do it, but here goes: Fucking feed people. Cancel the programs where we pay farmers not to farm, and grow food. Buy it from them and use it in schools. Create real jobs. Fund SNAP. Stop calling it welfare and start calling it something that describes what it is: a subsidy like any other so that the people actually moving this huge wheel of capitalism can live decent, maybe basic but still pleasant lives. Hunger: solved.