Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (12 page)

So that’s why I encourage everyone to vote for my guys. But I’m not about to judge a poor person who couldn’t give a shit about any of it. That person hasn’t been given a whole lot of proof that her vote will matter anyway; voting hasn’t resulted in policy shifts toward a more equitable distribution of government services. Our schools are still worse, our roads less maintained, our police less friendly. And we simply don’t give a fuck about quantitative easing or who might manage the prime
index, because we do not have money and so those concerns are entirely irrelevant to us.

Poor people have gotten the message loud and clear: The powers that be are not concerned about us. Meanwhile, wealthier people get all exercised about a poor person dropping a cigarette butt on a city sidewalk, as if this is proof that poor people
just don’t care
.
Let’s take that theory a step further. When powerful people stick a waste treatment plant in that same poor person’s backyard, does that mean that rich people
just don’t care
? I’m not even going to bother answering that one, because I think I already did.

Personally, I don’t litter. It’s not because I particularly feel any responsibility to the environment or anything. The reason I don’t litter is that first, it’s an insane ticket to pay if you don’t have to, and second, it’s one of the areas of my life where I get a bit fuck-you and refuse to live down to the expectations of rich people that I don’t give a shit where I throw my trash. Besides, some poor asshole has to pick it up, and I try not to make peoples’ jobs worse on principle.

It’s always been interesting to me that we’re expected to care about beautifying the roads or streets. I don’t, really. Not until the places that I live get the same maintenance resources as the places where the mansions are.

If you wonder why I am angry sometimes, why I don’t always feel a sense of human kinship with people wealthier than me, that’s a pretty good example right there. They don’t feel any toward me, and I’m under no obligation to be the
bigger person. It seems like I’m expected to have the oblige, but I never get the noblesse. And yeah, no. I won’t be doing that.

—

And now I’ll finally say it: Some stereotypes exist for a reason. The bald front lawn and truck with no wheels, the pile of tires—these are all images that come to mind when you think of poor people. In fact, I am the proud owner of a tire pile, inherited from previous owners of my house. I can understand why you don’t find that aesthetically pleasing. Hell, I don’t find it aesthetically pleasing. But what I can’t understand is why you’d judge the person who’s too poor to pay the water bill to spray that dead lawn, or pay the mechanic’s bill to fix that truck, or take the time off work to do something about those tires. (I saved up once and put in two rosebushes. They died because I was away at work too much to water them.)

Like most poor people, I have rented for most of my life, and some of my landlords have maintained my apartments so appallingly that I’m not exactly motivated to drop money I don’t have on improving their property. When I finally did buy a house, I had enough to cover the mortgage but not to put money into something as frivolous as landscaping. My yard is pretty much dirt with some grass sprinkled here and there. I estimated the cost of putting grass in: It came to about a paycheck and a half, before we even considered the water bill.

While I’m on the topic, let me tell you about my house. You see, I have terrible, awful credit, mostly due to medical and
student debt. There’s no way in hell I’d find a mortgage. So when I was living in the trailer and got pregnant again, we needed space. I had my biological dad living with me, my husband, and one kid already, in a single-wide.

So we went looking for a place to rent, like you do. And what we found was nothing affordable. The only places we could have made rent on were either in student housing, which is not where you live if you’re trying to get an infant to sleep, or were so beaten down that they would actually be unsafe, because you really shouldn’t let babies play on surfaces with exposed nails.

So we asked my parents for help co-signing. What wound up happening is that they could refinance their own home for less than they could get a separate mortgage; they refinanced, paid cash from that for my house, and I pay
their
mortgage because it’s sort of
my
mortgage. Understand that we are discussing a house that didn’t even approach $100,000 here, so the monthly payments are reasonable. Better than any place we could find to rent. Those are the contortions that those of us who are lucky enough to have family help—something that I have only recently had the luxury of—have to go through in order to participate in the economy.

Now back to the subject of maintaining that house. Yard care, which I hear is a relaxing pastime for many, is just another chore that I don’t have time in the day for. There’s no point paying for grass seed if you don’t have a decent lawnmower and you never have an afternoon off to mow it.

So, okay, the ugly-lawn stereotype, I own that one and I
don’t really care what people think of me on that score. But the stereotype about bugs attaching themselves to poor people because we’re dirty? That one pisses me off. I would like to take this opportunity to correct a common misimpression: You do not have to be a sloppy housekeeper to get bugs. That is some classist bullshit, right there. I’ve lived in places with roaches; they were there before me, and I’ll place a public bet that the exact same roaches are still living there years after the fact. I tried everything. We stopped eating at home for two weeks so that there wouldn’t be a single scrap of food in the place—they stayed. We put down poison—they stayed. We tried to smash them all—they wore down our resistance through sheer numbers. It was like being part of a single scout unit and finding an entire army just beyond the ridge; you’ve got no chance.

Roaches are nearly impossible to kill without repeated professional extermination treatments, and those ain’t free. They live in walls and under woodwork; if there is a single crack in your apartment they can come in at will. Seriously, call your local exterminator and ask him if it is possible to stop a roach infestation with half a can of Raid in an apartment with cracked walls and a leaky sink. Start a timer from the end of your question and see how long it takes for him to stop laughing.

Bedbugs and lice like rich people as much as they like poor people. But if you’re a poor person with either of those things, you will be judged. The only difference between a poor person with lice and a rich person with lice is that a rich person pays
someone else to pick the nits out of her kid’s hair. And if you’re a poor person unlucky enough to get bedbugs, holy hell does your life suck. There isn’t an effective pesticide for bedbugs—well, okay, there are two, but they’re so toxic you can’t spray them in your living space and then keep living there. Bedbugs can live for months without any sort of sustenance, and they also can live in ductwork and other places that you can’t see when you’re deciding whether or not to move into a place. You can’t stop them once someone’s introduced them into a building without some serious and expensive effort, and you can pick those things up on the bus, or at a gas station, or in a rented car, or at the airport, or generally anywhere in public.

Flies are inevitable when there are holes in your screens during the summer and your AC sucks or is nonexistent and you have to keep the windows open. They’re easier to control through simple cleaning and some vigilant swatting than cockroaches, but they’re a normal annoyance and a simple fact of life. That said, it’s considered trashy to have flypaper up. You can’t even win when you’re clearly deploying effective containment measures.

Rodents living in holes in the walls of poor people’s houses is such a common thing that mice were the entire supporting cast of Disney’s
Cinderella
. Similar mice have starred in more than one children’s movie since then. If you live in an older building, you’ll get mice somewhere in it. I guess the upside is that you can pretend you’re Cinderella, but I wouldn’t hold out hope for any glass slippers coming your way.

Being poor
: that’s how you get ants. Having household pests
isn’t a result of a sloppy, irresponsible nature. It’s a result of being broke. It’s insulting and priggish to insist otherwise, especially if you’re someone who actually pays someone to come to your home to clean for you.

Hey, I’m not blaming people for having those luxuries—I’d love to have them too. I’ve often thought that I need a wife. Or maybe a staff. I’m not really sure what would solve the problem, which is that there’s always a time crunch. There just aren’t enough minutes in the day for me to earn enough money and keep up on life’s details and clean my house and maintain my yard and have a marriage and hang out with my kids. So my husband and I rank those things in order of importance by visibility: Are we the only people who see or have to live with this? Yes? Then who cares?

I really wish I were one of those naturally neat people. I’m not. I’m a natural slob. It takes some serious routine to get me to keep my house clean as a matter of course, but I’m normally too fucking tired when I get off work to clean, besides which I’ve been cleaning up after people all day. I’m rarely in the mood to carry on with that another couple hours when I only have eight hours off between shifts. My feet hurt, and my back is sore, and if I’d like both sleep and a shower, then wiping the grease off the oven isn’t even on my list of priorities.

I always have way more stuff that I can neatly store. Anyone who has ever gone without can relate to this. Who knows when you might need something and can’t afford to buy it? So I rarely throw anything away if I can store it and maybe use it
in the future. Stained shirts might be useful rags for the one time in my life I get some furniture polish and motivation at the same time. My stash of ruined T-shirts made great diapers when my kids were babies. I’ve torn apart two broken coffeemakers to make one working one. You never throw anything away if one of the parts is working, because you might need that part eventually.

I tend to buy in bulk when I have the cash or if there’s a really good sale. Right now there are probably ten bottles of laundry detergent in my closet, because I found it so cheap. I go to discounters and wait until the snacks actually expire, at which point they’re ten cents or a quarter for a whole bag of chips. Granted, the only reason they sit around that long is that they’re off-brand and actually kind of gross (I have seen chips that were supposed to taste like BBQ ranch and cheddar and sour cream all at once, which I think we can all agree is just the worst thing humans have invented), but you can give them to the kids and they’ll never notice. Or you can have a couple beers and you won’t really care either.

—

I guess some people would call all this kind of shameless. And that’s what this whole discussion about civics, and citizenship, and personal responsibility comes down to: self-respect, or a perceived lack thereof. Most privileged people have enough compassion to feel badly for people who don’t have money. But unfortunately, a not-insignificant percentage of advantaged
people have a hard time understanding that shame is a luxury item, because there is a point at which things are so bad that you lose all sense of shame.

Shameless is admitting that you’re poor and asking for money. It’s being brazen. It’s having sex in public because you’ve got nowhere else to go. It’s openly selling drugs when that’s what you do for a living. I’m not going to try to defend hard-core drug dealers. They’re indefensible—unless they are on TV, in which case we are fascinated by them. But most “drug dealers,” in fact, are people who essentially share weed with their friends at cost. They’re not looking to morally flatten their neighborhoods; they just don’t see anything wrong with people getting a little high instead of a little drunk. And pushing dime bags is enough to pay a bill or two, keep your phone or gas on, and keep your car moving.

That’s desperation. And I’ll tell you something else shamelessness can lead you to: selling your food stamps. Is that illegal? Yup. Is it understandable? Yup. If you are willing to live on nothing but ramen, you’ll have at least $20 left over on your food stamp card. You can then, completely hypothetically and I have never done this, engage in a transaction with a neighbor. They get food, and in return you get $10 for your gas tank. Your neighbor will do you this favor so that you will take them in the car you now have gas for to cash their paycheck, which they need to do to replace the $10 they just gave you for gas anyway. That’s what we mean by hustling; you have to figure out who’s good for what at any given time so that you can find rides and babysitters and small loans. You also need everyone
to know what you can be counted on for, because that is your bartering token.

Is that shameless? Maybe. Shameless is something that happens when you have been pushed beyond shame, when you have nothing left to lose. If you will shortly be homeless, what have you got to lose by begging in the street? Maybe you will avert the disaster. If not, you’ve simply gotten a head start on your new station in life.

“Trashy” is a word that has two meanings. It can mean classless, hitting
Maury
levels of public airing of personal behavior. Or it can mean unkempt, which is largely a function of how much time and money you have to spend on maintaining your house and person.

Trashy, the insult, means that you embody the poor-white-person stereotypes. Trashy is what you call people who have brought their eighteen-month-old to the restaurant and are letting him gleefully tear paper napkins and tortillas apart and scatter the pieces on the floor around him like so much confetti. Trashy is talking loudly on your phone in the bathroom. Trashy is using your outside voice to have personal conversations in public areas that are decidedly inside.

My husband, who’s from the West Virginia part of Ohio, says that in the sticks where he’s from, you can always tell a trashy person because their chickens are out. If you build a chicken coop out of reclaimed fencing and duct tape, you’re not necessarily trashy. But you’d better damn well keep your chickens in that coop and off the road.