by Michelle Tea
Shane Matzeo had no dad, but he had Monopoly-like plastic money to buy stuff with at the corner store. I wanted it, too, but my mom got mad when I asked. “That’s welfare. Your parents work,” she said. Shane was my age and sometimes my unofficial boyfriend. We touched the tips of our tongues together on the front step once, because he said that’s how you kiss. We giggled afterward and promised not to tell. He had a little sister named Rachel, same age as mine, and we four played together a lot. Once, when playing Monster, Shane was “it” and chased my sister through his house until she put her arm through the glass front door. We all went to the hospital and she got fifteen stitches, so we weren’t allowed to play with the Matzeo kids for awhile.
Jason Spanelli spent summers and holidays with his grandparents down the street, not exactly in the housing development, but close enough to play with us. He was a fat kid with a crush on my sister. The neighborhood whispered about his grandparents being “family,” because they had a new car every other week and always paid for everything in cash. Their house was a hangout for his whole extended family, and they always offered you food the minute you stepped through the door. “Sausage and peppers? Some lasagna, Honey? Did you eat?” his grandma would say, coming at you with full steaming plates. Even if you told her you had, she made you have a piece of cake or a “no-thank-you” helping. Mom said she didn’t care if they were mafia—“They’re still good people,” she said. “They brought us food and gave me rides everywhere when I was pregnant with you and your dad was overseas, and I’ll never forget that.” Plus, they were Catholic and went to our church, so she liked that, too. We were always allowed to play with Jason.
Mindy had more Barbies than anyone, because she had a sister who was fifteen years older who passed down all her Barbies and Barbie clothes. She also had the Dream Machine, Dream House, Corvette, an Easy-Bake Oven, It’s Sew Easy, the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine, Shrinky Dinks, and that Operation game. Her toys were powerful currency when she didn’t get her way. “Welllllll, if I can’t be teacher today, you can’t borrow my Barbie disco outfit overnight,” she’d say, and eventually someone would give in, usually my sister. Mindy’s things were all she had going for her.
Gramps lived next door with Grandma, who was sent away to the funny farm for “nerves” before I was born. I don’t know what made her so nervous, but it had something to do with the hysterectomy she had after having my uncle Chuckie, who “wasn’t quite right in the head,” according to most people. Since then Grandma hadn’t been right either, and she had been in and out of this funny farm, which seemed like a great place because when she came home for holidays she brought lots of mosaic ashtrays and other art projects she’d made. She never talked much, just sat chain-smoking calmly with her legs crossed all ladylike, but the top leg or foot was always bouncing up and down furiously. I think this was the “nerves.” One time she drank almost a whole bottle of beer my dad had set down, and everyone freaked out. “Frances, you know better! It’ll kill you with your medicine!” my grandpa screamed. She laughed and kept on bouncing that leg.
Our cousins lived in a real house down the street—seven kids in one family, so there was always someone to play with there: Bobby, Greggy, Shelly, Sherry, Cindy, Butchie, Mikey. In that order. My uncle Butch died in a car accident when Cindy and I were six. I sat in the car with my dad during the funeral. It was raining hard and I wanted to go up to the grave site with my mom and cousins, but I was too young. I did get to go to the wake, where there was lots of food and crying and laughing, old ladies I didn’t know kissing and hugging on me and my sister. Uncle Butch and his friend had been driving drunk, too fast. Partying, as usual. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone crying, everyone said. This was the day I learned the word “decapitated.”
We never did end up at that mysterious “poorhouse” Gramps was always talking about. We were spared the labels of “homeless,” or worse, “stinky.” Even if we were wearing our cousins’ hand-me-downs, one weekend being dragged to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to serve soup or hand over our own hand-me-downs was enough to prove that there were people worse off than us, and that they didn’t all live in China.
ONE YEAR I DID SOME READINGS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. I stayed at the British Library one whole day, giddy with the idea of me looking at the original manuscripts of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Finnegans Wake, Jane Eyre. My first reading was in Chatham, east of London. I took the train out to Basildon and a sales rep took me around to four chain bookstores to sign stock. The bookstore people were really nice. South-By-Sea looks like the British version of Coney Island, a town next to a run-down amusement park on the water. I was walking around and thinking how lucky little ol’ me was to be there, thinking how I’m from nowhere, never thought I’d go anywhere, how people from nowhere sometimes get stuck and sometimes break out, when I stumbled on a cobblestone and skinned my knee. I ripped my cute new black striped tights, and later, while gently pulling them out of the blood and rocks embedded in my leg, the words of my parents crept into my head—“Can’t have nothin’!”—a phrase sputtered whenever anything of meaning or value was destroyed, as though we were destined to never have anything “nice.”
These words were most often blurted when someone else in our neighborhood stole or ruined something of ours. Later, when we moved from the projects, the phrase was uttered less and less often. My parents must have known it would be hard to “have anything” living among others who had nothing. Dog eat dog. Poor stealing from the poor. It happened sometimes, and it did seem especially cruel and unexpected. You expected the poor to steal from the rich, the rich to tax or exploit the poor, the rich to steal from one another (or else how would they be rich?), but people with nothing taking a little something from other people with nothing? Insulting. Painful. Just wrong.
MY SISTER MIGHT NOT REMEMBER “CAN’T HAVE NOTHIN’,” BUT she remembers the feeling. She has a new condo, which she can’t wait to show me, she says. She swipes a card and we walk through an Italian-marbled lobby, down soft, salmon-colored carpeting, and then are whisked up in silent, jetlike elevators. We walk through a winding maze of halls, passing no one. She unlocks the door and waves me in to a catalog-perfect, neat-as-a-pin, color-coordinated living room. There are gray marble kitchen countertops, fake flowers in a slender vase on a glass-topped table in the breakfast nook, perfectly arranged photos of perfectly smiling people on a shelf. There’s an old one of me. Price stickers are still on the backs of some of the frames. The bedroom is immaculate. Headboard matches the dresser, big fluffy pillows on top of a big down comforter. Not a shoe peeks out from under the bed. Not a hint of make-up lies around the bathroom sink. Everything is as it should be.
She tells you the cost of everything because she wants you to know she can have it.
It’s like a display model, like one of the many little homes with minimal furniture and fake televisions we looked at when our parents went house-shopping in our teens. It looks like no one lives there until she pulls out four pairs of black pants she just bought. She pulls them from a closet full of similar black pants. But these are designer, she tells me. They still have the tags on them. They were expensive but she got them for a good deal, she says. She just paid $500 to have her hair straightened. She tells you the cost of everything because she wants you to know she can have it. In her mind, she has everything. I used to hate her for wanting it.
The only questions she and my parents ask me these days seem to be about things I’ve bought or can’t afford to buy. Are you ever going to be able to buy a house? Don’t you need a new car? Do you have health insurance yet? I think they think I have nothing.
I still can’t believe my sister doesn’t remember anything about the old days. She is in all of my mental snapshots, and when I dig them up, I feel the unintentional camaraderie of poverty, the little pieces of kindness in humanity when conditions weren’t ideal. It’s my definition of community. I remember it all, enough to write it down, so I know I do have something.
PAS
SING AS PRIVILEGED
LILLY DANCYGER
I WAS AT A NETWORKING EVENT A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, TALKING TO A few other young New York City journalists. As it often does, the conversation drifted into politics—how divided our country is, the importance of hearing opinions that challenge our own, and the responsibility of the media to offer varied perspectives.
“The problem is that you have all of these privileged millennials in New York writing news from inside the bubble!” one member of our group said with a laugh, gesturing around the circle we stood in.
I nodded along. He was right, that is a problem. It’s true that the media, especially New York-based online media, is full of twenty-somethings whose parents could afford to send them to expensive schools, to support them through summer internships, and to help out with their rent during those difficult first few years, when journalists make pennies compared to college graduates in other industries.
It’s a deeply flawed system that makes it almost impossible for poor or working-class people to work as reporters, writers, or editors—the gatekeepers who decide which topics are worth discussing in newspapers, magazines, and books.
Then I realized he was referring to us—the people in the conversation—as the privileged millennials.
Including me.
I suppose it shouldn’t have come as such a shock that my background wasn’t immediately readable to these people I’d just met. I was appropriately dressed for the event, I knew the jargon and the talking points, I blended in. What they didn’t know is that I’m a high school dropout who was raised by a single mother—a recovering heroin addict with debilitating PTSD who was only able to keep a roof over our heads and food in the fridge with the help of multiple government assistance programs.
When I was a teenager, my “bedroom” was a loft bed above the kitchen of our studio apartment, where my mother slept on the pull-out couch. I got my first waitressing job when I was fifteen, moved out at sixteen, and have been financially independent since.
As I awkwardly wiped condensation from my plastic cup of wine onto my dress slacks, it occurred to me that I’d done such a good job of making something of myself that I’d made my past invisible. The system is stacked against poor kids breaking into the competitive world of journalism, but I did it anyway, and now my peers see my graduate degree from Columbia and my magazine job, and they assume that I must have had help, like they did—that someone paid my rent, at some point. I pass as one of them.
THE FACT THAT I PASS IS, IN ITS OWN RIGHT, A TYPE OF PRIVILEGE—one that’s intertwined with my other privileges as an able-bodied white woman. I can choose to show my societal disadvantages or hide them at will, a luxury Black Americans don’t have, a luxury many disabled Americans don’t have. And my education and employment, no matter how much I had to scrape and scam and fight for them, provide me undeniable advantages over people with backgrounds similar to mine who weren’t able to make it out, whether because they were discriminated against by admissions offices or hiring managers, or because they had to skip college to work a menial job and help support their family, or any other reason.
Now that I’ve made it this far, I can’t deny the privileges I have today. But I also can’t—and won’t—hide where I came from.
My mother joked once that she had actually helped me pay for college by being so poor that I qualified for the maximum amount of federal financial aid. I could barely fake a smile as I thought about how hard it had been to get that financial aid when I couldn’t prove my mother’s income because she hadn’t filed taxes for the last five years. I’d had to bring in copies of her disability and social security checks—her only income—to prove I wasn’t getting any money from her.
Once, when a professor gave an especially short turnaround time for a homework assignment, I approached him after class, asking for more time. I had to work that night, I explained. He told me I needed to make my schoolwork a priority. I agreed. It wasn’t worth explaining that I’d have a really hard time doing any schoolwork at all if I didn’t have a place to live because I didn’t pay my rent. I remembered that moment, and my mother’s joke landed with a particularly loud thud.
I took an unpaid summer internship—commonly accepted as an unfair prerequisite to a good job as a writer, but I still bartended at night. I often went straight from my fancy magazine office to the dive bar downtown; dressing for both was an art form I perfected: skinny jeans with a grungy bar tank top hidden underneath a stylish blouse, with red lipstick and black eyeliner stashed in my purse to be applied on the subway. I wondered if any of my classmates had to worry about the absurdity of working full time for free, if they had to go from work to work.
Now I pass. I’ve made it. So why do I feel so queasy? Why did I have the urge to defend myself at that networking event, to tell the people around me, “I’m not one of you!”
The usual narrative about the scrappy working-class kid who pulls herself up is that she’s supposed to be embarrassed about where she comes from. I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
The usual narrative about the scrappy working-class kid who pulls herself up is that she’s supposed to be embarrassed about where she comes from. She’s supposed to work hard to keep up the illusion, to convince her peers that she, too, went to sleepaway summer camps and lived in college dorms. When she passes, she has succeeded.
But I don’t want to blend in. I’m proud of how hard I’ve worked. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve never treated waitstaff or security guards or bus drivers like they’re not there, that I relate to them more than I do to most of my peers. I’m proud of the fact that I dropped out of high school, and not just because I still managed to go on to get an Ivy League graduate degree, but because I knew what was best for me at the age of just fourteen, and I had the courage to do it.
I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
ONE MORNING IN MY SOPHOMORE YEAR OF COLLEGE, I WOKE UP in my loft bed in the tiny apartment I shared with a friend, exhausted from bartending late into the night. I’d only slept a couple of hours, but it was time to get up if I was going to make it to my 10 a.m. Literary Foundations class on time. The sun peeking in my window was blinding, and the smell of French-fry grease and margarita mix clinging to my hair was nauseating.
All I wanted was to turn off my alarm and go back to sleep. I could do it—I could stay in bed, skip class, sleep a little more. Who would care?
Instead, I lay in bed and calculated on my phone exactly how much I was paying per class session. I had scholarships and federal financial aid, but they didn’t cover everything. Even with the money I earned bartending, I still had to take out loans to make up the difference. They weighed on my mind as I remembered watching my mother struggle to pay bills and promising myself I’d never agree to pay for anything I couldn’t afford. That hadn’t exactly worked out, so I figured I had to at least make use of the thing I was going into debt over.
Once I worked out how much money I’d be wasting if I stayed in bed, I dragged myself to class, suddenly seeing my peers with clear eyes—the classmates who didn’t want to be there; the ones who skipped class, showed up late, didn’t do the homework; who treated college like a four-year party. I knew they weren’t paying their own way. If they were, they wouldn’t take it for granted.
Once I realized that, I stopped being so jealous and resentful of how easy they had it. I stopped envying their co-signed leases, their rent checks arriving in the mail as if from a giant tooth fairy. They could have all that; I had something they didn’t. Call it perspective, work ethic, appreciation, grit. Call it what you will, but I have it, and I won’t hide it.
In the moment, at that networking event, I didn’t say anything. I did what I had learned to do—blend in and let people assume that I’m one of them. On the subway ride home I was kicking myself for not speaking up, but what would I have said? How could I have told them that I’m not like them with
out coming off as rude, self-pitying, or both?
Then I remembered that realization I had on that morning when all I wanted to do was skip class: I have something that they don’t. I have the perspective that comes with clawing your way into a world that was designed to keep you out.
I don’t need to constantly announce to my peers that I’m different from them; I just need to remember that myself. I need to never forget that I have as much in common with the doorman as I do with the fancy women he holds the door open for. I’ve made it into this world, and now I owe it to the world I came from to hold onto my perspective, my work ethic, my appreciation, my grit, and use my history to be a better writer. To tell truer stories. To speak for the people who were successfully kept out of this world.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Dorothy Allison is the bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, she lives in Northern California.
Naomi Begg is a lecturer in English, communication, and creative writing from the Scottish Highlands. She likes yoga, hot tea, the feeling you get when snow is in the air, and death metal. She aims to be a millionaire by the age of fifty and to win a Nobel Prize. Any Nobel Prize will do.
Rachel Ann Brickner is a writer and multimedia storyteller from Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Joyland, PANK, and elsewhere. Currently, she’s at work on her first novel and several projects about debt. You can see more of her work at rachelannbrickner.com.
