by Linda Tirado
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.
Assuming, of course, that they fit at all. I have one favorite pair of jeans, which I’ve had for so long that they’ve gone soft from washing. I’ve worn them when I was a size 12 and when I was a size 16. If I wash them in really hot water and then throw them in a hot dryer, they’ll shrink enough that I can belt them to stay up when I’m skinny. And if I wash them in cold and stretch the waistband while they’re drying, they’ll expand enough that I can zip them when I’m on the top side of my usual range of sizes. So yeah, when I put them on, I am wearing pants, but they’re the kind that make you look weirder than you would just leaving the house without any pants on in the first place. At least if you’re pantsless you’re given the room to be crazy. Bad pants just mean bad taste for most people.
I’d never had occasion to walk into a makeup store until recently, when I was going on camera and desperately needed something for my face. I figured that if I went to a special makeup place, they could help me choose foundation and maybe lipstick, because I never know what color to get. The salesperson not only helped me with that, but she also hooked me up with free makeup application lessons, and gave me more free shit than I could have imagined. Samples of this, samples of that, here try this face cream. Just because I walked in with twenty bucks. It’s insane, the perks you get at specialty stores.
I’ve heard my whole life that I should spend wisely, invest in my appearance, that it will make people take me more seriously. Buy a few key pieces, the style authorities say, which would be great if I could ever scrape together $300 of disposable income to spend on a suit. A $20 bottle of makeup, okay, I can do that every now and then. I’ve got $50 sometimes, but it’s still not enough to buy a suit with. If I could put away $20 a week in a little piggy bank marked “nice suit for Linda,” then I’d have enough to buy it about fifteen weeks from now. And who am I kidding? By the time I have $40 saved, I can think of ten other things that $40 could be spent on. Stuff like milk and toilet paper. How often am I really going to wear a suit, and how important might that suit be the one time I need it?
More than once I’ve shown up to a professional event wearing something entirely inappropriate. I’ve gone too casual to formal events, and I’ve gone the other way too. I’ll show up to a casual event in heels. I don’t have the time or resources for style handbooks and fashion magazines, and I don’t get the social cues and niceties. And even if I did get them, I couldn’t afford them.
Let me clarify: I’m not saying that all poor people don’t know how to dress. There are certainly those among us who do better than others in this area (we have our share of aspiring fashion designers who watch Project Runway and all those makeover shows, and you can learn to put on any kind of eye shadow in the world on YouTube). But even if I knew what to wear, I couldn’t afford it. I once wore a suit two sizes too small because I’d gained some weight and didn’t have anything else that fit. It didn’t occur to me until hours into the thing that the only people speaking seriously with me were men looking for company that evening. What I actually had to say was never heard. Then there was the black-tie event to which I wore a light summer dress. Of course I knew it was the wrong se
ason for it, but it was the nicest thing I had. I wasn’t taken particularly seriously at that event either.
So, if first impressions are as important as everyone says they are, what do you think my chances are of getting a professional job if I’m competing against someone who dresses the part? I guarantee you that even if that other job candidate is a little less qualified than me, the boss is going to feel more comfortable hiring the person who she’s not afraid will stick out like a (poor) sore thumb at the weekly meeting with the CEO.
I didn’t really realize that I was fully lower class in both sensibilities and presentation until I found myself at what was the last of my professional social engagements. I was attempting to resurrect something like a career during the worst part of our stay in Ohio, when we weren’t getting our GI Bill stipend, and I thought maybe I could scrape something up. I was invited out to dinner by a bunch of old political work colleagues, and I found myself with nothing to say. I had no insights on the new restaurants or movies or bars, nothing that you typically reach for to make conversation. Every single addition I could have made would have been inappropriate: I couldn’t have talked about my neighbor getting in a fight with his truck while he was drunk because it wouldn’t start and he thought punching it might help. (His roommate had disabled the thing. Friends don’t let friends drink and drive, and smart friends let friends punch the truck instead of them.) I couldn’t talk about which food banks were best for produce and which for diapers. I also didn’t order any food or drinks, which was pointed out repeatedly by the waiter. (“Are you sure you won’t be ordering? Can I tempt you with this/that/the other?”) I finally had to leave the table, track him down, explain that I couldn’t afford anything on the menu, and ask could he please stop making a huge deal out of it? And after that, I never called any of those colleagues again. Nor did they call me.
I understand why that happened. But what I don’t understand is why people who walk into a fast-food restaurant often seem to think I should put on the same smile and elegant demeanor they could expect at Saks or the bank where they put their money. I think the sorts of people who honestly think that service workers should be more smiley and gracious just don’t get it. They don’t get it because they can take so much for granted in their own lives—things like respect, consideration, and basic fairness on the job. Benefits. Insurance. They’re used to the luxury of choosing the most aesthetically pleasing item on the shelf, of caring what color their car is rather than simply whether it runs or not. They don’t understand how depressing it is to be barely managing your life at any given moment of the day. So forgive me if I don’t tell you to have a pleasant day with unfeigned enthusiasm when I hand you your fucking hamburger. You’ll have to settle for the fake sort.
In my world, we don’t have the time or the energy to bullshit about our feelings or worry about anyone else’s. When I’ve found myself in professional situations, I’m driven nearly to distraction by how much fucking effort is wasted making sure we all feel nice and fuzzy and comfortable. I don’t get that; it’s not part of work to me. And it keeps me from getting ahead. If someone asks me my opinion on something, I simply give it. I don’t bother spending five minutes talking about the weather and how lovely your shirt is first. I am thinking about the question I was asked. I figure nobody’s getting paid to win the office nice competition. And it’s amazing to me that some of the same people who can walk by a homeless person without even blinking are obsessed with what everyone thinks of them at work. Meanwhile I know that if I wasted half as much time in my service jobs talking about my feelings as I have in my professional life, I’d be out of work and lying right next to that homeless guy my white-collar friends just skirted past.
Maybe feelings are something that only professional people are allowed to have. My friends and I know that no one gives a shit about ours. We’re constantly told to know our place and not make a fuss about the insane conditions we’re expected to deal with, both at home and at work. And yeah, this discussion about attitude is coming back to the subject of work a lot, because guess what? It’s what we spend a huge percentage of our lives on. And how we’re treated there isn’t something we can just shake off when we leave. It becomes a part of us, just like that armor we wear.
But still we’re told to keep smiling, and to be grateful for the chance to barely survive while being blamed for not succeeding. Whether or not that’s actually true isn’t even relevant; that’s what it feels like. Unwinnable. Sisyphean.
Responsible poverty is an endless cycle of no. No, you can’t have that. You can’t do that, can’t afford that, can’t eat that, can’t choose that. This is off-limits, and that is not for you, and this over here is meant for different kinds of people. More than once I’ve spent money I couldn’t really afford simply to state that I could, if only to myself. Just to say it.
To be told that you deserve nothing more than that, are entitled to nothing more, is enraging. If poverty is supposed to be like prison, then why don’t we kill two birds with one stone and put prisoners in all the low-wage jobs? All the private prisons would be wildly profitable, and the poor people would deserve their poverty because it would be their punishment.
Sure, we can beat the odds. Sometimes we can climb out of it. You’re reading this book by a service worker, after all. But the irony of my success here is that I didn’t get this chance because I worked my balls off for some asshole who thought me ungrateful for my sub-living wage. You’re reading this book by me because lightning struck, because my story went viral. And by definition, that can’t happen for everyone. You can hope for your one real shot, but you sure as hell don’t plan for it. It hurts too much to plan and plan again and keep waiting for the magic day.
So that’s been my American dream. And it’s reality for millions of us, the people who are looking grumpy behind the counter. Our bodies hurt, our brains hurt, and our souls hurt. There’s rarely anything to smile about.
5
I’ve Got Way Bigger Problems Than a Spinach Salad Can Solve
We all cope in our own special ways. I smoke. My friend drinks. In fact, I’m highly confident in betting that you and many of your friends cope by drinking as well. Come home from a long day at work, and what do you do? Pop open a beer? Or a bag of potato chips? Or maybe you take a Valium when you’re feeling stressed out. Or get a massage. Or go to your gym and sit in the sauna room.
Why are other people’s coping mechanisms better than poor people’s? Because they’re prettier. People with more money drink better wine out of nicer glasses. And maybe they get a prescription for benzos from their own personal on-call psychiatrist instead of buying a pack of cigarettes. They can buy whatever they like and it’s okay, because retail therapy is a recognized course of treatment for the upper classes. Poor people don’t have those luxuries. We smoke because it’s a fast, quick hit of dopamine. We eat junk because it’s cheap and it lights up the pleasure centers of our brain. And we do drugs because it’s an effective way to feel good or escape something.
I get that poor people’s coping mechanisms aren’t cute. Really, I do. But what I don’t get is why other people feel so free in judging us for them. As if our self-destructive behaviors therefore justify and explain our crappy lives.
Newsflash: It goes both ways. Sometimes the habits are a reaction to the situation.
And now I have to add one big caveat: Sometimes, sure, the stupid shit we do does explain our crappy lives. Are there meth addicts out there from nice middle-class homes who ended up homeless and far worse off than I’ve ever been? Absolutely. And if you want to believe that addiction is a person’s fault and not a disease, then you can go right on ahead and judge that person for having brought about his own downfall.
But unless you’re prepared to convince me that smoking and smoking alone keeps me poor, then please, spare me the lecture. I know it’s bad for me. I’m addicted, not addled. There are reasons that I smoke, and they’re reasonable ones. They keep me awake, they keep me g
oing. Do they poison my lungs and increase my chances of getting cancer? Obviously. Does that stop me? No. Because the cost-benefit isn’t a simple I like it versus I’ll possibly live longer. It’s I will be able to tolerate more versus I will perpetually sort of want to punch something.
I once talked to a neighbor about the fact that people who lived on our block were statistically likely to die earlier than the people who lived five blocks over in the wealthy neighborhood. He told me that it was just life, it was the way it was. He’d stopped questioning it. So if you already figure you’re going to die early, what’s the motivation for giving up something that helps get you through the here and now?
Look, I’m not saying that getting in a cage match or smoking copiously and with glee is exactly good for my longevity. But I don’t much see the point in worrying about the end of my life if stress will kill me first. If I don’t vent, don’t perform some kind of self-medicating, there won’t be an old age anyway. I’ll wind up dead or in jail or institutionalized when I finally lose it.
Let me be clear: I am not all poor people. Of course there are wholesome people in every class. There are poor people who would never dream of doing anything as déclassé as using drugs. This whole book could be called You Can’t Put an Entire Third of the Country into One Group of Behaviors.
Often, those folks who are unlike me are religious. I tend to think of religion as the same sort of thing as smoking—a soothing ritual that brings someone a moment of peace. But if I don’t want to be judged for my habits, I’m sure as hell not going to judge anyone else for theirs. That’s why I always defend religious people against those assholes who act like they’re too good for anything so magical as religion. We all think magically about something.
So, on the one hand, sure, poor people have been known to engage in some unhealthy behaviors. It’s not as though we, the unwashed masses, are doing anything that everyone doesn’t do. It’s not like drug and alcohol and cigarette sales just stop once a consumer hits $75,000 a year in income or something. It’s a bit galling, actually, to be lectured about my self-destructive habits by someone who’s fighting his own hangover. You’re still getting drunk, friends, whether enjoying a bottle of Bordeaux or drinking a can of Mickey’s. But it seems that the disapprobation of excessive drinking is meant mostly for those of us on the rotgut end of the scale.
