Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

by Linda Tirado

  I think the reason for this is that people are less moralistic about the vices themselves than they are about the cost of the vices. The logic is that if you’ve got excess money and throw it away on booze and cigarettes, then that’s your business. But if you’re poor, then that’s a sin and a shame. Because if you’re poor, rich people assume you’re on welfare, or you’re getting food stamps or some other social services. Once you take a penny from the government, a morality clause goes into effect, where you’re never allowed to have anything that you might actually enjoy. It’s the hair shirt of welfare.

  I have trouble understanding why taking a few grand a year in food stamps is somehow magically different than taking trillions as a bailout. Food stamps cost $76.4 billion for 2013, compared with trillions, possibly hundreds of those, for the banks. And that’s just one instance of handouts for the upper parts of society; it’s not like the feds handed cash to the banks and the rich are otherwise left to muddle on alone in the wilderness.

  I do not see a difference, the way many people do, in the federal money. Whether you are getting your benefits in the form of SNAP cards or deductions, it’s the same thing. There is this money that you otherwise would not have had, that the government gives you. Stimulus spending can happen in proactive or passive ways; whether it’s a block grant or a tax break, it’s still the government investing money in a thing because it wants to ease some burden for someone somewhere or to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. It wants people to not starve? Food stamps. It wants people to buy houses? Interest deductions.

  The one difference? Rich people get way more from the government than poor people do—see above-referenced mortgage interest, capital gains, light inheritance taxes, retirement savings breaks—but the poor are the only ones getting shamed for it. You want to know how I could justify relaxing sometimes while I was on benefits? The same way you justify blowing a reckless amount of money on a really nice dinner while you take a business deduction because you talked about work for ten minutes.

  People bitch about double taxation, where corporations are taxed for their profits and then they give money to their shareholders, who are also taxed. This is apparently hugely unfair, and the only reasonable solution is apparently to exempt people from having to pay taxes on their dividends. Because some kinds of income just don’t count as income? Because someone, somewhere, already paid a tax on this particular individual dollar? By the same logic, I shouldn’t be asked to pay payroll taxes because my bosses already paid taxes on it too.

  Capital gain, by definition, is money you make for the simple fact of having money. That’s it. No work, no nothing. Just have some money, wait for it to grow, and then you have more money. Which you clearly should not have to pay taxes on, because that would be unfair. Somehow.

  This, of course, is nothing like unemployment, where an employer pays a tax for every employee, and then if I pull unemployment, I have to pay tax on that as well. But sure, keep thinking that we’ve got all the cushy non-taxation going on down here in the lower classes.

  —

  All humans chase good feelings. It’s just that people with money chase them in ways specific to the upper classes, which makes it okay. You can’t argue that a pair of expensive shoes or an expensive steak is actually something you need. It’s just something that makes you feel good.

  According to a study published in Science magazine, which is a place I trust about science things, your brain actually has less capacity when you’re poor. The theory is that so much of your brain is taken up with poverty-related concerns that there’s simply less bandwidth available for other things, like life. It’s not the only study like that.

  At Princeton, they’ve found that the effect on the brains of poor people from the stress about money alone is equivalent to losing a bunch of IQ points. And they’ve also found that if you remove the stress, our brains snap back and perform at the same levels you’d expect to see in a wealthier test-subject pool. The same goes for the short-term memory impairment and trouble with complexities—skip a night of sleep and tell me how well you’re performing the next day; you’d be functioning on about the same level we do every day. We’re not dumb—we’re conserving energy.

  They’re even starting to find similarities between people in poverty and soldiers with PTSD.

  Poor people didn’t need to wait for the science to know this, though. We feel it. We could have told you that being always tired and distracted wasn’t great for higher cognitive activity. I stopped thinking in higher concepts, gradually. I feel stupid when I realize how long it’s been since I thought about anything beyond what I had to get through to keep everything moving along: no philosophy, no music, no literature. We know we’re not at capacity, and it rankles. So we fix it, best as we can. I know a few veterans, dealing with mild to moderate cases of PTSD, who have turned into potheads. It keeps them from getting too jumpy, keeps their memories from being too sharp. I hear that bankers like coke to stay focused. College kids take Ritalin to study.

  I flirt with addiction, drinking too much coffee and smoking too much, but I’ve never let myself go there because I think it’d be too much of a relief and I’d never be able to come back voluntarily. And if I were dragged back, I’d face a lifetime of having to say no to one more thing that I knew would make me feel good. I doubt I’d do well with that. I’m not particularly strong that way.

  Self-medication is a thing that exists. We fake rest and nutrition like we fake everything else to make it through the day. Mostly, we do it with chemical assistance. I smoke because it keeps me calm, because it keeps me awake, because it keeps me from feeling hungry, because it gives me five minutes to myself, because it just feels good and I like it.

  Have you ever felt tempted to go to one of those places where you can pay to smash china? I never have, but then I never saw a reason to pay to smash things. I just did it. It feels good, really good, to break things when you’re frustrated. It doesn’t actually solve anything, but for a second you feel better. I like breaking glass. It’s therapeutic. It was my favorite part of working as a picture framer; we had to smash the flawed glass into tiny bits for disposal. More than once, I popped in to help on my day off just to smash things. It’s the same logic that explains mosh pits.

  One day, when I have nothing but free time, I will start a mosh pit for old people. I quit jumping into them only when I started to realize that I’d become the creepy old person in the corner. For years, though, mosh pits were my anger therapy of choice.

  Sex is also therapeutic when it’s blissfully mindless. Orgasms for orgasms’ sake. It makes your muscles relax, your headaches lessen. It makes the stress go away for however long it lasts. It’s kind of amazing to have some outlet, somewhere, that you don’t have to work for; that’s the whole point of having a fuckbuddy. It’s effort-free. As long as you’re attracted enough that sex is a possibility and you feel safe, that’s all that matters. Sex, done properly, makes you feel wonderfully accepted.

  It’s different from love. Maybe in the upper classes it’s called a fling, but down here where I live it’s a pressure release, and no love or imitation Hollywood romance or delusions of long-term commitment are required. It’s not like I fuck everyone within arm’s reach, but I don’t expect to fall in love with everyone I’ve ever been infatuated with either. It’s just nice to be in a pleasant spot for a while, that’s all.

  —

  The coping that I and many of my friends do via medication isn’t just about emotional relief. For me at least, it’s just as much about physical pain management. I’ve stopped paying attention to how much ibuprofen I take in a day. More than I should, certainly. A reckless amount, even. I’m a pill popper, just not the narcotic sort. I start my day with ibuprofen and cold medicine, because I get sinus headaches from pretty much every part of nature and my jaw is always killing me. B12 for energy, vitamin C as a prophylactic measure. The ibuprofen starts to wear off in a couple hours, so I take some more. Repeat as n
ecessary. Add in a pot of coffee and maybe a guilt-ridden switch to naproxen in the afternoon for pain management, plus whatever nicotine I get in there. And if I absolutely have to sleep well, I wind up taking something that says “p.m.” on it, whatever that might be. If the pain is bad, as it often is for people with serious back injuries and dental problems like mine, alcohol or some kind of narcotics might be taken too. That, friends, is what pain management looks like outside the health care system.

  Miraculously, I’m not dead yet, and as far as I know, my liver hasn’t started to fail. My husband comes from healthy stock, the sort of people who maybe keep a bottle of aspirin around for emergencies. He was horrified at my intake, to the point that he once asked me to try not to take anything for a while to see if it would reset things for me. After a couple days I wound up in bed trying not to breathe too much because moving made the headache worse, and he’s never mentioned it since.

  I know that any actual cure of my chronic pain would have to at least partly involve lifestyle changes that simply haven’t ever been logistically possible. Any kid who watches Sesame Street can tell you that it’s important to sleep well, drink lots of water, and eat a balanced diet. And I can guarantee you that I can drink lots of water. The other two are trickier, if not mostly impossible.

  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?

  6

  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.