Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

by Linda Tirado

  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 hypotheticall
y 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.

  Okay, so we’ve established this: Poverty isn’t pretty. We can’t afford to dress nicely. Our yards are a mess. We don’t really care about your political pet projects. But do you know what we really do care about? Each other. And I’m going to make a big leap here that I am very comfortable with: Poor people are, as a rule, a bit more generous. We understand what it might be like to have to beg even if we have never done it ourselves. In fact, there’s data to back me up. The latest research shows that people of low socioeconomic status are more likely to be altruistic than their higher-class counterparts. In 2011, the bottom 20 percent of earners gave a higher percentage of their wealth away than the top 20 percent.

  I’ll put it to you this way: If good citizenship consists of a well-ordered life, then we poor people make terrible citizens. But if it means being willing to help out your fellow human beings, I’d say we’re right out in front waving a flag and waiting for everyone else to get on the bandwagon.

  10

  An Open Letter to Rich People

  Dear Rich People,

  I know that nobody understands you. I want to help. I have, for all my faults, always been rather compassionate to people who are in real pain.

  I know that you understand what I mean when I say that sometimes I feel so unappreciated that I just can’t be bothered to care. See? There. I feel your pain.

  So to make it easier, I have some observations, some advice. Because if there’s anything a poor person knows about, it’s how to survive in this fucked-up world.

  And seriously? You people are doing it wrong.

  1. WORK

  What is it with you people and your meetings? I’ve been allowed to sit in on a few of them recently. I don’t know how you stand them. Suddenly, the insane rules you people make us live with seem inevitable. See, until I started sitting in on the meetings, I couldn’t see a single reason for programs that had contradictory rules or relief programs that were practically inhumane in their lack of realism. Now I realize it’s because every meeting results in nobody having a clue what they’ve actually done. They’ve been devoting only 10 percent of their brains to the meeting itself, the remainder being occupied with fantasies of mayhem and whatever song they last heard. Here are my observations from one such meeting:

  I’d have been fired from all my regular jobs if I made my bosses repeat themselves this much.

  WE HAVE BEEN OVER THIS SO MANY TIMES ALREADY!

  If time is money, how does this world function?

  Holy balls, the flattery.

  So many people not paying attention right now.

  Why are they reading the handout to us? I think everyone here can read.

  Is it possible that there is actually no point to this meeting?

  I’m not kidding, rich people. You can email me for a copy of the notes.

  I’ve just been sitting through meetings wondering when the work would get done. What I have discovered is this: In every one of them, someone opens by talking about how we want to be respectful of everyone’s time and right to speak, along with a plea to keep comments short. Then everyone sort of tunes out while the agenda is being read. Some talking is done by whoever is running things, mostly follow-up from the last meeting.

  Then the fun begins. Someone will rise, bring up a good point. Someone else will clarify. A third will ask a relevant question. And then—and here’s the part that gets me every time—someone will ask a question that makes it perfectly clear that they weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention during the last ten minutes or so. And nobody calls them out for it. As long as the question or observation is worded just a little differently, it counts as a new contribution. What the fuck, rich people? Time is money, unless that time is being spent repeating things that have been established already?

  Worse are the endless reassurances. “I don’t want you to think I’m opposed, because it’s a fantastic idea you had to buy ten crocodiles and set them loose in a school as a publicity stunt, but I just don’t think it’ll work for us.” Why on earth do you people not just tell each other when your ideas suck? Why the self-esteem dance? You guys, you’re allowed to have bad ideas and irrelevant points. It does not make you a terrible human being. Maybe you should just accept that and then you don’t have to cover any criticism, even the most gentle, in five minutes of apology. Maybe we could borrow some of your apology time for our workdays, and then both of our problems would be solved.

  By the end of the meeting, which inevitably has run over by at least twenty minutes, nobody is entirely sure what’s been accomplished, but everyone feels like their concerns were heard. I have come to the conclusion that business meetings are like group therapy for the wealthy. Everyone sits around looking at each other and waiting for it to be their turn to speak so that they can zone out for the remainder of the time they aren’t allowed to leave the room.

  The meetings are what made me realize that you guys slack off at work too. It’s just that you don’t call it slacking off (and that you all have office doors to close so no one can see you playing solitaire or shopping online).

  So, rich people, now that we’ve established that your work ethic and approach to your job are not exactly unassailable, how about you get off your high horse about how we poor people do our jobs? Also:

  Please stop equating our jobs. I am not saying that you put in no effort, that you’re not tired or overburdened or anything. I just think that we should delineate between the jobs where you can pee at will and the ones where you can’t.

  For the love of God, please stop telling us that outrageous salaries are justified because some people are just worth that much. You guys can totally pretend that anyone can possibly justify earning thousands of dollars every minute. Just stop demanding that we pretend with you, that’s all. You guys are supergood at excluding us from conversations. Maybe make that one of them. Just let me know when you start gossiping and I’ll rejoin the conversation. I bet someone got laid.

  Maybe you could hire us? I hear rich people complaining about being overworked. I hear poor people complaining about being unemployed. I feel like there’s a solution here. You know we work cheap, ri
ght? You could totally pay me $10 that one time to run your errands for you or write that standard report that’s a pain because it’s such rote work. We are highly trained in rote work.

  2. CIVICS

  This is a big one for me. See, civics is the study of citizenry, its burdens and responsibilities and privileges. It’s more than whether or not you, as a class, vote frequently. It’s about whether or not you’d want to live in the nation you’ve created; if you were born tomorrow into the lower classes, would you be quite so sure that America is the land of opportunity? (See what I did there? That’s philosophy. I am trying to speak in your language here, rich people. Because I care deeply about how your day is going today.)

  Do I think rich people are highly hypocritical in this area. Um, yeah. Shall I delineate further?

  If you’re the makers, what do you make? I make food and fill boxes and exchange goods for money. Please find a different word, rich people, besides makers. Maybe you could try “magicians,” because you can create money where there was none before. And then please teach me how to do that too.

  I know it’s a pipe dream, but maybe you guys can just admit that we all get shit (see entitlements, roads, tax credits, crop subsidies, fire departments) from the government and move on with your lives?

  It’s relatively easy to keep a neighborhood looking nice if the local government actually maintains the roads and medians and signs. If they are too busy making sure that the already-nice sections of town stay that way, they do not have time to come improve the not-nice parts. This is why we laugh when you wonder why we live in run-down areas. It’s because when public service cuts happen, they never happen in the bougie neighborhoods. You should know that, given that it’s being reported in all your media outlets.

  Your dogs do not belong in restaurants even if they are supercute. I swear to God, the number of tiny dogs I’ve seen in inappropriate places is at least ten times higher than the number of times I’ve gotten laid in my life. And, newsflash: Only service animals are allowed in restaurants. That’s actually a public health concern. I don’t get why you’re allowed to decide you’re completely above the law simply because you found a purse to fit your dog into.