Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

by Linda Tirado

  When some wealthier people sense an unwillingness in lower-paid workers to move faster than they absolutely have to, or to do much of anything with their free time, it’s because we are marshaling our resources. We’re not lazy, we’re stockpiling leisure while we can. I can’t tolerate more mental exercise after a full day of logistics and worry. Full capacity just isn’t an option.

  We start the day with a deficit. Most poor people don’t wake up feeling refreshed and rested. When I wake up in the morning, I’m in pain. If it’s ragweed or wood-burning season, I wake up with insane headaches. If I’m spared that, there’s still my aching back, stiff from a night on a mattress that was worn out long ago. There’s not a moment in my life that my mouth doesn’t hurt; my tongue is raw from touching broken teeth and my jaw isn’t any happier about them. (I fully realize that some of the trouble is that I don’t know how bad I feel. There’s no baseline, no normal “healthy” to compare an average day with.)

  I’m not trying to say that only poor people feel pain. The point here is that life is a bit peachier if you have medicine or are under a doctor’s supervision to treat these things. Allergies are less severe if you get allergy shots. My headaches are partially due to my jaw-teeth trouble. I realize the aging process would suck enough on its own—I’m generally less than pleased to have it helped along on a daily basis because I don’t have enough money to seek proper medical attention. For fuck’s sake, a decent mattress can be considered a contributor to an optimal health outcome.

  But poor people wake up knowing that today, no matter how physically shitty we may feel, we can’t call in sick or slack off at our desk surfing the Internet. We have to go to our crappy jobs no matter what. We will feel guilty about the bills and the dishes and we will firmly put them out of our mind as we march out the door in our polyester uniform shirts. Or worse, we will have to find something to do with our endless unemployed hours.

  Sometimes, that’s all the day is, just another gray nothing. Other times, it’s already a bad day and people just have to fucking push me. I’ve got a bit of a temper, and I have trouble holding my tongue when I’m pretty sure someone’s being an asshole. My record from waking up to losing it is in the neighborhood of an hour. Mostly I make it through a whole day, but sometimes it’s just not in the cards. The night before my record-setting morning, I’d made it home from work at ten p.m. and passed out by eleven. I’d been working extra and was short on sleep to begin with. My boss called at five a.m. wanting me to come in. I drank some coffee and dragged my sorry ass out the door, and when I showed up, he was mad that it had taken me half an hour to come in. He’d been under the impression that when I said, “I’ll be there,” I meant that I’d use my teleportation device instead of the beater car I had at the time. I blew it off, figuring that he was just in a bad mood. But he simply couldn’t let it go—every time someone complained about this or that setup not being done properly, he said that if only I’d been there on time we’d have made it.

  I lost it. Completely. This is the version of what I said that I can best remember through my blistering rage: “If you think I’m so goddamned terrible, why did you call me in? Did you not realize that I’d be on a fourteen-hour shift and that I was running on a few miserable fucking hours of sleep? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU INCOMPETENT FUCKING ASSHOLE?” And I said all this in my outdoor voice. In front of customers. I spent the afternoon looking for work, as I was newly unemployed.

  Being poor is something like always being followed around by violins making “tense” movie music. You know that commercial where the band Survivor follows a guy around playing “Eye of the Tiger”? Yeah, it’s like that, but the musicians are invisible and they’re playing the shower scene from Psycho. Nobody likes being harried, but for a lot of us it starts upon waking and doesn’t let up until we crash at night. Eventually, you just know that something bad is going to happen. That’s not paranoia or pessimism; it’s reality.

  When my story went viral, I got a lot of blowback from people demanding to know how I dared to have children while I was living in a weekly motel. Well, I’ll tell you: That’s not how we started out the pregnancy. The VA didn’t end up paying us the living stipend that we’d expected so we’d gotten a cheap apartment. That was fine, for the short term. Until one day, when I was heavily pregnant, a summer storm flooded our apartment and destroyed everything we owned.

  The landlord hadn’t paid for proper maintenance on the storm drains, and they backed up. We didn’t have family in the area, so we went to stay at the motel while we sorted out the damage. We’d been in touch with maintenance, who’d assured us that they’d take care of the water.

  What we hadn’t realized was that the landlord’s version of “taking care of it” was having the guys run a Shop-Vac for a while and then set up some box fans. This was to take care of a flood that was feet deep. The water soaked into the concrete walls so thoroughly that when we stopped in a few days later, you could see the mold growing to above your head.

  We didn’t have enough money to pay for both the motel and our rent. We called the landlord to get a new apartment, maybe one that wasn’t toxic, and were told that the apartment was fine now that it was dry. We called the health department and the press, neither of whom cared much. The health department guy, in all fairness, happened to not be in charge of this particular issue and couldn’t tell me who was. But he agreed that we definitely shouldn’t live there, especially not with a baby.

  The result? The landlord sued for eviction because we weren’t paying the rent on our flooded apartment. Cue the movie violins. Something as simple as a summer storm can mean disaster. So I learned to simply expect that if things felt like they were going rather too well, something would come along to knock me back into reality.

  Gruff attitudes are rife among people with low-wage jobs. And it’s no wonder, really, considering the lives we lead. Yet many of our employers actually seem to think it’s reasonable to require unfeigned good cheer in their employees, and this I don’t get. It doesn’t make sense to hire people at wages that guarantee they’ll be desperate and then be disappointed when they’re not always capable of pretending otherwise. Look, I don’t like walking into a gas station or fast-food joint or box store and dealing with a bunch of sullen idiots either. But people don’t seem to stop to wonder why we’re uniformly so pissed off and unhelpful. I think you’ll find that the happier employees are in general, the happier they are at work. It isn’t rocket science. My guess is that, like me, a huge number of poor people are depressed. Anger is one of the few emotions that can penetrate depression. It’s strong enough to punch through the haze, so a whole lot of people like me hold on to our anger. We cherish it. The alternative, at least for me, is a sort of dreary nothing. Anger and depression make for a cute couple, right?

  —

  Regardless of our mood, we’re never fully checked into work because our brains are taken up with at least one and sometimes all of the following: 1) calculating how much we’ll make if we stay an extra hour, 2) worrying we’ll be sent home early because it’s slow and theorizing how much we will therefore lose, 3) placing bets on whether we will be allowed to leave in time to make it to our other job or pick up our kids. Meanwhile, we spend massive amounts of energy holding down the urge to punch something after the last customer called us an idiot. People don’t have any compunction about insulting service workers, but it’s amazing how quickly they’ll complain about your attitude if you’re not sufficiently good-natured about it.

  Our jobs are as much emotional labor as they are physical. What they are not, what they are never allowed to be, is mentally engaging. So we’re trying to zombie out to survive. We’re not allowed to deviate from policy even if the policy is kind of stupid and counterproductive. Nobody is interested in our thoughts, opinions, or the contributions we might be able to make—they want robots.

  Our survival mechanisms are the things that annoy the customers most. Next time you see someone being “sullen�
� or “rude,” try being nice to them. It’s likely you’ll be the first person to do so in hours. Alternatively, ask them an intelligent question. I used to come alive when someone legitimately wanted to know what I’d recommend. I knew everything about my products, having stared at all the boxes while I restocked them, but people rarely wanted me to tell them about anything more than the price.

  What’s guaranteed to be counterproductive for you is demanding better service with a superior attitude. We’ll perform better service. But we’ll be sure to hand you the shirt that we know is stained, or the meat that’s within the technical limit of servable but will probably taste less than optimal. And we’ll do it with a shit-eating grin on our face and well-wishes on our lips, just like you demand but refuse to pay a single extra penny for.

  If you want us to be happy to serve you, make it worth our while and be pleasant. Next time you’re in a low-wage place, try walking up to an employee and saying, “I’m sorry to disturb you, I know you have work, but could you tell me where this thing I need is?” I guarantee you, that is how you get service from a demoralized staff. Respect their workload. There is no low-wage employer in the world that doesn’t expect a ton of chores finished in a shift besides customer service. Don’t just expect that millions of people are by nature pleased to grovel at the feet of your twenty dollars. Humans in general aren’t built that way, and Americans in particular. We’re supposed to have a stubborn streak of pride, remember?

  —

  In Cincinnati, I lived just under two miles from the closest grocery store that carried the sort of formula my daughter could tolerate. She was insanely colicky, so I used to spend my free time walking her around the city, letting the vibration of the stroller lull her into farting an incredible amount before she finally, blessedly, fell asleep. I went to the store most days, buying only what we absolutely needed, because I couldn’t fit much more in the stroller. I still love to wander, because if nobody knows where I am, then nobody can ask me for anything or call me about an unpaid bill. And I get angry out of all proportion when someone disturbs my peace, because it is so rare that I actually feel light and free.

  I don’t get much of my own time, and I am vicious about protecting it. For the most part, I am paid to pretend that I am inhuman, paid to cater to both the reasonable and unreasonable demands of the general public. So when I’m off work, please feel free to go fuck yourself. The times that I am off work, awake, and not taking care of life’s details are few and far between. It’s the only time I have any autonomy. I do not choose to waste that precious time worrying about how you feel. Worrying about you is something they pay me for; I don’t work for free. You don’t get to demand this ten minutes from me too. This is mine, and my family’s.

  I actually don’t mind, on feminist grounds, when men tell me to smile. I can see why women would, but I’ve worked in bars and I’ve worked in strip clubs and I’ve learned that you can commodify anything, including sex and pretend love and faked respect and false empathy. “Smile,” coming from a man, is just the opening chatter to me at this point. It is a sign that this particular man has nothing original to say and is probably kind of a dick.

  I do mind the smile-on-command directive on class grounds. Listen here, buster. It’s not my fucking job to decorate your world, not unless you’re willing to make it so. Sure, I’ll smile. That’ll be five bucks.

  I feel bad about my reactions sometimes, because I can’t always stop them even when they’re directed at someone who’s having the same sort of day as I am. I was once at a store and could not for the life of me find the fucking diapers. I wandered the length and breadth of the place—nothing. I was exhausted, completely finished. Some poor woman who worked there stepped into my field of vision. I meant to ask where the diapers were stocked like a normal human being. What came out instead was “Why did you people hide the fucking diapers?” I couldn’t tell you how that made it from brain to mouth. It just happens sometimes. So when I am on the receiving end of customers’ misery, I’m never sure whether to actually be mad at the customers. Maybe they tried to be polite and just didn’t have the energy. Because when they were at work, someone else came in, and so on, and so on, and so on.

  Maybe it’s because, as I mentioned earlier, I spend a lot of the time depressed. Always have, always will. Give me medicine, I get less upset about being depressed, but the fact of it never leaves. Sometimes I am clinically, trouble-getting-out-of-bed depressed. Other times, I am just low-level, drag-myself-through-my-day depressed. Some people might call me pessimistic because I always expect disaster to occur. But looking at my life, I think that’s bull. When I expect doom? That’s what I call reality.

  Mostly, I ignore the depression. I developed a caustic sense of humor. I discovered mosh pits to vent. I listen to seriously angry music. When that doesn’t work, I soothe the emptiness with terrible food and old jazz. If that doesn’t work and I can afford it, I go in and see someone about getting some medicine for a few weeks. That means making appointments any place I think I might be able to get in, assuming that I’ll be turned down for service, and showing up to them all until I find someone who’s willing to do me a solid and give me a week or two of anti-anxiety medicine. If I can’t find anyone to do that, I just sort of check out for a while.

  Those times, I can’t get past the part of the day where you’re supposed to put on pants. I’ll stare at the pants. I will tell myself to put on the pants. I will get stern with myself about them. And then I’ll lose a few hours to a discussion with myself about how much I actually really do deserve all the punishments I will heap upon me if I do not put on the pants. When I zone back in again, the sun will be down and it will blessedly be time for bed again.

  Sometimes I can convince my boss that I have a terrible flu. Sometimes I just don’t show up, and those times it’s half and half whether I’ve got a job to go back to; it depends on how understaffed they are. Sometimes I haven’t been employed in the first place.

  Not all poor people are chemically depressed, but a lot of us are situationally depressed at any given time. And that’s because our lives are depressing. I realize that might at first sound simplistic, but I don’t think it’s a lot more complicated than that.

  When I think of myself and all the poor people I know, there is only one person who I would have called irrepressibly sunny. Her name was Melissa, and she seemed indefatigable. Nothing, and I mean not eviction, not being without electricity, not being called names—nothing brought this woman down. She once told me that even when she felt terrible, she liked being a bright spot. I’d known her for six months when her kid got in trouble and the school intimated that it was because she wasn’t doing enough for him. And that’s what finally broke her. She got into a terrible funk, withdrawn and silent unless you forced something out of her. She started noticing all the things that were wrong in her world, and that was the end. She was one of us.

  That’s the worst, watching someone lose hope. I’m not swelled with it personally, but I always like to see people who aren’t only pretending to be in a good mood, people who are truly optimistic about life. Those people are contagious, even to a curmudgeon like me. It’s heart-wrenching to watch that fade, like watching a star die or something. I can’t think of anything poetic and tragic enough to describe it.

  —

  I recognize that the attitude that I fall into—hell, that I cultivate—as a ward against the instability of being poor isn’t always helpful to me. But it’s not as if I can just go in and out of it, like putting on or taking off my makeup. The attitude I carry as a poor person is my armor, and after so many years of fighting and clawing and protecting myself and my family from impending disaster, that armor has become a permanent part of me.

  Take a walk through any impoverished neighborhood. You will hear the word “pussy” a lot. A lot. It’s just how some people talk. “Suck my dick,” a man will say jauntily to his friends. Or angrily to his friends. Or randomly to women passing on the st
reet. “Fucking pussy” is a popular phrase too, as in “you’re a” or “I need some.” Street cant isn’t something that poor Americans came up with magically a year after the Pilgrims got here. It’s a product of environments in which everyone’s always posturing just a bit, just in case. A lot of times it means absolutely nothing.

  But there is always the potential that as you are walking down the street, some sort of altercation will erupt within feet of you. Maybe someone is angry with a cashier because their card was declined, and they start yelling about disrespect and ass-kicking and what they ought to do. Maybe a homeless person will loudly and suddenly commence complaining about whatever it is that is bothering them that day. Maybe a mercurial couple will have a disagreement in their own attention-seeking fashion.

  I was sitting in a Denny’s recently, drinking coffee and trying to finish writing a chapter of this book. The table next to me had a few kids, two men and a woman, all under twenty. And the table behind me had two people in it, one of whom took it into his head that he’d been insulted by Table 1 somehow. Next thing you know, everyone’s out of their seats throwing insults back and forth, tossing gauntlet after gauntlet, trying to goad a fight. I wound up taking the aggressive dude outside to smoke while we waited for his friend to grab their food and leave. Someone else talked down the people who really had been confronted for zero reason.

  That was a random Tuesday. I’ve been to the same Denny’s more than once, and I expect to just drink my coffee. But you never know when you’re going to be talking down an idiot. It doesn’t happen all the time, and it’s not like most trips to the store aren’t rather boring and mundane. It’s just that it could happen at any time in the environments where everyone is always tense and worried and stressed. It does happen with some frequency. And it’s best to be prepared for the eventuality.