I Don't Want to Die Poor

by Michael Arceneaux

  And for so long I took to heart the poisonous folklore about student-debt martyrs who selflessly scrape by to pay off their loans—those “I only ate Spam and paid off my $160,000 debt in ninety-six hours” stories. I blamed myself, thinking that if I had just worked harder and sacrificed more, I wouldn’t be in this situation.

  But the truth is, a lot of this was always out of my control. The student loan industry is a barely regulated, predatory system, and with Donald Trump in the White House and those equally useless people in Congress, oversight of the industry is becoming nonexistent.

  I was trying to do the right thing for myself, and I believed that doing the right thing for myself would ultimately benefit my entire family. Despite the cost, going to the college I chose seemed like the best way to get to where I wanted to be. I understand now how naive I was; how uninformed I was; how my naiveté and my ignorance made me an easy mark for a predatory industry boosting a higher education system set up for us to fail.

  I am a member of that class of college students that graduated into a financial crisis, not long after a 2005 bankruptcy bill was passed that made private student loans non-dischargeable unless borrowers could demonstrate that loan repayment put an “undue hardship” on their finances. Naturally, the undue-hardship exception has virtually never applied to anyone. It’s so vague that it’s virtually meaningless.

  I think of that slippery little phrase every time I field a nasty phone call from my student loan oppressors. If only I were a corporation or a bank, privy to loopholes, tax havens, lenient bankruptcy provisions, and so many other measures that allowed it to be treated far more humanely than an actual human being. Like so many others, I’m muddling my way out of a trap. I try to accept that I’m simply doing the best that I can with the choices I made in earnest.

  Whenever I think I am at that point when I have truly made peace with my choices, I am reminded again and again that I am not over the hump.

  I got such a reminder in February 2018. It was months before the release of my first book, and I was doing everything in my power to get it as much attention as possible. Some of that included me writing an essay for the New York Times Sunday Review about my private loan debt woes. I ended it with what would prove itself to be a false sense of peace.

  Recalling the more rude student loan payment callers, I boasted of a newfound ease with the struggle to continue making these sizable monthly payments, now well over a $1,000 a month in repayment bills: “the joy-inducing invention of that block button on the iPhone so that sometimes we can simply say, ‘They’ll get that money when I got it.’ ”

  When I originally wrote these words, I really, really wanted to believe them. However, just two days before the essay went live, that peace I professed to have was hastily snatched away. I was told that unless I paid more than $800 before 8:00 mountain standard time the next day, I would default on my loans. For multiple reasons, I could no longer keep up with the payments and had fallen incredibly behind. Among them included having to do far less freelance work than I’m used to doing, in order to finish my book.

  My first book was a lifelong dream, but it was a difficult journey in getting to that point. Part of what made it difficult was this belief that I was niche, and thus not deserving of what I felt was a fairer advance based on what I’d gleaned from colleagues. I am very much grateful for having a book deal with a major publisher, but I struggled so much through that. Still, I was hopeful. I convinced myself that this was just yet another sacrifice and that my better tomorrow was inching closer. I was determined to lean into the notion that life was about to become different for me. And that I’d earned that.

  But when I made that payment and then learned the next morning that the customer service rep I had spoken with had taken out double the amount we agreed on, I was devastated. I was in the negative by several hundred dollars and with no income coming in soon enough to offset the error. Whenever you pay by phone with these people, they read aloud a verbal contract for every single amount you want to pay on a select loan (I had several, as they were divided largely by semester)—and then you say your full government name aloud. I am very familiar with this process. I did not pay online because I needed to pay specific amounts on individual loans in order to make sure none of them accidentally charged off (“charged off” means my loans defaulting, which for me would spell the end). I did exactly what I was supposed to, and someone else fucked up.

  On the day I found out, I was making my first appearance on national television to talk about my book. The show was The Opposition with Jordan Klepper. And yeah, that Sunday, this student loan essay was going to run in the Sunday Review of the New York Times. This was all a very big deal to some country boy from Houston who didn’t know any damn body reading the New York Times, but loved the paper all the same because it often gave him a glimpse of what could be.

  The day after that, I was due to appear in Philadelphia for my very first paid speaking gig. So much of work in media is doing free shit with the hope that one day you’ll actually be compensated for your work. Most folks cannot afford this type of sacrifice, but we do what we have to do all the same.

  In the invitation the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, who hosted the event, extended to me, they noted that past guests included “almost every American President, Secretaries of State, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of state including Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Sebastián Piñera, and Vicente Fox.” And: “In the past two years alone, recent speakers have included Vice President Joe Biden, former General David Petraeus, Federal Reserve Board Chairwoman Janet Yellen, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, venture capitalist Daymond John, and author Tom Friedman.”

  And my Black ass. In this same fancy and formal letter, they cited my political articles with headlines such as “Someone Tell the Democrats to Stop Acting Like the Political Equivalent of Unseasoned Chicken.” They knew what they were getting and they wanted me anyway. I was due to be in conversation with Andrew Sullivan about “tribalism.” Any sensible soul would recommend air frying your tongue over speaking to Andrew Sullivan at length, but a check is a check.

  I almost didn’t get to earn the check from this gig, though, because I no longer had any money left and I needed money to get to Philadelphia. The organizers did not book my travel, but did say they would reimburse me. All I had was a little bit of credit on a card I had turned to for help while I tried to finish the book (further complicated by medical costs related to health issues spurred by stress—shocker). All of this was dawning on me as I was about to go on national television.

  On the car ride down to the set, my hometown friend of more than twenty years, Jeanne, called me. Her teenage daughter was informing me that because I had a blue check by my name on Twitter, I was famous. That was comically false, but when she gushed about me and car service, I had to tell her to chill. I told her what was happening and how none of it mattered if I was struggling to eat.

  She knew I was prideful. She knew how much I had already sacrificed. She could hear the pain in my voice. But she knew that I knew that I had to shake it off because I had to go be “on” because I had a book to shill for. You couldn’t tell what was going on when you saw me on camera, but I immediately sank on the car ride back home.

  That Sunday, I realized how incredibly difficult it was to find a physical copy of a newspaper—in Harlem, no less—and searched in vain to find a paper I actually couldn’t afford to purchase because I needed to get through the feat of having food to eat in the next few days—so ’twas good that I couldn’t find it and had to wait for my editor to mail me a copy. The next morning, I took a BoltBus to Philadelphia to debate identity politics with a condescending snob who deflected from every argument with hyperbole and theatrics. For example, did you know that Ta-Nehisi Coates and I are the “real racists”? Not sure if Coates had posted something that morning that drew Sullivan’s ire, but FYI all the same. He went on to say that I hated Catholics. Don’t wor
ry, he insulted the audience that included high school students, too. The night ended with him asking “Do you really think I haven’t listened to a thing you said?” while going in for a hug before leaving the venue. I’d dismiss this as with all “white people,” but there I go being the real racist again or something.

  I think what mainly stuck with me in that moment was his insistence that most of the lingering barriers I spoke of were a figment of my imagination. Because he, who came from Britain, had managed to do all right for himself, it was some testament to his great American fable. It’s adorable to believe we live in a meritocracy, but so much of certain types of success is dictated by everything else besides perceived special talents and abilities. It’s about privilege, and how that privilege gives way to greater access and larger means than are offered those who lack it.

  Those couple of days and the harder months that followed took such a toll on me. This was supposed to feel like the beginning of a triumphant transition. I was supposed to begin to feel the benefits of all those years of going without and struggling. Yet here I was doing some of the things I had long wanted to do and at the same time drowning in debt and so unstable that one mistake had made it extremely difficult for me to eat. How pitiful. How embarrassing.

  Since finding out how much I would owe each month, there has not been a day in my life that I have not thought about my overwhelming debt. On many days, I decide to not let it dictate my day, that there’s nothing I can do about it, so the best I can do is the best I can do. But then there are those darker moments when I think about how little control of my life I have allowed myself to have because of the choices I’ve made. And it’s not about faulting or questioning anyone else. I’m glad Recruiter Bae instilled some optimism in me. It’s a shame I have nowhere to send him a DM. I don’t question my mom’s choice to eventually give in to something she had said she wouldn’t, but I have wondered if she regrets it.

  She may no longer feel I’m a self-centered bastard for tagging this debt on both our backs. But I haven’t always been so sure—and still wonder whether her words may continue to ring true.

  FOR $1500 AN EPISODE

  With the few friends to whom I mentioned the prospect, I always introduced it with the following caveat: “There is no fucking way that I am actually going to do this.”

  I just could not envision myself throwing house tequila and soda at some man I met through a casting director’s imagination at some hookah spot in Harlem in the middle of the afternoon. Or crying inside of a church that looked as if it were roughly two more months of poor tithing away from turning into a chic fusion restaurant/lounge, one that only the new white neighbors and their Black friends who needed Black friends to tell them to fix their hair would frequent. My mama would never agree to appear on camera, so at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the production capturing images of her swatting me with the New Testament as my dad poured more Paul Masson or Jack Daniel’s into a water bottle. My hateful-ass friends would boo and hiss at such an assertion, but I’m kind of a classy-ass bitch now. Not a total class act (I used to love the 1992 movie entitled Class Act starring hip-hop duo Kid ’n Play), but someone that can sing Countess Luann de Lesseps’s “Money Can’t Buy You Class” and confidently bop to the line “elegance is learned, my friend.”

  A reality show would threaten that, among other things.

  I love reality television as a viewer. And as a culture writer, I have written a lot about it. (Yeah, yeah, I’m fond of some of the “deeper” reality-centered pieces, but I’m proudest of my Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta recaps.) My appreciation for the genre notwithstanding, I knew there was a difference between being a proud consumer of the content and being an ideal candidate to help create it.

  Yet here I was in a conference room for a meeting with a network, technically presenting myself as a cast member for a reality show. It had been a long year. The kind of year that makes you reevaluate your life and the choices you’ve been making. I may have kept consistently working as a freelance writer, but as many have come to learn or will learn in due time, one of the perils about the growing gig economy is that it can take you longer than it ever should for you to get paid for services rendered.

  Years before EBONY magazine was sued by writers for unpaid work, I was stalking its accounts payable offices in Chicago. (I had warned some writers of the magazine’s problems, but some choose to go where the work is even if there is a great risk attached—mainly because there is no work to be found elsewhere.) I was writing multiple times a week on the site, but not receiving regular checks. I had a pop culture and sex column in the magazine, too, but my check for that wasn’t around either.

  I wrote for other outlets, but sometimes they, too, had problems. Whereas some Black-owned publications struggled with capital, the white-owned outlets had been pumped with a lot of venture capitalist money that was often mismanaged—resulting in many a once highly trafficked outlet abruptly folding, and later being sold for far less than the overstated value it had coasted on. Already tired of not only this volume of work, but having to chase people for compensation, I was looking for something different. Something bigger, better, and less taxing. More than anything, something consistent.

  Some opportunities were dangled in front of me, the sort that could help me ascend quickly, but none panned out fully, for various reasons—incompetence, gross mismanagement, small-mindedness, hater shit, what have you. Increasingly irritated, I was at the point where I asked myself whether or not it was time to sincerely consider taking an unexpected detour. Maybe it wouldn’t take me exactly where I wanted to be, but if nothing else, perhaps it would take me out of this sad and sorry state that I felt stuck in.

  I told myself from the very first conversation that I was just going to humor the process, maybe take notes for the future. That’s not untrue, but it wasn’t the curiosity alone that kept me around. It was also the rising fear that some of my goals might end up too far out of reach. If I don’t make any real headway soon.

  With my old dream of becoming Katie-Couric-with-a-dick long over, and my current setting of freelancer-who-wished-he-had-hoed-in-college-so-he-wouldn’t-have-had-to-keep-taking-out-private-student-loans, I was now entertaining whether or not I ought to jump on the opportunity to become a more ambitious version of Shereé Whitfield.

  Consider all of the athleisure clothes designed to wear at the club Shereé Whitfield could’ve moved on Instagram had she gotten She by Shereé off the ground while she still had a peach. If you are going to submit yourself to a medium that will lead to loss of anonymity (well, depending on the network, because some are more viewed than others) and likely doom you to encounter at least some nominal level of national embarrassment, you should do as much as possible to generate a profit from it with some business venture. If my storyline on The Real Housewives of Atlanta was centered on me becoming the Donatella Versace of Buckhead, as was the case for the self-described “Bone Collector,” best believe my maxi dresses, tights, and denim designed for big asses (both natural and cosmetically enhanced to comedic levels of jiggle) would end up available for purchase. Not to take away from her accomplishments—getting Chateau Shereé up and running no matter whose name the utilities were in, Kenya Moore—but the time she had on the show could have been better spent hawking forever. In theory, I’d be in the confessionals sipping Casamigos with a metal straw (I’m so green), wearing a T-shirt with my book cover printed on it, commenting on a scene where I talked about designing organic thot briefs and notebooks bearing faux inspirational messages such as “My Heart Score > Credit Score.”

  If I did this, I would push harder than Shereé, which actually might make me more like Porsha Williams—but like if Porsha joined a good book club. I know that I’m not Nene Leakes because there is no way I could say “bridemaid” that many times on television without my tongue attempting to run away from home at least once. Regardless of which Real Housewives cast member was my true equivalent, the overall point is if you ev
er dare to do reality, you’d best have a plan on how to maximize the moment.

  However, there were signs shouting “Run on, run on, Oprah” the entire time I kinda entertained this opportunity.

  I found out about this through Dana, the boss of one of my editors at a site for which I used to write regularly. I was technically a freelancer, but the volume of daily work made it feel more like permalance. Permalance is a cute corporate term that loosely translates into “We are going to work you as if you were a full-timer, but we don’t want to pay for your health insurance, so if you get sick, try some Robitussin or whatever it is you poor people use to treat yourselves because it’s not on us.”

  When I met Dana, I immediately asked, “Gay men love you, don’t they?” She wasn’t a hag, just amazing. It was a compliment wrapped in a potential human resources violation.

  Dana had an elevated taste level, as exhibited by the books, plays, films, and shows she mentioned. She was not someone I even assumed watched a lot of reality television, but she was also a realist: We both understood how you often have to meet people where they are—even more so when your plan is to take them from somewhere foreign to somewhere eventually satisfying.

  When she first mentioned the show, she described it as an effort to show a group of gay Black men in the city not as we had been used to seeing them—i.e., as sidekicks and stereotypes alone. Yes, every producer talks like this, but I believed her intentions because I knew her and knew her vision came from a sincere place.

  A lot of the jargon we hear from reality television’s biggest personalities derives from the Black LGBTQ community. Many of us keep saying this with the hopes that at some point it will matter because it sucks to watch people bite and profit off it—especially when some of the very folks cashing in on our brilliance engage in casual homophobia with the best of them.