Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

  Anyway, just in case you mistakenly think for even a second that I’m stuck-up and making so much money that I don’t remember using five-dollar calling cards well into adulthood, please enjoy this guided tour of some of the stupidest and most desperate money moments of my life before I get dragged to prison for not understanding how to pay the taxes on a royalty check I used to buy a fucking lawnmower.

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  My first-ever roommate, who was otherwise a very kind and thoughtful stoner, got me (and herself) evicted for selling shitty weed out of our apartment but not actually using any of that money to pay her half of the rent. It was a surprisingly nice place: hardwood floors, gigantic windows overlooking a courtyard, a kitchen big enough to put a table in (which I do not even have now, as a seemingly successful adult). I’m not even sure how we got approved for it because I was definitely nineteen and had nothing to my name other than a very nice iron. But we moved in and got the electricity turned on and then a house phone we agreed to split equally until the first bill came, and it was three hundred dollars, because homegirl had a best friend who lived in California. Neither of us had three hundred dollars, or one hundred and fifty dollars each, if we’re keeping it all the way real, so we did what broke people do and made nighttime plans on the phone before we left work and hoped no one changed the location while we were at home in the shower getting ready. At that time, I worked in a bakery and had no one to come home and call anyway, so who cares? But can we please just stop for a minute and think about the stone ages when a person you met three months ago could just, like, fuck up your life in this way? I’m sure that my biggest dilemma in 1999 was worrying that I wouldn’t be able to call JB’s and get a pizza. Looking back on it now (mystified that somehow we survived), I’m like, “WHAT IF I HAD NEEDED A FUCKING AMBULANCE, SHARON.”

  We didn’t get evicted evicted; we got a notice taped to our door that we were so far behind on our rent that authorities were about to get involved, which was a surprise to me because I had been sending floral-embossed checks from my first-ever bank account faithfully every month. My roommate had not. We self-evicted to avoid the embarrassment of the sheriff setting our meager belongings (I had three different dustpans and a futon with a Beatles cover on it) out on the curb. That was when I started to live out of my car, driving around in a bedroom on wheels (there was a broken coffee maker and my iron and some lamps under a blanket in the back seat) and sleeping and bathing in hourly motels.

  This is the kind of thing that seems cool in a movie. In real life, I made friends with the greasy creeps who worked the front desks of hourly motels, and they’d sometimes charge me for five hours if I’d actually been there for seven, but that is not a sustainable way to live. I didn’t have an address, but, as I said before, I eventually started living with slash working for my homeboy’s stepdad at his graphic design studio, and he let me use his address since I was opening all his mail anyway. One day, while I was working, there was a knock at the door and I answered it. This nervous-looking dude is trembling on the steps, and he’s like, “Is Samantha Irby here?” And of course, because I’m an idiot, I’m mentally running through all of the possibilities of who this could be: Have I fucked this person? Do I owe this guy money? Is he my dad??!?!! I nod at him, and then he shoves an envelope into my hands and yells, “You’ve been served!” before literally jumping off the porch and sprinting away. All I could do was laugh because, what the fuck is this, L.A. Law? I never went to court (I do not advise this legal strategy), so I got a judgment entered against me, and instead of calling a lawyer (again: don’t live like this!), I saved up the money to pay it and mailed a greeting card with a check made out to my old landlord with “this wasn’t even my fault” scribbled on the memo line.

  Not long after that, I had another roommate situation fall through, as they inevitably do. You know what’s always seemed fucked up to me? People who move through the world as if shit doesn’t keep them up at night. I wish I could feel the freedom, even for a minute, of someone who bails on shared bills and fucks another person out of a place to live. The other night, I was lying in bed wide awake at two in the morning with an anxious knot in my stomach thinking about this group project I had been assigned my senior year of high school in a goddamned elective economics class (I MEAN, WHAT?), and we were supposed to do a presentation in front of the entire class about what NAFTA was and its economic impact on the United States, and are you asleep yet? This was 1997, okay? If it was now, I could just say the word NAFTA three times in the vicinity of my phone, and the ghost of Steve Jobs would have an A+ PowerPoint loaded onto my computer in a matter of seconds, and all my Instagram ads would be for Canadian plastics and Mexican corn. Back then, we would’ve had to go to the library and pore over encyclopedias and then type everything up in the computer lab, and maybe you’ve never met a high school senior, but none of us were doing any of that. The day of the presentation, standing in front of the board looking at our shoes while the teacher (a stone-cold fucking FOX, my god) shook his head sadly as we carried on nonsensically about “North America …” I felt like a dumb bitch!

  Twenty years later and I’m still thinking about making the one kid who actually tried get a D on a group project that didn’t matter, so, yes, it is wild to me that more than one person has caused me to do the “pack whatever you can carry because we are leaving tonight” shuffle. Am I a bad judge of character? Probably! But is it naive to assume that this friend of a friend who seems nice and has a job wants to have a safe place to sleep and keep her shirts? It can’t be. BANANAS ASSUMPTION: This stranger I barely know won’t mind if I get two pet snakes and take all the doors off the hinges and play the piano at three in the morning. REASONABLE ASSUMPTION: This stranger I barely know who works at the same job I do will pay her half of the bills so neither of us has to sleep on the street. Who knew this was a risk?

  So that’s when I moved in with Mel, the graphic designer I worked for and my friend Jon’s stepdad, because my parents were dead and I had dropped out of college and I was making $7.25 an hour working at a bakery and it was going to, umm, take me a minute to come up with first and last for a new apartment. I had nothing, less than nothing, a backpack full of a few worthless things plus a bunch of CDs and my mom’s old couch crammed into the smallest/cheapest storage unit I could afford. I can’t cite credible sources and exhaustive studies to prove that growing up poor is basically a financial death sentence no matter how well you do later in life because I’m not a sociologist writing a textbook but … if I had access to generational wealth I probably could be a sociologist writing a textbook!

  I remember going to see the late showing of The Sixth Sense one Saturday night and tiptoeing in the back door like I wasn’t a whole-ass adult, wondering why my parents had chosen to fail me. Abortion was legal in 1980! Spare me the humiliation of trying not to make noise on my friend’s mom’s stairs!! I was working for Mel part-time when I wasn’t cosplaying as a rebellious teenager, so I’d go sell opera tortes at the bakery on some days and walk downstairs in my pajamas to organize Mel’s accounts payable and get paid to stumble through Whole Foods doing the grocery shopping on others. It was a pretty good gig, and I learned more about being a person and trying to create a nice life in the years I lived with and worked for that family than I had from birth to when I first realized that rich people actually take their shoes to a fucking cobbler.

  Mel had a bunch of store cards to places like Shell and Barnes & Noble. One Christmas, I gave everyone I knew those giant discounted art books that no one buys and classical music CDs, because he never checked the balance on those cards and could write off all the purchases anyway (another concept I could not and did not understand until very recently when my accountant friend told me that if I eat lunch with someone who mentions a book to me, I can declare that meal as “work”), and I lived on gas station beef jerky while pretending to be Lelaina in Reality Bites, because he never checked those receipts, either. He had a house account at several small shop
s and boutiques in town that just tally everything up at the end of the month and send a bill. Did you know rich people can just do that? So I started taking all of my shitty jeans and T-shirts to his dry cleaner, who was visibly repulsed by having to launder gigantic bootcut late-’90s jeans, to save money, i.e., cost my fake dad money. I’d order gourmet sandwiches at this super fancy grocery store called Foodstuffs and charge them to his account, because I was not raised on twelve-dollar tuna sandwiches and once I had one I couldn’t imagine going back. On the one hand, this feels fabulous, but on the other I was scamming sandwiches.

  In a fit of impoverished desperation, after I moved out of Mel’s house (the first time) and rented this ugly, carpeted (gross) apartment in a shitty neighborhood that had a bus stop directly below my window and an el station a few blocks away, I sold my first useless car (’88 Ford Escort, hatchback, manual transmission) to a junk dude for like eighty-seven dollars after finding his ad in an actual phone book I found buried in a closet at the bakery. Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t know I wasn’t going to get two thousand dollars for that car. Because I don’t know anything!! I once went to pawn a relatively new, super clean microwave whose sole purpose had been heating up sad, low-calorie frozen meals, and, because my cursory knowledge of pawn shops had come from television and not actual lived experience, I was straight-up insulted at the owner’s meager offer—less than twenty American dollars. I had the box it came in and everything, and I remember clear as day needing one hundred dollars and thinking, “I know how I can get it! I can pawn this microwave!” before carefully cleaning and boxing up this literal piece of trash and hauling it down to my car (in the olden days, commercial microwave ovens weighed no fewer than sixty pounds and had to be installed by a licensed electrician), then driving to this pawn shop nestled between a Popeyes chicken and a twenty-five-and-over bar that required three forms of ID for entry (what), stumbling through the door with the unwieldy box, and setting it on the counter in front of your bored uncle, then standing there hopefully as he barely glanced up from his newspaper to assess it and declared, “Twenty bucks.” I felt like a deflating balloon—the cheap gross rubber kind and not a beautiful shiny mylar one—as my heart sank from “ooh, maybe I can pay the light bill and go see a movie!” to “would this even buy me popcorn?” But that’s how you learn lessons in life, right? Having outsize expectations based on courtroom dramas, and then having reality smack you in the face.

  Still, I wasn’t prepared to be handed the junkman’s vending machine money in exchange for an actual car that had newish tires and a recently replaced clutch. I just stood on the gravel in the junkyard, shocked and embarrassed, surrounded by warm refrigerators with the doors hanging off like loose teeth and pickup trucks without hoods, clutching this pittance I needed too badly to refuse. I thanked him and shoved the cassette tapes I’d forgotten in the glove compartment (Wu-Tang, De La Soul, Violent Femmes) into my bag. But I hadn’t considered how, exactly, I was going to get home from this remote land of rusted dishwashers and broken lawnmowers. I figured I’d catch the bus, but after doing that hopeful combination of waiting and walking, none came. I ended up at a pay phone by a Home Depot and called a cab. It cost almost forty dollars to get back to civilization. I am a moron.

  Between periods of functional homelessness and living in places too depressing to go home to at the end of the day, I used to house-sit for obscenely wealthy people with purebred dogs that cost more than a semester of college. Most of the things I learned about fancy living came from generously helping myself to the luxurious face creams and aged liquors of people who could afford to both go away for weeks at a time and pay someone to live their life for them while they were doing so. I would pack four pieces of clothing in a bag (they always had easily accessible washing machines and dryers), my cell phone, and a pair of beat-up gray New Balances (to blend in seamlessly with my surroundings), then go to their houses after work and pretend to be Eloise at the Plaza. I would walk a mile picking up shit behind a Portuguese Water Dog, then spend the rest of the evening in a jacuzzi tub with Fiona Apple moaning out of Bang & Olufsen speakers. It felt like the greatest grift of all time! I never threw parties while house-sitting because I don’t give a fuck about parties, and also because none of my friends were going to dodge cops all the way up to Kenilworth to eat pizza rolls cooked in a restaurant-quality wood-burning oven. So, by default, I looked like an incredibly responsible person. Maybe it seems unremarkable to you that I got to stay in a house with dimmer switches and MTV, and all I had to do in return was walk a nice dog around a pretty neighborhood and drag the recycling out to the curb once a week?! Honestly, I’d do that shit now.

  Speaking of falling asleep in front of a massive flat-screen TV with cable I didn’t have to pay for while a helpless creature with limited language skills banged its food dish around inside a playpen, I babysat way past the acceptable age for that to be a regular income stream for an adult person, and had several regular gigs during which I would not only cram as much HBO into my eyeballs as I could but also go shopping in the parents’ Costco-size pantries. These were, like, rich people with a fleet of nannies and housekeepers who drove around their armies of Jeep Grand Cherokees just buying shit all day long. No normal person could keep track of that without a meticulous inventory list. I, too, am wasteful and terrible and have no idea where all my stuff is, but I’m talking about that lip balm I bought on a whim at the pharmacy and various frayed and knotted phone chargers. Not whole laptops and shit! I would roll up in my busted Ford Taurus on a Saturday evening, put the kid(s) to bed at seven, then spend half an hour smelling the eighteen types of cheese in the massive brushed-steel refrigerators in the remodeled kitchens of people who were cool just, you know, not knowing who has the Lexus right now.

  Not a single one of them ever noticed the missing packages of frozen tortellini or boxes of granola bars, because the moms didn’t eat and what the fuck did the dads care about dinosaur-shaped nuggets? (I care, very much, about dino nuggets, and if someone takes so much as a Coke from the garage without my permission, I notice. I mean, I don’t freak out or anything, but I definitely know that there are four Feisty Cherry Diet Cokes on the bottom shelf of my fridge right now, and if there were three I wouldn’t rest until I figured out who drank the one that’s missing and make them vomit it into my upturned palms.) There’s definitely no shame in this but at one point I was thirty years old, getting paid in fresh ATM twenties by people who were basically my same fucking age, who’d started the evening by showing me where “grandma’s number is next to the phone!” while listing all the foods their kid is allergic to. On the one hand, I’m a loser. But on the other? HOW DO WE TRUST ADULT TEENS TO DO THIS? Okay, sure, it’s sad for me to rely on burping your infant to pay for my prescriptions. But can a fifteen-year-old really remember the injections your baby gets, and in what order, while simultaneously trying to read all your old Vanity Fairs? Okay, fine, the capable ones can and this is probably more an indictment of me than it is a slam on them. I’m just saying that getting a ride home from a dad your age seems sad, but if you justify it enough, it can start to seem like a cool life hack.

  On more than one occasion I ran an extension cord from the hallway into my apartment because my electricity had been shut off. This is an undervalued bit of creative genius. Now I can afford to leave the lights on in a room I’m not sitting in (remember when that was the worst child-crime you could ever commit?), but in the old days I was always mindful when choosing a new rat trap in which to live that I ended up in one near a hall outlet in case there was a month that brunch plans with a hot dude > the need to pay for light and heat. It’s tricky because sometimes the neighbors are assholes who’ll do shit like unplug the extension cord for laughs, knowing your alarm clock won’t go off, or tattle to the landlord, but that strategy worked way more often than it didn’t. I am also a veritable expert at setting up an emergency payment arrangement plan with the electric company and several popular cell phone p
roviders. I know that talking to a stranger wearing a headset is a terrifying prospect, but if you can summon the courage to call that 1-800 number on the bottom of your bill, it is very easy to get a major corporation to extend you a little bit of credit. This is why I don’t, say, bungee jump or do parkour: I have to reserve all my bravery for the days I need to bargain for an extra week of phone call privileges.

  Before Obamacare and before there was an urgent care center tucked inconspicuously in the back of every Walgreens, I definitely used the emergency room for routine exams because I couldn’t afford to go to the doctor for real, especially since the ER will never turn you away. I’ve complained about pelvic pain to get a pap smear and claimed “inexplicable tiredness” to get bloodwork done. Now the scam is that having insurance buys you a little time so that you don’t have to pay as much as you would have without it. I remember once getting a yeast infection, and this witch told me to wrap a piece of uncut garlic in cheesecloth and carefully insert it into my vagina for a couple days. And a few months ago, when the CVS pharmacist told me the actual cost less the handful of change my HMO was going to chip in for my raging candidiasis, I was like, “Oh, I’m sorry, what aisle is the garlic on, ma’am?”