I’m at NYU Dental waiting to get a cavity filled. I’m at NYU Dental because I’m poor, although if I were really poor — I am thinking — I wouldn’t be at a dentist at all. I happen to be reading Michelle Tea’s Without a Net, the first time I have ever read literature about the experience of growing up poor. People who are not poor, I imagine, have probably read a whole canon of books on other people’s poverty. Not only do not-poor people have more than poor people but they also know more — they know more than poor people about everything, even this.
I have a cavity. I’m sure of it. For weeks, I’ve been pretending to be unsure, ignoring the sensation that something is wrong. I can’t afford for something to be wrong. I don’t have the money to be at a dentist. I have a credit card I can put things on, but I don’t like to use it because I’m already deep in debt, mostly student loans.
I am thinking it is not fair to call myself poor, thinking how my poverty today is different than the poverty I grew up in.
My mom says we were never poor. She does not like it when I write about growing up without. She tells me it’s not true. You always had everything you ever wanted, she’s countered, and she’s right. I worked crap minimum wage jobs after school and on the weekends just long enough to afford whatever it was that I wanted. Concert tickets. The prom dress. The used convertible with the rip in the roof. I had what I wanted, but I didn’t have the things that we all need. Being poor is more than what you lack materially. It’s a state of mind. Being poor is the greedy fucked-up feeling we’d all get on grocery day when suddenly and for a limited time, we’d have food. It means spending what you got when you got it because what you got won’t last and there will never be enough.
For my family, not enough money meant not enough food. No health insurance meant we weren’t allowed to get sick. For my parents, not enough money meant debt. Binges on credit cards followed by piles of bills, my mother bent over a calculator at the kitchen table, in tears, the guilt and remorse. In spite of all the spending, the stuff we still didn’t have.
***
One time, my friend Syd — who lives in San Francisco — posted a picture on Facebook that she had taken of the food stamp office. There was a big pile of puke that they hadn’t bothered to clean up- they’d just stuck some newspaper on top of it and left it there. I guess that’s what I was expecting from NYU but it was actually clean and sort of nice. I must’ve been expecting the place to be like a free clinic, but it’s not a free clinic. It’s not like an emergency room of a hospital, which I have been to and which are pretty awful and by awful I mean full of poor people. NYU is not free — you still have to pay, it just costs less.
Syd has cysts in her ovaries. I know this because Syd is poor. She started a campaign online to pay for the costs of having her ovaries removed, so that she is not in constant pain. She cannot get the necessary medical procedure, which Medicaid deems unnecessary, done unless she pays for it, something like $6000. I donated $25, which was a lot of money to me that week. I don’t think she reached her goal. Syd went to the same college that I went to, where I always assumed everyone else was rich and I was the only one that couldn’t go to the movies or buy beer after beer at the bar. Everyone else, I always assumed, had parents who paid their tuition and sent them a little something every now and again so that they could have a little fun. Just assuming these kinds of things does some fucked up things to one’s head. When they got older, I always assumed, their parents paid their rent or helped them buy their first place. This was not the case for me and sometimes I am bitter and resentful. I am guessing that Syd couldn’t just call home for cash either because otherwise she would not let the world know that she has cysts in her overies, which seems like it should be a very private thing– not something you post online. Poor people don’t have the luxury of privacy, especially when they’re sick. Poor people’s bodies, I sometimes think, belong to everyone. Rather than be destitute, we will sell ourselves to you.
My brother, who is on disability, sells his blood and sometimes plasma. If ever you are in Findlay, Ohio, and you get into a serious car accident, God forbid, you just may get my brother’s white trash blood pumped into you. It just might save your life.
***
I sold my body, too. Before I started stripping there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for cash. I worked in fast food. I worked in retail. I was a check out girl at the grocery store. I stuffed envelopes after school. One summer, I even sold singing telegrams. I worked long hours for unreasonable bosses, all for very little pay. Of all various odds jobs I’d had in my lifetime, stripping was — by far and in many ways — the best. It had the best uniform. I could make my own hours. I felt genuinely good at it. And then there was the money. Thanks to stripping, I could work and go to school. I could earn my degree and travel and participate in the unpaid internships that are taken for granted as part of the undergraduate experience. I could have it all, I thought, just like my well-off peers. Then, when I graduated, I thought I would have another, even better job — a job that I liked just as much, that paid even more. I would never work for minimum wage again.
Years later, when the “better” job didn’t magically appear I sold sex. When I write about having been a sex worker, I’m not writing about sex: I’m writing about work. Here’s what not-poor people don’t always understand: everyone decides what they are willing to do and not willing to do for money. Everyone makes a choice- though poor people, oftentimes, have less of a choice.
Less than one percent break out of the class they were born into. Most people, like my parents, spend their lives dreaming the American dream. Am I part of that one percent? Did I make it out? I’m not poor, I sometimes tell myself. I have multiple degrees. I’m a freelance writer. I’m not looking for a “real” job. A real job wouldn’t hire me anyway. I am a former hooker who writes about being a former hooker. When I am written about, it is overwhelmingly decided that I have no class. Because of my online footprint, I get to do what I love and what I never would have allowed myself to do had I any other options. These days, I teach writing three days a week, making less that I’d make if I chose, instead, to collect the unemployment I’m entitled to. I have a job, so I must not be poor. And yet, I play that familiar game each month: which bill to pay? This month, the rent is late. And the cable. And Con Ed. Poor people don’t have cable. I have HBO. I put groceries on a credit card. I have a credit card. I go to Whole Foods and buy olive oil and fancy cheese. My partner and I have a not-inexpensive share in our local CSA. I must not be poor.
I want to say that poor people cannot afford to be proud but my parents were very proud and, if anything, that is what I’ve inherited from them. I’ve inherited their pride, which is to say their shame. I inherited their reluctance to admit their reality, a reality over which — I realize today — they had little control. In the evenings in front of the TV, my mother poured over architectural magazines, planning construction of a house that would never be built. As a child, on the couch alongside my mom, I pictured myself in the homes pictured in the magazines. We lived in the basement of my grandma’s house. When my grandmother died, my mother inherited the house. She later sold it and moved in with her boyfriend and lived off the money she made from selling the house, unable to find work in her new town. Before this, my mother was a secretary at a racetrack. She worked there for twenty years and when she finally left there may have been a cake. I think she left that job thinking she’d get a better one but no one wanted to hire a fifty-something year old woman who had only worked one job in her life — as a secretary at, of all places, a racetrack. My mother was a hard worker, as many poor people are. Poor people work hard — a lot harder than I work, doing work I would never even consider doing — and they will never be anything other than poor. These days, my mother works somewhere else as a secretary, making less money than I do. When my mother dies, I sometimes wonder how my brother and I will find the money to bury her.
***
NYU Dental is a teaching school. The students who are doing my exam ask me if I, too, am a student. Why else would someone who looks like me be here? I am white. Well dressed. Clean. Under education I have listed my two Masters. I must not be poor. I tell them no, I’m an adult. An adult who cannot properly care for herself, I think to myself. Who cannot afford to go to a “real” dentist. When the real dentist comes in he explains to me that he will be speaking to the students, for teaching purposes, and that I should pay him no mind. I will hear big, technical words that he assumes I will not understand. He has not seen my chart, does not know of my multiple degrees. He does not look at me close enough to know anything about me. Except for looking into my mouth, he does not look at me at all. He gives me the script he gives all the other poor people. When I hear words like “anomalous.” Words in Latin. I strain to understand, if only to prove a point. Here is the point I am constantly straining to prove, if only to myself. I am not a poor person because I am not stupid. I am not a poor person because I am here at the dentist. I am not a poor person because I can pay my bills, even if they’re late.
Nothing in my mouth is anomalous. I have no cavity. I’m pissed. I had thought I had a cavity because I had thought I felt pain, but it was only in my head. Now, I’m pissed at myself for thinking something was wrong. Otherwise I should not be here. Ninety dollars is a trip to the grocery store. It’s my T-Mobile bill. It’s eighteen rides on the train. Poor people do not have ninety dollars for preventative care. If I were going to spend ninety dollars on a non-emergency I would have gotten that toothpick-sized splinter removed from my thigh. I’m pissed at myself for making this mistake. For being so stupid. I was wrong. Not-poor people don’t know everything. Poor people know something very important and that is how to survive with nothing. Poor people know what needs to be handled and what to ignore.
I don’t have a cavity. All I need, he tells me, is a teeth cleaning. He tells me I have plaque. Gingivitis. He begins to sound like a Lysterine commercial only, home care, he tells me, is not enough. I need a thorough cleaning, he tells me.
“How much is that?”
He looks at the student.
“It’s seventy dollars,” she says to me.
I tell her I don’t have seventy dollars for a teeth cleaning.
He shakes his head. He tells me again that home cleaning is not enough. The teeth cleaning is important, he says. He tells me that that I should start saving because it is very important and it is not a lot of money and so “it shouldn’t take long for you to save up seventy dollars.”
After he says that, I stop listening. He tells me a couple of times in a couple different ways how it’s important that I get my teeth cleaned and I nod passively. I have a couple opportunities to calmly or not-so-calmly explain to him why seventy dollars is, for some people, a lot of money, but I don’t. It is not my job to educate him — certainly not for free. Instead, I listen and nod, passing as someone else, thinking all the while how I will never come back and have my teeth cleaned. Even when I have the money. Even if I sell an article to a major magazine, even if I win the lottery, I will never come back and have my teeth cleaned. I will not come back and have my teeth cleaned out of spite. And there she is, the little poor girl inside of me, not doing things that are good for her — and sometimes doing things that are expressly bad for her — simply out of spite.
On the inside I will always be the poor little girl who can’t go to the dentist. Who can’t go to the gynecologist when she has a yeast infection. Who will, instead, sit in the bathtub and cry. The poor little girl inside of me who rations nice things like soap. Who goes without until it hurts. Who buys the fancy cheese that is five dollars more not because it’s better but just because she can. Who looks for herself and her experience in literature, sometimes in her own literature, afraid of what she may see.
21 responses
I hear you, sister.
Hi Melissa,
First of all: wow. You really held up a mirror for me. Let me add the caveat that I do, now, have a grown-up job, with insurance. That I got to after years of breaking myself working 1 full time and 2-3 part time jobs, 110 hours/week, for years. My degree, BFA Illustration (haha, what was I thinking) did not get people I worked for to pay me withing 30, 60, or 90 days. Sometimes, ever. So, here’s me, now, in a soul-sucking job. One that enables me to get enough sleep at night, and to eat decent food, and funds the occasional trip Someplace Else.
Thank you for the insight into my own poverty-mentality trap.
But, what I wanted to tell you is this: the Big Soap Theory. You know how ‘rich people’ always have socks that stay up and towels you can’t see through, and pants that aren’t polyester? Well, they also (in the world in my mind where rich people live) always have those big fancy soaps. the kind you see at Marshalls and TJ Maxx for $3.99, $.99, $5.99 for a single bar(!!!). Here’s the trick of the Big Soap Theory: those outré (albeit discounted) prices are heavily front loaded to keep the trashy poor out. Here’s the secret I discovered: one stinking bar of Big Soap lasts me 3-6 months. I know this because, one day, I spent my last $4.23 on a Big Soap. I wasn’t going to be eating for at least a day, so, fuck it. why not step over the line to how the better folk live. That first Big Soap–luxurious, French-milled lavender olive oil soap–lasted me 4 months. And my skin felt wonderful. Not dry, oily, itchy, flaky. It was the gateway drug for me, that started me looking for the Big Soaps in other areas of my life, akin to your CSA share.
So, thank you. You’ve shined a light in a dark corner for me, and, hey, lookit: not alone.
p.s.: regular soap, with multiple bars over multiple weeks costs a hell of a lot more than Big Soap.
“And there she is, the little poor girl inside of me, not doing things that are good for her — and sometimes doing things that are expressly bad for her — simply out of spite.”-Hi. ME.
Love this, Melissa. Thank you for sharing. I’m also going without until it hurts but feel guilty calling myself poor. I was born into a working poor family that rose to middle class when I was about 7 and then to upper middle class around age 9, falling back to working poor at age 19. (My dad started a real estate business when I was about 6, and then it pretty much fell apart because recession.)
This is so true it gives me heartburn: Just assuming these kinds of things does some fucked up things to one’s head.
And the pride and the shame. Ugh. Proves John Steinbeck right: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.â€
Yes, yes, yes. Well put, well said, well done.
Oh, sister. This was so good, so raw and so insanely like my own upbringing and outlook that I read it through tears. I was poor. On my own, I am poor (despite the degree, despite what it looks like to people looking in). I am partnered with someone who is not poor, I am friends with people who are not poor. I find it difficult to explain to any of them what it means to be poor, as a state of mind. Here you did it, though, perfectly. Thank you.
There’s a lot in this piece I can relate to, but I just want people to know that if the above describes your current financial state, you NEED to be on public assistance. Food stamps are a godsend – just think of what you could do with the extra $200+ you won’t have to spend on food. It is well worth the slight shame of having to declare “EBT” every time you swipe the damn card at the grocery store. I was only on it for about 9 months, but I probably qualified for it for much longer than that, and I wish I’d taken advantage.
One of the best articles of the year.
Steal more.
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the kind words about the piece. I wanted to mention that my friend Syd is still collecting donations towards her medical expenses. You can donate here if you feel so inclined:
http://www.giveforward.com/helpsydpayherhospitalbills
Regarding public assistance, I collect unemployment for the days I don’t work (so, a couple hundred dollars a week). That definitely helps. I was also blessed by the real estate Gods with a rent controlled apartment, so I am lucky for that. (I wrote a story about that here: http://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2012/07/apartment-7)
Sue, I love your “Big Soap” theory. Some other-one-percenter should start a tumbler where they list all the expensive things they have found that are totally worth the extra dollar or so. Like the other day I bought a fancy conditioner from the discount bin (fancy conditioner had leaked all out the side, destroying the fancy label). I got half a dozen compliments on my hair the night after I used it. Totally worth it.
Yes, poverty is an economic state- it is also a mentality- it is the feeling of scarcity. Some days I feel a lot of scarcity in my life (like the day I wrote this essay), and some days I feel a great sense of abundance. How I feel is sometimes but not always related to how much money is in my account. I am working on cultivating that feeling of abundance. I keep my house real clean. I spend a lot of time outdoors. There is usually a big pot of homemade soup in the fridge.
Hey Melissa, Great article. Very familiar to me on so many levels…the crazy spend-like-hell-when-you-have-it, to buying nice cheese instead of saving for dental care. I have often thought about the strangeness of class–having been both poor and not-poor, and the ridiculous assumption that poor=stupid. These days I continue to choose financially poor and experience-rich.
I just finished reading Woody Gutherie’s “Bound For Glory” (he would have been 100 years old last Sat.) and now your piece. Different frames of mind for sure. Thanks for your view. Have you read that book by chance? I recommend it.
I relate to this more than I have anything in a very long time. Currently I have 76 cents in my account but I just returned from a writer’s fellowship in the Yucatan. As an ex sex worker and writer,non-cash jobs, paycheck-to-paycheck survival is a puzzle that terrifies and baffles me on a moment to moment basis. Thank you MP.
Yes. All I could think after that dentist said “it shouldn’t take long for you to save up seventy dollars” was how I wanted to punch him in the nose and how those are the things people who are not poor say. Then I thought about how when I don’t have money seventy dollars stretches so very far and the last thing I’d want to do with it is get my teeth cleaned. The idea of handing over seventy dollars for someone to probe my gums is physically painful.
This is my mother. This was her mother. It may have been her mother before that but I don’t know enough stories about her to really know for sure. I want it to not be me, I try very hard to not let it be me. I have a job with good benefits. I have money enough to cover my expenses and pay my student loans. I have just enough to send my parents a few hundred dollars every month to help keep them afloat. Those are the same parents that opened dozens of credit cards in my name while I was in college, maxed them out and let them go delinquent in 2008. I’m declaring bankruptcy because of the mistakes my parents made in my name. I still love and support them. I can’t hate them or it will consume me. I’m trying to move forward with love in my heart, to not be poor, or really not to FEEL poor. To love my family and friends and life as much as possible. This may be the only life that I have and I damn well intend on loving it.
Melissa, just read this and I commend you for being brave and honest. My upbringing was the opposite but I’ve known many people in this state. I was always under the impression, being “poor” was simply a state of mind. I was always under the impression, being “poor” showed a lack of motivation, ambition, and an unwillingness to go out and get a real job. That was how I was brought up, conditioned. My parents were middle class teachers who stuck with it and ended up making huge salaries even in the 80’s. I feel bad for those whose upbringing was different. I guess we’ve all had our issues. I’m a survivor of two failed marriages, the second of which cleaned me out. But I tried hard not to show the “self-pity” to my colleagues and friends although it was a crushing blow which left me penniless. But, I always had parents and friends around me to pick me up financially. I enjoy your writing, loved your class, and hope to be back.
Wow! I always knew the odds were against me, but had no idea how much. After my mom divorced my abusive dad, we lived on the edge of poverty with her low-paying clerical jobs. When she lost her job & couldn’t find another, we moved in with my widowed grandmother & “dined” on leftovers from her school cafeteria job. We made our own clothes, entertained ourselves with reading & word games, & only had a car because my other grandfather gave us an old one. My mom died of Ca just before I graduated from HS (& my dad died from alcohol complications shortly after that. Social Security survivors’ benefits, loans, & odd jobs helped me get through college. I made it through med school (traded off education time with my husband) to become the first in my family to become a doc (surgeon). I didn’t realize that only 1% can do this! I wish you only good things—hang in there! I have always tended to think (rightly or wrongly) that, if I can make it, anyone can.
Oh, please check out the Callen Lorde health clinic if you need to see a gynecologist…their sliding fee scale is highly reasonable…and it used to be anyway that you could get a yearly routine gynecological visit for free through a program they had in partnership with Columbia University.
Sorry you had a worse experience with NYU Dental than I did…I wound up there myself when I was sure I had a cavity, and it turned out that the terrible pain I was in had no rational source whatsoever. $95 that I couldn’t *actually* afford at the time, but I guess it was a pretty good deal to find out I had no cavities and no major looming problems given that I hadn’t been to a dentist in 9 years.
This is mostly in reply to Sue:
http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice
There are a lot of cases where you have to have money in order to save it.
You can go to 7-11 and buy pre-made sandwiches that’ll get me through one day at a time, $5~ at a time. If you could afford the membership and buying food $200+ at a time, and a car to haul it in, You could go to Costco and spend half as much over the course of a month. (Of course there are in-betweens, but still)
Gotta love how much is stacked against you when you’re trying to get out of it.
Hi Melissa!
I went to Antioch with you. vYou were my RA one term. It’s really interesting hearing your story, because my story has some similarities. I have a Master’s in clinical psychology and can’t afford to do the unpaid internships so that I could achieve the career I’ve fought so hard for. I was also out of work for about a year and a half and had to be on food stamps to get by, but was not eligible for unemployment. I also grew up poor. I was raised by a widowed preschool teacher (preschool teachers are never paid enough), and we had times when we were so poor, we literally lived on bread and water. But at what my family lacked in money, we more than made up for with how much we loved (and still love) each other.
It’s interesting you mentioned that when you were at Antioch, you believed most everyone else there came from wealth. I think most people there believed that too. I think if most of us stopped and actually talked to each other about it, that perception would have changed. I’m pretty sure a lot of kids thought I was well off because I tried to dress in tidy clothes. Something I learned from growing up with not much money is that it’s a lot easier to get a job when you can at least somewhat fake looking like you have it.
Anyway, I really hope that things work out better for you. I’m still fighting for the career I want while working as a nanny. Even with all the struggle and difficulty, I’m glad I still have something to reach for. I hope you keep moving forward (those of us who don’t have money know you can’t stop anyway, because there’s so little to fall back on) and reach greater success. I hope that for everyone who commented here too.
And damn it! I would really like to afford to go to a good doctor someday. And get my teeth cleaned too…
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