Read Online Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Linda Tirado
Tags: Social Science, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Social classes, Poverty & Homelessness
Ads: Link
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 billsand 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 ISWRONG 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,
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 billsand 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 ISWRONG 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,
Similar Books
