I live on a street called Eutaw Place (pronounced like the state) that has been forgotten by both time and man. There was pavement poured long ago to connect the brick street to the curb or to even out the arched curve of the street and over time it’s been chipped away and potholed so that each car literally bounces and sways from side to side as it drives past my house, making the sounds of government neglect or civic apathy. It is not a “nice” neighborhood.
For the past four months, I’ve been listening to that noise all day. I’ve been out of work, spending my time at home with no sense of the days as they pass, working frantically on job applications and graduate school applications, always working but often with few tangible results to show for it and becoming rather loopy and burnt-out (though I finally got a job offer yesterday—more on that in a future post I think). But I knew that time was all bent out of shape here even before my time was all mine, handed back to me like a screaming infant by circumstance. When I first moved in, the man who lived across the street was moving out, aided by his adult daughters and their partners. One of his daughters introduced herself to me and told me I’d moved in at just the right time.
“The midnight fights have really slowed down,” she said. “This neighborhood is on the come-up.”
I can only assume she was right – there are, in fact, late-night screaming matches between some of my neighbors or their friends, but only every few weeks. I once wrote in my college thesis that “truth is stranger than fiction, its metaphors more heavy-handed.” That’s the way I feel about the midnight fights, during which my first-floor neighbor once screamed at another neighbor that she was “acting like we live in the ghetto.” I looked through my broken blinds down at my broken street and thought, well, yes.
That was the first indication that time was fluid on Eutaw Place. Kids would sometimes be awake on their respective front porches at midnight while my second-floor neighbors were blasting Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” which I could identify by the rhythm of my vibrating floor. I once watched at 2 a.m. as a man in a white t-shirt knocked on my neighbor’s house, was let inside, started arguing loudly with his hosts, left to take a walk around the block, knocked again, was let in again, argued again, left, took a walk, and repeated the process at least two more times—they let him in every time. I felt like I was watching one of Tom Stoppard’s absurdist plays that my high school theatre teacher loved (we were “not doing high school theatre,” merely “theatre in a high school setting,” he insisted). I woke up early one morning and found the entire contents of a woman’s wardrobe in my backyard, wet with rain. I had heard no struggle, no fighting—and my walls are thin. I saw plenty of things I can’t explain. Someone burned my Halloween pumpkin until it was a charred bowl. The UPS man left his socks on my stairs and only his socks. I was tempted to check my carbon monoxide detector more than once.
But it was all real. The breakdown of time and routine and predictability is often—though not always—a hallmark of poverty. People who grow up with guardians who struggle to make ends meet sometimes talk about the breakdown of routine and safety—no one knows when there will be food in the fridge again or when the next flat tire will set them back on their credit card payments. Regardless of income, the same can often be said of homes where substances abuse is loudly or quietly thundering overhead. People with family members who use and/or drink problematically can’t predict who will be in the house at any given moment and in what state of sobriety or mood, who will be awake at 3 a.m. or asleep at noon. In Christian spaces, much is made of the generosity and humility of “the poor.” And I do believe that those old Bible stories are meant to teach us about the danger of feigning scarcity when we can actually afford to give to others, especially non-monetary offerings. But real scarcity warps time and eats at the brain. As one of my friends who used to be homeless put it, “I still look on the ground for half-burned cigarettes, because I use to pick them up and finish them off.”
The constant surveillance of poor neighborhoods mixed with a lack of recourse or reliable accountability for governments/cops/corporations doesn’t help either. I heard one of those midnight fights in full swing the other night and looked out of my bedroom window to see three flashing squad cars on my street, probably called due to the disturbance (why they needed three cars to break up a two-person argument, God only knows).
“What is this, a police state?” a man I couldn’t see yelled at a cop (the latter replied “yes” in a monotone).
On a few different occasions, I was informed via letter that my food stamp (SNAP/EBT) benefits were going to be cut off for reasons that were never fully explained. I would email questions to my local government social services office, which never replied to me and was never reachable by phone. Eventually, I found another number for a customer service line where they gave me the answers no one had bothered to give me via email or snail mail. I tried to draw unemployment benefits but was told, at one point, that there was simply no record that I had ever been employed in the state of West Virginia (your benefits are based on your past wages). More than once, I wanted to pathetically plead with a state government employee that I was a good person, so can I please just have the money? But it doesn’t work like that.
When I lost both my income and routine back in August, I genuinely did feel my brain warping. I had more time but was also more anxious, and I slept worse. I drank water religiously and still felt dehydrated—psychologically dehydrated, if that’s possible. I thought I lost my keys in the woods one weekend and spent thirty minutes walking back and forth along the trail cursing myself, only to get home and find that they were in a pocket I had already checked half-a-dozen times. I video-called Elizabeth one weekend and told her that I thought my fully-grown cat was getting bigger.
“Not overweight,” I clarified. “Just bigger. I think he’s expanding? Or is my furniture smaller than I remember? Am I losing it?” I later found out that many cats grow a heavy winter coat.
“Let me see him,” she said, and I turned the camera around. “Oh, he’s definitely becoming a presence,” she agreed.
My point is not that I experienced true financial insecurity for a few months and it opened my third eye or taught me a valuable lesson™. As James Baldwin once put it, “I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering – enough is certainly as good as a feast.” My point is that uncertainty and scarcity are a kind of bad magic that gets into the brain. I sometimes found myself afraid that I would become downwardly mobile, that I was bad at writing resumes or interviewing or that my degree sounded fake and was unemployable (to be fair, what the hell is “environmental and urban studies”?). Anxiety about my future made me ungenerous. Sometimes I saw fit to blame West Virginia, since she was all I looked at all day long. Maybe the organization I had worked for was too localized to be known by employers, maybe they saw me as provincial or were confused as to why I went to a fancy college and then did AmeriCorps, which usually attracts uncertain eighteen year-olds or panicking middle-aged career-changers. This was both an irrational and pointless fear, and I was only shaking my fist at God and the mountains. But it was the fear that was crazy-making.
Sometimes when people comment that our nation’s populace has gone insane, income inequality graphs dance like sugar-plum fairies in my mind’s eye. I’ve seen the online speculation that Luigi Mangione was essentially driven to madness by debilitating pain he had experienced from a back injury for which he eventually underwent an expensive surgery after struggling to convince doctors or perhaps insurers that the surgery was necessary (this appears to be all that’s really clear from his online posts). Some have suggested the surgery itself was botched, leading to more pain and a period of spiraling, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation of that. I don’t know how certain we can be about anything that goes on inside another person’s mind. But it seems plausible to me that a person’s thinking could be warped by the threat of a medical bill they couldn’t pay, by the violence of impersonal bureaucracies, or by the inability to admonish massive systems that impoverish and harm others.
I know, for instance, that I waited in a long line in a fluorescent government office in a neighborhood with crooked sidewalks to figure out why my initial food stamps application had been rejected. The elderly man in front of me, who was standing in front of the only staffed window at this understaffed, underfunded office, was detailing all the screws that had been put into his body after various accidents (some of them work-related, I’m sure). He was there to apply for a grant to get his roof repaired, but he spent five minutes explaining the screws and his pain while the rest of us tapped our feet impatiently. The clerk told him to come back with a completed application from a website that the man clearly didn’t understand how to access. It was unclear if he even owned a computer or a printer. I don’t know if I can come back, he said. I don’t have a car and I can’t hardly ever get a ride down here. And the clerk shrugged apologetically, handed him a note with the name of the website, and sent him away, because the rest of us were waiting to argue our own cases. We couldn’t help him. We could hardly even help ourselves. And I felt crazy.
P.S. Because this is a bleak one, here is a note of hope for the sake of the holidays. There are actually a few American CEOs who have become internet heroes of a kind due to their rejection of (at least some) types of profit maximization—lipstick on the pig, but nonetheless. From this 2018 Mental Floss article:
When longtime Costco president W. Craig Jelinek once complained to Costcoco-founder and former CEO Jim Sinegal that their monolithic warehouse business was losing money on their famously cheap $1.50 hot dog and soda package, Sinegal listened, nodded, and then did his best to make his take on the situation perfectly clear.
“If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you,” Sinegal said. “Figure it out.”