Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "hunger"
Life On 1£ A Week
It is a strange thing to live in poverty when you have a job. I don't mean a minimum wage job, of course, because it's very hard not to live in poverty on minimum wage. I'm talking about the peculiar, "respectable" poverty of the underpaid professional.
As you know by now, when I graduated from college, I went to work as a parole officer -- not because I wanted to, but because it was the only game in town. I was a Criminal Justice major, none of the police or sheriff's departments were biting, and the Federal agencies were hopelessly out of reach, so when the offer floated my way I grabbed it, as a drowning man grabs a life preserver, not necessarily grasping in the moment that he is not actually saving his life but simply decreasing the speed at which he will die.
The starting salary for my job in 1997 was $19,800 a year. After taxes and union dues, that amounted to about $14,800. After deducting what I'd pay in student loans for the same period, it was $11,800. After deducting rent, it was $6,810. After deducting utilities, $5,125. After deducting my city parking permit, $4,925. Even in 1997, even in small-town Pennsylvania, even with a commute that lasted exactly how long it took me to cross the street, $4,925 a year is pretty damned tough to live on. It isn't impossible by any means, and people make do with less, but for a middle-class kid whose only experience with privation was the self-inflicted, collegiate kind, it was an eye-opener.
The first thing I noticed was the constant hunger. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that my chief memory of that time was trying to eat on a food budget that amounted to about $5 a day. Breakfast was no problem. I lived above a diner and could purchase an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a coffee for a little over two dollars. I could not afford to eat out at lunch, however, so I had to walk home and cook a very carefully measured-out portion of No Frills Brand Spaghetti. Tomato sauce and butter being luxuries I could very seldom afford, I sprayed the noodles with Pam and gave them a dusting of garlic salt, which was one of the few spices I could obtain from the 99c Store, to add the illusion of flavor. That and a glass of water constituted my midday meal. Dinner, which I ate at five o'clock, was the same thing. By seven, I was hungry again, but could not eat until the following morning. I often went to bed tormented by stomach pangs, and I have vivid recollections of waking at 3 AM to ransack my little slot kitchen, hoping to find a sauce packet or a crust of bread or even a breath mint left in a drawer by a previous tenant, and never, ever succeeding.
Because my car had broken down and I lacked the money to fix it, I was forced to do all my grocery shopping from the farmer's market down the street. In practical terms this was both more expensive and more wasteful than the grocery store, because the meat, vegetables and bread I bought from the market were free of preservatives, and if they weren't eaten in 24 - 72 hours the only thing they fed was my garbage can. At the same time, the lengths I went to ration the food I did have were in retrospect somewhat ridiculous. At some point or other I did manage to lay hands on a jar of tomato sauce, and I have a vivid memory, when it was finally empty, of refusing to throw it away but instead pouring a batch of just-cooked spaghetti into it, sealing the jar, and then shaking it for several minutes. By this method I managed to obtain a sauce coating per noodle of about 1/32 of an inch. I considered it a stroke of absolute genius.
Aside from hunger, there was a constant battle to save money in small ways. I could not afford to wash my clothes at a laundromat, so I opted for the 19th century method of filling my bathtub with hot water and dish soap, stirring the clothes with a broom handle, and then laying them on the radiator to dry. In another stroke of genius, which ended up looking suspiciously like idiocy, I tried to use a steam iron to speed-dry a dress shirt that I needed for court the following morning. Oddly enough, I managed to reduce the shirt almost to ashes without drying it, which I would have thought physically impossible. I was so convinced it was a fluke that I destroyed two more shirts, really good ones I might add, before I abandoned the method.
Poverty of this sort is not the poverty of, say, a homeless man. It is not the poverty of my next door neighbors at the time, a husband and wife with two children whose apartment was no larger than mine. It is not poverty at all, really, but rather what George Orwell called "life on 1£ a week." It is a constant awareness of the emptiness of your belly and your pockets, and of the things you cannot do and cannot have. Among the things I could not do during this period were eat at a restaurant of any kind after ten o'clock in the morning, go on a date, go for a drive, see a movie, drink a beer, rent a DVD, buy a book, travel (even by bus), attend a concert, or even enter a department store -- not, at any rate, without the knowledge that I would be leaving empty-handed. Daily life consists of sleep, work, and then a kind of idle torpor between the time you get home and the time you fall into bed, during which it is nearly impossible to do anything, since, after all, there almost nothing for you to do.
Worse than any physical suffering or mental depression
caused by life on 1£ a week is the never-ceasing taxation of one's dignity. The sole of your dress shoe comes away from the upper; you can't afford to have it resoled so you glue it yourself, but the glue doesn't hold, and now you flap when you walk. A pretty girl flirts with you but you back away, knowing that you can't afford to take her to dinner or even go Dutch at a cheap restaurant. Co-workers, not grasping the depth or your poverty and feeling snubbed by your refusal to drink or lunch with them, ostracize you as a snob. Hunger-induced weight loss requires you punch new holes in your belt with a screwdriver, but you botch the job and ruin your belt, and now you have to use a safety pin and pray nobody notices. Though it is fifty degrees outside the landlord hasn't turned the heat on yet, but you daren't complain because you are six days behind on your rent and won't have it for another three days. A close friend is getting married in the next state, and not only can't you afford to go to the wedding, you can't send a present or even a check, with the result that his newly-minted bride despises you from that day forward.
This was my experience, or some of it anyway, with "respectable" poverty, the poverty of a man who wore a suit and tie to work, had health benefits, and even carried a badge, yet who had to eat No Frills Brand spaghetti twice a day and not occasionally chowed down on rotten meat because hey, if you cook it long enough, it's not rotten, it's just burnt. There was nothing whatsoever unique about it. Millions were in the same boat. Millions more are today. And yet according to the government I was not below the poverty line, not in need of assistance, and did not qualify for special terms on my student loans.
After all, I had a job.
As you know by now, when I graduated from college, I went to work as a parole officer -- not because I wanted to, but because it was the only game in town. I was a Criminal Justice major, none of the police or sheriff's departments were biting, and the Federal agencies were hopelessly out of reach, so when the offer floated my way I grabbed it, as a drowning man grabs a life preserver, not necessarily grasping in the moment that he is not actually saving his life but simply decreasing the speed at which he will die.
The starting salary for my job in 1997 was $19,800 a year. After taxes and union dues, that amounted to about $14,800. After deducting what I'd pay in student loans for the same period, it was $11,800. After deducting rent, it was $6,810. After deducting utilities, $5,125. After deducting my city parking permit, $4,925. Even in 1997, even in small-town Pennsylvania, even with a commute that lasted exactly how long it took me to cross the street, $4,925 a year is pretty damned tough to live on. It isn't impossible by any means, and people make do with less, but for a middle-class kid whose only experience with privation was the self-inflicted, collegiate kind, it was an eye-opener.
The first thing I noticed was the constant hunger. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that my chief memory of that time was trying to eat on a food budget that amounted to about $5 a day. Breakfast was no problem. I lived above a diner and could purchase an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a coffee for a little over two dollars. I could not afford to eat out at lunch, however, so I had to walk home and cook a very carefully measured-out portion of No Frills Brand Spaghetti. Tomato sauce and butter being luxuries I could very seldom afford, I sprayed the noodles with Pam and gave them a dusting of garlic salt, which was one of the few spices I could obtain from the 99c Store, to add the illusion of flavor. That and a glass of water constituted my midday meal. Dinner, which I ate at five o'clock, was the same thing. By seven, I was hungry again, but could not eat until the following morning. I often went to bed tormented by stomach pangs, and I have vivid recollections of waking at 3 AM to ransack my little slot kitchen, hoping to find a sauce packet or a crust of bread or even a breath mint left in a drawer by a previous tenant, and never, ever succeeding.
Because my car had broken down and I lacked the money to fix it, I was forced to do all my grocery shopping from the farmer's market down the street. In practical terms this was both more expensive and more wasteful than the grocery store, because the meat, vegetables and bread I bought from the market were free of preservatives, and if they weren't eaten in 24 - 72 hours the only thing they fed was my garbage can. At the same time, the lengths I went to ration the food I did have were in retrospect somewhat ridiculous. At some point or other I did manage to lay hands on a jar of tomato sauce, and I have a vivid memory, when it was finally empty, of refusing to throw it away but instead pouring a batch of just-cooked spaghetti into it, sealing the jar, and then shaking it for several minutes. By this method I managed to obtain a sauce coating per noodle of about 1/32 of an inch. I considered it a stroke of absolute genius.
Aside from hunger, there was a constant battle to save money in small ways. I could not afford to wash my clothes at a laundromat, so I opted for the 19th century method of filling my bathtub with hot water and dish soap, stirring the clothes with a broom handle, and then laying them on the radiator to dry. In another stroke of genius, which ended up looking suspiciously like idiocy, I tried to use a steam iron to speed-dry a dress shirt that I needed for court the following morning. Oddly enough, I managed to reduce the shirt almost to ashes without drying it, which I would have thought physically impossible. I was so convinced it was a fluke that I destroyed two more shirts, really good ones I might add, before I abandoned the method.
Poverty of this sort is not the poverty of, say, a homeless man. It is not the poverty of my next door neighbors at the time, a husband and wife with two children whose apartment was no larger than mine. It is not poverty at all, really, but rather what George Orwell called "life on 1£ a week." It is a constant awareness of the emptiness of your belly and your pockets, and of the things you cannot do and cannot have. Among the things I could not do during this period were eat at a restaurant of any kind after ten o'clock in the morning, go on a date, go for a drive, see a movie, drink a beer, rent a DVD, buy a book, travel (even by bus), attend a concert, or even enter a department store -- not, at any rate, without the knowledge that I would be leaving empty-handed. Daily life consists of sleep, work, and then a kind of idle torpor between the time you get home and the time you fall into bed, during which it is nearly impossible to do anything, since, after all, there almost nothing for you to do.
Worse than any physical suffering or mental depression
caused by life on 1£ a week is the never-ceasing taxation of one's dignity. The sole of your dress shoe comes away from the upper; you can't afford to have it resoled so you glue it yourself, but the glue doesn't hold, and now you flap when you walk. A pretty girl flirts with you but you back away, knowing that you can't afford to take her to dinner or even go Dutch at a cheap restaurant. Co-workers, not grasping the depth or your poverty and feeling snubbed by your refusal to drink or lunch with them, ostracize you as a snob. Hunger-induced weight loss requires you punch new holes in your belt with a screwdriver, but you botch the job and ruin your belt, and now you have to use a safety pin and pray nobody notices. Though it is fifty degrees outside the landlord hasn't turned the heat on yet, but you daren't complain because you are six days behind on your rent and won't have it for another three days. A close friend is getting married in the next state, and not only can't you afford to go to the wedding, you can't send a present or even a check, with the result that his newly-minted bride despises you from that day forward.
This was my experience, or some of it anyway, with "respectable" poverty, the poverty of a man who wore a suit and tie to work, had health benefits, and even carried a badge, yet who had to eat No Frills Brand spaghetti twice a day and not occasionally chowed down on rotten meat because hey, if you cook it long enough, it's not rotten, it's just burnt. There was nothing whatsoever unique about it. Millions were in the same boat. Millions more are today. And yet according to the government I was not below the poverty line, not in need of assistance, and did not qualify for special terms on my student loans.
After all, I had a job.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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