I spent the first 28 years of my life dirt poor. I don't mean the modern definition, the "we only had one 52 inch flatscreen TV" poor. I mean we had one enormous, Jeep-sized console TV from before I was born, and if it died, there was no money to fix it. I spent my childhood praying every night that God bless and protect my TV.
P.S. And God, if you could cure Mom's cancer too, that would be swell.
When she wasn't unemployed due to her terminal disease, my single mother worked as a nurse's aide. Her healthy, butt-wiping years were the salad years of my youth; they afforded me a whole three shirts when I was in the seventh grade. You can guess how seventh graders treated the kid with three shirts. You know how kind kids can be. And when mom's cancer came roaring back after a brief remission, we got even poorer. To stave off homelessness and pay our bills, I mowed lawns. She died when I was still a teenager, and I kept mowing. And later, shelving books. I struggled through high school, then some college, then depression, then college again, then grad school, and then finally...success! I was a taxpayer!
It took me until I was 28 to crack $15,000 a year.
I'm not rich now, but compared to my situation for most of my life, I am implausibly prosperous. Sometimes the poor kid in me still has a hearty giggle over his good fortune, and those moments are precious to me. I feel the relieved, disbelieving giddiness you might feel if you smashed a speeding Corvette into a concrete bunker, shattering the car to dust, yet somehow walked away thinner, taller, and with a better head of hair. How the fuck did that just happen to me? Probably best not to ask too many questions.
Much as I seem rich to my inner poor self, so too do I seem rich to people with less than me. This has a couple of manifestations that I've come to call my "no longer poor" tax. You're not even aware of these taxes until you make enough money, and then all of a sudden you've got problems that really should be reserved for someone who makes a lot more money than you do.
The first tax is simply rude. My stuff doesn't matter to poor people anymore. They're careless with my possessions, sometimes breaking them and not bothering to tell me about it. And heaven forbid they offer to pay for its replacement. On my better days, I excuse it by thinking "Well, they have no conception of how much that dining room table cost. That's why they're letting their kid draw on it." But eventually, the sheer stupidity of that sentence catches up to me. It's never been said, but their reasoning is clear enough: John has more than me, so he should subsidize me. I never faced this expectation when I was poor. If someone broke or lost my stuff, they apologized profusely and at least offered amends. I dearly miss this...what's it called? Oh yeah.
Courtesy.
The second tax manifested last week. My housecleaner of two years is a nice enough girl, 24. She comes from a long line of uneducated rural folk who scrape by, and that's all she expects of herself, and that's fine because I'm certainly not scrubbing my own toilets. Ask any ex-girlfriend. They will gladly testify that I have never touched a toilet brush. Or even more controversially, the toilet paper spindle.
The housecleaner asked me for an $850 interest-free loan so that she and her boyfriend can get the luxury apartment they want, without waiting until they can save the money for the deposit.
She and I have no relationship beyond our professional arrangement. We do not socialize. We do not text. We are not Facebook friends. If I ran out of gas, I would hitchhike before I would call her. And yet she's asking me for almost five months' pay in advance based on...on...
I've actually been here before. Her thinking is as sophisticated as this: "Me want money. Who me know who money got? (surveys life) John! Me get money from John." And then, devoid of any sense of shame or propriety, the request is made, and the only lesson learned is mine:
I did poor all wrong.