Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

  Raymond drops me off with Paul, a thick-armed blond guy who is, compared with Roberta, painfully short of people skills. In response to my homemaking history, he mutters only, “That doesn’t bother me,” and hands me the personality test. This one is shorter than Wal-Mart’s and apparently aimed at a rougher crowd: Am I more or less likely than other people to get into fistfights? Are there situations in which dealing cocaine is not a crime? A long, repetitive stretch on stealing, featuring variants on the question: “In the last year I have stolen (check dollar amount below) worth of goods from my employers.” When I’m done, Paul eyeballs the test and barks out, “What is your weakest point?” Uh, lack of experience—obviously. “Do you take initiative?” I’m here, aren’t I? I could have just dropped off the application. So it’s a go. Paul sees me in plumbing, $8.50 to start, drug screen results, of course, pending. I shake his hand to close the deal.1

  Friday evening: I’ve been in Minneapolis for just over fifteen hours, driven from the southern suburbs to the northern ones, dropped off a half dozen apps, and undergone two face-to-face interviews. Job searches take their toll, even in the case of totally honest applicants, and I am feeling particularly damaged. The personality tests, for example: the truth is I don’t much care if my fellow workers are getting high in the parking lot or even lifting the occasional retail item, and I certainly wouldn’t snitch if I did. Nor do I believe that management rules by divine right or the undiluted force of superior knowledge, as the “surveys” demand you acknowledge. It whittles you down to lie up to fifty times in the space of the fifteen minutes or so it takes to do a “survey,” even when there’s a higher moral purpose to serve. Equally draining is the effort to look both perky and compliant at the same time, for half an hour or more at a stretch, because while you need to evince “initiative,” you don’t want to come across as someone who might initiate something like a union organizing drive. Then there is the threat of the drug tests, hanging over me like a fast-approaching SAT. It rankles—at some deep personal, physical level—to know that the many engaging qualities I believe I have to offer—friendliness, reliability, willingness to learn—can all be trumped by my pee.2

  In a spirit of contrition for multiple sins, I decide to devote the weekend to detox. A Web search reveals that I am on a heavily traveled path; there are dozens of sites offering help to the would-be drug-test passer, mostly in the form of ingestible products, though one site promises to send a vial of pure, drug-free urine, battery-heated to body temperature. Since I don’t have time to order and receive any drug-test-evasion products, I linger over a site in which hundreds of letters, typically with subject lines reading “Help!!! Test in Three Days!!!” are soberly answered by “Alec.” Here I learn that my leanness is an advantage—there aren’t too many places for the cannabis derivatives to hide out in—and that the only effective method is to flush the damn stuff out with massive quantities of fluid, at least three gallons a day. To hurry the process, there is a product called CleanP supposedly available at GNC, so I drive fifteen minutes to the nearest one, swigging tap water from an Evian bottle all the way, and ask the kid manning the place where his, uh, detox products are kept. Maybe he’s used to a stream of momlike women demanding CleanP, because he leads me poker-faced to an impressively large locked glass case—locked either because the average price of GNC’s detox products is $49.95 or because the market is thought to consist of desperate and not particularly law-abiding individuals. I read the ingredients and buy two of them separately—creatinine and a diuretic called uva ursis—for a total of $30. So here is the program: drink water at all times, along with frequent doses of diuretic, and (this is my own scientific contribution) avoid salt in any form at all since salt encourages water retention, meaning no processed foods, fast foods, or condiments of any kind. If I want that job in plumbing at Menards, I have to make myself into an unobstructed pipe: water in and water just as pure and drinkable coming out.

  My other task for Saturday is to find a place to live. I go through all the apartment-finding agencies in the phone book—Apartment Mart, Apartment Search, Apartments Available, and so on—and leave messages. I also try all the apartment buildings listed, finding, at the two buildings where someone actually answers, that they want twelve-month leases. I walk to the supermarket to pick up the Sunday paper, pausing to apply for a job while I’m there. Yes, they could use someone; things get pretty hectic around the first of the month, right after the welfare checks go out; I can come back next week. The newspaper, though, is a disappointment. There is exactly one furnished studio apartment listed for the entire Twin Cities area, and they’re not answering the phone on the weekend. Maybe, though, given the incipient incontinence induced by the flush-out regimen, it’s just as well I have no apartments to see. Dinner is a quarter of a BBQ chicken from the supermarket, unsalted and washed down with a familiar, lowtech diuretic—beer.

  This is not, all things considered, my finest hour. If I could just surrender to my increasingly aqueous condition and wait out the weekend with a novel, things would be looking up. But home in this instance is not a restful place; it’s more like what is known in the military as a “situation.” When I am home, Budgie wants to be out of his cage, a desire he makes known by squawking or, what is far worse, by pacing dementedly. When he is out of his cage, he wants to sit on my head and worry my hair and my glasses frames. To minimize the damage, I don’t let him out unless I am wearing my hooded sweatshirt, tied up tight enough to cover my hair and most of my face, and still I am constantly having to move him from his favorite face-to-face perch on my shoulder to, say, my forearm, from which he will work his way ineluctably back to my face. This is what anyone coming to the door would encounter: a cringing figure, glasses peering out the porthole of her sweatshirt, topped by a large, crested—and, I can only imagine, quite pleased with its dominant position—exotic white bird. But I cannot incarcerate him nearly as much as I would like to. It’s my job—isn’t it?—my way of earning my shelter, to be this creature’s friend and surrogate flock.

  Unfortunately, Budgie does not serve the same functions for me, and on Sunday I decide to seek out my own kind. A New York friend, a young African American feminist, had urged me to look up her aunt in Minneapolis, and I have a reason beyond sociability for doing so: I have been worrying that the scenario I have created for myself, both here and in Maine, is totally artificial. Who, in real life, plops herself down in a totally strange environment—without housing, family connections, or job—and attempts to become a viable resident? Well, it turns out that my friend’s aunt did exactly that in the early nineties: got on a Greyhound bus in New York, with two children in tow, disembarking in the utterly strange state of Florida. This is a story I have to hear, so I call and get a wary invitation to come on over this afternoon. Caroline, as I’ll call her, is a commanding presence, with high cheekbones and quick-moving, shamanistic eyes. She gets me my drink du jour—water—introduces me to her children, and explains that it’s her husband’s day off, which he is spending upstairs in bed. The house—well, she apologizes for it, though three bedrooms in a freestanding building for $825 a month doesn’t seem so bad to me at the moment. She itemizes its deficiencies: the bedrooms are tiny; the block is infested with drug dealers; the dining room ceiling leaks whenever the bathroom above it is used; the toilet can be flushed only by pouring in a bucket of water. And why are they here? Because on her $9 an hour as an assistant bookkeeper at a downtown hotel, plus her husband’s $10 as a maintenance worker, minus utilities and $59 a week for health insurance (she is diabetic, the five-year-old asthmatic), this is what you get. Yet if you do the arithmetic, these people are earning nearly $40,000 a year, which makes them officially “middle class.”

  I explain my mission in Minneapolis, although it turns out her niece has already briefed her, and ask her to tell me about her move to Florida ten years ago. This is the story more or less as it emerged, since she didn’t mind my taking notes, of someone doing in real l
ife what I am doing only in the service of journalism:

  She had been living in New Jersey, working at a bank, when she decided to leave her husband because he “wasn’t involved” with the children. She moved in with her mother in Queens but found it impossible to get to her job in New Jersey from there, in addition to taking her youngest child to day care every morning. Then her brother moved in, so you had three adults and two children in a two-bedroom apartment, which was just not working out. So she decided to take off for Florida, where she had heard the rents were lower. What she had was their clothes, the Greyhound tickets, and $1,600 in cash. That was all. They got off the bus in a town a little south of Orlando, and here a nice cab driver—she still remembers his name—took them to a low-priced hotel. The next step was to find a church: “Always find a church.” People from the church drove her around to the WIC office (Women, Infants, and Children, a federal program offering food help to pregnant women and mothers of young children) and to find a school for her twelve-year-old girl and day care for the baby. Sometimes they also helped with groceries. Soon Caroline got a job cleaning hotel rooms—twenty-eight to thirty rooms a day for $2–$3 a room, for a total of about $300 a week. It was “go to bed with a backache and wake up with a backache.” The little girl had to pick up the baby at day care and watch him until Caroline got home at about 8:00 P.M., which means she didn’t get much chance to go outside and play.

  What was it like to start all over in a completely new place? “Anxiety attack! You know what I’m saying?” It was the stress, she thinks, that gave her diabetes. There she was—thirsty all the time, blurry vision, a terrible itching of her privates—and she had no idea what the symptoms meant. One doctor told her it had to be an STD, but it had been a long, long time since any sex had occurred. One morning the Lord told her, “Go to a hospital. Walk, don’t ride.” She walked thirty blocks and passed out at the hospital. Maybe the Lord wanted her to walk so she’d pass out and finally get some attention.

  There were good things that happened, though. She used to help a man at the hotel where she cleaned, a man who was sick with cancer, bringing him food and even cleaning the bad-smelling sores, and he was so grateful that he once gave her $325, which he knew was the exact amount of her rent. And there was one major friend, Irene, whom Caroline met “at a Dumpster.” Irene had problems, yes. She was both black and Indian, a migrant farmworker, and had been raped by someone and also abused by her boyfriend, who left an ugly scar on her face. The boyfriend found the rapist and hacked him to death and ended up permanently in prison. So Caroline took Irene in and for a while it worked out very well. Irene got a job at Taco Bell and helped with the kids, whom she fussed over and loved as her own. Then Irene started drinking and “dancing on chairs” in bars, finally leaving to live with a man. Caroline misses her and even went back to Florida once to try to find her. She could have died. One time a cancer the size of a quarter popped out of her right nipple. It’s hard not knowing.

  It was in Florida that Caroline met the current husband, a white man, as it turns out, and her tribulations did not end with marriage but went on to include bouts of homelessness and a lot more interstate travel by Greyhound with children. When, after two hours, I get up to go, Caroline asks if I’m a vegetarian. I apologize for not being one, and she rushes into the kitchen, coming back with a family-sized container of her homemade chicken stew, which I accept with heartfelt gratitude: dinner. We hug. She walks me to my car and we hug again. So I have a friend now in Minneapolis, and the odd thing is that she is the original—the woman who uprooted herself and came out somehow on her feet and who did all this in real life and with children—while I am the imitation, the pallid, child-free pretender.

  But on Tuesday, when the post–Memorial Day week begins, my life seems real enough again in a gray and baleful way. This is my day of drug tests, also of traffic and a steady, appropriately sphincter-relaxing rain. The first test, for Wal-Mart, is painless enough, conducted at a chiropractor’s office a few miles down the highway from Wal-Mart itself. I’m given two plastic containers—one to pee into and one to hold the decanted sample—and sent down the hall to an ordinary public rest room. Easy enough to substitute someone else’s pee, if I’d had a vial of it in my pocket or met a potential donor in the rest room. The next test, for Menards, takes me to the southwestern suburbs, to a regular allopathic hospital, complete with patients being whisked around corridors on gurneys. A dozen people are already ahead of me in the waiting room of the SmithKline Beecham suite I’ve been sent to, most of them, judging from the usual class cues, of the low-wage variety. The waiting room TV is tuned to Robin Givens’s talk show Forgive or Forget, where today’s theme is “You took me in and I cleaned you out.” Seems eighteen-year-old Cory stole from the cousin who took him in, thus ruining Christmas for the cousin’s girlfriend and her child. Cory is not repentant, in fact makes excuses about having had to cheat and steal all the way up from the projects, that’s how his life has been. Robin beats the air with her fists and yells, “Cory, Cory, stop being a victim!” Thievery is nothing, apparently, compared to the crime of victimhood. With each fresh denunciation of Cory, the studio audience applauds more excitedly. He is bad, as are some of the impassive viewers right in this room, who will soon be judged and exposed by their urine. My mind slides back to one of the “approve/disapprove” statements on the Wal-Mart survey: “There is room in every corporation for a nonconformist.” But no, no, no! The correct answer, as we will all find out soon enough, is “totally disagree.”

  Finally, after forty minutes, I am called out of the waiting room by an officious woman in blue scrubs. What are they planning—to cut out my bladder if I fail to produce a testable volume of pee? I ask whether they do anything but drug testing here. No, that’s pretty much it. She checks my photo ID, then squirts what looks like soap onto my palms, although there is no sink in evidence. Now I’m to go into a bathroom and wash with water while she waits, leaving my purse with her. I pause for a beat or two, goo-filled hands held out, pondering the issues of trust that have arisen between her and me. Why, for example, am I supposed to leave her with my purse while she doesn’t even trust me not to sprinkle some drug-dissolving substance into my urine? But for all I know, any display of attitude might lead her to slant the results. So I go meekly into the rest room, wash my hands, and then pee, which I am allowed to do with the door shut, and our little parody of medical care is complete. The whole venture, including drive time and wait, has taken an hour and forty minutes, about what it took for the Wal-Mart test, and it occurs to me that one of the effects of drug testing is to limit worker mobility—maybe even one of the functions. Each potential new job requires (1) the application, (2) the interview, and (3) the drug test—which is something to ponder with gasoline running at nearly two dollars a gallon, not to mention what you may have to pay for a babysitter.

  Until I know the drug test results, I feel obliged to keep looking for jobs. Most of my encounters are predictable and unpromising—fill out the app, get told to wait for a call, etc.—but one stands out from the corporate, legalistic, euphemistic, and thoroughly aboveboard feel of all the others. The ad is for “customer service” work, a type of job I tend to avoid because it normally involves a résumé, which in turn would involve levels of prevarication I am not prepared to attempt. But this customer service job is described as “entry-level.” When I call I am told to come in at three sharp and to be sure to “dress professional.” The latter injunction presents a challenge, since my wardrobe consists of T-shirts and only two pairs of pants other than blue jeans, but I have a jacket and decent shoes brought along for a stop in New York on the way to Minneapolis, and this, fortified with lipstick and knee-highs, makes for a pretty damn impressive getup, I think. When I arrive at Mountain Air (as we’ll call it), in a characterless white box building just off a service road, nine other applicants are already waiting. It turns out this is a group interview, conducted by Todd in a large room, where we applicants s
it in folding chairs while Todd, a sharply dressed fellow of about thirty, lectures and shows transparencies.

  Todd speaks very rapidly in a singsong cadence, suggesting that he does this several times a day. Mountain Air, he says, is an “environmental consulting firm” offering help to people with asthma and allergies as a “free service.” We will be sent out to the sufferers in our own cars, making $1,650 if we complete fifty-four two-hour appointments in thirty days—though you’d have to be pretty lazy to make only that much. Plus there are incredible perks like weekend training sessions held all over the country where they “get stuff done, of course, like hearing motivational speakers, but you can bring your spouse and have a great time.” All we have to be is eighteen or older, bondable, possessing a car and a home phone and having one year of Minnesota residency. Whoops! He asks if any of us are not long-term Minnesota residents, and when I raise my hand he says the requirement can sometimes be waived. What Mountain Air is really looking for is—and here he reads from a transparency—“Self-disciplined/Money-motivated/Positive attiude.”