Pepsi | Children are almost never seen in the hotel. Once I heard a baby crying on my floor, the fourth floor, for about a week. But I never saw the baby. Perhaps there are kids here, but we don’t see or hear them. There is a rule in the Social Services Department that children aren’t to live in a place where there are no cooking facilities. A child who lived here would have to be unknown to Welfare and Children’s Services. Can you train a two-year-old to be silent and invisible? People do.
But one day right after Xmas I come downstairs and see a child in the lobby. The child is four or five years old, a little girl, black, wearing dirty little overalls and a happy face T-shirt, baby Reeboks with no socks, and a big green ribbon in her hair. She is sitting on one end of the cardboard couch, alone, staring at the TV. Several of the Doomed, also staring at the tube, seem unaware of her presence.
I go out to get my coffee, read the Trib amongst the Trib writers, walk over to Sherlock’s to look at the books, then walk back to the hotel. The kid is still sitting there staring at the tube.
I go upstairs, take a shower, do some laundry and hang the clothes up in the window to dry, then go down to get my mail. The kid is still there, staring at the TV.
“You letting kids move in here now?” I ask the Desk Guy. He shrugs.
This is extremely dangerous, I think. If I approach the child, someone will think I’m a cop. A welfare cop, or a child molester. A baby seller or a baby-stealer. A social worker baby-stealer. A welfare cop family breakup artist. Fuck it.
I buy a Coke from the Coke machine, sit down next to the kid. The kid stares at the tube. The kid is stiff with terror. I should take the hint. Whatever the kid is afraid of is not something to mess with. (It occurs to me later that maybe the kid was afraid of me.) The poor little fucker.
“Coke?” I say, offering the Coke to the kid. The kid stares at the tube.
“Would you like a Coke? I got you a Coke,” I say.
The kid stares at the tube.
“You speak English?” I ask, emboldened by the fact that nobody has leaped for my throat yet from some hidden recess of the lobby.
The kid gives a tiny little nod, staring at the tube.
Response! I push the can of Coke at the child. “It’s for you. You must be thirsty. Coke.”
“Pepsi,” says the kid, staring at the tube.
“Coke,” I repeat, stupidly.
“I don’t like Coke. I like Pepsi,” says the kid, staring at the …
“But we don’t have a Pepsi machine here. We just got a Coke machine.”
“Pepsi,” says the kid.
“Are you hungry?” I ask. “Want some cheez-its? Food? Where’s your mommy?”
The kid stares at the tube. A tear, just one, has left a track down the dirty cheek. “Fuck you,” the kid whispers. “Fuck Coke. Pepsi. Pepsi. Go away.”
The Room | The hotel room is average-sized, maybe twelve by fourteen feet. The head of the bed, against which I sit while reading or writing, is against the east wall of the room and a bit right of center. The bed itself is an ordinary double bed, not uncomfortable, mattress and box spring resting on a heavy wooden platform which is impossible to move (and, I suppose, to steal). It has a heavy, solid wood headboard, to which I’ve attached my reading lamp, but no footboard.
Between the headboard and the wall, in the northeast corner, is a brown-painted wooden night stand with one small drawer. In the drawer are Dudley’s I.D. and other papers, pocket calculator, pen, and flashlight. On top of the stand sits Dudley’s clock, ashtray and cigarettes, and a couple of half-burned candles for power failures. Against the north wall, between the stand and the door of the room, an armless chair with brass-colored metal frame and green plastic seat and back.
To my left as I sit against the headboard facing into the room, set into the south wall of the room, a nice-sized window perhaps four feet by five with the sill at knee-level. The window is propped open about eighteen inches from the bottom with half a metal curtain rod wedged
into the groove of the frame on either side. A more or less permanent arrangement made by Dudley, who says that the window is extremely heavy to lift due to the counterweights inside the frame being broken off. The lower pane of the window is cracked all the way across and the upper pane cracked across one corner. The cracks have been taped with masking tape, now dry and crumbling. A set of lightweight white curtains hang to the floor, and behind them a plastic window shade on a roller. Between the floor and the windowsill, at the lower right corner of the window, is an old wrought-iron radiator with the adjustment valve taken off and capped.
In the southwestern corner of the room, opposite the foot of the bed on the left, is a shallow niche containing a sink and wooden medicine cabinet with bleary mirror, above which is a light fixture with bare bulb and the only electrical outlet in the room, into which is plugged the extension cord for my reading lamp. The sink’s faucets are the kind with springs inside which turn them off when you let go of the handles. Only the cold water works. To the right of this, a tiled shower stall with wooden door, sheet tin nailed on the inside. When turned on, the shower head emits a trickle of water which alternates with alarming frequency between icy cold and blistering hot (when there is hot water at all). To the right of this another door opens into a closet about four feet by five, with shelves along one side. At right angle to the closet is the corridor door on the north wall.
Across from the hall door, on the south wall, stands a rickety wooden dresser with three of its seven knobs missing. On the dresser sits Dudley’s old black-and-white TV set, also plugged into the extension cord.
The ceiling height is about ten feet. The ceiling and walls are painted light gray and several cracks run at angles across the ceiling, spackled but not painted. The floor is covered with carpeting of a dark brown, napless indoor-outdoor fiber. There is a hardened, black circular patch between the bed and the window, probably a burn from a hot plate.
The one peculiarity which stands out in my perception of this room is a fuzzy black splotch on the wall about a foot to the right of the door frame. This discoloration is about a foot in diameter, darker at the center and fading out at the edges. After a few days of getting used to the room and its little irregularities — the walled-over outline behind the dresser, which must have once been the door to another room, the lighter patch in the paint of the northeast corner where another piece of furniture must have stood, the cracks in the windows and ceiling hastily and unprofessionally repaired (a banner across the front of the building reads “Grand Opening” and claims a complete renovation since the 1989 earthquake; Dudley says the banner has been there for six months, and it will remain for another six months until shredded by a windstorm in December) — my attention is increasingly drawn to this blotch on the wall. I measure myself against it and see that the center of the blotch is at the approximate height of the center of my head. I note that when the room door is opened inward and I stand behind the opened door, the back of my head is centered within the stain. However, when I stand with my head aligned within the blot, the doorknob of the closed door is more than a foot beyond my reach. Also, that the stain is not a one-time deal, like the bloodstain in the hall toilet. Someone with dirty, greasy hair spent a lot of time standing pressed against the wall in just this position, behind the opened door of the hotel room.
I picture myself as this person, standing behind the door. I’m holding a gun. My partner or roommate is conducting some kind of shady deal in the doorway. Whoever my partner is doing the deal with knows that someone is standing behind the door with a gun. There are no bullet holes in the walls or ceiling.
I explain this scenario to my daughter.
“You’ve started watching TV again,” Jessy says, pleased.
“Take a good look at it.” I gesture toward the blot.
Jessy studies the goddamned thing for ten minutes. She studies the door, the doorknob, the ceiling, the walls, the window. She walks to the splotch and stands with her back to the wall. From this position she studies the whole room again. “Jesus,” she finally says.
Dudley never notices the spot. He is not terribly perceptive.
Nevertheless, the spot seems to haunt the room. A Mystery Spot.
Money and a Room |If one has no money, one can’t very well expect to have a room of one’s own, can one? Maybe if one has a BIT of money one can spend it all on rent in order to have a room … but then it would be just the room, you see, and no … OK. What kind of money are we talking about here, and what kind of room? Define your terms. No? OK then, how about just money? A room of one’s own without money can only be a trap. How can one create anything within a trap that will not be born entrapped?
The animal trapped by the foot will chew off the foot to escape. What about the one who is trapped by the mind? The mind in a trap can’t create, it can only stumble around trying to find a way out. And on freeing oneself from one trap, one may find oneself in another, larger trap. Freedom is relative. The bars of the cage may become harder to define. May become impossible to define.
Journal Entry |Went to Martinez today, to the housing authority there, to try to expedite my application for subsidized housing. Another ordeal which could have just as easily been taken care of by mail.
I left the hotel at eleven a.m. and was still fifteen minutes late for my two o’clock appointment. I had enough trouble just trying to find out how to get to the place on BART and bus. People out there don’t take buses. They don’t understand that it takes an hour on the bus to get someplace that would take ten minutes in a car.
The lady at the housing authority tells me that I need to provide proof that I’m homeless.
“How do you prove that you’re homeless?”
The clerk looks up with a puzzled little smile from the pile of paperwork which is supposed to document my financial status, marital status, family status, social status, legal status, educational status, vehicular status, employment status, and the level I have reached in the criminal justice system.
I sense that I’m not going to get a helpful answer. I don’t suppose they could just take my word for it.
“I mean,” I continue, “All these years I’ve always had to prove that I lived somewhere. Rent receipts, utility bills, you know. They even come to your place and check, count your kids, the whole bit. I’ve never had to prove that I didn’t live anywhere.”
“That’s a good question,” she says, laughing a little.
“So what do other people do for proof of homelessness?” I’ll sign an affidavit. I’ll swear to HUD.
“I don’t know. We don’t have many homeless people in Contra Costa County.”
“What would you suggest, then?”
“It’s up to you to get proof. I just process paperwork. Perhaps a form from a shelter.”
“I don’t live in a shelter.”
She is beginning to show symptoms of exasperation. “Just go in and ask for the form. Surely they’ll let you have one.”
“I just need the form for the shelter,” I say to the woman at the desk at the shelter referral service.
“What form?”
“The form you give someone when you send them to the shelter.”
She gives me a funny look. “You want to go to the shelter? There’s a waiting list, you know.”
“I just want the form that says …” I am beginning to sweat all over my laboriously washed sweatshirt. “The referral form.”
“You want me to refer you to the shelter.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you homeless?”
“That’s right.”
“You told me that you are living in the Cracksmoke Hotel on San Pablo.”
“I’m getting evicted.”
“Where’s your eviction notice?”
“I forgot.”
“You’ll need to bring it in.”
“I just want the fu … the form. The form.“
“What do you want the form for?”
“I don’t want it. The Contra Costa Housing Authority does.”
“What for?”
“Proof that I’m homeless.”
“Proof of homelessness? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It isn’t my idea!”
“Look. I don’t know what your scam is, but there are people with real problems waiting …”
I get up and walk out of the office, crying and formless. Unable to handle going back to my loathsome hotel and my unspeakable room, I find myself sitting in the BART plaza on Fourteenth and Broadway at one o’clock in the morning. Lots of homeless bastards wandering around with filthy blankets wrapped around their shoulders in the shadow of the soaring new American Presidents Lines building. Obviously couldn’t do the paperwork necessary to get off the street. How could they if I, with fourteen years of college, can’t figure it out?
Copyright © 1997 by Aggie Max. Used with permission by Chronicle Books.
Walt Whitman sang of his own armpits and sweet fat. What do mothers
sing about? We sing ceaselessly of our children, of solutions
and customs and patterns and problems. We throw suggestions at each
other, with or without disclaimers, hoping to feel another’s approval.
Then we sing of ourselves and our vanities. When the conversation goes
on long enough, we ultimately sing of our appearance, refining the
discussion to the equivalent of armpits and sweet fat. Our vanities are
a matter of selection, and this is a glimpse at vanity on a small scale.
Daughter and granddaughter of beautiful, kempt women, I fall far short
of the standards they set regarding personal grooming. As an
adolescent, I played up my ill-adaptation to conventionally female ways as
a means toward self-definition; as an adult, I am a stranger to my
ancient makeup kit and ransack my closet daily to find clothes without
olive oil stains. I have chosen other ways to be vain.
A few years ago, strand by strand, my hair began to gray. At first I
was proud of them. To me they represented the trials I had struggled
through. They were the visible tokens of my common-enough journey as a
mother. My gray hairs came along with my Caesarean section scar, my
sleepless nights with newborns, my trips to the emergency room, my worry
and guilt over parenting mistakes. They came with the laugh lines at my
eyes. As I peered closer to the mirror to inspect them, I felt both
shocked that I could be old enough to have gray hairs and proud that I
had engaged life deeply enough to have earned them. Vain in its way, of
course, this particular pride was quite radical given my pedigree.
My mother, like her father before her, had gone gray so young that I
have no memory of her natural hair color. I see her leaning over the
bathtub, head upside down, surgical gloves on her hands, squirting dye
all over her scalp from the pointed beak of the plastic dispenser. As
the years fly away, the color is now black, now brown, now rusty red, now
wild orange, now back to auburn. Not for a millisecond would she have
considered going through the rest of her life with gray hair.
I grew up assuming that I would go gray by 20. But at 20 I
scorned the image of dangling myself over the bathtub, blood rushing to
my head, spreading acrid-smelling goop through my hair. Having read
Dorothy Dinnerstein, I respected the crone, tuned in to the wise woman,
honored the spinster and resented the patriarchal hegemony that
insisted on the value of youth and external beauty over that of the
soul. Naturally, the spinsters I had in mind all had gray hair.
For a few years I admired my gray hairs. Then, suddenly, the day before
a departure for summer vacation, I had my hair colored. As my son bopped
around the salon, the colorist spackled henna paste through my hair.
Under the heat lamp I nursed my child. Changing back to my clothes in
the dressing room, I felt giddy. The strands that had been gray now
winked a deep coppery red. The rest of my hair, usually brown, was ad
copy perfect: shiny, with a healthy, reddish, glow. To my eye, my hair
was beautiful, a gift to myself. As long as the red lasted (it washed
out in weeks), I carried my head like a treasure.
Recently I had my hair reddened again, and the uplift was the same.
Where does this satisfaction come from? I say that I like the way it
looks and leave it at that. Many women will say that masking their gray
brings their appearance in concert with their inner sense of self. Their
gray hair, they say, does not honestly represent the person they feel
they are. They want their feelings and their looks to match. But I
wonder about this inability to allow for divergencies between body and
soul. How odd it is to say that we feel younger than our hair! As if our
hair was not an integral part of us, and we have to show it who’s boss
lest it betray us to the world! Do we actually feel younger when our
hair looks unaging? “When you look good, you feel good,” say some. “When
you feel good, you look good,” say others. Vanity is easy to spot, even
easier to ridicule, but difficult to explain.
There are of course women who skip the artifice. I know one woman with
a youthful, wrinkle-free face, bright brown eyes and a slim body made
lissome with yoga. She favors vivid red lipstick and layered clothing
patterned by silk screen and batik. What makes her deliberately
assembled appearance remarkable is her hair: white, wiry waves kink to
her shoulders. She wears it loose, or in a ponytail, or even in two
thin girlish braids beside her ears. Unfairly enough, this choice of
hers rankles me and many others who know her; we all fantasize about
dyeing her hair. She would look so much better, we murmur, if only her
hair were black, or strawberry blond, or platinum.
I know another woman, past 40, who wears her hair down to her waist.
Once it was brown; now it is streaked throughout with stiff gray
strands, and bands of gray cascade from her part, framing her face in
streaky steel. She has a beautiful face with pale blue eyes and wears
no makeup. Her suburban friends are advising her to dye her hair; her
urban circle says leave it alone. She says she knows she would look
better and younger, but declares that a new look “would not be me.”
Indeed, there is something seemly and aesthetically pleasing about the
way her long, long hair makes its gradual way to total gray.
Acts of self-adornment, or the act of refusing to adorn, though
privately motivated, are public statements; the mirror speaks to us as
alter ego and as audience, both. But what is the source of our personal
vanity? Our individual histories, of course, and the tastes and
preferences we have cultivated because of those histories. Vanity is
certainly overdetermined, and perhaps universal.
Whichever way the impulse carries us, I like to believe that being
human and able to make choices about what we project to the world, we
all draw from a common, Whitmanesque well of vanity — that what lures me
to reddish hair is what lures you to staying gray, and you to lipstick and
nail
polish, and you to a perfectly wound scarf, and you to unshaved legs,
and you to eyebrows shaped by hot wax, and you to pierced eyebrows, and
you to bleached teeth …
In 1970 I was twenty-five years old, exactly half the age I am now. I had no husband, no job, no marketable skills or social graces, little formal education, no money, and no place to live. I had two small second-generation welfare brats, ages two and four. Fortunately, I had a friend named Adeline, who helped me set up house in Berkeley, which was a good place for small children and refugees from New York City.
When the children were a few years older and enrolled full-time in school, I decided to enroll myself and attempt to secure that prize at the end of the rainbow: a high school diploma. Not that I hadn’t figured out along with most of my male counterparts including the ex-father of the children that you can’t support a family on a minimum-wage job, but I had hope: that insidious poison which encourages one to Do The Best You Can With What You Have And Surely Something Good Will Happen Eventually Maybe.
And maybe eventually something good would happen; maybe by the time the children needed separate rooms you would have achieved the means to provide them. Maybe by the time they’re ready for college you’ll be able to send them.
But there are all these built-in cutoff points which They’ve provided to tip the scales against you every time you try to take a step toward that magical point of balance where everything works. And you know they’re there, and you may even know where they are, but you think that by the time you reach that point (the point where the children need bus fare and lunch money every day and have to buy their own schoolbooks, for instance) you will have figured out how to provide the extras. And then They cut you off.
They will pay to send you to vocational training, but They will not pay for child care while you go. They will help you find a job, but the job will neither provide nor pay enough for you to provide child care. And then the “taxpayers” vote in an initiative which assures that persons with incomes as low as yours will never be able to afford decent housing in California. Which was supposed to encourage landlords to lower the rent. My landlord doubled the rent. We went on to live in basements, attics, and finally a junked trailer in someone’s backyard.
And while you’re trying to deal with this the children get older. They need more stuff. They’re supposed to go to high school. They get part-time jobs that they hate where the paycheck is deducted from the welfare check. They want nice clothes and sports equipment and stereos. Cars. Their own phones. They’re ashamed to have their friends visit. The list of things you can’t provide for them gets longer. You can’t pay the bills. The rent goes up and up. They hate you. You have failed in life. You are a failure as a parent and a human being. You can’t figure out how to go on. You might as well die. And then They cut you off.
But your life is not a failure, you must remind yourself. It is merely the logical extension of having been born poor.
- – - – - – - – - -
There are advantages, at times, to not being a Real Person. You may have to spend a lot of time looking for them and figuring out how to use them, but they’re there. Sometimes you can walk through walls, fit into places where Real People can’t fit, go places where Real People don’t believe you can go. Sometimes you can fly. But you have to do a lot of crawling first, a lot.
I’d been working on my application to a four-year college. A Real College. If I made it I’d be the first in my immediate family. It’s harder that way, having no one who has gone before to help you find the way.
My older child had chosen to go to a community college in another city. He worked weekends, lived with me, and needed eight dollars a day just for bus fare. My younger child, Jessy in this story, was in the middle of her High School Crisis. We’d moved from her former school district, and the former school wouldn’t allow her to continue there. She dropped out. I dragged her to the new school she’d been assigned to.
A bleak, dirty brick building rising in the middle of a vast trash-covered concrete yard, surrounded by razor wire.
“I’m not going,” she said after one look.
“I guess not,” I agreed.
- – - – - – - – - -
The next step was, of course, a cutoff. Welfare finds out that you’re in the midst of a college application, already struggling to send one kid to college, having a mid-teen educational running battle with the other kid, and what do they do. Cut off your check, what else?
- – - – - – - – - -
It goes something like this: “We have received information indicating that your minor child Blahblah is no longer attending school and blahblahblah, informing you that in order for you to continue to receive your grant this child must attend daily meetings of the Work Help Incentive Program (WHIP) and actively participate in finding employment within three (3) weeks so that we may discontinue your grant and blahblah.”
These “workfare” programs do not find you a job. They do not train you for one. They give you “counselling” and a list of minimum-wage jobs you can apply for. Mainly, you get to sit around in a large plastic waiting room full of screaming brats all day, same scenario as any other welfare-inspired enterprise. If you don’t go, they kick your family off welfare. If you do go and don’t get a job, your family gets the boot. If you attend and you do find work, same thing. The only function I could attribute to this particular program was to get families kicked off welfare. The office was not even accessible to public transportation, except after a long walk through a bad neighborhood.
“I’m not going,” said Jessy.
“I guess not,” I agreed.
Fortunately, at about this same time, my daughter got bitten by a rat.
- – - – - – - – - -
The family’s assortment of pets included, at this time, several snakes, a tarantula, some chameleons, goldfish, guinea pigs, and two big rats named Jack Mack and Rad Boy. Jessy had let the rats out for exercise one day and for some unknown reason they decided to stage a fight to the death. While she was breaking this up, Jack Mack bit Jessy right through the knuckle of her right hand.
I took her to Childrens’ Hospital, where she was admitted for tendon damage and possible infection, the hand wrapped in a huge ball of gauze and suspended from an overhead fixture.
“Very Dr. Seuss,” she remarked, flying on drugs, obviously referring to the apparatus.
- – - – - – - – - -
Thus immobilized, Jessy missed her day at WHIP and I received notice that my welfare grant was to be terminated. However, we could if we wished schedule a “fair hearing,” which I requested immediately. It was scheduled to take place in three weeks at Welfare HQ.
Due to fear, I had never requested a “hearing” before. I spent the three weeks quaking with terror. Jessy came with me to the meeting, her long-healed hand heavily bandaged and helplessly suspended in a sling.
The hearings are held in a small plastic office. I had expected a looming courtroom presided over by a Mad Queen.
They provide you with a sort of lawyer, which They call a client advocate, to defend your “rights.”
The Defense advocate assigned to me is young, skinny, serious and Jewish. The Prosecutor is old, skinny, severe, and WASPy.
PROSECUTOR: “We have a report from Mrs. So-and-so from the Work Help Incentive Program, which states that your daughter, Jessica, failed to report to her scheduled appointment at the Work Incentive Bureau and this therefore renders yourself ineligible to receive further aid from the County of Alameda, State of California, United States of America, City of Oakland, for your daughter Jessica Morris, age fifteen, who is judged to be uncooperative with the rules of said County, State, and etc., and is therefore a burden on the System, undeserving of the support of said County and State and Country, and the taxpayers of this Country, and we therefore have terminated your AFDC check, and rightly so.”
THE DEFENSE (rummaging through a huge stack of papers — my AFDC file): “Mrs. Ashby, it is your right to present an objection to the County’s allegations … uh … if you have an excuse, let’s hear it.”
ME (terrified and trembling): “Uh … I called Mrs. So-and-so at the WHIP? Excuse me … the Work Incentive? Program? Office?” (Involuntarily, I start crying) “And I told her that Jessy couldn’t come to the Program that day … because she was in the hospital? I did call! I called them!”
THE DEFENSE (rummaging): “Yes, there seems to have been a note made of that.” Vibrating with tension or energy or hysteria, maybe all three, she thrusts a barely legible copy of a form on pink onionskin paper at The Prosecutor.
Prosecutor squints at the form, frowning. “Yes, I see. But this” (waving the form at The Defense) “Is not proof that the Daughter–” Jessy’s head snaps up; she looks around at the participants in this farce (The Daughter?? Are they referring to Me???) “That The Daughter was actually hospitalized … this –” (waving form) “only states that a phone call was received by Mrs. So-and-so at the WHIP — excuse me — the Work Help Incentive Program Office on this date …”
I rummage through my own stack of papers and pull out the form I signed when Jessy was released from the hospital. I hand it to The Prosecutor.
PROSECUTOR: “Hmmmm …” She focuses an evil eye on Jessy, who has not said a word. Who has been keeping her right arm in the sling, inert, the sling which she hasn’t worn since she was discharged from the hospital two weeks before. Who, from time to time, evinces a tiny grimace of pain. Who knows perfectly well that the family can’t survive without this AFDC check, negligible as it is, and that without the AFDC coverage she will have no access to medical care, and the rent will not get paid, and bus fare will not be available, and that she is too young to get a legitimate job and too uneducated to get a good job and Mom is already trying to support a houseful of people (including Dudley who has been laid off for a year) who are all liable to wind up homeless in the street. Yet, she feels that she must speak honestly and truthfully.
“Well,” Jessy begins, cheerfully, “What happened was that I got in the hospital because I got bit by this rat. I didn’t mean to get bit, it just happened. And it hurt a lot, and it swelled up and made me sick. There was this rat, right?”
The Prosecutor and The Defense are both staring at Jessy, as if hypnotized.
JESSY (brightly): “This rat bit me right on the hand. On the right hand, and I’m right handed, so it was a real bummer. So I couldn’t use my hand and it was all red and swollen up. This rat bit me right on the knuckle, and the doctor said that the fluid from the tendon was leaking out, because the rat bit right through the tendon. It was real ugly, and it hurt a lot. The rat didn’t mean to do it, but he was fighting with this other rat, and I was trying to stop them from fighting. Right? The other rat’s name was Rad Boy. It wasn’t his fault, I mean, he didn’t start the fight. Who started it was Jack Mack. The rat, I mean. Jack Mack bit me. I knew he didn’t really mean to. He was trying to bite Rad Boy. He bit me in the hand, because he thought my hand was Rad Boy, my right hand, right, and they were fighting. I don’t know why they were fighting. But they were having this terrible fight, right? And I thought they were really gonna hurt each other. So I’m in the Emergency Room, and this doctor was sticking this needle in my arm. Right in my bloodstream! So I passed out. I just got real dizzy and thirsty, because the doctor was sticking this needle in my bloodstream. But she was a real nice doctor. She said she didn’t mean to hurt me, but it was for my own good. So then I woke up, in the Emergency Room, and the doctor asked me What Happened? So I said that a rat bit me. But he didn’t mean to. So they put all these blankets on me. And they asked Are You In Pain? And I said What Do You Think??? I got bit by a rat! And they said they were gonna put all this medicine in my arm. And I was supposed to go to the WHIP — sorry — the Work Intensive thing? But I was in the hospital with needles …”
“Your AFDC grant will not be discontinued!” states The Prosecutor, loudly. “This hearing is concluded. You may go now.”
JESSY: “So there were all these needles in my arm. And they put this big, big bandage on, and they hung my arm from this stick over the bed, up in the air. But then I couldn’t eat, like, I couldn’t hold the fork with my left hand. Because I’m right-handed. Right? And I couldn’t call the office with my left hand. I mean, I couldn’t do anything because I’m right-handed. And my mom came and washed my hair for me. I mean, I couldn’t even wash my hair!! I really looked terrible …”
I take Jessy’s elbow and steer her out of the office. As we leave the building, Jessy says “Hey, I did good, huh, Mom.”
“You were great,” I tell my daughter “Great!”
Sometimes you can walk on water.
Aggie Max grew up on welfare, ran away from home at the age of 16, had her first child at 21 and was a welfare mother and bag lady before she collected her experiences in a memoir, “The Last Resort: Scenes From a Transient Hotel.” In this darkly humorous and painfully honest collection of essays, Max is as forthcoming about her own shortcomings as she is critical of the crippling machinery of public “assistance” in the United States. In the first of three tales from her book, Max, who writes under a pseudonym, recalls how a rat bite saved the family income. The other stories will appear in “Salon” in coming weeks.
If you’re born into welfare, says Max, it is not just financial status or education but the whole culture of poverty that makes it nearly impossible to escape to a better life. While the “haves” have a standard set of milestones on the way to adulthood — first date, first kiss, first car, first job, first credit card — the “have nots” have their own coming-of-age rituals: “First cigarette, first drink, first joint, first ‘sexual encounter,’ first crime, first arrest, first shot (first intravenous and first subcutaneous ‘skin-pop’ usually count as separate milestones), and by the time you hit the Big One, your First Welfare Check, you’re probably in the game forever.”
Max was born in 1945 into what she calls “one of the first families in America to go on welfare.” With her parents, a teacher and journalist who were “notorious” communists during the McCarthy era, she lived a nomadic life, bouncing between low-income projects in Manhattan. “We moved around 10 times within the same 10 blocks,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s what poor people do. You don’t have a car, you just have maybe a baby carriage, and you put all of your crap in there and you move down a block.”
Though taught to read by her mother before she started kindergarten, Max dropped out of high school and ran away from home as a teenager. She ended up in housing projects, “derelict” hotels and homeless in the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Throughout her chaotic life, she found the public library a sanctuary and writing one of the few links to sanity.
While raising two children on welfare and working at “many insignificant jobs too numerous and stupid to mention,” Max returned to school, received her high school diploma at the age of 30 and then, after 10 years of attending various community colleges, she enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
“One of the reasons I went to Mills was that they had housing and here I was, with two teenagers, being evicted again,” she laughs.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English, Max was
awarded a scholarship to the prestigious master’s program in creative writing at Mills, where she began a journal about her life. She was forced to drop out two credits short of receiving her master’s degree when she was hospitalized for pneumonia.
With no marketable skills and again on the verge of eviction from student housing, Max was back at ground zero, and she resumed life in transient hotels while she continued to write. Her work drew notice from an English professor at Mills, who took it to Chronicle Books. Chronicle published “Last Resort” in May.
Though Max’s book is filled with rage and frustration, in person she is quiet and easygoing, with a wry and self-deprecating sense of humor. She now lives in an apartment in Berkeley that is filled with the paintings she did as an undergraduate art major. Max no longer receives welfare but is on disability for chronic asthma. Her son is a filmmaker and her daughter (whom she describes as the “only person in my family who actually likes people”) is trained as an emergency medical technician and has worked for the Red Cross as a CPR instructor. Max recently completed work on her parents’ memoirs, which will be published later this year. Her mother, now 88, has been singing for 60 years with Pete Seeger under the stage name Sis Cunningham.
As someone who has finally managed, in her 50s, to escape poverty, Max says she is happy — tentatively. “I always feel things could change cataclysmically overnight,” she says. “I guess I’ll never escape that.”
Second to acting, Mother loved cleaning, which is not to say she loved even that above me. I’m sure she loved me more than cleaning, but what made her happiest was combining the two. We cleaned together.
“Never leave a room empty-handed,” she would often say to me, meaning that there’s always a glass in the living room that needs to be taken to the kitchen sink, a magazine in the bedroom that has to be returned to the living room, and so on. She taught me how to be orderly and how to clean house efficiently.
I excelled at doing “la vaisselle,” as we referred to it, always using the French word. (In English there is no single word, you have to combine two: “dish-washing.”) Unfortunately, this skill my mother passed on to me is not of great use today, because most people have a dishwashing machine. But let me write about it anyway, because she perfected la vaisselle to a science.
Take a party, for example. It’s over, everybody’s leaving. First thing you do is eliminate everything that smells: ashtrays, wine bottles, food. If it smells bad, you aren’t going to stay around long enough to do the job, so create an environment you can survive in. Plan to do the glasses last, when everything else is clean. You need lots of big surfaces to let them dry, because you don’t dry glasses with the dish towel. Glasses will never look as good as when they’re rinsed in the hottest water and left upside down to dry — the hot water evaporates quickly, leaving them spotless. Wash the pots and pans first; better yet, wash them immediately after cooking, not after the party. Do the rest of la vaisselle in this order: plates first, silver second, serving plates and bowls last. You have to have two sinks or at least a sink and a plastic bucket. You clean and rinse dishes in separate containers. Don’t try to do it all at once, the way many people do. (That really upset my mother — she thought it was one of those ridiculous mistakes that are perpetuated for no reason, the most despicable kind of mistake because it’s stupid.) Use a brush, not a sponge, to wash with — the kind with a straight handle and a round tip is best. I still get mine in Sweden, where my mother bought hers. They are just perfect, you can do the glasses with one stroke.
When my stepfather, Lars, bought the Thibtre de Montparnasse in Paris, my mother rushed in to clean it. “That poor house-keeper,” she told me, referring to the lady who generally did that job, “she had to work with the dirtiest rag and the most plucked-out broom. How can she do a good job? I told Lars, ‘Make sure she has what she needs. You cannot clean with an unclean rag or sponge; that just lets you spread dirt around — push it a little bit here, a little bit there. It doesn’t help eliminate it.’”
I am still on the lookout today for the best sponges, best vacuum cleaner, best rags. When I come to New York, where I live, from Italy, I always pack one of those special wicker things that beats the dust out.
When the weather is good, I beat my carpets and pillows out the window. You should see how much dust comes out! The vacuum can’t do it, it just cleans superficially. You can get great satisfaction at seeing all that dirt fly out.
I love cleaning. For both Mother and me, cleaning and organizing are soothing, though because it feels good we may do too much of it. It can get obsessive, and we have to watch out for that. My mother even had to go to a doctor — she couldn’t stop cleaning, and everything got a little out of hand. The doctor diagnosed that she was allergic to dust, which is why she felt so strongly about getting rid of it, but I know that wasn’t it. She was seeking that “high” that cleaning gives. I know what it feels like; I’m always on the lookout for dust in secret places where I haven’t looked before to see if any has landed there. If I see it, I can’t stop thinking about it until I get rid of it. Dust brings out the hunting instinct in me, and I know I got that from Mamma.
