Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(24)

Amy was the one who’d make you hot tea if you were working sick. And we were always working sick. No health insurance. No sick days. We diagnosed ourselves with “bar flu,” threw up in trash cans, napped in the coat closet, and hit another line of coke to make it through the shift. But Amy always had off-brand Theraflu. She was the one who always had a tampon and ibuprofen stashed under her bar. The one who’d listen to my girlfriend drama and usually manage to not tell me, “Jesus, just fucking break up with her already.” Anytime I was ready to lose my shit, Amy would happily sneak me a shot of Grandma, Grand Marnier. Tastes like sucking on a rotten orange, but it does the job. Without realizing it or putting a word to it, I started relating to her like she was a big sister. Someone I could tell my problems to, someone to call me on my shit, someone who looked out for me.

   Every so often, Amy would stuff the trunk of her piece-of-shit Toyota with day-old bread from the bakery near her apartment to pass out to the hungry, broke bouncers who were paid like family, next to nothing. I mean, who needs to pay family?

I’d only been working there a couple weeks the first time she did it. We always left as a group, bar staff being prime targets for mugging. She told everyone to meet out by her car. The other bouncers were happily grabbing bags of bread and stuffing them in their backpacks. I just stood there with my hands deep in my pockets.

The way people look at you when you’re poor, the shame they need you to feel, it changes you, makes it hard to accept anything that feels like a handout. We fetishize poverty as though it makes you a better person. The truth is, all it does is make you mean. The constant stress of it. The never-ending fucking shame of it. It makes you angry and hateful. You’re not jealous of those who have more. You’re just exhausted by the fucking humiliation they will not hesitate to throw at you. There’s a world of opportunity you’ll never reach. College. Jobs. A network of contacts. There’s no loan from Mom and Dad for a down payment. People say “broke” when they have to tap savings, run up a credit card. There’s an entire society of people who don’t have checking accounts. The shame of it means the only people you can risk empathizing with are those who’ve been there, who won’t humiliate you.

   Once you’ve been hungry, the sort of hungry that feels like your body devouring itself as you fall asleep, you’re never really comfortable around people who haven’t felt the same gnawing under their rib cage. I hadn’t been comfortable around people in a long time. And there’s always someone who will say, “I don’t eat leftovers. I’m not homeless.”

I don’t think most Americans realize how fucking insane it is to the rest of us how much food is wasted here. We don’t even finish a fucking apple, or you don’t. I do if no one’s looking. Never mind the portion sizes at restaurants that make it impossible to finish a meal, laws are written to make damn sure no one else can eat it either. The food wasted at office parties and company meetings hurts. It hurts like the hole in my belly I can still feel like a phantom limb. We toss food in dumpsters and mock those desperate enough to dive for it. Restaurants pour bleach on the garbage bags to make sure their castoffs don’t attract the hungry.

I never got past survival mode with food. When you live on what’s pulled from grocery store dumpsters, you never feel secure unless you have enough food to get you through a week. But I learned pretty fast that finishing an apple or eating bread crusts or canned sardines or chopping the rotten part off a vegetable or eating green peppers or cutting mold off cheese or sniffing meat to check if it’s spoiled or not being able to name a food I won’t eat is considered weird.

   So my first instinct upon seeing a trunkful of expired bread was to shrug and look away rather than risk the humiliation of looking hungry.

My new coworkers were unconcerned with looking hungry. They already knew they were among their kind. They grabbed loaves and traded bagels for English muffins and didn’t give a shit that everyone knew they were poor.

One of them was a guy I’ll call Kyle because there are always Kyles, so many Kyles. Kyle was covered in tattoos of varying quality on skin like mayonnaise left on the counter too long. He told me once that after his dad went to prison, the county sheriff used to call his mom if he found a fresh deer on the road. They’d have meat for weeks.

He told me that random detail one night as we walked home together. I was renting a room at the time from an old Turkish lady who wanted me to marry her son for a green card. I could’ve used the money, but I didn’t think INS would’ve bought that Jesus healed the gay in me so I could fall in love with a five-foot-four Turkish dude who didn’t speak English.

We were eating some of Amy’s bagels as we walked up Connecticut, and Kyle’s bagel bag ripped open, bagels rolling down the fucking street, inevitably landing in puddles. He punched a bicycle that was strung off a balcony and nearly broke his hand. Then he just fucking started crying. And he told me about road kill. We split my sack of bagels. Neither of us ever mentioned it again.

   That first time I hesitated in front of Amy’s trunk, it was Kyle who said, “Wait. You get any?”

I said, “It’s okay,” because I’m an idiot.

He said, “It’s still good.” Like he was warming up to explain expiration dates to the dipshit rich kid. I wanted to tell him, “Oh, honey. I know all about expiration dates.” Instead I took the sack of bagels he held out and nearly fucking cried. He looked at the two loaves he had left and said, “Sorry if you don’t like raisins.” One of the others said he didn’t mind raisins so much. I could have his pumpernickel. And I just fucking started laughing and hugged my sack of bagels to my chest. You don’t survive the Family with an aversion to raisins. I was sure they’d think I was nuts. And maybe they did. But they weren’t going to judge.