r10tp00f - Tumblr blog

r10tp00f · 4 years

Text

Shame

You don’t need me to tell you how ashamed of myself I am. On the other hand, I’ve had occasion to wonder many times with many people in my life if the extent of my shame is something anyone besides Wendy, my therapist, has appreciated or understood. My shame about class and money is somewhere in, like, my top ten sources of shame? After fat shame and ugly shame and failure shame and crazy shame, so it’s fifth, maybe.

I think the first time I felt shame about money I was eight. Third grade. The trailer park we lived in, which was called McGarrity’s, for some reason never explained to me, was owned by a man named Frank Conger, who was the music teacher and chorus director at Soddy Elementary, where I went to school. The trailer itself we owned outright, because my mother and father, in what seems like some universe other than the one I inhabited with them, had bought it shortly after I was born, when they moved with infant-me from Graysville to Soddy. My father had always been a hardworking and very, even admirably high-functioning alcoholic, at least since my mother knew him; and my mother, once upon a time, wasn’t an alcoholic at all.

When I was born in 1982, my father worked at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Soddy-Daisy (doing what I’m not sure, some sort of labor in the course of which he was up on a telephone pole and was struck by lightning, sometime before I was old enough to understand or remember). My mother worked at DeLong, a sewing factory in Dayton. They both had new 1980 Ford Mustangs (my mother’s was maroon with maroon plastic and red carpet interiors and a sort of maroon striped upholstery, as I very hazily and imagistically recall). We lived, the three of us, in a double-wide trailer in Graysville, mere miles from my mother’s sisters, Aunt Linda and Aunt Suzy, who lived in Dayton, and even fewer mere miles from the tiny trailer my mother’s mother, Mamaw Betty, and her mother, Mamaw Pat, lived in a few streets over from us in Graysville, too. I think the settlement money my father got from Sequoyah as a result of the lightning strike accident was how they purchased the trailer and the Mustangs, but I wouldn’t swear to it. My earliest memories are not from Graysville, but after we had moved to Soddy. I remember playing in bed with my mother at night, under a blue comforter with sort-of needlepoint, six-pointed stars, my mother and father lying side by side, the streetlight coming in from the window, the room otherwise dark, and my mother balancing me on her knees and raised hands, our fingers laced together. I couldn’t have been older than two. I remember sitting in a round plastic laundry basket in the middle of the living room floor while my mother folded the clean clothes on the couch and we watched TV. Probably her stories, Loving or All My Children. Later, I remember my sister being an infant (which would make me three) sitting on our loveseat in the living room in the dark of pre-dawn morning, Cassie beside me, both of us bundled up for winter, while my mother went outside to warm up her Mustang to drive Cassie and me to our Aunt June’s house, where we stayed while Momma worked. I remember one such morning in particular because the Mustang’s engine caught fire while my mother was warming it up and she raced in to call the fire department. I’m not sure what became of the Mustang, other than it was gone after that.

And of course my parents divorced when I was four and Cassie one and the three of us stayed in the trailer we owned after Daddy moved back home to live with his mother, my Mamaw Ruby. And when I was eight, after we had been living with my mother’s boyfriend for two years already and my mother’s descent into alcoholism and addiction with him was total, we had no phone and regularly went months without electricity and hot water. He had already broken one of the kitchen windows trying to get in after my mother had locked him out after he hit her once (they taped the window up with packing tape and duct tape and and cardboard, after). The hot water tank had busted and soaked through the carpet and underflooring in their bedroom, leaving a hole straight through to the ground a few feet below the trailer floor that they tried to cover with the board on which my mother’s talented friend Brenda had drawn and painted for me a Rainbow Brite mural for my birthday; it had hung on the wall over the toybox in Cassie’s and my room before they used it to try and cover the hole in their bedroom floor because it was winter and the bitter cold winter air coming through the hole was making it impossible for our one kerosene space heater to warm the trailer, as much as it ever did or could). We couldn’t pay any bill with any regularity, by then. And though the trailer was ours, or my mother’s, I suppose, the plot in the trailer park it was parked on wasn’t ours (I think the plot rental was maybe $80 a month, if my memory serves), and we owed Mr. Conger money as a result. One day in third grade, as we were leaving music class, he called for me to stay behind while the rest of the class went back to our classroom, and he asked me “When is your mother going to pay me the money she owes me?” When I said I didn’t know, he told me “Tell her I want my money.”

I think that was the first time I was ashamed about money.

I had many such occasions to come. Early in my therapeutic relationship with Wendy, 2012 or 2013 or maybe a bit later, in 2015, when I was talking about the shame I had about money, she pointed out that I had never had any opportunity to learn how to handle money responsibly or well, that I never had that behavior modeled for me by any adult who then taught me how to do it on my own. Every year between 2010 and 2014 I earned more money in a year than my mother ever had. Between 2010 and 2016 I worked a minimum of two jobs at any given time (at one point in 2012, I think it was, I worked four, teaching simultaneously at UB and D’youville, writing copy for a TA colleague’s husband’s stem cell research site, and scoring AP English Language exams—I think I earned about $29,000 that year, total? The most I’ve ever earned by far, and more than my mother ever has or will.)

I spent money freely during that time. I’m not sure what else I could reasonably have been expected to do, given my shortcomings and weaknesses and background. I was earning money and didn’t think I’d ever be in a position where I couldn’t earn money again. Even if I never earn more than this, I thought, I’ll earn at least this, and that’s plenty. So I spent what I earned. Clothes, shoes, music, concerts, books—many, many books. And gifts. I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on gifts and clothes for my nephew Tyler and my niece Zoey and my best friend Kate’s girls Sofi and Minah, and trips to see them all twice a year, going first to Tennessee then to Houston once every summer and once every winter. A handful of trips from Buffalo to Toronto to see Tori or Nigella or go to academic conferences. A couple of times for a long weekend, just for fun. A two-day trip to Boston once, partially subsidized by the UB English department, the rest out of pocket, to present at NEMLA, the second largest and most prestigious conference in the humanities. There was the trip to London, aided partially by a student loan, to see Tori introduce the fabulously, heart-achingly beautiful musical she had written, The Light Princess. (I’m ashamed of damn near every dime I ever spent on anything in my life that wasn’t food or rent or utilities, but I’m not ashamed of the London trip to see Tori or any of my three trips to Toronto to see Tori, either; and if The Light Princess ever plays on Broadway, I won’t be ashamed to sell whatever I’ve got to pay Broadway-musical money to see it there, too; I wouldn’t be alive if not for Tori.) I spent money on a couple of trips to New York City to see Pat and Jana, too, once when I was there with them to see the McQueen show at the Met(ropolitan Museum of Art) and once to see Nico Muhly’s Two Boys at the Met(ropolitan Opera). We’d have gone to see Silence! the Musical (the musical parody of The Silence of the Lambs) off-Broadway, too, if Pat wasn’t such a fucking snob. (He apologized the next year, after he had read notices making clear the show was a tongue-in-cheek exercise of campy, bad-taste parody, as I had tried to explain to him, instead of the earnest musical of accidental bad taste he assumed I was recommending. He couldn’t imagine a musical of any kind being in good taste. Such a snob.

For someone who said he found me so fascinating and stimulating, he sure thought I was stupid. In part because he, having been raised in doorman-high rise Manhattan by his advertising executive father and downtown LA by his dilettante artist mother; having gone to Yale, his father’s alma mater, for undergrad; having taken the train from Penn Station to spend weekends at their summer house in Connecticut; thought I was some sort of amusing, borne-of-poverty hillbilly savant who, were I not born and raised so unfortunately poor and backwards, might have otherwise been an actual genius and not the forlornly downtrodden, unschooled, uncouth genius of otherwise unrealized potential he thought I was. It was not an accident that the painting he did, inspired, he said, by me and my work, was based on the linguistic connections between Dustin and dustbin—you know, what Brits call a garbage can. He used the word “receptacle,” as I recall, when he showed it to me in progress in his Brooklyn studio, and not just because I was an admitted and committed cumdump. I was so blinded at the time by his perverse fascination with me it didn’t even occur to me to say, “So what I represent to you and what, in this painting, my name represents of me to viewers, is semiotic varieties of garbage, Pat?” I’m not offended he was calling me garbage, I’m not even saying he’s wrong, but he might have considered the possibility I’d understand that’s what he was saying in the painting even as he avoided saying it to my face. But I digress.)

Or do I? Maybe not. Pat always vehemently insisted neither he nor his family were rich. His father regularly dined at the alumni-only Yale Club in Manhattan and they lived in a downtown New York Apartment with not only room for a grand piano but the actual grand piano itself (despite the fact no one in the family plays piano); its own private, lushly decorated elevator vestibule (for their actual apartment alone, not all the apartments in the building as a whole); a private, smaller-apartment-sized storage area on a lower floor; and an unobstructed view of the U.N. building mere blocks away. But Pat’s family weren’t wealthy. No. Maybe his grandfather had been wealthy, Pat allowed, but by the time he died and left Pat only a small trust fund—a pittance, really!—the rest of the McElnea’s weren’t wealthy. Maybe if I wasn’t so poor I could have seen that, I suppose. I could have had enough money to know what real money was and know Pat didn’t have real money, as he insisted.

I didn’t work all that hard to convince Pat of his privilege. I didn’t make a habit of parading the more ignominious and painful details of my itinerant, hotel room to hotel room, flophouse to flophouse, roaches-crawling-on-me-while-I-slept-on-the-Smith’s-floor-with-my-mother, ages eight-to-fourteen homeless childhood before Pat for his exotic delectation. I rolled my eyes a lot, and wondered what the hell I was doing sleeping in the guest room of a tastefully appointed Manhattan apartment while who knows what conversation was going on about me and my un-orthodonture-corrected teeth in the parlor as they entertained a few of his father and stepmother’s hoity-toity friends.

But I knew what Pat didn’t know about his family’s wealth and thus, what Pat wouldn’t ever and possibly couldn’t ever know or understand about me. And eventually I felt like too much a freakish token in his almost comically snooty artist’s salon to subject myself to it anymore, and had to lose his and Jana’s friendship the way I had (for different reasons) lost Sara’s and Trent’s and Stefan’s and Elizabeth’s and would come to lose Kate’s. Because, in their various ways, I understood them better than they understood me.

Not because I’m such sensitive, intelligent hot stuff. It’s not a question of skill or talent or greater intellectual capacity. I’m not smarter or kinder or more talented, none of those things are true; they all were and are more capable than I am in what feel like countless ways. It’s a question of learned consciousness.

I won’t go on about it, because I know my academic bullshit is tiresome to normal people, but the concept, from W.E.B. DuBois, is called double consciousness. He coined the phrase regarding race, but it applies to any social or cultural abjection. Whether black people like it or not, their place in the world means they have to know far more about white people than white people can or will ever know about them. It’s a white world, they only live in it. So black people are able to understand the existence of white people and are conscious of that, just as they are conscious of the fact the reverse is not true. Black people understand what it is to be black and to be white. Double consciousness. It’s true of queers and straights, women/femmes and men—and the impoverished and everyone else. It’s not the result of a character flaw or malice on the part of every white person (or straight person, or man, or securely middle class or wealthy person); it’s a lived reality enforced by social structures and the way they prop up self-protecting, replicating circuits of power.

If you’ve never been homeless, you don’t know what it’s like, and no one who has been homeless can adequately explain it to you. I understand what it would be like to be financially secure in the middle class because the world presents that reality to us more than any other, so everyone in our culture knows what that would be like. But no person who has never been so poor they were homeless knows what that’s like. It’s not a personal failing, only the way the world works.

When I was little, six or seven, Cassie three or four, before we had yet become homeless but when we were well on our way, we often had no food, despite the fact we were on food stamps. My mother and the man we lived with would take a portion of our food stamps and illegally sell them to mom-and-pop convenience store owners for cents on the dollar, in order to get cash to buy beer and drugs. So we never had enough food to make it through the month. I remember being off school during the summer, and Momma taking Cassie and me to the grocery store with her when we didn’t have any food or food stamps left. She would take us to the deli counter, and she’d get us styrofoam to-go containers, the sort with compartments, with mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, one bread roll, and a piece of fried chicken. She’d get the woman at the counter to put a PAID sticker on it, despite the fact she hadn’t paid (I don’t know how, my best guess is she offered to pay cash, at a later date, that the counter lady could pocket for herself), and we’d walk out of the store carrying them, because who is going to stop a six year old and a three year old and say “Hey, did you actually pay for that food?”

I don’t know how to tell you how that feels. Standing there ashamed, barefoot on the cold grocery store tile, knowing your mother is maybe begging, certainly stealing food because you don’t have any food left at home, and that if you tell anyone, they’ll take you away, and you don’t know if they’ll ever let you see your mother again. I had seen a made-for-TV movie with Sarah Jessica Parker playing a young, mentally ill, neglectful mother of four small children (as I recall). There was a scene where the oldest child, a girl my age at the time, fills an empty baby bottle with tap water and gives it to her little brother to stop him crying. She finds an open bag of potato chips and squeezes some water from the baby bottle onto a chip to soften it so he can eat it and won’t choke. She does it because there is no food and her mother is nowhere to be found. They are alone. Later in the movie, children’s services take them away from their mother and make plans to place the siblings in separate foster homes because no one will take them all together. They’re saved from being separated by a childless couple who own a farm, but they never get to go back to their mother. I remembered that movie. Watching it had made my stomach hurt in a way I hadn’t quite felt before, it made me cry, and I didn’t know why. But it taught me things. I knew if anyone found out about our lives Cassie and I would be taken away from Momma and we may never see her again, and I knew Daddy didn’t want us, and they might take Cassie away from me, too, and I couldn’t protect her anymore, and I’d be all alone, and that man would kill Momma without me there, and some man we didn’t know might touch Cassie if I wasn’t with her, and I couldn’t stop it.

I can describe it to you. I can’t tell you how it feels.

My mother used to call me lazy. I’m not sure why. Once we had a home again, except for the bout of severe depression my senior year when I didn’t clean my room once during a bleak stretch of months, no child had a cleaner room than I. From the time we became homeless when I was eight until we moved into a small house with Momma’s then-boyfriend David and got a washer and dryer when I was fifteen, the only reason we ever had clean clothes was because I urged her to take us to the laundromat so we could do laundry. From fourteen on, any time I was left alone in the house for any length of time, I cleaned it top to bottom (except my sister’s room). Goodness knows she never told me to practice my clarinet or learn my lines or do my homework or finish reading whatever I was reading. Or finish my college applications or practice for the Solo & Ensemble competition or prepare for the state tournament when I qualified in dramatic interpretation or revise my poem for the Young Southern Writers anthology. She never had to tell me those things, I did them on my own. So I don’t know where lazy came from with her. I mean, it worked, I’ve felt self-conscious about being lazy my entire post-teenage life. And everything I’ve ever done in the way of external recognition and achievement is because I’m desperately trying to make myself and my life valuable to others in ways I know it’s not, to prove a worth I wish I had but don’t and never did (and, at this advanced age, never will, which is a tough pill to swallow. If I could swallow it along with a cyanide capsule I guess I would.)

Some time ago—maybe months, but sometime in the last year—I was talking on the phone with a friend I’ve only ever known via the phone (what we were talking about I don’t recall), and the subject of my disability status, such as it is, came up, I think only by implication (I don’t think it was the topic at hand). He said to me, in reference to what I don’t remember, (I paraphrase as nearly as I recall) “not like you, you could go out and work if you had to.” A few times, when some habit of mine, predicated on my fear of going out in public and interacting with others, comes up, he’d sort of scoffed, laughed, said “Come on!” The last time, I think, was about taking out the garbage. I said I usually take it out at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, which is true, and he thought that was ridiculous, clearly. I’m not saying it isn’t. I know I’m ridiculous. The world’s least funny joke.

And I know other people would agree that, as he indirectly (probably so as not to hurt my big-dumb-baby feelings) suggested, I’m not that disabled, and others who know anything about my life now probably think so, too. Wendy doesn’t think so, I suppose, and my primary doctor Erin says she doesn’t. I assume when my previous doctor Lynn first told me she thought I should apply for disability and that she didn’t think I should be working that she didn’t think so. On some level people perceive my life, my inability to work and operate with some degree of productive normality in the world, to be, for all legitimate intents and purposes, malingering. I’m certainly not making my feelings up, or imagining them. My body does hurt the ways I’ve said it hurts, and I’m fucked in the head the ways I’ve admitted I’m fucked in the head, but the view that I’m making it all out to be worse than it really is and if I really want to I could get out and work and live like the counterfeit image of a somewhat normal person would be widely held if the details of my life were widely known. And I’m ashamed of that. I don’t know how to make it otherwise, but I understand they do, and that shames me.

Sometimes, when I’m trying to think how I could better communicate myself to others (Wendy told me not to say this, by the way, she said not to say what I’m about to say because making myself more vulnerable wouldn’t help, but she said so to try and protect me from the worst of my feelings, and I’m not good at helping in that goal, and I lost the thread of what she had gently encouraged me to say some time ago, anyway)—when I’m wondering what I could say or should say to make my life clearer to people, I think, should I tell them every time I cut myself? I don’t tell people every time I cut, because it’s humiliating, but should I? Should I tell them how I think about killing myself or otherwise dying every day of my life? How even if I sound like I feel okay, I don’t? How deep down I still think of dying as a relief? How, deep, deep down, I think that literally every man in the world (every doctor who’s a man, and every man nurse, and man Uber driver, and man grocery store employee, and man student, everyone who’s a man)—all men who have ever lived or will ever live would rape women and would hurt or kill me if they thought they could get away with it? All men, even Tyler, now that he’s a man and knows I’m a faggot? (I’m not saying my rational mind thinks it, or the part of it that’s rational, anyway. Just the part of me that knows we’re not entirely rational beings and people act in irrational ways based on irrational desires all the time.) Should I tell them how I hate myself for simultaneously feeling death would be a relief and men would kill me if they could, yet I live as locked away as possible so they can’t do what they want and what’s probably best for me?

But then I wonder what that would do. People might understand I’m even more fucked up than they knew, but the reasonable and responsible and practical part of them will still think, “You could go out and work if you had to.”

I know, what a freak.

I know it’s difficult for people to exercise any patience with me, given the fact I wasted fifteen years getting degrees any fucking idiot could have known weren’t practical or advisable in the long term, fifteen years being reckless and irresponsible and selfish and shortsighted and profligate and willfully stupid, fifteen years achieving only the most trifling and laughable outcomes to show for the pansy-ass, insubstantial work I did—My dissertation? Who gives a shit about my faggoty, labor-of-love dissertation?!—when people were doing actual work, working their asses off, making actual sacrifices, when here I sit on my obviously fucked but fundamentally malingering ass when I could go out and work if I really had to. I dunno, maybe I should have seen Lynn’s suggestion I apply for disability as a way to maybe get my messy life off her hands, at least for a while, and Wendy and Erin and Quinn and Ela’s kind reassurances as the best response they have to a fucking disaster like me on their caseload. However things end with me, I know it will be a relief to them to have me off their books, even if they’d never say so.

One Friday in July of 2016, I sat in Wendy’s office as I had nearly every Friday since the fall of 2010, and I broke down harder than I ever had before. For over an hour, I cried so hard I couldn’t speak. I’ve never cried so hard in my life. I had finished my Ph.D. I had no job to show for it. I had been homeless again from August of 2015 to March of 2016, and as of July I was renting a room in a rundown house with three straight men who stole food and money from me. I had no way to pay the next $500 I owed for each month renting that room. I was estranged from the best friends I ever had because I’m such a fuck-up and a freak. Sitting in that chair in Wendy’s office, I decided I needed to die. Or had to, anyway. No one and nowhere in the world would have me. I didn’t make sense anywhere in the world. I had nowhere to go. I had reached the limits of who I could be and what I could do.

After an hour and a half, I stopped crying, and as I got up from the chair and moved to leave, and Wendy said “Take care,” as she always does when I’m leaving. But that time I was leaving for good, even if she didn’t know it. I said “I’m sorry I never got better. It wasn’t your fault.”

At the top of the stairs, she called me back into her office. She asked me if I was planning to kill myself. She said it sounded to her like I was. I told her no, I wasn’t. The only lie I’ve ever told her. She told me if I were any other client, she would be admitting me for a psych. hold, she wouldn’t be letting me go away on my own, but she was only letting me go because she was afraid if she committed me I wouldn’t forgive her and it would irreparably harm our therapeutic relationship. I knew it was a terrible bind I placed her in. If I lived a thousand years I could never repay her.

The next Tuesday, I got a call from Angel Steele in the housing department at Evergreen. She said there was a place for me in the Lofts, which were opening in August. If I hadn’t received that call, I wouldn’t be here to write this. I wouldn’t be here at all.

When I received my disability designation in 2017, the letter said I was expected to improve. Wendy said she didn’t indicate that (can improve is a very different thing than will improve or even should improve), and I don’t think Lynn or anyone else who wrote in support of my disability application said so either. But the letter said so. It also said they would do a review of my claim after three years, in which time the improvement was expected to have taken place. I got the letter saying they were conducting my review in May 2019, but they’ve yet to send their inquiries to Wendy or Erin in order to conduct the review, and it’s been a year, so I don’t know what to expect or when. Wendy and Erin both said they intended to say I was still fully disabled, and Wendy said she intended to also make clear there was no evidence whatsoever that, regardless of what the initial disability letter said, it was ever the case that I was going to improve necessarily, or enough to alter my disability status, and she tried to reassure me: there’s no evidence whatsoever you have improved, even if they did expect you to. How pathetic a person I am, that what passes for encouragement and reassurance in the context of my life is don’t worry, no one who knows you thinks you’re any better.

But who knows what they’ll say. The chances they could revoke my status are high, I imagine. I’m 38. Or will be, on June 26th. I’m not supposed to be cripplingly debilitated by emotional instability and psychological disease, given what appear from the outside to be unfortunate but livable circumstances. Livable to someone fundamentally saner and a better person than I am, anyway. Someone should’ve told that disability judge I’d only disappoint him as I have everyone else.

If they take my disability status away, when they take it away, I’ve got nowhere to go. I don’t kid myself: as barely employable and barely functioning as I ever was, things have not gotten better or even maintained. They’re worse. I’m worse. I mean, in my mind. I recognize that others’ perceptions that I could go out and work if I had to is the assessment of a sane and hardworking person, but that’s not what I am. I’ll try whatever I can try, like I tried whatever I could before. I did what I could, my massive and devastating personal failings all too sadly withstanding. All those attempts ran out of steam on which my finally worthless efforts and the ultimately disgusting person I’ve become could float. Running on less than empty. That’s what happens given that the tank of the sorry person I am is a fucking collander in every conceivable way.

So I got a reprieve from what I understood to be true four years ago, July of 2016, sitting in Wendy’s office. It’s still true, even more true, and I know that reprieve is likely to be temporary, though my deficits are permanent, and will thus be terminal. A poz, homeless faggot becomes a corpse sooner rather than later, and this poz faggot would become a corpse rather sooner even than soon, all things considered. I know I will be homeless again, and I know then I will have to die.

That’s a lot to live with, as much as I can be said to be living.

Even someone as fucked as I am doesn’t look at my life through the telescope of money and the lens of necessary shelter and see, in the distance, home. I see, rather, the facts that indicate I probably won’t have a home for much longer. The facts that remind me I haven’t had a home for quite a lot of my life. And the conclusion that there are good reasons for that. Where, exactly, should a person like me expect to find shelter? My past and future homelessness, my current financial broke-ness, and my always already broken-ness militate against sheltering me. Nothing about me says to anyone, yes, you look a safe, sane, hardworking sort, come in and make yourself at home.

The first phrase of one of my very favorite books, in some ways most dear to me, Jim Grimsley’s Comfort & Joy is “To find a hiding place.” A few pages later, on the plane home—“home”—Dan thinks about Ford, “This is my hiding place.” But the thought seems wrong to him. Moments later, “Shelter, not hiding place. This wall of Ford was, would be shelter. That’s where the thought [had been] wrong.”

No wonder that book had my heart from the first word. Shelter in the love of a good man. Reading that book I thought, “Oh, this man understands some things about me.”

But.

Neither he nor anyone else is under any obligation to make any sense of my money shame, my fear of homelessness, my failures generally, or to understand me as a person at all.

Talk about a position that doesn’t pay.

0 notes