Fridays Aren't Real : Everything is Funnier When You're Poor

drinking tap water, loving cash and amazing grace

HELLO! A big thank you to the bad folks that enable this not-so-newsletter I appreciate ya.

Okay, so this is the tiny section where I can put a blurb on my whereabouts. Listen sorry for my absence I’ve been working on stuff for a year now and I can’t give any details on it because I don’t know if they’ll even happen and I don’t want to get sued. Yes yes, I know you expected something on parenting I get it, thank you. I had a lovely Mother’s Day and hung out with kids, so many kids. So many FUCKING kids.

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This past Sunday morning I was photo-diving pulling all of the histories of my family down from our closet. I scattered photos, obituaries, zines, and newspaper clippings all over the floor while wanting to have a good cry I then found a lonely wrinkled-up handwritten letter I sent my mom when I was sixteen. I signed it off with—

Thank you for starving so I can be special. Thank you for breaking the rules so I could be flyest in the room. This was the best summer.

Your most stubborn, most noisy, Christy

I would love to start by embarrassingly admitting how my growing up poor didn’t stop me from forming goals towards upward mobility and adopting respectability politics, all of that is sketched into our skins like tattoos that read “ I might be poor but when I make it I’ll then blame poor people because it’s their fault their poor .” Yes I know, long tattoo but it’s in traditional cursive and of course placed right along the chest.

So here I am being obnoxious and playing the role I loathe in others, I’m going to tell you how respectable I grew up despite a low income. Here are things you didn’t know about me. Broken english is my first language. My mother considered taking me to a French immersion school. Using the address of her employers just for Westchester educations! I also studied and was trained to play classical music which I loved because it was the first time I didn’t struggle to read something. I wished the notes I read on my music sheet could flow and have rhythm like the boring Shakespeare in my curriculum. I danced ballet and jazz. My mother iced me out in Ralph Lauren, the Juicy sweatsuits I carried a second-hand Dooney & Bourke bag and my feet were sweaty in my red jelly Melissa’s in the springtime. She believed like many other poor people that if I am just close enough if I am in proximity with wealth, then they will accept us and treat us equally, treat us like we are worthy of attention, that we are worthy to live.

Oh, you guys are still stuck on me wearing Juicy and Ralph? Listen I don’t know how poor folks do it but staying fly is imperative. Do you think she was gonna tell me her hustle I mean not that she would’ve explained to me anyway. You know, immigrants and their secrets. If you don’t have an immigrant as a parent I will tell you that you will spend your entire life begging them to just be honest with you, and when they do blurt out their secret you suddenly understand their privacy. It’s never anything light, like a name change, or that they're gluten-free.

You immediately regret asking because the secret is that their firstborn child, yeah the one you didn’t know existed lives in another country… I’m being nice he actually lives in the opposite building across the street from you.

My mother made sure I was set for any social interactions, I guess hoping that I’d be prepared to debunk any inflexible ideas about us from our neighbors on the upper east side who at times would accidentally walk towards the dividing income line and gawk at us. With the little money we had, I still felt as if I was on top of the world…Then my dad went to prison. Don’t feel bad for me, I got to read about his impressive 50-count stash of peach fruit cups and accidentally leading a gang. He had poetically written out all of this on yellow-lined legal paper.

“Pick one,” she said to me one day. “ Pick which activity you want to pursue, you can’t do them all.”

I quickly chose— “piano.”

I was no longer playing Chopin but hymns. My mother’s friend from our church started to give me lessons and after a month of mastering Amazing Grace. I was fed up because I was only playing it so loudly to drown out the grumbling hunger that came from my mother’s stomach. I suddenly hated piano. So I quit. My mother didn’t stop me from quitting, maybe it was a relief as we both knew she couldn’t afford it anymore. She just said

“ Don’t ever feel like you’re too good to play Amazing Grace.”

She was right, I had no beef with Amazing Grace. What I actually hated was being poor. But my mother slowly stopped caring about being accepted and attending to the gaze of the rich. I witnessed this change. It was as if my dad being incarcerated showed her the efforts that poor folks make, and she instilled in me to pursue my dreams for myself and not for others in high places. But it was too late for me I wanted classical music I wanted to be an exemplar, a model of excellence and I believed it could only be achieved through certain methods. Certainly not being poor.

The thing about being poor is I never heard about any money my mother made, I didn’t even hear about the money we didn’t have I just heard phrases like:

“Christy, uniforms are in now. It’s easier if you wore the same thing every day.”

“We ran out of bottled water so drink from the tap, same thing.”

We ran out of …. means I can’t afford right now

“ Stop pouting we only eat this meal 4 times this week”

You wanna know why I hate meal plans? Eating the same thing every day reminds me of my childhood. It feels poor! I would never!

I knew we were poor because I didn’t see a bank. I saw check cashing places and Western unions. I assumed everyone did everything in cash. I once had a gig working as a Shabbos Goy they paid me in CASH I babysat kids in the neighborhood. CASH! Cash was normal to have. But the first time I entered a bank I was sixteen, I worked at a YMCA for the summer,` and I saw my name on a check and I gave it to my mom. I had no clue what to do with it.

This is important to note, in order to have a bank account as a teenager you need an adult. You need very American information from your parents. Well, we didn’t know this, but my mother didn’t let any barrier that she would face get in my way. So she did what any loving and thoughtful mother who wanted her child to secure their first bag would do. She filled in random digits on the line that asked for her social security number. ( I did not know about my mother’s immigration status then, remember immigrants and their secrets)

“ You’re getting a bank account. Besides they just need your social, asking for mine is to keep people like us away.”

I remember sitting down at the dining table and looking at how proud my mom was of me. I was holding on to my first debit card, a student checking account with no overdraft fees, I had to learn what that meant too. There was a whole course at the bank. I ran my fingers on the raised numbers wondering how this plastic thing has all my money.

I took a sip of my tap water and I thought to myself; I will never use this.

I went to the atm and took all the cash out. Four hundred and fifty dollars. I was hype! Call me hood but I love the feeling of cash. I love looking at it. I love how my mom would fold it neatly and put it in her purse. I love the way my dad would take a wad of cash out of his back pocket lick his thumb and begin to count the 20s.

My mom told me I wasn’t responsible enough to have that much cash laying around. So I responsibly took a couple of twenties out when I needed to and left the rest in a shoebox under my bed.

Every two weeks I got a check. I stopped going to the banks and went to check cashing places, the banks were so far it was a trek. I kept feeding my shoebox with crips bills.

The summer was ending, it was a Friday and I rushed over to be a good Shabbos Goy, my side job entailed turning off lights and completing other tasks on the Sabbath for an Orthodox Jewish family because they are not allowed to, due to their religious law.

When I walked in, the family said they chatted with my mother the other day while she was with her friend.

“ Oh cool, Sherri?”

“ No.”

“ Delbra?”

“No.”

We went on like this to the point that I just stayed for Shabbat dinner.

“ Tammy?”

All of the family at once: NO!

Shortly after I walked into our apartment, I locked eyes with someone who did not look like Sherri or Delbra. It was her friend. Her friend whom I have never seen before eating my knock-off brand Cheetos on the leather sofa my mom and I dumpster-dived for. They both stood up.

“ Christy this is-”

“You’re friend?”

We don’t need to say his name. His name is FRIEND!

My mom’s friend was over a lot, he started to grow on me and I was happy to see my mom enjoy her life. The summer was ending and I was ready to check out the Black-owned bank I built under my bed. I saved around two grand that summer. The joy of feeling accomplished not giving up and proving to my mom that I was becoming an adult quickly faded from my face as I opened my shoebox and there was nothing in it.

My YMCA cash, my Shabbos Goy cash, it was all gone. Thankfully my mom’s friend wasn’t around during this meltdown. I pride myself to stay as cold in front of strangers as much as possible, no way this friend was gonna see my tears. I ran to my mother who was watching the classic Lifetime movie where the girl is in a domestic violence situation and her parents don’t know, then the friends are like “You have to tell someone” But the friends never do.

I screamed. “ Mom, my money is gone, it was for piano lessons!”

She never said anything, she picked up her bag and just walked out.

Growing up poor can distort your version of events. I started to blame myself for having cash out, shaming my love for big wads of cash. I started to check my bedroom window to see if it was secure enough. Maybe someone broke in? Maybe I pissed someone off? Why didn’t I just take the bus and go to my bank and ask for more courses on ‘How to not get your money stolen 101.’

I started to feel deserving of this. Being poor turns you into just accepting things as they are, not feeling worthy of the fight or to investigate the bad stuff. Shaming yourself for not taking a hike to the bank instead of asking where are the banks in the hood.

I cried myself to sleep for the entire weekend. It was Monday morning, I woke up to find my mom making breakfast, this was unusual because my mom is usually at work cleaning some mansion or taking care of kids that were never me.

“ There’s something on the table for you.”

It was an envelope that wasn’t sealed I peeked in it and there was my money.

My mom’s friend never came back to our place. We never talked about him again we never talked about where my money went or how she got it back. She avoided it.

On the last day of summer vacation, I booked a piano lesson with some of my money. I just wanted to touch a Steinway again. The piano teacher was classically trained and impressed with me. I may have even had a crush on him.

“ I’ll see you again next week?” He asked.

I told him this was the only class I would be able to pay for. He didn’t really ask any questions almost like he understood my need to feed my fix. He could see all the hard work of the summer with my fingers angrily dancing on the piano keys.

I was his last student of the day we walked out together. I shook his hand—

“ You like French food?”

I’m sitting down in front of this twenty-eight-year-old stranger in a fancy restaurant. It was so inappropriate and I didn’t care because he listened to my entire summer. He mentioned to me that the best classical-trained artists can’t play Amazing Grace. And that’s because they aren’t the best. The song amazing grace is so advanced and many pianists make it their own, they drag out the notes there’s a mystery, and there’s a display of these dramatic and explicit ups and downs.

Just like my summer. An anthem for my life. He mentioned that I should be desperate to be anything other than classical, and at first, I thought this guy is just trying to make me feel better about being poor and my mom’s boyfriend taking my money. And he was. I had to question and interrogate what I defined as a classically trained artist, I had to expose what I defined as a good child of immigrants and why I was seeking mediocrity.

Growing up poor gave me perspective, bruises I can write about, the laughter that cracks when it gets louder—even an understanding of my mom’s friend, and why he took my money. Growing up poor is a recipe for excellence and unfortunately, the shame, obstacles, and the systems we participate in will eliminate that. I looked at the French menu proud that I could understand it, and then that moment of pride went to sadness. With the talent my mother spoke into me would I ever be able to afford to flourish it? And if I can’t does that make me less than excellent?

And then I did the boldest thing all summer I asked this grown man to be my boyfriend, and he declined.

The waiter came over— “ Sparkling or tap?”

Tap water, please. Always tap.

my teenage bedroom with my thrifted keyboard, thank you Mom. I have the privilege now to pick it up again.