Tips for New Paupers - By John Dolan

Dispatch / October 15, 2008

Little did I know that when I lost everything last year, I was doing research. At the time I thought it was just stupidity or bad luck or both. But now that the economy’s crashing, it turns out I’ve been out there gathering valuable tips for millions of new paupers.

And let me clarify, I’m talking real poverty.

My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat a simple, wholesome diet towards the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of Dickensian privation spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience. That’s the kind of poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon—because I’m here to tell you, it can happen here and it can happen to you. And it’s remarkably unpleasant. You may be saying “Duh!” here but you’re probably not imagining the proper sort of unpleasantness. So I’ll try to lay out what to watch for, how to hunker down when it’s not just a matter of cutting back or selling your second car but having no car at all, having no money for heat or food.

All the things we learned are going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that it’s very hard to think clearly when your life has collapsed. These are what they call the old verities, the truths of life before the middle class was (briefly) in session:

Warmth. Above all you need to have a dry warm place to sleep. We had only an unheated boat, and that was not enough. We woke up to the thump of sea ice banging against the hull and realized that the old world was still very much in session. When we finally fled to stay with family, we stayed in our blankets up against their gas fireplace for weeks. You won’t even want food much after a while. You’ll want heat itself, not the chemical middle man. You are going to realize that cold is the most frightening thing in the world. In older English dialects, “to starve” meant “to freeze.” You will see why.

Car. Got one? Maybe you should sell it. Cars drain the last dollars out of you. And there’s something worse: cops can smell desperation, and they hate the poor. I didn’t use to hate cops much, except drug cops, but God, I hate them now. The real purpose of cops is to keep poor people off the roads. That’s their only real goal. On my way to an interview for a job that could have gotten us out of the gutter, a cop stopped me because my insurance was two weeks overdue—for the simple reason we didn’t have money to pay it. She gave me a $600 ticket for that, plus $120 for not having an updated address on my driver’s license. Then she called for a tow truck and told me, “So, a lesson learned here today!” as I watched my car towed away and trudged off with our terrified dog down a typical Western suburban road: four lanes of fast traffic with no sidewalks. Are you poor? The cops are your enemy now. Accept it. The car is how they’ll try to get you. Sell it if you can—which is to say, if there’s any decent public transportation—hah!—where you live.

Shame. As in, forget about it. Shame is an affectation. I don’t even need to say this, really. Once you’ve experienced actual cold and hunger, your good old Ouldivai Gorge mammal body and brain will take over, and believe me, shame won’t be a problem.

You’ll also find that most of the social stuff is easier than you’d expect. These people are in show biz in a way; they have to be, just to survive. Makes them lively. And though I suppose it all depends on where you are when you lose out, in my experience they’re not especially violent. They talk about it a lot, but so do all the white jocks I ever met, and in neither case does anything actually happen. They’re flinchy people, mainly, who spend a lot of time waiting for things. When you’re waiting, you get very frustrated but you don’t want to shake things up. So they’re tense, bitter, sociable, gossipy and treacherous—a fine cross-section of the population. After waiting around with them in line at the local food bank, sharing “how I ended up here” stories and hanging out with them around a propane heater trying to stay warm, I relaxed a lot. They’re not going to mug you. They are going to try to get any cash you have, and God did they get a huge chunk of our last resources, but it was friendly, schmooze-based extortion, just like in the middle-class world. All that was missing was the deodorant.

Food Banks. These places, usually in the basement of a church (because churches are the only public institutions in the new suburbs of western North America) hand out baskets of groceries every week or, more often, two weeks. You have to wait a long time, so learn your refugee skills. Come early, get a number first, and be nice-but-pushy. It’s a delicate operation being nice-but-pushy, but you’ll learn it. The “nice” part is because you need to ask people for help and advice; you’re not rich enough to be solitary any more. The pushy part is simple: it’s to prevent you from being ignored. So always talk to people, but never show money or mention it, if you have any.

Antidepressants. Get on them right away, if you’re not already. If you are, up your dose. Because it’s going to hurt. Doesn’t matter how much Marxist theory you’ve absorbed, doesn’t matter that you can put your fall into global context; it’s happening to YOU now, and it’s going to hurt like you wouldn’t believe. You’re an American, and you share that culture’s values whether you like it or not. So you define yourself by your job, car and house. When they go, you’re going to hate yourself. Don’t even bother arguing about it. It’s going to happen. Just take the damn Prozac. Would you refuse a coat in Siberia? Refusing Prozac after falling into poverty makes about as much sense. Tom Cruise can go fuck himself. Prozac saved our lives. I won’t go into the sordid details but really, I don’t think we’d be here now if Saint Prozac hadn’t extended a sacred hand to us.

So the second you slip beneath genteel poverty toward the street, find the nearest Free Clinic, and don’t be deterred by the smell of the crowd in the waiting room. Smell is going to be a problem for you at first but after a few weeks you won’t mind, because you smell too and so does everyone around you. If you want a break from the relentless olfactory fact of being around unwashed large mammals, sidle up to somebody who smokes. That’s the one good thing about cigarettes, and it may be why losers all smoke. Don’t smoke just for that, though. Cigarettes are insanely expensive and turn lots of poor people into cringing beggars.

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8 Comments

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1. EXILED ONLINE - MANKIND�&hellip | December 14th, 2008 at 6:13 am

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2. Uncle B | February 6th, 2009 at 8:15 am

Layed off Chinese workers line up at train stations to go back to well kept and still family owned farms for a meager but livable survival. Not so for the affluent American victim, his capitalists ripped off the family farm years ago! His ass was reamed long before he realized what he was losing! Money does not disappear, it just changes hands - My question: Where did it go?
3. Mickii Dole | February 28th, 2009 at 9:22 am

I am a landlord/owner/manager, and I have many tenants that are perilously close to being homeless because the economy is sucking them dry. The ones closest have kids. Do I really want to kick them out because they can’t pay? No. We work with them as far as we can, until they simply can’t come up with at least part of the rent. I think that if they knew how hard it would be to be homeless (with kids), I think that they would do everything they possibly could to keep their roof over the kids heads. I see them spending money on things that simply don’t matter, just to feed that denial fueled by their ego.
In short, it frustrates me they don’t know what you have learned. It frustrates me that I have to facilitate their learning! Sometimes it sucks being a hands-on landlord!
4. tommy | March 5th, 2009 at 9:15 am

I guess my question is do the people who could benifit from reading this have access to the internet… The public library maybe…
5. Trey | March 18th, 2009 at 6:16 pm

Immediately telling people to “get on antidepressants” is a horrible piece of advice. These medications are not made for everyone and certainly are not a prerequisite to make it through poverty. I’ve been homeless an entire year and I’ve also been on antidepressants for an entire year. I was must more mentally sound when homeless. Antidepressant medications, for the most part, alter the chemical balence in the human brain in an attempt to “fix” an already present imbalance. Taking some antidepressants can lead to further and deeper depression for those not suited for the treatment. Also, medication isn’t free.

This is wholly unsound and DANGEROUS advice. Please, for the sake of anyone who may read my post here and blindly follow it, put some kind of warning or suggestion that maybe throwing pills down my throat might not be a bad idea. In fact, clearly my problem is that I’m not on antidepressants. And anyone out there who is watching me fall apart like this, take heed: you, and your children and your children’s children should all be on antidepressants like now.

So, I hope my posting helps!
6. Mudhead | March 20th, 2009 at 9:56 pm

This is the absolute gospel truth. Dolan, as always, knows what he’s talking about. And it CAN happen to YOU. Don’t doubt that for moment. In November I was a card-carrying member of the American professional middle-class, with all the privileges and comforts that suggests. Two months later I was, for all intents and purposes, homeless, washing pots and pans in a County-run crisis house, with absolutely zero money, and nowhere to go. Dolan doesn’t mention debt, but I was - am - also deeply in debt after losing my livelihood, home, and health in rapid succession. Dolan gives some sound advice in this piece on setting priorities and dealing with the situation. I’m close to turning this around, but I had to learn some of Dolan’s points the hard way. And I did have some outs, as Dolan did. God help anyone who doesn’t have such advantages, because no one else will. There’s nothing quite like sleeping in your car under the full moon to provide you with a new perspective on life. Dolan’s advice about warmth, shame, medication, et al. is to the point, as is his warning about hunkering down in some secluded spot until the crisis blows over. It likely won’t work. Shaving in a public rest room is as bad as he describes, even shaving in a gym locker room doesn’t really work. Do NOT be reluctant to reach out to friends and family, even if it feels so humiliating that you can’t stand it, even if you’d rather die. You really don’t have choice; recognize that you will be incurring a debt to them that you must repay somehow, but take whatever they can offer you. If you don’t, you’ll be standing on a corner with a cardboard sign in no time. Until it happens to you, you can’t believe how far and how fast you can fall. Unless you wish to really hit the bottom hard, you could do worse than follow Dolan’s advice. As for where you can access this advice: find an independent coffee house that provides free WiFi. Many offer this as an enticement in order to compete with Starbucks, which requires an AT&T account. This will be your port in the storm. Tip the staff as well as you can, don’t make a nuisance of yourself, be as clean as possible, but use that link to the greater world beyond. Without it, you’re in a bad, bad, way. Oh, and whatever else you do, keep your cell phone account going. Sell your blood if you have to, but keep the cell phone working. Email’s great, but when someone wants to talk with you NOW, there has to be a way for him or her to get in touch with you. Depending upon your location, a cell phone is much more important than a car, which, as Dolan indicates, simply sucks up your money in payments, insurance, gas, maintenance (I had to drop a new battery into mine, which cost $100, when I had $120 to my name), etc. Good luck. You’re going to need it.
7. jimbo bubba | June 12th, 2009 at 9:30 pm

I am not homeless and I worrying about homelessness even though at the moment I am doing fine. I am not in debt, the house is paid for and my health is good. What worries me is peak oil and the fact that many believe infinite growth on a finite planet is possible. Limits on resources, including oil production, has been reached. This, in my view and of many former oil engineers and other professionals, is causing the bad economy now. The economy will only get worse turning into a depression greater than the 30’s. At least in the 30’s a resource wall was not an issue, this time it is along with debt. I hope the worse that will happen to me is that I may have to farm my own land to feed myself. I emphasize, I do not know how well or bad for that matter I will be doing in the future. I am truly worried indeed.
8. Alan | June 14th, 2009 at 6:37 am

Several years ago I began to try living without hot showers,
or any showers. I started taking rag baths: vigorous rubbing
with a damp rag, using little water (just enough to wring out
the rag; 3-4 quarts per “bath”). It went very well. Not only
is it easy, it works much better than showers. I now get much
cleaner. I’ve found that having lots of water run over me (in
a shower) provides too much lubrication, whereas it is
primarily the *friction* that is cleansing. Further, the
friction is stimulating, amounting to a very wholesome
self-massage that promotes lymph drainage (detoxification), in
addition to being surprisingly good exercise. Between the
exercise, the lymph detox, and the deep cleansing, it feels
great. You tingle all over, and feel wonderful — really clean
and refreshed. Much better than a shower.

True, a hot shower has a certain delicious sensual quality.
But if you want that, why not go in with your neighbors and
put in a hot tub? Nothing like *soaking* in the warm water, if
you want that kind of experience. Trying to get that from a
shower is a huge waste: all the hot water (energy) just runs
down the drain. The experience of a rag-bath is much
different, and for most purposes better.

I know that hot showers are the American religion, and that
everyone (including me, formerly) thinks they are an absolute
necessity. But they’re not. I can see now that they’re just a
lazy rich-person luxury.

SEMI-HYPOCRISY ALERT: I joined the YMCA a couple years ago and
have not been able to resist the temptation to use the
showers, immediately after my workout. However: my
cool-to-luke showers run about ONE minute each — just enough
to rinse the sweat off. It is a convenience. I still use the
rag baths at home for real *cleansing*. I’ve now learned that
it is a foolish waste to try to get clean in a shower.

STATEMENT OF NON-SMUGNESS: The above notes are NOT uttered in
the arrogant/smug attitude of a well-off person, talking down
to someone of lesser means, perhaps desperately impoverished.
You know the drill: “well, why don’t you just _____” — the
blank being filled with whatever presumptuous bromides pop
into the speaker’s head, like “pick yourself up by your
bootstraps”, or “get a freaking JOB!”, or “learn to do
without”, or whatever. My suggestion of an alternative to
conventional showers is NOT given in that spirit. It is given
in the spirit of: “Here’s an idea. If it works for you, and
helps you, great. If not, then forget it.”