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improved my circumstances in the long run because I just couldn’t afford to work for nothing. Again, the people who can afford unpaid internships are getting help from home—in my world, everyone else has to work for a living. And this means that we’re being cut out of all that potential networking too. That’s at least one reason why I’ve never had much of a professional network—I never had the chance to build one. Accepting an unpaid internship, or one of those internships that basically pays you lunch money, is for people who don’t have to pay the rent.
    Because I’ve always been in a take-what-you-can-get situation, I’ve wound up working the sorts of jobs that people consider beneath them. And yet people still wonder why we, working at the bottom, aren’t putting our souls into our jobs. In turn, I wonder about people who think that those who are poor shouldn’t demand reciprocity from their employers. We should devote ourselves to something that doesn’t benefit us more than it absolutely has to? We’re meant to care about their best interests, but they don’t have to care about ours? If you’re going to put as little as possible into my training and wages, ifyou’re going to make sure that I can’t get enough hours to survive in order to avoid giving me health care, and generally make sure that I’m as uncomfortable as possible at any given time just to make sure I know my place, then how can you expect me to care about your profit margin?
    Remember, you get what you pay for.

3
    You Can’t Pay a Doctor in ChickensAnymore

E xcruciating should be defined in the dictionary as an exposed nerve. Once I killed nearly a whole bottle of vodka in the space of a night, and I’m not a frequent drinker. I was at least six shots gone before the pain started to fade into blessed numbness.
    It took me a few years of the long slide into poverty to cotton on to the unavailability of anything besides crisis medical care. I’d come from a home in which we went to the doctor when we needed to. Dad had benefits. It never occurred to me as a kid to question it. And it took me a while as an adult to understand that without benefits, which no longer come standard-issue with your average job like they used to, hospital administrators would rather you die on the street than sully their expensive sheets. (And the sheets are expensive. Like the Tylenol. Whole books have been written about that, and Ican’t do the subject justice in a few paragraphs, but don’t think we don’t know that they charge us triple for those lifesaving medications because we are not rich enough to have other rich people negotiate better prices for us.)
    Being healthy and being poor are generally mutually exclusive conditions. We all have physical weaknesses, but a rich person gets these tended to before they get out of control. Poor people don’t have that luxury. So it’s pretty enraging to poor people when rich people, who get preventive care and can afford vitamins and gym memberships, look down on us as if we don’t have a clue how to take care of our bodies. We know—we just can’t afford it.
    —
    Dentistry is one of the things we are most lacking in. And it’s one of the most glaring marks of poverty. I watch the tooth-bleaching ads and cringe, because I know exactly what I’m being pegged as. Incapable. Uneducated. Oblivious. What I should be pegged as: uninsured, and until recently, uninsurable.
    I did get some dental surgery once. I had five teeth pulled and a partial denture built so that at least I would have front teeth. I think I was nearly twenty-six at the time. I made an appointment, which took all the force of will I had. I got in the chair at the office, and promptly listened to forty-five straight minutes of the most upsetting, judgmental lecture I’d ever received in my life. This woman, the dentist, decided that I must be on meth. (I’d like to make this point clear: I havenever in my life done meth. Ever.