Who Is

There was a time when I was really broke. There have been a lot of moments in my life when I was cash poor, but for the most part, money was gonna come in some time.

Except this time.

I was just out of college. I lived in an apartment. I was the apartment manager, so my rent was cheap, like 300 bones a month. But somehow that wasn't cheap enough. So I got a roommate. And he lived in the living room of the small one-bedroom, third-floor walk up. Let's call him The Skateboarder. We were both ass broke. I wasn't working. He was waiting tables. But only a couple days a week.

This is how broke we were:

We would go to Goodwill and swap pricetags so we could get the blender we for some reason so desperately needed, for even less.

When The Skateboarder did work, he got free meals. But he would always sneak me in with the wait staff so I could eat for free, too. Then, when he knew he wasn't going to work for a few days, he would take home the bread they could no longer sell and we would eat that. For days.

We stole toilet paper rolls from the university I had just recently attended.

We paid for gas in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.

And still, we never had any money.

We would go to garage sales and buy up what we thought were fashionable vintage clothes and sell them back to the fashionable vintage shops by the college.

Happy Hour was an important event of the evening.

Burritos and mac n' cheese were our staples.

And still, we had no money.

The Skateboarder, since he was only paying me 150 bucks to live there, was supposed to split the jobs associated with being the apartment manager, like vacuuming the halls, taking out the trash in the laundry room, and keeping the recycling area clean. But he never did. And I guess I never pressured him.

I never made my credit card payments and my interest rates sky-rocketed. I bounced checks and was always being charged huge bank fees. Up until then, I had been living on student loans and I had been working, but I just did not have a plan. And then, my big plan was to go back to school and incur even more debt. I called and had all the application fees waived.

I drove without insurance. I got parking tickets. I drove a car that did not have any reverse for two years.

I took the greyhound home for the holidays. Once they went on strike and I had to spend the night in the downtown bus station because nobody could come pick me up and I didn't have money for a cab.

I must be thinking of all this because I am unemployed. And ineligible for benefits. And trying to do a different kind of work than what I am used to. I must be thinking of all this because suddenly the future looks like a really blank slate. And that can be scary. I must be thinking of all this because I look back to see who is she gonna be.