Like many poor people, we were subject to the uncertainty and chaos that comes with a lifetime of bad jobs and worse landlords, and we moved often. If something changed inside me that day, I didn’t feel it. For the first time, I saw myself through his eyes, and it made me feel very alone. But at my 10th birthday party, my best friend’s brother made it clear he was not having fun the cheap birthday cake and off-brand snacks were not good enough for him, and he complained that there weren’t any video games to play at my house. His parents insisted his twin brother come along for these sleepovers, and for a while, that worked out just fine. My best friend, whose family was rich, enjoyed sleepovers at my house just as much as I enjoyed staying over at his: I got the thrill of playing video games and splashing around in his parents’ Jacuzzi, and he got to stay up all night watching the kinds of movies his parents would never let him see. I’d known for years that my family was poor, but it wasn’t something I was especially self-conscious about. Soon after we returned, I started telling lies of my own. Being asked to lie about that trip wounded me in some imperceptible way. Florida was something different, even if I didn’t realize it at first. That kind of lying is not so much learned as imposed. Lying to ourselves allows us to believe it’s all going to be OK, somehow, someday. Lying to the social worker keeps our family together. Lying to the landlord keeps a roof over our heads. Observing this etiquette doesn’t feel dishonest because its falsehoods recognize the deeper truth that many of society’s institutions are hostile to the poor. If I ever thought of these as lies, I soon came to see them as part of the etiquette of poverty - a means of getting by for the poor and also a gift we give to the rich, a practice that lets us avoid talking about the uncomfortable differences between us. And I’d read the notes outlining invented reasons I couldn’t attend school whenever there were field trips that cost money we didn’t have. I knew when she’d passed bad checks because the owner of the corner store taped them to the back of the cash register until the debt was paid. I’d heard my mom swear that the rent check was already in the mail while watching her slip it into an envelope. I was mindful, too, of what could happen to my stepdad if my lies unraveled.īy then, I was familiar with the kinds of stories poor people must get used to telling. But for weeks after we got home from Florida, I was mindful of the person I was now supposed to be: a boy touched by tragedy, still grieving for some lost relative. Stumbling through our cheap hotel room, I saw my stepdad packing a suitcase with bricks of cocaine - something the television program “Miami Vice” had taught me to recognize.Īside from some new furniture, our lives didn’t improve in any material way because of my stepdad’s working vacation. None of it made any sense at all until our last night in Florida, when I woke up to use the bathroom after a long, soda-fueled day of exploring the Magic Kingdom. My stepdad was miserable by the time we crossed the Rockies, and I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t chosen to make the much shorter drive to Disneyland, in California. Then there was the decision to drive cross-country to Florida, which hardly seemed practical for a family living on a small island in southeastern Alaska. We were very poor and had never been on vacation, much less traveled to an amusement park resort. Staring down the American landscape from the back seat of a rented car, I pondered the logic and suddenness of our trip. I remember being touched by my teachers’ condolences, which struck me as genuine, even if the funeral was not. As the oldest of three children, I had the job of excusing our prolonged absence by telling our school we were headed to a family funeral. It was April of 1989, and my parents said the trip couldn’t wait until summer break. Our destination was Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Fla., and the cost of admission was a lie. When I was 9, my family went on a long, strange road trip.
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