-- Or if you're allergic to reading anything over a year old, read Men We Reaped, which was fucking stunning, and no lie, even better than Random Family because while LeBlanc worked her way inside, Jesmyn Ward was born there -- it's like the difference between an embedded war correspondent and a war refugee.
"The Price of Parsimony: NYT, 2004"
A while after my experience in C-Town, Lolli's stepfather received a $70,000 check after winning a lawsuit and burned through the money in a matter of months. By then, however, this sort of abandon made perfect sense. Holding onto the money placed him in physical danger; he'd also have to field an endless litany of heartbreaking requests from family and friends. Putting it in the bank wasn't practical, because he might lose his disability benefits if the government knew of his assets; for the same reason, he couldn't invest the money legally, which left him especially vulnerable to scams. The smartest thing was to treat it like the windfall that it was -- like hitting the lottery.I gushed over the sight of that stunning check -- $70,000! He gave everyone Christmas gifts and bought furniture. He proudly repaid his brother twice over for a $10,000 overdue debt and covered the costs of his girlfriend's sister's funeral in style. When he offered to buy me a leather coat, I declined, but I knew I wanted one. I happily accompanied him on cab rides to buy takeout: he didn't have to struggle down the street with his cane, and I was as glad for the change of pace. Only once did I caution him, on New Year's, after he handed a livery cabdriver $20 for a $5 trip. But when he said, ''It makes me feel like a man,'' I understood. By that point in his life, he'd given up hoping for a different future. I'd given up believing in a different future for him, too.
Whenever I was downtown, which was less and less, I felt that life was elsewhere. Uptown, I was learning to surrender to the slower rhythms of my subjects' days. Ordinary acts absorbed me utterly. Even the most mundane things -- children playing, a trip to the grocery store, watching an old dog sleeping -- gave me a sense of discovery. After all, I was supposed to spend hours hanging out, observing. I started to crave the street. On the best days, I was keenly aware of the sensory environment but unaware of myself. I knew I was in precisely the right place, at the right time. Doing my work meant remaining still.
Like that of a child shuttling between divorced parents, my behavior changed with my surroundings: at a welfare office in the Bronx, I could be endlessly patient, numbed. Yet if I had to wait in line at the Gourmet Garage, I became irritable. Increasingly at ease in the places most white New Yorkers thought of as impossibly dangerous, I'd tense up at book parties and gallery openings. I preferred to brave the stairwell in a housing project than walk into a roof-top party. A college friend, now a psychologist, declared me counter-phobic. Possibly true, but what good do labels do?
But the greatest threat to my reporting wasn't the danger, which was erratic and unusual, but the frustrations and despair, which were relentless, pervading every task of daily life. In the Bronx, survival regularly felt impossible, escape unimaginable. Even hope became a risk.
Back in SoHo, I slept, a lot. I'm generally an early morning person, but I came to love the bed. I'd sleep a solid 12 hours after a prison visit, a whole day after a weekend in Lolli's mother's courtyard. One afternoon, one of the girls from the Bronx called to wake me; I used to be prompt, calling up to their windows, waking them. Now, I was late, I answered the telephone cranky. ''You sound like my mother,'' she said critically.
Poverty is a climate. Within a few years, I had adapted to its weather's unpredictability: I stopped believing that institutions functioned in any reliable or useful fashion. I would be surprised, delighted, when anything went smoothly. I developed a sense of humor. I stopped wearing black, started wearing fuchsia. I became an optimist, and a fatalist.