BY HELEN MORAN, 2013
There is a man who worked all his life to be a success, but everything he touched turned to ashes, and he ended up in the soiled crevices of a corner of the subway, with nothing but a cardboard box and a shopping cart. He didn’t even own a good broom. There is a woman who has in her possession a bedsheet, some wooden clothespins, a bath mat, and a radio; late in the evening, she walks to a café in the West Village. Outside the café is an empty rectangular cement patio. Eventually, tables and chairs and umbrellas will overtake the patio, but they are locked up inside the café. For the time being, the patio is empty. The woman sets out her bath mat and radio. She makes a tent with her sheet. She uses her imagination to see it as her temporary home, a very beautiful place, filled with promise, until the café manager arrives at six in the morning to discover the woman and her belongings, set up like a refugee camp. The manager tells the woman to find a different place to set up, but not before complimenting the woman on the bath mat.
I have the same one in my apartment bathroom, says the manager.
The most basic thing it behooves you to understand is that, as a poor troubled brown person, rich white people’s problems are much larger and more important than yours. If you understand this when you interact with them, and listen to rich people patiently, sometimes they will buy things for you. Or if you happen to not be good with people, but are on friendly terms with a more outgoing and charming person who is poor, you can connect to the rich people through the charming and poor person, because rich people love nothing more than to befriend a group of friendly and poor people, it gives them credibility. It makes them feel noble.
Remember to be interesting. Don’t be nice. Nice is not interesting. Nice is the how are you of greetings. Nice is the declawed cat, the beige house with the gazebo, and what’s the point of a gazebo? An investigative and probing spirit will give you a tour of the boarded-up and condemned house that every rich white person keeps inside herself.
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Once you befriend them, as you get to know them, you can begin to ask for things. First, establish your friendly relationship with the rich person and then after it has been established, say over the span of a couple weeks to a month, you can ask them to buy things for you. This is called ASKING. Create a story designed to pull on their heartstrings. Tell them your feet hurt from your worn-out shoes, which your mother never replaced because she was busy turning tricks, and last night you had a dream in which you miraculously discovered a pair of brand-new shoes underneath your bed. Tell them you have never seen the ocean, and you would like to go swimming in the ocean before you die, but you own no swimsuit or goggles, not even a beach towel in your possession. Ask and receive! Ask and receive! Ask and receive!
A young woman moved from borough to borough. Every time she moved, she kept nothing and slept on the floor of every apartment she ever inhabited in New York City, except her most recent studio apartment, which she shared with a roommate, because the previous roommate left behind a twin bed with a floral bedspread. The mattress was infested with bedbugs, she discovered quickly, the box spring, too. The first month of living in the studio apartment, each morning she woke up with dark red welts up and down her arms and legs and around her torso. Some of them she scratched and infected. Her roommate’s body was unscathed, whereas her own body became nothing but a canvas for these welts. She woke up in the middle of the night with a flashlight spotlighting the bed, searching for the blood-sucking parasites, but they were too small, at times nearly invisible. She only saw tiny black specks, their shit according to the internet. During the day, if she slid a credit card into one of the ripped seams of the mattress, the bedbugs would flow out in great numbers as if the mattress were stuffed with nothing but the brown-and-red leaf-shaped bugs. For a day, she prayed they would leave. After almost thirty years of not praying, she asked God to take the bedbugs away. When that didn’t work, she tried to see things from the bedbugs’ point of view. Wouldn’t the bugs say to one another, She’s great, but we’ve had enough, it’s time to eat the blood of a new person?
One bright and sunny day, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She researched how to exterminate them, she bought a toxic powder, and a mask, and sifted the toxic powder over her mattress and into the cracks in the molding, and the electrical sockets. While the toxic poison covered her twin bed with a fine powder, she went on the train to get out of her apartment. A young man sat across from her on the C train, and he kept making eye contact with her, as if he wanted to ask her something. They started talking. It turned out he was a single parent, he did shifts at the co-op, he took the train five stops and a transfer and a ride on the bus to buy his groceries, and he lived in a Crown Heights brownstone. He told her his favorite thing to do was to go to music festivals and casinos, but now that he had a daughter, casinos and festivals were off limits. After they got off the train together, she offered him a bag of harmless drugs she discovered in a locked storage closet at her place of work, in exchange for a place to stay. She explained her situation, she showed him the welts all over her body. She lifted up her shirt and showed him the belt of bites around her waist, then she gave the man a bag of light beige powder the size of a pillow for a tiny dog. Even though he had a daughter, she felt whatever he chose to do with the powder was his business, he was an adult, and it was not in her jurisdiction to police his usage of drugs, illegal or not. She needed a clean bed to sleep upon and the man had offered her a place in his bedroom, in his very own king-sized bed, a bedbug-free paradise-refuge.