My first jobs in high school were all babysitting gigs, and let’s be 100 percent clear about what I spent that money on: many issues of Sassy magazine, Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Bjork’s Post on cassette, every brown and maroon drugstore lipstick I could get my hands on, and steel-toed Doc Martens that I would clomp around in all day every day, even during gym class. Not once did it occur to me that I should be “putting money aside” or “saving for a rainy day”; the first fifteen miserable fucking years of my life had been one great big, long-ass rainy day during which I gazed longingly at the material possessions of my classmates, scowling at their name-brand jeans and hating my broke-ass parents. As soon as I got my first envelope of twenty-dollar bills for chasing babies named Tommy and Caroline around playrooms big enough to dwarf our entire apartment, I started plotting all the dumb ways I was going to waste it, like trading my nondescript blue backpack for one from Eddie Bauer (an exercise that required two buses and much confused trudging through the “good mall”) and skipping my free cafeteria hot lunch in favor of overpriced bags of carbohydrate trash from the vending machines in the student center.
I have never—and I mean ever—had a real desire to let otherwise-unaccounted-for money just chill in my bank account unmolested for more than maybe a week and a half. I barely have the willpower to leave other people’s money alone for the short time it’s in my custody. Money that isn’t earmarked for some pressing (transportation/pharmaceutical/credit card balance) need?! Why, yes, I do need fourteen nearly identical blushes, thank you. When I got my first real paycheck, I opened an account at the bank across the street from my job at the bakery. It was the same one my bosses used, so deposits would clear the same day and that was really the only thing I cared about. I ordered some cartoony checks that the teller had to show me how to fill out so I could pay the rent in my newly leased apartment (if either of my parents ever used a checkbook I never saw it—my dad kept a fat wad of bills held together with a rubber band in his pocket), I didn’t open a savings account or learn about making investments. That kind of stuff was for adults—adults who didn’t have years of deprivation to undo.
So many ratty Kmart bras I needed to replace with ones that could actually hold my tits up; so many albums with actual liner notes to replace the ones my friends had dubbed for me. Finally, I could read the lyrics to all those Portishead songs I was kind of making up in my head! I wish I could say that I bought some fly shit and a fancy ride, but really I just bought a lot of Gap shirts and name-brand sodas. I’ma assume some broke people are reading this and you know what I mean. I was making it rain dollar bills as I worked my way through the aisles at the Jewel, filling my cart with grape Crush and DiGiorno pizzas and CINNAMON TOAST MOTHERFUCKING CRUNCH. I bought a lot of Converse and a genuine Sony Discman that I filled with bona fide Energizer batteries.
I was trying to fill this gaping hole inside me with “stuff I couldn’t have when I was a little kid,” and I assumed that one day, when I had finally bought enough magazines and name-brand snack foods to feel caught up, the feeling would go away. But it hasn’t. And because I know the value of a dollar, when I get one, I want to buy the nicest thing I can with it. I’m still buying hardcover books and department-store mascara, still daydreaming about what I’m going to spend my 401(k) on when I withdraw that shit early, because who are we kidding? I’m not trying to live to sixty-five, are you nuts? Technically, I can afford it. I make good money, and I don’t have any debt, because I’ve never owned shit and I dropped out of college. I pay for everything in cash because I don’t understand APRs, and my credit file was so thin from so many years of living off the grid that when I finally got around to applying for a Discover card, Experian thought I might be dead.
Will my yawning internal pit of desire ever be full? Is there any amount of cash that’s enough to fully satiate this ravenous beast?! I don’t know, man. Will Céline keep making dope-ass sunglasses every season? Will Netflix and Spotify and HBO ever stop providing me with unlimited access to hours upon hours of entertainment to distract me from the ennui that awaits in real life? Will the ghost of Steve Jobs keep putting out next-generation iPhones with that one new feature I absolutely must have no matter how many of my firstborn sons I gotta give to Sprint to get one? How many lipsticks is too many? Is a daily Starbucks run really that big a deal? Why do they keep making new shampoos if you’re not supposed to immediately toss the half-full one you’ve been using just fine for months and get the shiny new one advertised in one of the many magazines you’re always “wasting” five dollars on? (Side note: I spend a lot of time anxi-sizing [anxiety fantasizing] about jobs I would never be able to do, and number one on that list is definitely “inventor of new cosmetics,” because how many different eye shadow kinds can there even be, how many kinds of lip pencil have yet to be thought of?)
If scientists could just cool out for a minute on the whole manufacturing of hot shit I will surely die without, I might be able to set aside some money for stocks or whatever, but I can’t right now, because did you know that for a scant $7.99 surcharge during off-peak hours, you can get Whole Foods precut watermelon pints and gluten-free vegan pizzas delivered right to your door by a dude named Jared driving a Smart car? That is if you don’t want to take an Uber there and back because fuck the train, a bitch just got paid!
Do I need to cancel my Hulu subscription? And if I do, can I wait until this season of The Voice is over? I don’t want to suffer through the indignity of commercials!
Ugh, I was feeling bad about my shoes at this fancy “cocktail lounge” the other night with this bitch I don’t like that much who I know for a fact is greater-than-slash-equal to me in levels of poverty, and she made an elaborate show of heaving her giant designer purse onto the bar so she could dig through it to find the laundry money she was going to use to pay for her Sazerac. “That’s a really nice bag,” I said genuinely, taking a sip of my light bill. “Did you recently receive a settlement of some kind?” She laughed heartily and poured her Obamacare deductible down her throat in one long swallow. “Girl, nah, I bought this with money I should’ve spent on my car payment.” I clinked the ice in my checking account overdraft fees and nodded solemnly in agreement.
A lot of us are living like this, right? Taking cabs and ordering takeout Thai on payday, then walking the three blocks to work from the train with a bologna sandwich in our bags a week or so later? How does anyone do anything? Or, better than that, how does anyone do both the shit they want to do with their money at the same time they’re doing the shit they need to? Example from my own dumb life: I need to buy a plane ticket to LA on some last-minute shit. If I buy it now, I’ma probably have to pay my rent late. If I wait, chances are I’m gonna have to fly out at 10:30 p.m. and pay $1,200 for a center seat or some equally undesirable thing. Every time I pay an overdue bill from a doctor visit so long ago I can’t even remember what was wrong with me at the time (WTF is the point of this insurance if it doesn’t cover anything?), I shed a tear for the half dozen quirkily adorable T-shirts I could be ordering from ModCloth instead. I want to be one of those people who feels satisfied when I pay my bills rather than cheated out of whatever frivolity was sacrificed in their place.