Holly
Holly
I came back from the Peace Corps in December of last year. I was going to stay a little while with my mom in my childhood home, make a little money, and then send off to truly pursue being a painter. I would move to New York city maybe as early as February I told myself. First of course there were some necessities. Before anything else I needed an American number which I purchased on recommendation of my brother, from the budget provider Ting for just 25 dollars a month.
Next I would need a job. Something that I could use to break into the service industry and hit NYC with some skills I think. So I print my resume of Peace Corps, afterschool childcare and Jimmy Johns bike delivery and go door to door asking who’s hiring. I get mostly nos, including one local pub that yells angrily that in fact they are letting people go. On just my third day though I met Marie, an older french immigrant and owner of the local location of european cafe and chocolate store Leonidas. After taking a perfunctory glance at my resume and asking me if I was “the stupid kind”, she said I could start Sunday making $17.50 while I was trained.
Sunday I was shown the dishes sink where I was left to wash dishes for the better part of my 8 hour shift. When the day was done Marie asked me if I had eaten anything.
“There wasn’t any time,” I say.
“That’s how we do things here,” She says, obviously encouraged that I hadn’t complained.
It’s Christmas time, so the store is a true hell scape of towering boxes of chocolate, screaming children, college kids reuniting, family brunches, and the retired regulars. All of whom are the kind of wealthy clientele that scoff incredulously when their milk is whole and not skim, demanding it be remade no matter how long the line is. The line is always long for my time at Leonidas. I am constantly moving as fast as I can and still behind. I show up six full days in a row before asking about a day off, my back is killing me and at home I can hardly walk. Marie tells me I could take the next day off or come in and make some real money overtime.
I take the day off, which I use in part to google how to get health insurance. Upon my arrival back to the states I was informed that even though I was 24 years old, my dad’s retirement meant that I was now uninsured. The Illinois get covered website is unable to confirm my identity and gives me a number to call. A problem for after christmas I decide.
I continue to put my all into learning the ins and outs of barista life. Every day I silently wash dishes, confuse drink orders, burn milk, and spill crepe batter, until Marie works herself into a rage of tuts and yells “I’ll do It!”.
Even when my siblings and one year old niece (whom I had only met once before) are here for Christmas, I work Christmas Eve. When my friends all visit for New Years Eve I work all day before meeting up with them at night. I’m saving, I’m working for my dreams I think.
I talk in Spanish with Linda, the manager from Mexico City who was a doctor in Mexico before she followed her husband to the states. Her son studied at UW Madison just like me, but now lives at home unemployed. She is still paying off the school debt. She likes to say “The American Dream” with air quotes and roll her eyes.
After shifts I call the state health insurance number many times just to be told to go back to the same website which I got the number from. When I beg that they don’t hang up they call me rude and hang up.
It is during these first weeks that I meet Holly. Holly is the previous owner of my new American cell phone number. When I say “meet” Holly, I mean to say I learn her name through frequent texts saying that Holly’s walgreens order is ready for pick up. It is annoying, but the price you pay for a cheap number I suppose.
In the following weeks I became more and more resented at the cafe. Marie is enraged that I can’t seem to remember who ordered what drink. She tells me “wake up! Wake up!” whenever I make a mistake. I am added to the tip pool which only gets me hated by my co-workers. Linda tells me I pay no attention to details when I put the sliced ham back where the cheese is supposed to go. Marie eventually reaches an almost open hatred of me. A customer asks what omelet is the best and when I say “The Parisian” Marie informs the customer that I am a liar and I have never had the omelets. I am scheduled for 7 days in a row and five days out I tell Marie that I can not work the 7th day because I have a doctor's appointment (a lie).
“You need to work on your communication,” she says.
Chatting with Linda I complain about having been scheduled 7 days in a row. Linda complains that Marie often makes the schedule so that Linda comes in almost every day but is never able to get overtime hours.
“But the tips are good,” Linda says.
An hour later when Marie arrives for the day I am called from the dishes by a furious Marie who says I was not scheduled 7 days in a row.
“I never said I was,” I lie, but I know I have made a huge mistake.
Two days later I am called on my day off by Marie who informs me I am being let go because it seems my “heart is not in it”. Oh well. I was going to quit anyway. I can use the time to figure out health insurance. The state reps office who I have been in touch with has been calling me while I am at work. They close at 4pm and I have been getting out at 5: 30pm. When I’m finally able to call during the day, I am given a new number to call which fixes the issue in a matter of minutes making me able to splurge for the 100 dollars a month credit subsidized Blue Cross Blue Shield plan.
In the next weeks of unemployment I lie in bed with a chest cold. My phone rings multiple times a day. I answer in hopes it is someone I have given a resume too, but it is always a scam. It is always some credit something looking for Holly.
I use my time to work on completing a collection of essays about the Peace Corps. I start handing out resumes to local restaurants again. Nobody is hiring. They are looking for someone with restaurant experience. I start saying that I worked at a cafe, but that the cafe only wanted someone for the holidays. I can see them see through the lie. I go to one restaurant that has a dishwasher wanted sign. The guy asks me where I’m from. When I say here he says “but where are you really from?”, because why would a privileged suburban white kid be begging to wash dishes.
The only calls I get are for Holly. She is constantly being reminded that her prescription is ready for pickup. I apply online to work at the local Five Guys. The interview lasts just a handful of minutes. They promise me up to 40 hours of work after the first week or two of training, but I find out that they have just hired around ten high school kids and only plan to keep one or two of us full time for the summer. I buy nonslip shoes for 40 bucks from walmart to handle the grease soaked floors. Five Guys would have sold me a pair for 80 dollars if I needed.
The work is mind numbing but easy and without the presence of an overbearing and judgmental french lady. I get decent at flipping burgers. I shoot the shit with my co-workers who don’t get too pissed off when I mess up. “It’s okay you’re learning,” they say, which makes me feel good and then childish for needing praise. On my second day there is a buy one get one free promo that wasn’t communicated to the store and I am called into a standing room only Five Guys full of furious customers. We race for 5 or 6 hours to try and keep up before I am sent to lock the doors and turn customers away while we can try to finish the orders we are still working on. There are so many of these orders that the ticket machine has begun printing on to the floor. That night we did not finish closing until 1:30am. The high school kids were sent home at 12 so they could make it into school the next morning. Julisa, the early in transition trans woman who refuses to give up control of the grill, tells me she has a shift starting at 4am in the Modelo warehouse and she will not sleep tonight. The manager in near tears explains he regrets locking the doors. The last manager to turn away customers was fired, he explains. It is worth mentioning that this promo mistake got national news attention. The CEO of Five Guys gave out 1.5 million dollars in bonuses to those that worked during the deal so that “no one would shoot him” he even joked that he preferred paying for the bonus over buying his wife a new fur coat. I do not think I got paid any extra during that shift. If I was, it was not noticeable.
I managed to get along for a while flipping burgers, but when the first pay check hit I realized why Marie and Linda constantly reminded me the tips at Leonidis were good. At first, I would try and not take the mandatory half hour lunch break at Five Guys, preferring to keep making money, but when I realized how little I make anyway, I stopped caring. Even as the weeks passed they only scheduled me for 20 or so hours. I find out this is what all fast food companies do. They rely on an army of part time employees so that they never have to give full time employee benefits. My shifts become meditations on futility. How many hours of human life have been spent like this I wonder. How many great pyramids could have been constructed using all the labor of all the Mcdonalds workers ever?
It is at some point during my time at Five Guys that I receive a message from a urologist's office. It is for Holly. I hear something about my husbands cancer and delete the message. The prescription refill texts make more sense now.
I get a call from a Chinese restaurant I had forgotten I gave a resume to over a month ago. They will train me to be a server. My big break. On my first day the bus boy tells me I'm hired only because they are taking another server off the schedule for a week or two over something he had done.
I like working there. The place is unorganized and frequently messes up orders, but they feed me a staff meal of stir fried tofu or duck scraps every shift. I often think about the lives of the Chinese chefs who I can not communicate with outside of hand signals. They laugh and yell at each other in flowy tonal Chinese and squat in the alley to smoke cigarettes on break. I make nearly double an hour as a server than at Five Guys for a much easier job, but two weeks later I am taken off the schedule and the old server is hired back.
I get a text from someone named Eileen presumably looking for Holly asking if I could make a dress for a charity sale next week. When I say this is no longer Holly’s number she tells me I am a good person.
“May god bless you,” she says.
“No worries god bless,” I reply.
After losing the Chinese restaurant job I asked a friend for the number of his old therapist in the area. He gives me her info and I send her an email. She says she is in-network (my fancy new healthcare plan shows 10 dollar co-pay for in-network therapy visits) and a week or so later I am sitting in her office talking about how isolating life feels. I am back in my mom’s house in a wealthy suburb of Chicago working the lowest paying jobs struggling to save money while paying no rent. There is nobody my age in this neighborhood. When I finish shifts at Five Guys the police slow down as they pass me biking home. I get glares in the street. One time while I stand painting by the side of the road a police officer comes to inform me that a neighbor called the police to do a wellness check on me. I feel totally unwanted in my home town, but financially stuck.
At some point in March I give a talk to the Spanish classes of the high school I went to about my experience in Peace Corps Peru, something that I have been working to set up ever since I reconnected with my old Spanish teacher to do a video call between my students in Peru and his high school kids. I do a full presentation during 7 of the 8 45 minute period classes, afterwards I am sure to mention to the teachers that I am looking for work. A couple days later I get an email that one Spanish teacher is pregnant and looking for a maternity leave sub in the fall. I interview and they say I should start subbing for them now just to see if I like it.
Once I am processed through the hr department they show me the subbing app where I can pick up as many classes as I would like. I quit Five Guys the same day.
I start listening to an occasional message left for Holly and come to some realizations. Her number was taken from her because she couldn’t pay her T-mobile bill. I get messages offering deals for buying back the phone plan debt. I also get calls about medical debt. More scam calls about Medicaid which I realize I am getting because the number is listed under some medicaid database the scammers must have access to. I also start getting texts from a paycheck advance company informing me my balance is running low.
My first shift as a substitute I tell the kids that I once went to their high school.
“What do you do for work?” asks a tall 14 year old awkward in his newly lankly body.
“This” I say.
He smiles nudging his friends as if to say watch this.
“So you like live with your parents then?” He asks.
“Yes”
“Do you sleep in your room or do you get the basement?”
“I know what you're doing. If you really want to keep going I can write you up,” I snap.
Kids are kids I think to myself. I’m not new to education and have thick skin I think, but the interaction sticks with me for days. His entitled smile.
The next week I get an email from my therapist's office.
“Claims from your sessions have been processed and will count toward your deductible. The account balance is $616.67.”
My stomach turns. It was supposed to be in net-work. It was supposed to be 10 dollars. They had even told me I would be charged the same day as the visit. $616.67. That’s what I make for two weeks of Five Guys with the hours they give me, but if you take out groceries and my phone plan and health insurance and every other current expense of living then how long does it take me to save $616.67? 600 dollars that I am spending because I saw someone in part because I was struggling with feeling trapped.
“I would recommend calling the back of your insurance card to verify your mental health benefits. Even though we are ‘in-network’ everyone's benefits are different and sometimes the sessions go toward the deductible prior to meeting it.
We are happy to pause sessions and create a payment plan. I look forward to hearing from you.”
Is the email I get in response to me asking for an explanation. I call the insurance company and they explain that while the therapy office is covered through Blue Cross Blue Shield, the office does not have a contract with my plan specifically as my plan is a new plan. There is nothing I can do, they say. I think about not paying. I immediately change my card on file on their electronic system to my Peruvian debit card which is tied to an empty bank account. I look up what happens to medical bills if you don’t pay them. It gets sent to collections and collections finds your phone number and calls you nonstop. That’s why I’m always getting calls for Holly. I think about what it would mean to have this number be harassed for two different medical debts. The number itself becoming a uniquely American cross to bear for whoever its next owner would be.
I don’t end up paying. My therapist takes pity on me and calls the four sessions pro-bono, sending me a resource for low cost therapy.
It seems I will secure the maternity sub position for the fall. In May I plan to go to Mexico for the summer to paint. I am in some ways saved for the following 6 months if everything goes to plan, I could still move to New York City next winter. I know in reading this story it is easy to feel anger toward a privileged kid dipping a toe into the waters of poverty. Seeing someone struggle to accept realities that for many have been realities for a lifetime is understandably frustrating. Or maybe for many others accepting these realities is just a part of becoming an adult. I would like to offer that my struggle to accept these realities is not a failing on my own behalf. Instead it is fresh eyes to see again these realities for their absurd unjustness. I want to be an artist. To do so I will have to eschew many of the privileges I grew up with. I am prepared and willing to do so, but the work of an artist requires the ability to produce hours and hours of bad art. If learning a skill takes 10,000 hours then we can reasonably expect 10,000 hours worth of bad art. That isn’t just any bad art though, it has to be personally fulfilling and interesting to the artist in order for it to really push the practice, which means it can not be tied or motivated to profit. That makes time and specifically free time the single most valuable resource to the artist, and so how can we ever expect good art if our working class spends every hour of their time just trying to survive. Poverty amongst artists is often romanticized. The artist is rewarded for sticking out from society and speaking their mind for never “selling out”. Wealth in many ways is social. Capital and access to capital becomes an in-group out-group thing. It is no coincidence that many of my co-workers at these jobs I have worked over the past months are immigrants or members of the queer community. I would like to ask you why do you think the trope of the best baristas being non-binary exists? Do you think non-binary people don’t make good lawyers or doctors? Or is it that these people’s gender identity socially ostracizes them, removing them from support networks that would have provided them the resources needed to do anything more than serve coffee. In this same way the artist is ostracized from society through their freedom of speech and independent thought. For the artist this fierce refusal to bow to the corrective forces of capital is seen as noble or at the very least, beautifully tragic. I ask you then to tell me what is romantic about Holly’s story? What is romantic about the woman who drowns in debt making dresses for charity sales as her husband battles to live through cancer? I am reminded of her deeply unromantic story every day as debt collectors call me asking for Holly. These calls are my daily reminder that poverty is not romantic, not for artists, not for anyone.
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