Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (7 page)

One of the steps A.A. asks of recovering alcoholics is to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of themselves, and now, alone in my motel room, I find myself fairly obsessed with my stuff, how much of it there is and how long it will last. I have my laptop and a suitcase containing T-shirts, jeans, and khakis, three long-sleeve shirts, one pair of shorts, vitamins, and an assortment of toiletries. I have a tote bag stuffed with books, which will, along with the hiking boots I have brought for weekends, turn out to be the most useless items in my inventory. I have $1,000, plus some small bills crumpled in pockets. And now, for an alarming $59 a night, I have a bed, a TV, a phone, and a nearly unobstructed view of Route 25. There are two kinds of low-rent motel rooms in America: the Hampton Inn type, which are clearly calibrated, rather than decorated, to produce an atmosphere of menacing sterility—and the other kind, in which history has been allowed to accumulate in the form of carpet stains, lingering deposits of cigarette smoke, and Cheeto crumbs deep under the bed. This Motel 6 is in the latter category, which makes it, homier, you might say, or maybe only more haunted. Walking out from the main entrance, through the VIP Auto Parts parking lot, you reach the Texaco station with a Clipper Mart attached. Crossing the turnpike from the Texaco—a feat that, performed on foot, demands both speed and nerve—brings you to more substantial sources of sustenance, including a Pizza Hut and a Shop-n-Save. This is, of course, a considerable step up from the situation described in J. G. Ballard's harrowing novel Concrete Island, in which the hero crashes onto a median island and finds himself marooned by the traffic, forced to live off the contents of his car and whatever food items he can scrounge from the debris left by motorists. I bring pizza and salad back to my room for dinner, telling myself that anything tastes better when acquired at some risk to life and limb, like venison fresh from the hunt.

How many people, other than fugitives and refugees, ever get to do something like this—blow off all past relationships and routines, say bye-bye to those mounds of unanswered mail and voice-mail messages, and start all over again, with not much more than a driver's license and a Social Security card to provide a thread of continuity to the past? This should be exhilarating, I tell myself, like a dive into the frigid New England Atlantic, followed by a slow, easy swim beyond the surf. But in those first few days in Portland the anxieties of my actual social class take over. Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived. So what am I doing here, and in what order should I be doing it? I need a job and an apartment, but to get a job I need an address and a phone number and to get an apartment it helps to have evidence of stable employment. The only plan I can come up with is to do everything at once and hope that the teenagers at the Motel 6 switchboard can be trusted to serve as my answering machine.

The newspaper I pick up at the Clipper Mart bears the unexpected news that
there are no apartments in Portland. Actually, there are plenty of condos and
“executive apartments” for $1,000 a month or more, but the only low-rent options
seem to be clustered in an area about a thirty-minute drive south, in the soothingly
named town of Old Orchard Beach. Even there, though, the rents are right up
at Key West levels—well over $500 for an efficiency. A few calls confirm my
impression that winter housing for the poor consists of motel rooms that the
more affluent fill up in the summer.
[8]
You
get the low rates after Labor Day, and your lease expires in June. What about
a share, then? Glenwood Apartments (not its real name) in Old Orchard Beach
is advertising a room at $65 a week, share bath and kit with a woman described
to me on the phone as “a character, but clean”—and I think, hey, that could
be me or at least my new best friend. Navigating with my Clipper Mart map, I
reach the declining, and evidently orchardless, beach town at about ten and
am shown around Glenwood by Earl. He repeats the “character, but clean” part
about my potential housemate, adding that they are “giving her a chance.” I
ask if she has a job, and, yes, she does cleaning. But I'll never meet her because
the place is so disturbing, to the point of probably being illegal. We go into
the basement of this ramshackle combination motel and boardinghouse, where Earl
indicates a closed door—the kitchen, he says—but we can't go in now, because
a guy is sleeping there. He chuckles, as if sleeping in kitchens is just another
one of the eccentricities you have to put up with in the landlord business.
So how do you cook? I want to know. Well, he isn't in there all the time. The
room itself, just down the hall from the “kitchen,” is half the size of my little
outpost in Motel 6 and contains two unmade twin beds, a two-drawer chest, a
couple of light bulbs on the ceiling, and nothing else. There is no window.
Well, there is a windowlike structure near the ceiling, but it offers a view
only of compacted dirt, such as one might normally see when looking up from
the grave.

I walk back to the main street of town and set up my “office” at the pay phone near the pier, from which I secure invitations to view a few more apartments, forget the shares. At the SeaBreeze, I'm shown around by a large, contemptuous guy who tells me there are no problems here because he's a retired cop and his son-in-law is a cop too, and everyone knows this, but I can't tell whether I'm supposed to feel reassured or warned. Another putative plus: he keeps down the number of children in the place, and the ones that he gets don't make any trouble, you can take his word for that. But the rent is $150 a week, so it's on to the Biarritz, where a jolly gal shows me the efficiency for $110 a week—no TV, no linens, no dishware. What I don't like is the ground-floor part, right on a well-traveled commercial street, meaning you have a choice between privacy and light. Well, that's not all I don't like, but it's enough. I'm heading back to Portland in defeat when I notice that the Blue Haven Motel on Route 1 has apartments to rent, and the place looks so cute, in an Alpine sort of way, with its rows of tiny white cottages set against deep blue pines, that I stop. For $120 a week I can have a bed/living area with a kitchen growing off of it, linens included, and a TV that will have cable until the cable company notices that the former occupant is no longer paying the bill. Better yet, the security deposit is only $100, which I produce on the spot.

Given a few days or weeks more to look, maybe I could have done better. But the meter is running at the rate of $59 a day for my digs at the 6, which are resembling a Ballard creation more every day. On the afternoon of my third day there, I return to my room to find that the door no longer responds to my key. As it turns out, this is just management's way of drawing my attention to the fact that more money is due. It's a bad moment, though, lasting long enough for me to glimpse a future without toothbrush or change of clothes.

Now to find a job. I know from my Key West experience to apply for as many as possible, since a help-wanted ad may not mean that any help is wanted just now. Waitressing jobs aren't plentiful with the tourist season ending, and I'm looking for fresh challenges anyway. Clerical work is ruled out by wardrobe limitations. I don't have in my suitcase—or even in my closet back at home—enough office-type outfits to get me through a week. So I call about cleaning (both office and homes), warehouse and nursing home work, manufacturing, and a position called “general helper,” which sounds friendly and altruistic. It's humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself—your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience—to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package. At a tortilla factory, where my job would be to load dough balls onto a conveyor belt, the “interview” is completed by a bored secretary without so much as a “Hi, how are you?” I go to Goodwill, which I am curious about since I know from past research it has been positioning itself nationwide as the ideal employer for the postwelfare poor as well as the handicapped. I fill out the application and am told that the pay is $7 an hour and that someone will get back to me in about two weeks. During the entire transaction, which takes place in a warehouse where perhaps thirty people of both sexes are sorting through bins of used clothing, no one makes eye contact with me. Well, actually one person does. As I search for the exit, I notice a skinny, misshapen fellow standing on one foot with the other tucked behind his knee, staring at me balefully, his hands making swimming motions above his head, either for balance or to ward me off.

Not every place is so nonchalant. At a suburban Wal-Mart that is advertising
a “job fair” I am seated at a table with some balloons attached to it (this
is the “fair” part) to wait for Julie. She is flustered, when she shows up after
about a ten-minute wait, because, as she explains, she just works on the floor
and has never interviewed anyone before. Fortunately for her, the interview
consists almost entirely of a four-page “opinion survey,” with “no right or
wrong answers,” Julie assures me, just my own personal opinion in ten degrees
from “totally agree” to “totally disagree.”
[9]
As with the Winn-Dixie preemployment test I took in Key West, there are the
usual questions about whether a coworker observed stealing should be forgiven
or denounced, whether management is to blame if things go wrong, and if it's
all right to be late when you have a “good excuse.” The only thing that distinguishes
this test is its obsession with marijuana, suggesting that it was authored by
a serious stoner struggling to adjust to the corporate way of life. Among the
propositions I am asked to opine about are, “Some people work better when they're
a little bit high,” “Everyone tries marijuana,” and, bafflingly, “Marijuana
is the same as a drink.” Hmm, what kind of drink? I want to ask. “The same”
how—chemically or morally? Or should I write in something flippant like, “I
wouldn't know because I don't drink”? The pay is $6.50, Julie tells me, but
can shoot up to $7 pretty fast. She thinks I would be great in the ladies' department,
and I tell her I think so too.

What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the “right” answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the “Accutrac personality test,” which warns at the beginning that “Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or 'psych out' the questionnaire.” Naturally, I “never” find it hard “to stop moods of self-pity,” nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that “management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals.” The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us. We don't just want your muscles and that portion of your brain that is directly connected to them, we want your innermost self.

The main thing I learn from the job-hunting process is that, despite all the help-wanted ads and job fairs, Portland is just another $6-$7-an-hour town. This should be as startling to economists as a burst of exotic radiation is to astronomers. If the supply (of labor) is low relative to demand, the price should rise, right? That is the “law.” At one of the maid services I apply at—Merry Maids—my potential boss keeps me for an hour and fifteen minutes, most of which is spent listening to her complain about the difficulty of finding reliable help. It's easy enough to think of a solution, because she's offering “$200 to $250” a week for an average of forty hours' work. “Don't try to put that into dollars per hour,” she warns, seeing my brow furrow as I tackle the not-very-long division. “We don't calculate it that way.” I do, however, and $5 to $6 an hour for what this lady freely admits is heavy labor with a high risk of repetitive-stress injuries seems guaranteed to repel all mathematically able job seekers. But I am realizing that, just as in Key West, one job will never be enough. In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap—as measured by the pay—that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.

After two days of sprinkling job applications throughout the greater Portland
area, I force myself to sit in my room at the 6, where I am marooned until the
Blue Haven will let me in on Sunday, and wait for the phone to ring. This takes
more effort than you might think, because the room is too small for pacing and
too dingy for daydreaming, should I have been calm enough to give that a try.
Fortunately, the phone rings twice before noon, and more out of claustrophobia
than any serious economic calculation—I accept the first two jobs that are offered.
A nursing home wants me on weekends for $7 an hour, starting tomorrow; The Maids
is pleased to announce that I “passed” the Accutrac test and can start on Monday
at 7:30 A.M. This is the friendliest and best-paying maid service I have encountered—$6.65 an hour, though as a punishment this will drop to $6 for two weeks if
I fail to show up for a day.
[10]
I don't understand
exactly what maid services do and how they are different from agencies, but
Tammy, the office manager at The Maids, assures me that the work will be familiar
and easy, since “cleaning is in our blood.” I'm not so sure about the easy part
after the warnings I got at Merry Maids, but I figure my back should be able
to hold out for a week. We're supposed to be done at about 3:30 every day, which
will leave plenty of time for job hunting on weekday afternoons. I have my eye
on a potato chip factory a ten-minute drive from the Blue Haven, for example,
or I can always search out L.L. Bean and fill catalog orders from what I hope
will be an ergonomically congenial seat. This is beginning to look like a plan:
from maids' service to something better, with the nursing home tiding me over
during the transition. To celebrate, I eat dinner at Appleby's—a burger and
a glass of red wine for $11.95 plus tip, consumed at the bar while involuntarily
watching ESPN.