On Hypothetical Questions
“No. There’s no scenario where I’d eat a human being, so you can stop making them up and asking me, understood? Jesus, is this how you spend your day, just coming up with this shit?”
On Friendliness
“Listen, I know you hate playing with that chubby kid because his mom’s a loudmouth, but it’s not that kid’s fault his mom’s a bitch. Try to be nice to him.”
On Fair Play
“Cheating’s not easy. You probably think it is, but it ain’t. I bet you’d suck more at cheating than whatever it was you were trying to do legitimately.”
On Leaving My Toys Around the House
“Goddamn it, I just sat on your goddamned truck guy. . . . Optimus Prime? I don’t give a shit what it’s called, keep it away from where I like to put my ass.”
On Child Safety
“Don’t touch that knife. YOU never need to be holding a knife. . . . I don’t give a shit, learn how to butter stuff with a spoon.”
On Slumber Parties
“There’s chips in the cabinet and ice cream in the freezer. Stay away from knives and fire. Okay, I’ve done my part. I’m going to bed.”
On Sharing
“I’m sorry, but if your brother doesn’t want you to play with his shit, then you can’t play with it. It’s his shit. If he wants to be an asshole and not share, then that’s his right. You always have the right to be an asshole—you just shouldn’t use that right very often.”
It’s Important to Know the Value of a Dollar
“Let’s just shut the fuck up and eat.”
Both of my parents grew up poor—my mom, in an underprivileged Italian community on the outskirts of Los Angeles (her mother and father both passed away before she turned fifteen, at which point she and her five siblings were split up between a few different relatives); and my dad, on a farm in Kentucky, where he and his family worked as sharecroppers until he was fourteen and his dad bought the farm.
“When I had an earache, my mom would piss in my ear to kill the pain,” my dad once told me in an effort to illustrate the depths of his family’s poverty.
“That just seems weird, Dad. Not something poor people do.”
“Yeah, maybe that was a bad example,” he said after thinking about it for a moment.
Regardless, my parents never missed an opportunity to remind me and my brothers that we had it good. “You prance around on your fucking skateboards and bikes like you’re the goddamned Queen of England,” he used to tell us when we spent our weekends goofing off with friends and neglecting our chores.
Sometimes my parents worried that my brothers and I had it too easy; that we’d grow up not understanding the value of a dollar, or how it feels to struggle. Even before my mom attended law school and began working in poverty law, she spent a lot of her free time volunteering in the poor communities of San Diego. She worked with parents on welfare and with homeless families, organizing afterschool programs or helping them become self- sufficient to get off welfare. Anytime I complained about anything, she’d invoke those families.
“Why aren’t you eating your pasta?” she asked me one night over dinner when I was ten years old.
“It’s got peas in it,” I replied.
“So pick out the peas.”
“Well, you know I don’t like peas, but you put peas in it anyway. Why do you do that?” I whined.
“Excuse me? You’re treading on thin fucking ice, buddy,” my dad barked, looking up from his plate. “That’s your mother. You and she are not equals. Here’s her,” he said, putting his hand high up above his head, “and here’s you,” he added, putting his other hand well below the table. “If she wants to serve only peas for the rest of fucking eternity you will sit there every goddamned day and eat them and say ‘thank you’ and ask for more.”
“Why would I ask for more if I hate them?” I said.
My dad told me to leave the table and go to my room—or at least that’s what I think he said, because he was screaming with a mouth full of peas. About a week later, my mom came home from her law school library a little later than usual to find my brother Evan and me sitting on the couch watching TV a few feet from our dad, who was leaning back in his recliner, half-asleep. She turned off the TV, rousing my dad, and told the three of us that she had an announcement.
“We’re going to eat what impoverished families eat,” she proclaimed.
“What does ‘impoverished’ mean?” I whispered to Evan.
“It means poor people or something,” he said, worry lines spreading over his face like a spiderweb.
Our mom went on to explain that she had visited the grocery store where some of the poor families she knew through her volunteering shopped with their food stamps. She described the food, how only some of it was expired though all of it looked disgusting, and then capped off her anecdote with, “We’re going to eat for a week only the food I purchase from that store, with the same budget as they do.”
“Dad?” I said, turning to him in desperation.
“Dad thinks this is a great idea,” my mom replied, before he could answer.
A couple days later our fridge and cupboards were stocked with the strangest-looking foods I’d ever seen. I remember thinking to myself,
“How is this fresh baked?” I asked Evan, holding a limp, floury slice in my hand.
“I don’t know. I guess at one point, someone baked it, and then it was fresh.”
At lunchtime on the first day of our new food regime, I opened up the brown paper bag my mom had packed for me. The first item I pulled out was a foul combination of foodstuffs posing as a turkey sandwich. I held it up in front of me. The bread looked like two pieces of soggy sandpaper, and the turkey looked like it was made out of whatever Larry King is made out of: some kind of pasty white, stringy flesh.
“That looks fucking nasty,” my friend Aaron said, staring at my sandwich like it was a mangled creature that had washed ashore after a tsunami.
That afternoon I came home and marched right into Evan’s room. I asked him if his lunch bag was filled with the same inedible stuff as mine. It was. We each had thrown out our sandwich and the strange, carrotlike vegetables that came with it, and eaten only the block of white American cheese that completed the so-called meal. I wanted to revolt, but Evan has never been the revolutionary type, and I wasn’t prepared to stage a
