Between
Jobs

First thought every morning, before I'm even all the way awake: where's work today, and how do I get to it. Been the same thought for fifteen years, inside or out. I'm thirty-four. I've been working since the week after graduation. Framing crews, kitchens, a warehouse, two different moving companies, landscaping in the season. Never out of work for long. Never getting anywhere either.

I'll give you the part that's mine before you go digging for it. A DUI at twenty-four. Lost my license, and the license was how I got to the job sites, so I lost the job right behind it. Got the license back, eventually. Then a few years later I mouthed off to a foreman and walked before he could fire me. Stupid. Both of those are mine. I'm not asking anybody to pretend I was a saint.

But here's the thing I want you to sit with. I made those mistakes in a town where a guy like me used to be able to make them and come back. A bad year used to cost you a bad year. Somewhere in the last fifteen, that changed. Rent went up every lease. Pay didn't. The room for error went to zero, and I was always going to be a guy who needed some room.

My mistakes cost me jobs. The rent is what made one lost job cost me everything.

There's been work since the storm. Mucking out basements, demo, hauling, hanging drywall in houses the river went through. Cash some days, a check others, nothing the day after that. I spent most of last year helping put this town back together. That's not bragging. That's just what the year was.

And I'll say the next part with a straight face because somebody counted it: about half the guys doing construction in this town earn less than what a one-bedroom here requires. The men building Asheville can't afford to live in Asheville. I'm not the exception on those crews. I'm the average.

Day work is a lottery on top of it. Show up early, maybe get picked, maybe stand there till nine and walk back with nothing. No work, no pay. You can't stack a life on maybe. I know. I spent about ten years trying.

It took me four months out here to walk into the AHope day center. That's pride, and pride is expensive. I had it in my head that places like that were for people worse off than me, and that I was one good week from sorted. I was wrong by about two years.

Inside it's a shower, a mailbox, an outlet. My mail goes there now. You need an address for almost everything: job applications, the ID I had to replace, the license fees I'm still paying down. Lose the address and watch how fast the rest of it goes.

A caseworker there asked me what happened with the license. Not what's wrong with you. What happened. There's a difference. You feel it the first time somebody uses the right one.

Here's my math, and I've had years to check it. Even in my best stretches, full-time and overtime, rent ate the first chunk of every month and didn't leave much behind. One slow month and you're behind. Two and there's a notice on the door. I've read that notice three times in ten years. The last time, there was nowhere cheaper left to drop down to. The bottom rung was gone.

People say budget better. I know how to budget. Budgeting is most of what I do all day. You can't budget across a gap that's wider than the paycheck. Look at the two numbers up above this section. The wage it takes to rent a one-bedroom here is more than what they call a living wage. Both of those numbers are real, and neither one of them is about my character.

So it comes down to rent or eat, same as it does for anybody at the bottom of this. I eat less the last week of the month. Have for years. It started as a plan. Now it's just the shape of the month.

I spent last year rebuilding this town. I can't afford a room in it.

The pantry line is full of guys like me now. Working guys, or guys who were working last month. Nobody talks much. We all had the same idea about who food lines were for, and we were all wrong the same way.

There's a place over in West Asheville where you sit down and somebody brings you a plate. The first time, I almost walked back out. Felt like charity, and I was raised to believe charity was for somebody else. I'm over that now. Mostly. A hot plate at a table does something a box of cans doesn't. I won't pretend it doesn't.

And the line keeps getting longer. The cashier whose hours got cut. The retiree whose check quit stretching. The guy from my old crew who won't make eye contact because he's embarrassed, like I was, like we all were. None of us is a different kind of person. We're the same kind of person standing in a market with no floor.

Code Purple nights I'm inside if there's a bed. Other nights I've got a spot, and no, I'm not telling you where. You learn to sleep light. You learn the cold comes in layers. You learn which guys from the old crews still nod at you and which ones look through you now, and you remember that you used to look through people too.

Some of this is mine. I've said it and I mean it. But I knew guys dumber than me, with worse habits than mine, who are doing fine today, because they made their mistakes back when a mistake cost a setback instead of everything. Same guy, different decade, different ending. That's the part that keeps me up more than the cold does.