MY LIFE AS A WASTREL, PART 2 - HOW I KEPT OFF THE STREETS

The thing about having no money is that it means different things to different people. I got to the point where my income from my job wasn't covering my rent; due to a fire at my place of employment there wasn't enough work to keep me paid in full, and when there finally was work my health had taken enough of a hit that I couldn't do my physically demanding job. I had a letter telling me I was expected to vacate the flat I was renting; I ignored it and decided the best course of action would simply be to stop opening my mail. So although I had no legal place to live I had a roof over my head and some income; all I had to do was live in constant fear of being turfed out on to the streets.

There was some outrage a couple of years ago when a clip from a 2003 documentary called Born Rich was shown on a couple of late night shows. In the clip Ivanka Trump recalls how her father pointed at a homeless guy outside of Trump Tower and told her that the homeless guy was eight billion dollars richer than he was after one of his many business disasters. People took umbrage at the tone deaf nature of the comment, but to me Donald's point is that he has the support network and assets in place that allow him to screw around as much as he wants without having to worry about missing a meal or sleeping outdoors. He was a conman that sold himself on being a great businessman despite having six different companies file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He shouldn't be trusted to run a church tombola, let alone the world's largest economy. But he illustrates my point that having no money doesn't necessarily stop you living comfortably.

I got my notice to evict in February 2018, I took this as a signal to stop paying any rent. The few months before that were very tight financially. My laptop, a few years old, broke in November 2017 and I didn't have the money to replace it. I didn't have a TV so I would sit in my kitchen and read, if I could focus on a book without anxiety making my mind wander. I soon found this hard and took instead to downloading podcasts on to my mp3 player at work and listening to them in my flat whilst filling out a couple of nonogram magazines I had bought months earlier but never finished. Nonograms are a sort of logic puzzle, you shade in squares on a grid and a picture forms. I still do several a day using an app; by hand they take a lot of time and concentration. Here's a completed one that would have taken about three or four hours with the app; hand shading each relevant square would obviously take a lot longer:

Laugh it up, Chuckles!

This is how I passed the time was when I living at my poorest, when I was still trying to follow the rules as best as I could. My electric was paid in advance by key; I kept a careful eye on it. My flat was cold, with a stone file floor in the kitchen and most of the flat sat on top of a garage. The only heating was old economy 7 storage heaters in the bedroom and lounge, the idea being they'd get hot at night when electricity was cheapest and warm the flat during the day. They were terrible; the bedroom would be fine in the morning but by the time I got home all benefit would be lost. The walls were cold to the touch and mould started growing on one bedroom wall. I would come home in my work uniform of thin polyester trousers and a polo shirt, plus a hoodie. Once upstairs I would put a dressing gown over that. I would sleep like that under a duvet. For months I would actually sleep in an office chair in my kitchen because before I started wearing compression bandages it was too difficult to climb into bed.

I was paid on the 25th of each month. For months I'd only been paying off the minimum of my credit card and sometime in the second half of that year it maxed out. I was living off my pre-arranged overdraft and getting charged for it daily, and sometimes that wasn't enough to last until payday. Some days I would buy a packet of stuffing mix for 16p, cool that and eat it for dinner. Other days I would mix a large dollop of mayonnaise with Tabasco or salt and pepper and eat that. The town co-op supermarket was only a few hundred yards from my flat, so I visited it most days when I knew food was being reduced right down in price before expiring. You could get sandwiches intended for that day's lunch for about sixty pence, and sometimes small bags of doughnuts or sausage rolls reduced from £1.20 to less than 20p. I would know exactly how much I had and how much my basket of goodies would cost. I was a member of the co-op, so any own brand products I bought I would get 5% of added to my account to spend there at a later date. I kept a close eye on this figure, too.

As I've previously written, Christmas that year was fucking miserable, meeting my brother's girlfriend, her brother and her mother for the first time with barely any presents for anyone. I had bought tickets months and months in advance to see a couple of shows in London, but had no money for a hotel or a bus there. Some time in January my parents came across some money, I think they gave both my brother and me £200? Maybe it was £100, I'm not sure, but I know they said they wanted me to put my money towards a new laptop. I put it towards the rent I already owed for that month.

I didn't want to seem ungrateful or let them know how much trouble I was in, so I let myself into work after dark and used their computer to take out a small payday loan, knowing it was an awful idea. That night I ate like a prince, and the next day I visited the local computer shop to buy the cheapest laptop they had. They had one for £200, built to do little more than run office programs. I asked if they were likely to get anything cheaper, knowing they bought second hand machines, and the owner told me he had one of the same specs that he could let go for £175 because the case was banged up and scratched, so he couldn't sell it to professionals despite it running fine. It didn't do much other than browse the net, run basic games, and download and play back TV shows and films, but it was a lot better than nothing!

Even when I stopped paying rent I was losing so much income paying back debts that it was a struggle living. I applied for Universal Credit, which provided a little extra on top of my pay cheques. I had figured out how to eat pretty well for very little, none of it healthy food but reduced ready meals or ridiculous £5 freezer bundles the co-op would sell, something like £5 for a frozen pizza, two baguettes of garlic bread, a bag of potato wedges, a bag of onion rings and a tub of fancy ice cream. I didn't have a microwave so I only bought food that could be prepared in an oven or a wok, or increasingly straight out of the packet. There were no fast food chains in my town; if there were I have no doubt I'd have occasionally made use of the various value meals, daily offers and such.

I mentioned at the top of my last post that there are aspects of being poor that simply don't occur to those who have money. A few years ago Gwyneth Paltrow challenged herself to live healthily for a week on the $29 the US government would award her family should they need to go on food stamps. Obviously, she didn't have an actual poor person's understanding of where to buy cheap food, and spent her twenty nine dollars on this:

Sometimes six limes just isn't enough!

Paltrow took heat for not taking the challenge seriously and bailing on the fourth day, and I don't have time for a lot of her nonsense, but I appreciate her setting herself up for failure in order to shed light on how difficult it really can be. Even if she had spent the week feeding her family hot dogs, spaghetti and store brand bread and peanut butter she would never understand the all-consuming fear that comes with being poor or squatting or whatever else. I learnt that when my government benefits were paid in on the 5th they would come in at 1 in the morning. I would leave my flat a little before then and head to an ATM so I could take out as much money as I could before one of the various lenders I owed could withdraw it later the same day. On the 25th when my boss paid me I would check my account before and after work, or if I wasn't working then constantly on my laptop so I could pull the same trick.

I took to shoplifting, something I had honestly never, ever done before, not even sweets as a kid. It felt terrible, but I knew I'd get away with it and shoplifting one item worth two or three pounds would mean I could eat well three or four times. I was fairly blatant; when I got to the co-op I would put my backpack in the shopping trolley, go around the store and pick out a dozen or so items, and leave one between the backpack and the trolley when I went to pay. I'd put the paid for items in the trolley and transfer them into the backpack and reusable bags outside the store. If anyone had ever pointed out I missed an item I planned on acting mildly embarrassed, making a joke of it and paying immediately. The staff all knew me as a regular, I spent all my money in there; food, drink, electric, painkillers. I only stole one item at a time and made sure I could pay for it. I'm not proud of it, but by paying for, say, two boxes of crackers and stealing a big block of cheese, rather than paying for a box of crackers and a small block of cheese, I could eat well six times instead of three. Is this how I planned to be looking after myself at the age of thirty? Of course not, but I just went with it.

My real rock bottom came when I stole from my boss, or at least get company. That felt really terrible, and I wish I hadn't. I wasn't the only one doing it; one day the back door was busted open and the float on the till was stolen. Then a couple of times the shop had been opened up to find that the money in the float was short with no explanation. My boss and her husband figured that a workman had a copy of a key. Other times the float wouldn't add up at the end of the day, which didn't really make sense as we had so few cash customers. There was such high turnover of staff it was hard to pin anything on anyone. It drove me wild that people were stealing from the company that had done right by me right up until the fire. When my boss asked if I knew anything about the money going missing overnight she may as well have punched me in the gut. I had taken on so much responsibility for that company, sacrificing my mental and physical health. I ended up taking the same liberties that someone else obviously was.I

A couple of times I went into the shop overnight and stole from the float. One Monday the driver left a bag of laundry with £20 inside, something he did every week for a regular customer; we'd do his laundry and return it with his change on a Thursday. When nobody was looking I fished out the £20. When the boss went to book in his laundry it wasn't clear if the money had been taken or if the old fella had forgotten to include it. When my boss called the customer he said the driver had dropped the bag between his flat and the van. The driver was an old boy himself and would often confuse things if they weren't spelt out for him. Once he left a £300 pair of customer's shoes on top of the van and drove off; the shoes were never seen again. The mystery of the disappearing £20 was never solved.

My biggest crime, and most reckless, was to process a fake refund on my debit card. The card machine ran separately from the till and I had a better understanding of either than my boss. I went in the shop early one morning, told the card machine I was processing a refund, swiped my card, and when it was done I ran the end-of-day reset, keeping that paperwork and the shop copy of my receipt. I gave myself £67 and change; I'd read years ago that most employers that checked for fraud looked for expenses and refunds starting at £80; apparently most people think they'll get away with stealing a little under £100 so this is a sensible safety net. I knew if the transaction was noticed and they looked into whose card it was I would be fucked; but I was betting that the lady who handled our finances, an employee of my boss' husband, was just too busy to notice, and I had destroyed the paper trail so she'd have to check electronically or whatever. It was a stupid risk, borne out of desperation, and I couldn't actually buy food for a further three days whilst the refund was processed by the bank. I was very afraid of getting caught, obviously, but I was fine.I

All told, I probably stole £150 over three or four months. I've thought about coming clean, but honestly what good would it do? My boss did call me once, I think she was hoping I'd build a website for the business. I had built one before, just as an excuse to play with a site builder, and because I thought it would help us win an award. My boss loved it, but her son builds websites for a living, and he'd been promising one for years, so she didn't want to upset him. She was a nice person, and so was her husband, but they had a habit of promising more than they could deliver. Every summer they talked about throwing a big boozy BBQ at their place. They constantly talked about bringing over a couple of the picnic benches her husband's company made so we could sit down on a lunch break without having to walk into town. I had a custom made desk built, but they never arranged for it to be delivered. Anyway, my boss said she hadn't seen me around and hoped I was okay, and I told her I had to relocate due to being homeless and was spending as much time in hospital than out of it. She hoped I would get better and remain the workforce. It was kind of weird but kind of nice.

I still check the company Facebook once in a while, I imagine the dry-cleaning side of the business (Not that they do any real dry-cleaning, when they refurbished they stuck with idiot-proof, no skill required wet-cleaning machines) took a real hit with COVID, and presumably the laundry side to a lesser extent. The last time I checked I saw that almost every trace of me had been removed from the timeline. Nothing told can stay!

It was obvious my time there had run, I was able to do less and less, I found it harder to care about how smooth the pockets were on a suit that would have cost a month of my rent or about a barely perceptible stain on a dress that someone was spending the equivalent of a week of my food to have cleaned. It suddenly felt very demanding and unfair. I stopped returning money I found in pockets to customers; I reasoned if you could afford to forget about a five pound note in your pocket you could afford to lose five pounds. The most money I'd ever found was £80, left at a pick up point by a customer. I returned it to him, which meant both the delivery driver and the employees at the village shop the suit was dropped off at kept their hands off the money! The fella actually sent £20 back as a thank you, but my boss kept it and spent it on Christmas decorations for the shop. Somehow that didn't seem fair!

So that gives you an idea of how I was surviving at my lowest point; illegally residing in a flat, indulging in penny-ante theft and generally hating myself and my situation. I have more to say about how bad my mental health got and how I eventually got the help I needed, but I fear this post is already a lot longer than I anticipated.

My next post will finish my ramblings about that time in my life, but for now I'll just say I'm doing much better, and again encourage you to leave a comment or e-mail me if you have any questions about that time, or anything else really!

Peace!

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