Issue Five

At age 22, binging on English novels for the first time in my life, I read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, in which he describes his voluntary descent into poverty. Years later, I encountered Isaac Asimov’s judgment of the book –Orwell’s experience of penury was not authentic, he suggested, because money was available to him the moment he chose to have someone send him a check. Orwell was, as we might say, merely slumming, making a grand show of his solidarity with the poor but only playing, never living, the role of someone in need.

Asimov points to an intriguing question, but he answers it too quickly. When we suffer willfully, by our own hand, do we genuinely suffer? If a poor person has chosen poverty, is the poverty real? Does it cut to the bone or merely graze the skin? The question extends to other kinds of suffering. Do self-flagellants, like the Monty Python monks who beat their own heads with stones, feel real pain? Does an acetic who puts himself on an meager regimen have anything in common with someone who has never had a day without hunger?

All of these questions related directly to my own life, though it took me years to notice the connection. The same year I was devouring English literature, I began a series of austerities–not quite what the church used to call mortifications of the flesh, but daunting nonetheless. I denied myself the 3 greatest pleasures of my former life–TV, movies, and music. I slept on the floor, with at most a blanket as a cushion. I became a vegetarian, drinking no alcohol or caffeine, only water; later, I began eating only lentils, rice, oatmeal, bread, potatoes, and the occasional apple or orange.

At that time it was not uncommon me to fast every other day, and on days when I did eat, I ate little. My stomach was often hungry. Inevitably, my body, which had never been heavy, became rather emaciated, to the point that people began inviting me to dinner hoping to fatten me up with a good meal. Considering I was wholly oblivious to the change in my weight, and indeed fancied myself as slightly flabby, it’s reasonable to say I had some form of an eating disorder. But whatever delusions I was entertaining, I had succeeded in experiencing the sensation of hunger and knowing it intimately.

But was this hunger real, when it was of my own making? And what about 14 years later, when, long after I had returned to more routine eating habits, a friend suddenly announced that she had depleted the balance in our joint banking account, leaving almost no money even for food? Were the ensuing weeks truly hungry, when all that stood between me and good meal was a desperate call to friends, explaining that I needed cash?

These questions make me steer between two extremes. On the one hand, it’s ludicrous to suppose that my experiences or those of an anorexic high school girl are identical to those of a Somali child in whose world food is not available. On the other hand, my experience of being without food was real. The practice of an austere diet or fasting showed me how much I structured my life around food, and how deep was my desire to eat food, not just to satisfy my hunger, but to satisfy my desire to be eating. I chose to eat unsalted lentils and rice in part to test something I’d read in ancient monastic works–if one adopts a bland diet, one stops thinking about food at all. This claim proved to be true–while I knew as an abstract fact that I had to eat in order to keep my body healthy, the food on the shelves of the grocery store meant no more to me than the plastic bags and paper napkins there. At an age when my deepest hunger was for knowledge, this proved an important discovery.

In those days, I was involved in a conscious struggle to master my body and quell the appetites of the flesh; if I went too far, at least this was the result of my own quite elaborately planned choices. Much later, when I found myself without money, the situation was quite different. The physical sensation of being hungry was the same, but the experience of hunger was different. It was not my choice and came without notice. I briefly tried to think of it as an adventure, an unexpected return to the alimentary experiments of an earlier day. But I was too overwhelmed by my powerlessness to convince myself to enjoy it. To suddenly find myself so vulnerable was a great shock. The solution to the underlying problem was easy enough to identify–I could just call friends and ask them for a small loan to tide me over–but in that moment I was paralyzed. How do you explain to people that you’ve managed your affairs so poorly, you can’t afford tuna fish? In this situation, I knew well what I needed to do but found myself psychologically unable to do it. Call it lack of courage, false pride, misplaced individualism, anger, or frustration–whatever the cause, I didn’t rise to the occasion, and got out of the bad situation only after long-awaited freelance paychecks came some weeks later.

If you’ve ever taken a sitcom-like tumble and fallen really hard, hard enough that the pain robs you of sleep for several days, you know what it’s like to feel the combination of genuine misery and the irrepressible desire to giggle at yourself. Likewise with my cupboard-bare experience. Once I told my friends what had happened (waiting, as I often do, until the misery is passed so that I could treat the entire episode as a distant, childhood mistake), they reacted as all sane people would–by telling me I was an idiot not to call them immediately. They wondered why I hadn’t trusted them enough to ask for help, and were the roles reversed, I would wonder the same. In fact, I would probably not even wait for the request, preferring to show up at their home with bags of basic foodstuffs, and rudely cutting off any absurd feelings of false scruple and modesty on their part.

That time of unexpected deprivation I’ve dubbed, with apologies to Neil Sedaka, the hungry weeks. Unlike Sedaka, I don’t miss them. I like having a steady paycheck and food on the table, and I will never romanticize what it’s like to be on the edge, in part to avoid tempting fate, and in part because there’s nothing romantic about it. Being economically vulnerable is not pleasurable.

Knowing about my experience, a few friends have asked me if it changed my perspective on beggars, social politics, world hunger, welfare, and so forth, expecting, I suppose, that I would emerge from it with an impassioned sense of social justice, or at least some world-weary and wise insights.

Alas, no wisdom or consistent vision here, much less a clarion call for the care of the widow, the orphan, the hungry, and other favorites of the Hebrew prophets. In the midst of my first experiences of hunger, to be sure, I had a simpler and more compassionate vision. I’d never thought much about hunger until living in Barcelona, where a stunning brunette model, befriending me for reasons I still can’t fathom, invited me to dinner. Maria and I talked about yoga and the spiritual quest, we talked about how hard it was for her to build her portfolio, we talked about the Picasso Museum, I noticed the four straight men in the room looking at her and envying me, which flattered me, and I noticed the two gay men in the room looking at me, which also flattered me. She pressed me to sing some of the songs I’d written there, including one likening a lover to sugar – a sort of Sugar Shack/ How Sweet It Is for our era. She told me how she was still adjusting to life at a yoga center, and how some days after going out on the town and eating forbidden foods such as donuts, she had to be sure to daub all the powdered sugar off her lips before reentering the center. And she explained that she always made sure to give some food money to anyone on the street who asked for it, because “if you look in their eyes, you can see the humiliation and wounded pride, how it destroys them to have to ask for money to feed themselves and their children.” She said these words as the picture was still fresh in my mind of this young woman, strolling up the stairs of her apartment building, gently licking her fingers to remove chocolate glaze from the side of her mouth. Naturally, at that very moment, I swore with a particular forcefulness that I would never let anyone ask me for food money without offering some change and a kind word.

Then I spent several years living in New Haven, Connecticut, which has plenty of people asking for food money. Over time, I realized, as anyone with eyes and ears must realize, that many people asking for food money had no intention of using the money for food. Even before I learned what it was like to fear hunger as an unexpected event, I found this imposture insulting to people who really had gone without food. A friend’s experience illustrated this well. A woman on the sidewalk asked him for food money. Since he was carrying a large bag full of leftovers from a brunch, he asked the woman if she wanted some bagels. “What flavor?” was the reply. As my friend later commented, “I’ve been hungry, and when you’re hungry, you don’t worry about the flavor of the bagel.”

Once I knew enough to take hard-luck stories with a grain of salt, I started what became my standard practice, offering to buy food for anyone on the street who asked for money. This weeds out about 85% of the people who approach you in a major city. About 5% of the remainder will accept the offer of food, then later return to the store where you purchased the food and harass the cashier for a cash refund. Remarkably, people will even do this for prepared foods such as Chinese takeout. There’s no sense in getting angry about this sort of behavior–it’s often addicts who do it, and they’re in no shape to discuss social niceties -- but you ought to know up front when your attempt at a good deed is likely to put store personnel in a bad situation.)

In short, I began with generic feelings of goodwill that I didn’t always put into action, and there I remain. The biggest change in my life, I suppose, is that my once-nebulous goal of financial security has taken a different form. I hope one day to have enough money to offer an open table for those in my community, wherever that community ends up being. I have no illusions about solving world hunger this way. It may be, as the Bible says, that the poor will be with us always, and I’ve known many people who act out some unexpected drive by conspired to keep themselves financially fragile, continually finding themselves low on food and rent money. Short of restraining and force-feeding people, there will always–even on the street where we live–be people whose bodies are underfed. But down the road, say when I’m in my 50s, I would like to have a kitchen that everyone knows to be available. The meals there would be offered on a regular basis, and widely but quietly advertised so, not needing a special reason to attend, the people who are humiliated by their lack of food money could still feel comfortable stopping by from time to time. The eager ascetes of the world, hungering for spiritual growth, probably won’t come–in my early 20s, I surely wouldn’t have visited, because I dined on the pride of self-mastery. But the person who finds herself unexpectedly low on food, the decidedly non-heroic person who could easily let the fear of hunger become the beginning of paralysis, or even the person who just wants to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh–she just might show up. And heaven forbid I treat her as a fallen angel. Maria’s memory lives, and I will always welcome lips of sugar.