Poor With Benefits

For thirteen years, I went to a fancy Manhattan private school with a girl who is now a movie star — we’re talking a bona fide red-carpet fashion-magazine talk-show-circuit career, to the teeth-gnashing jealousy of all her former classmates. And yet, in her magazine interviews, she tends to give quotes like the one below:

“I’ve turned down a lot of work and been incredibly poor.”

And this one, elsewhere:

“I probably shouldn’t discuss my finances,” she says, “but I’m poor!” On the list of complaints: taxes, agent fees, publicist fees, and “obscene rent” on her West Village apartment.

Before you jeer at this, you must try to understand its cultural context. Back where we came from, you see, this was simply how people talked. It is an indigenous tradition of my people: in our fancy Manhattan private school, everyone claimed to be “poor.”

This was a lie, of course. Our tuition was equal to the average American’s yearly income; our parents were lawyers, architects, heiresses and celebrities. But by high school we had absorbed their New York liberal guilt with adolescent zeal, and to hear us go on, you’d have thought our school qualified for UNICEF aid. “I’m so poor,” we were always telling each other. “So poor! Can you spot me four bucks for a Fiji water? I’ll pay you back when I’m less poor.” And being the good little achievers that we were, we competed viciously over our relative poverty:

“Oh, you’re going to the Hamptons this weekend? I wish I had a country house in the Hamptons! But we’re poor, so our country house is in Fairfield.”

“At least you have a country house! We’re so poor, all we have is our one apartment.”

“On the Upper East Side! Besides, you have a personal trainer.”

“It’s not what you think — he’s a really cheap-ass personal trainer. We’re way too poor for a real personal trainer.”

Or, to quote another interview with my movie-star classmate:

“The only people there were drug dealers, squatters, and us,” she says of her old neighborhood, where she ate Joselito’s rice and beans daily and uptown parents were afraid to let their children travel for a play date.

(Take a guess: East Harlem? East New York? Nope: the East Village. In the ’90s.)

We were joking, yes, but at the time we didn’t quite understand the extent of the joke. It didn’t occur to us to wonder, for instance, why a certain subset of our classmates never joked this way. God knows how we appeared to the scholarship kids, let alone to our teachers — some of whom were rumored to live in actual Brooklyn.

All this, if nothing else, is a persuasive argument for going to college, and especially for going to college in South Central Los Angeles, as I did. Nothing takes the fun out of crying poor like the sight of a mother and her children digging through your trash for recyclables, or a sorority girl in designer sunglasses driving her BMW past a hungry-looking eight-year-old selling flowers on the highway, or a silver-spoon libertarian who avers: “Poverty doesn’t exist in America — just laziness. You can have anything you want if you work hard!”

When said libertarian graduated, his parents bought him his own condominium apartment. But the rest of us struck out on our own. We worked minimum-wage jobs, anxiously monitored our checking accounts, and moved into crappy apartments in neighborhoods we’d never seen before — some of them in actual Brooklyn. Eventually it dawned on us: at least by the standards of the IRS, we really were poor now!

Karmic absolution! Political victimhood! Street cred! It was thrilling. We were the nouveau pauvre, and we boasted as immodestly as the nouveau riche:

“I hope I can make my rent this month, but I’m just so poor!”

“Tell me about it! I’m living on ramen noodles to pay my heating bill! Man, it sucks to be poor.”

“I know! Don’t you just hate rich people? They have no idea what it’s like…to be poor. Like me.”

In a way, this is every bit as much of a lie as it was in high school. Oh yes, we worry about making rent — in the same superficial way that we worry about our Farmville assets, since we know our parents will come to the rescue if necessary. Sure, we live on ramen noodles — except for those occasional nights when our parents take us out for sushi. Hell yeah, we hate rich people — except when they cover our health insurance.

Call it Poor With Benefits, and enjoy it while you can; in a few years it won’t be cute anymore. Even now, just a year or two out of college, we’re starting to feel the occasional twinge of that most shockingly unfamiliar sensation: class anxiety. Like the time I ran into my movie-star classmate on the street in the West Village.

“I actually live just a block away,” she told me, after we’d exchanged awkward hugs and pleasantries. “But I’m about to move to Williamsburg. My place here is way too small.”

“Oh,” I said sympathetically, “a studio?”

She froze, guiltily. “No,” she said, looking away. “A one-bedroom.” She changed the subject. “Where are you living?”

And then it was my turn to freeze. I didn’t want to tell her where I lived. I had nothing to be ashamed of: at the time, I had a great magazine job and a spacious two-bedroom. And yet, next to her, I felt low. I felt insecure. For the first time in my life, I felt…poor.

“Sunset Park,” I mumbled.

She’d never heard of it.

To this day, I don’t know which one of us was more embarrassed.