The Ghost of Class Anger Future

I swear to Christ, my twin sister and I are nut-magnets. More so when we are together. If there is a crazy person in the room or on the bus or the city or the planet at any given time that I am nearby, the person will find me in the crowd and begin to spill the inner contents of their heart, mind, and history (and total insanity) into my face. Like the time I was at a busy bus-stop full of people and this guy comes right up to me, points into my face and says, "Fuck a white Jesus!"

I said, "Right on. I agree," and he went on and on until he became violent and threatening to everyone there and I went with another guy to the bus stop further down the street to get away from him.

Today Nina and I were sitting in Whole Foods having coffee and this crazy lady spins around in the booth behind us and stares. Nina smiles. We are used to being stared at because we are twins.

So Nina smiles and the lady comes right out and says, "Girl, Don't you hate being poor?"

We are a little shocked. We were just talking about how worried we are about rent, about finding a free rehab for our sister, about feeding our mom. "Yeah," Nina says, "Yeah I do."

"Girl, I hate it. I love money. I love it. I grew up in filth all my life, girl. Had nine 'bortions and you know I love money, yeah, throw your hands in the air like you just don't care!"

She raised the roof a little and it was somewhere around "Throw your hands in the air!" that her dilated pupils became long, dark caverns of emptiness wherein we saw the little yellow canary laying dead, her sweet song long gone and we knew simultaneously that this bitch was crazy.

Nina laughed, ever sweet, not sure what to say. The lady goes on and on and I finally get up and walk out. Nina said later that I just got up and walked out while the lady went on screaming, "My dad molested me and we had nothing to eat and I had five miscarriages and"

And we run. All the yuppies stare as if we brought this on ourselves and we were intimately connected to the lady. We felt we were and we couldn't stand it. My face was red because I go to Whole Foods honestly to bask in the fake ass light of rich people who are happy and nice and stable. It makes me very calm and is usually absent of triggers- but this lady was too crazy and close to home. I wanted to lunge at her and choke her up- "I AM TRYING TO PASS YOU CRAZY BITCH! QUIT SPEAKING MY THOUGHTS OUT LOUD!"

"I hate being poor. None-a-ya'all are poor. None-a-ya'all know what it's like to be me. I don't let nobody judge me. Nah. Fuck that. Aint nobody fit to judge me."

She is screaming it across the room at everyone as Nina and I escape out the door in our fancy Indian scarves and hoop earrings. Nina says, "That was poltergeist," referring to the scene in the movie when the woman looks right into the mother's eyes and starts talking like her dead Grandmother.

"Yeah, that was the Ghost of Class Anger Future," I say, laughing, hinting at the way everything she said was valid, probably brought on by her recognition of the gross class disparity between her and everybody else sitting there and the way they they looked at her like she was trash, not worth a second glance, and the way we looked at her, class traitors, like she was crazy and we weren't. "Five abortions and six miscarriages? Was that it," I ask, wrapping my scarf around my face to protect it from the sharp cold. "Damn she had a lot of numbers." Nina laughs because she knows what I mean.
"It could be a sign," I say, nodding towards the powerball sticker in the window of the corner store.
"Triflin. " Nina says, "That's so triflin, Jessica."
I howl in laughter, a little crazy myself now with the adrenaline and all the weird thoughts running through my head.

We go to the van and sit in silence. Then we start laughing. Why us, God? Always us. Nina does an impression of the way she wanted to act, like we were back home in Republic where screaming and fighting in grocery stores is allowed and expected and not one soul shies away from a confrontation. Nina was swinging her neck around and bugging out her eyes, "BITCH! BITCH! SHUT THE FUCK UP. I AINT THE ONE. I DIDN'T MAKE YOU POOR, BITCH- THESE PEOPLE DID. THEIR GRANDPARENTS MADE YOU POOR." She said it like she wasn't angry at the woman, but moreso angry at the women sitting around, some of them without a doubt old money millionaires, who Nina would have loved to have redirected the anger towards.

We went on pretending we were still talking to the lady, countering her crazy with our own, learned from years in dysfunctional, violent towns and families.

I was laughing so hard because although the lady was completely nuts and out of place there, she was so in place in our lives and our memories. She was like an amalgam of all the crazy women we have loved whose minds just flew out the door one day and never came back. She was an archetype- could have been taken straight from my thoughts to use against me like the State Puff Marshmallow Man. She thought we were like them, which made me feel like shit. But maybe we are? Although most of them live in fancy mansions in Squirrel Hill and make hundreds of thousands a year in interest on investments and I am stealing electronics to flip on ebay to make my rent, maybe we are still alike. As much as I hate "them,"- becoming like her is my worst fear, and no matter how much you love where you come from, the fake light coming from rich little condos seems so warm and welcoming when you're worried of being destined to a life of mind-numbing wage slavery, no health-care, constant upheavals.

That night my big brother calls me, just got out of jail. I'm so happy to hear from him. My older sister needs me to bring her drugs and I find her in a fever of withdrawal on my mother's couch. I give her the pills and she laughs, says our brother told her that in county, the prisoners would share their doses of methadone by passing it from one mouth to another in the cells. She says "this is sorta like that" and I laugh, not sure what she means, but I know she's near delirious with the sickness.

My girl calls me and says it's another miscarriage, third one, the doctors are saying endometriosis- they are talking about giving her a hysterectomy. She's crying. She knows I know all about it because my big sister had the same thing and got her hysterectomy a few months ago. I tell her it will be ok. I don't tell her that it's well documented that doctors often advise hysterectomies as a quick fix for poor women. I will figure out a way to tell her that tomorrow so she can ask about other options.

J calls me and asks me why I'm talking bout her man, telling people he cheats on her and shit. I tell her he does. He offers girls drugs for sex and L told me so because he did it to her. J says L is a whore and her man said he wouldn't fuck her even if he was mad at his dick. She tells me to tell L to watch her back. I act like it doesn't faze me, but I am worried. Her man is the biggest dealer in Fayette County and if he wants someone gone, they disappear. I spent the next day making calls trying to protect L from J, who has crazy eyes just like the lady in Wholefoods. A life story that's almost identical. The realization gives me an eerie feeling. J's been my best friend since I was in elementary school. I love her but her constant arrests and drama just leaves me exhausted. What happens to a poor woman who lives through so much shit only to have everyone she loves turn their backs on her?

I think of the chain of tragic events that characterizes the lives of poor women who just can't get ahead and surely can't heal from the last crash before the newest one plummets their lives and their minds. Melissa's man was shot over a drug deal and now she's alone with her four kids crawling through the garbage on the cracked linoleum floor where their mama is sitting, smoking blunt after blunt in front of a homemade shrine to him, his army picture framed in the center, bordered by hanging rosaries and blue Christmas lights, a crack pipe and a few xanax's in her lap where the babies should be if they could get close to her. She's just doing what the self-help book that the social workers gave her said to do - taking time to grieve, giving yourself stress-free mourning time, but, oh, my bad- those books were written for rich women who can afford to do that. Knock, Knock. Who's there? The State. The State Who? The State Who Won't Give You Resources to make your life better, but they will take your babies away. Zing!

Lordy, Lordy- I think of the apparition at Whole Foods. We saw her being escorted out, still screaming, when we drove by leaving the parking lot. Nina and I pray for her, rough-edged poorly dressed googly eyed dirty beanie hat wearing Class Anger Super Hero of my dreams, appearing out of nowhere to remind all of us that everything is so much more complicated than we think and none of us are innocent and no one is guilty and within that paradox lies the question that has no answer.

We pray. What else can we do? We've got our own problems. We'll meet her again one day, ask her for the current numbers and tell her ours. We'll give her a dollar or two to go play them in the lottery. Pray to God, girl, but row for shore. Aint nobody fit to judge me.