My dad taught me a little bit about being poor

The story of my father is long, but interesting. I'm truncating it here - it deserves several posts.

My father worked as a mechanical engineer for about ten years for Hughes aircraft in California. He was grateful for the opportunity - jobs on Maui, where he grew up, were almost nonexistent, even for, and perhaps especially for, a college graduate. (He was an insurance policy salesman for a few months after graduation.) The new job meant $900 a week - about a 400% raise from what he was expected to earn in five more years at his old job.

He was charismatic and competent, and got to work on satellites -- including Marisat and some secret military projects that, bless him, he still feels are secret and won't talk about. (I doubt any of the projects are operational, or classified, but I don't press him about it.)

He fell in love, married, bought a house, a car, a ridiculously expensive fishing boat he rarely used, and occasionally bought classic cars he started to fix, but usually ended up selling for a loss. He hosted dinners, and was well-liked.

He was also bipolar.

He began to have problems in high school and college. But they didn't come to a head until he was around 32. He started missing work. At some point, he began using drugs - a lot of them. He once handed me a list of two pages, double-column, of all the drugs he had used. No doubt some barbiturates probably were repeats under different names - but it included angel dust, cocaine, heroin, and things called yellow jackets and little bennies.

It was during this time that my mom became pregnant. They had tried for nearly ten years, and finally, during this time of crisis, they were successful.

Meanwhile, my dad lost his job. He was admitted to just about every mental health hospital in Southern California. At one facility, he told my mom he met Brian Wilson. She thought it was a schizophrenic delusion, until she stopped by and saw that it was, indeed, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.

Eventually, my mom decided, reluctantly, to get a divorce. It's kind of tragic -- I think if I hadn't been born, she might've been tempted to stick it out. I think sometimes she still regrets it -- even though I've told her she made the right choice, and even her traditional Japenese parents supported her. Divorce is always at least sort of sad -- but it's quite sad when the parents still love each other.

We moved into my grandparents' house for a few years. He lived with his sister for a while. But it was too much to manage a man with unmanaged bipolar disorder. He lived in his own apartment, but that didn't work out well.

Eventually, he found some stability in a series of board and care facilities, large group homes, sometimes numbering about a hundred mentally disabled adults.

I visited him every other weekend. Sometimes he was a scary nut. Other times, he was lethargic and barely responsive.

Due to frequent visits at these large institutions, I learned patience and tolerance of aberrant behavior, which, oddly enough, served me very well at Havery Mudd College, and, I believe, in life at large.


The rooms were small, with musty air, but they were clean. He always had a roommate - some of whom were really creepy.

I remember Ed, a schizophrenic with a knack for guitar. Once, we walked in, and he had only a hand towel over his genitals, as he giggled having whatever conversation/experience he was having in his own head.

Believe it or not, I liked Ed overall, even if I was reluctant to shake his hand after that.

He was better than Tom, who was always drunk and/or angry.


He was always broke, and dependent on Social Security Disability payments for rent, and Medicare-Medicaid for treatment/medication.

Dad spent what spending money he got from his sister and my mom on cigarettes. Everyone smoked there - I probably inhaled tons of secondhand smoke, but I was honestly more worried about my dad busting out his (fake, but I didn't know at the time) kung fu during his manic episodes. He'd buy the cheapest, nastiest cigarettes available. He quit periodically -- sometimes because he ran out, and sometimes because he promised me. It's from him that I learned about clove cigarettes, that extremely rare luxury -- they were expensive, incredibly bad for your health, and wonderfully aromatic.

He outlived three girlfriends, all of whom died of lung cancer. Two were in their mid-fifties, and one was in her late-thirties.

For a man who loved food, I was surprised how he adjusted to the kind of boring food. When he moved from one of these large facilities to a smaller halfway house, he was treated to home cooking. He still didn't have any money, but he was happier. We would go to Taco Bell, or Winchell's, where he would relish unlimited refills and enjoy a beef Meximelt, or a glazed donut, courtesy of Mom.

Those who know me may be surprised to know that my dad is an eternal optimist. Every time he moved, he said, "This is the best place! The FOOD is amazing!" Every time. He was either a liar, delusional, or an optimist. Over the last decade, his medication balance got reasonably good, and so I'm willing to conclude that it was optimism. He was definitely not a liar, at least not a habitual one.

He is currently living in a larger facility in Long Beach, an odd mix of mental institution and retirement home.

Through the years, he'd been hospitalized many, many times -- and not just for mental health reasons. There were many of those -- unpleasant rants, either in person or over the phone, were something that was painful, but eventually expected. I was surprised -- after many years of relative calm, he called in October 2008 to tell me I was a horrible son, that he was a four-star general Aztec emperor, etc. Even at the age of 26, I admit, I cried, but I managed to keep my voice calm, and tell myself that this was not my father talking, this was The Disease.

He almost died many times. But because it happened so frequently, I eventually got used to visiting him in a hospital. Apparently he has a very strong heart, one which has saved his life multiple times.

There were good times, too. He taught me gin rummy. He had an interesting (read: vulgar) sense of humor. I'm lucky -- many sons can't poke fun at their fathers like I can.

We almost lost him last year from kidney failure. My relationship with him, even as death approached, has always been a conflicting set of emotions.

But it was only today, as I was picking up a hot-n-ready $5 pizza for our lunch, that I realized he taught me about poverty.

***

As long as I can remember, he was always poor. He didn't have money for gifts; his sister would send me a bit of birthday and Christmas money. I don't know when or how I understood this, but I did, and didn't ask him for stuff, even as I was spoiled rotten by my maternal grandfather. Mom never asked him to help with anything, including college -- and how would he have helped anyway? Asked his sister?

I think it was hard for him to take bits of spending money from my mom, and, for many reasons, hard for my mom to give it.

He'd borrow money. He'd borrow from Peter to pay Paul. A couple times, he borrowed money from me; much later, his sister would find out and yell at him. He'd apologize, and give me the money that his sister gave him to pay  me back.

My mom and I remember only one time when my dad was scared. We were at Winchell's, and he approached a tough-looking guy. He told him that he would return his $20 as soon as he could. Later, he asked my mom for that money. At the time, he lived in a neighborhood where getting beat up, badly, over $20 was pretty likely.

He wasn't a saint, and, even in his poverty, would sometimes use what he had recklessly. At one point, he got admitted to the hospital for a ridiculously high blood pressure - it was something like 220/180. I'm not joking. He claimed it was caffeine -- later on, I found out he had bought meth from a dealer somewhere in the neighborhood.

He never wanted to walk in the park down the block. I don't remember if he had been jumped, or harassed. We'd go by car from Norwalk to Cerritos to nice parks.

Meanwhile, I lived a relatively comfortable middle-class life. My mom was a public school teacher, and therefore not at all rich, but it was just the two of us. I never went hungry; I always had clothes to wear; I always had shoes. It wasn't extravagant, but it was comfortable. Hell, I even had a NES and, a couple years after it came out, a SNES. We never owned a computer until some time in high school, and to my everlasting shame and regret, it was a Macintosh Performa.

So I wasn't poor.

My dad was.

But he didn't starve. He had adequate medical care. He was able to live with some dignity - once he accepted he was never going to be an aerospace engineer ever again. He had fantasies of going back, even after Hughes got absorbed and resold and redundancied and everything else during the passing decades.

He was dependent on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (in California, Medi-Cal).

He's a flawed man, even ignoring his bipolar disorder. And, to be honest, I don't know if he's an example of what's wrong with the social safety net in this country, or what's right.

The only thing I do know for certain is that, without exaggeration, he would've been homeless, and ultimately dead, without those programs.

It's not because his family didn't love him enough to house him -- his sister, a schizophrenic, lived with my grandparents her entire adult life.

I believe that because, without the luck we had with treatment and facilities, he would've found some way to disappear and die.

Had he continued to live in his apartment, he would've had an overdose, or done something that would've gotten him shot by a drug dealer, or a cop. Even at his sister's house, he was unsupervised during the day; I don't know if he did run off during that time, but he definitely engaged in self-destructive behavior including drugs, alcohol, and reckless driving. (He once zig-zagged on the freeway with toddler me in the backseat. Perhaps fortunately, I thought it was a game at the time.)

So I can say, with a measure of confidence, that my dad would've died decades ago without that safety net.

***

I'm writing this mostly because I want to. He's an interesting person, and, quite frankly, it helps me to process my emotions and thoughts in written form.

There's a part that's also writing this because I've seen many criticize welfare, Medicaid, and other programs designed to help the poor. Most do not cite any numbers, and some cite numbers without context, e.g., the number of people on food stamps does go up during a recession. It's designed to do that: that shows the program is doing its job, regardless of whether you think it should be doing it or not.

He's not a "welfare queen". But he's as close as it comes in my personal experience. And so, it's tough for me to disentangle conversation about the poor, and about welfare, from these thoughts about my dad.

In my volunteering in college, I've met homeless people who would drink chunks of their Social Security checks and buy electronics. I met homeless kids for whom homelessness was, at least part, an ideology -- quasi-hippies/anarchists, sharing and creating cheaply made magazines containing their literature. I cleaned human shit out of a food pantry, which means someone -- assuming it was a client, not a volunteer -- decided taking a shit in the storeroom was a good idea. I met two guys who were, in retrospect, probably doing a drug deal, whom I cluelessly interrupted, offered sandwiches to, and left alone to their meal, realizing at some point that one held an almost-but-not-quite-concealed blade in his hand the whole time.

I know poor people who seem so helpless and hapless that I sometimes want to scream at them and hit them and tell them to get their shit together, because they have kids and grandkids who depend upon them. I know friends whose parents worked in sweatshops, in the United States, and never forgot it as they went off to college, got good jobs, and participated actively in public service. I met illegal immigrant, the occasional homeless woman, and a de facto leader in the group at Pomona that showed up at the HMC graduation in an old, but clean, suit -- not for me, but perhaps just to wish the graduates well.

Being poor is simple and complicated.

It restricts opportunity, which can be simplifying. It's complicated, because there are multiple stories, multiple reasons, and multiple outcomes.

Anecdotes don't lend themselves well to analysis, even as they reveal things about the people we meet, and ourselves. But they do inform our values.

I admit -- my support of these programs are a product of the distillation of these experiences, and not based upon statistics of efficiency, fraud rates, longitudinal progress, or anything that's really needed to analyze poverty programs objectively.

But that's not how we decide whether we think something is good or not. We don't start from the statistics -we start from principles, formed by our experiences, our learning, and our environment. I think its the same for the critics of these programs.

It comes down to a moral assumption about certain things:

Do the poor deserve it?

Does it lend itself to abuse or dependence?

Can the country afford it?

I think that anyone claiming, one way or another, that their views on these programs don't rest upon some assumptions on these questions, based on our personal feelings, is not being completely honest. Objective metrics inform whether something works or doesn't - but our values determine the definition of "works" or "doesn't".

Maybe in the coming days, I'll investigate the statistics of these programs - how much they cost; the detected rate of fraud; the specific conditions that must be met; the proportion of funds, if any, that go to illegal immigrants. I suppose these are things I should know, as someone who has, in the past, advocated for the poor, and who continues to believe that the measure of our nation is in part based on how we care for the most vulnerable of our people.

For those who care, I do ask that you consider that, in my case, there is a real person who I care about in these figures.

Based on what I've said, maybe he's part of the problem. Maybe I should feel guilty for having had help taking care of my dad.

If it makes you feel better, I do have guilt.

But I'm also glad that they, and he, continue.