Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,104
assess it and declared, “Twenty bucks.” I felt like a deflating balloon—the cheap gross rubber kind and not a beautiful shiny mylar one—as my heart sank from “ooh, maybe I can pay the light bill and go see a movie!” to “would this even buy me popcorn?” But that’s how you learn lessons in life, right? Having outsize expectations based on courtroom dramas, and then having reality smack you in the face.
Still, I wasn’t prepared to be handed the junkman’s vending machine money in exchange for an actual car that had newish tires and a recently replaced clutch. I just stood on the gravel in the junkyard, shocked and embarrassed, surrounded by warm refrigerators with the doors hanging off like loose teeth and pickup trucks without hoods, clutching this pittance I needed too badly to refuse. I thanked him and shoved the cassette tapes I’d forgotten in the glove compartment (Wu-Tang, De La Soul, Violent Femmes) into my bag. But I hadn’t considered how, exactly, I was going to get home from this remote land of rusted dishwashers and broken lawnmowers. I figured I’d catch the bus, but after doing that hopeful combination of waiting and walking, none came. I ended up at a pay phone by a Home Depot and called a cab. It cost almost forty dollars to get back to civilization. I am a moron.
Between periods of functional homelessness and living in places too depressing to go home to at the end of the day, I used to house-sit for obscenely wealthy people with purebred dogs that cost more than a semester of college. Most of the things I learned about fancy living came from generously helping myself to the luxurious face creams and aged liquors of people who could afford to both go away for weeks at a time and pay someone to live their life for them while they were doing so. I would pack four pieces of clothing in a bag (they always had easily accessible washing machines and dryers), my cell phone, and a pair of beat-up gray New Balances (to blend in seamlessly with my surroundings), then go to their houses after work and pretend to be Eloise at the Plaza. I would walk a mile picking up shit behind a Portuguese Water Dog, then spend the rest of the evening in a jacuzzi tub with Fiona Apple moaning out of Bang & Olufsen speakers. It felt like the greatest grift of all time! I never threw parties while house-sitting because I don’t give a fuck about parties, and also because none of my friends were going to dodge cops all the way up to Kenilworth to eat pizza rolls cooked in a restaurant-quality wood-burning oven. So, by default, I looked like an incredibly responsible person. Maybe it seems unremarkable to you that I got to stay in a house with dimmer switches and MTV, and all I had to do in return was walk a nice dog around a pretty neighborhood and drag the recycling out to the curb once a week?! Honestly, I’d do that shit now.
Speaking of falling asleep in front of a massive flat-screen TV with cable I didn’t have to pay for while a helpless creature with limited language skills banged its food dish around inside a playpen, I babysat way past the acceptable age for that to be a regular income stream for an adult person, and had several regular gigs during which I would not only cram as much HBO into my eyeballs as I could but also go shopping in the parents’ Costco-size pantries. These were, like, rich people with a fleet of nannies and housekeepers who drove around their armies of Jeep Grand Cherokees just buying shit all day long. No normal person could keep track of that without a meticulous inventory list. I, too, am wasteful and terrible and have no idea where all my stuff is, but I’m talking about that lip balm I bought on a whim at the pharmacy and various frayed and knotted phone chargers. Not whole laptops and shit! I would roll up in my busted Ford Taurus on a Saturday evening, put the kid(s) to bed at seven, then spend half an hour smelling the eighteen types of cheese in the massive brushed-steel refrigerators in the remodeled kitchens of people who were cool just, you know, not knowing who