Broke, not Broken

Things get pretty boring when you're broke.

I guess I could start with a couple of days after my birthday. When I first moved to the city, I moved into a transitional area of town. It was the cheapest option to get downtown. After a year and a half of fine transitional living, the neighborhood changed. Instead of the swing towards gentrification, the baddies took the neighborhood back with a vengeance. The pendulum snapped back with full force. My truck has been broken into twice. Scott's been mugged once and had his bikes broken into three or four times. I watch drug deals on my drive to work. We joke, but it's actually gotten pretty scary around here. I don't go out after dark by myself anymore, not even to the grocery store.

A couple of nights after my birthday, Scott shook me awake.

"Baby, what are you doing? It's 3:30," I mumbled. "I have to get up for work in a few hours."

"I just got mugged," Scott croaked.

"What? No, you were mugged in November." I rolled over.

"I got mugged again."

I looked up. Scott was standing beside the bed in tears. He had a hard time speaking. The last thing I remember was him sticking is head in and announcing he was going to the gas station to get cigarettes at 1 a.m. And I had already been in bed for at least an hour.

As he left the gas station and got on his bike to leave, four men approached him and punched him in the neck, knocking him off his bike. They couldn't hit him in the face because he was wearing a helmet, so they aimed for his neck. That's why he couldn't speak. They wrestled him to the ground, held him down, and robbed him.

I remembered the date in my head. My birthday is at the end of the month. "Rent," I whispered.

"It's all gone."

I just wanted to reach up and slap myself in the face. Things were finally looking up. He had a job to go to, albeit a horrible one, but I finally had money to spend on myself. Instead of saving it, I bought myself decent clothes for work, ie my birthday presents. It's all gone, indeed.

I sat down and reworked my budget to encompass both of our rents and all of the bills. I could cover it, but it hurt. It's been Ramen Noodles and fried eggs to eat all month. I am miserably broke.

Life while broke is pretty static, hence my dropping off the face of the earth. I'm not doing anything; I'm not going anywhere. The only thing I could write about is my running commentary on TV, of which I have refrained.

Scott got a second job making sandwiches, which was fortunate because I love sandwiches so much, I could eat them every day. And I have been. He saves his free sub he gets when he works and brings it home and we split it for dinner. I also just found out that we qualify for food stamps, so that's something to look forward to, fitting in with the neighborhood and all.

On a side note, did you know that crack addicts will break off your car radio antenna because they can smoke crack out of the hard plastic part that connects the antenna to the car? Because they do. And they will.