In consideration of society’s unconscionable distaste for, and judgement of, those poverty stricken…
by: Nicky Pessaroff
I hold in my hands a silver-plated etrog holder that was a gift from my pseudo-grandparents on the auspicious occasion of my bar mitzvah. I know the etrog holder is only silver plated because I tried to pawn it. Its worthlessness hurts a little, but such is life.
An etrog is like a lemon wearing a skullcap, and that is what my etrog holder resembles most. It opens at the middle, the two halves more-or-less even in geometric space save for the bottom half platform. The outside is dented and dinged and beginning to rust. The inside is filled with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that I am taking to the Coinstar® machine at my local supermarket.
Coinstar® is a kiosk in green garb, almost the color of paper bills, but paper bills are never that clean. The inset portion is white with a flat tray at the bottom. You manually tilt the tray and the coins slide down, while loose buttons and balls of lint fall through the holes in its bottom. Within the belly of the machine, coins are sorted. One must take it on faith that they are sorted correctly.
Coinstar® is the place you go when you can’t afford even Totally Free Checking™, when you’ve abandoned your bank account and its dozens of overdraft fees that have you in the red in three digits — 10 years’ worth of extrication when you’re Coinstar® Poor.
When I was a graduate student, they had us teach Nickel and Dimed to our English 111 students. Even then, flush with student loan money that is still in an Income Based Repayment Program, I could tell that Ehrenreich’s thesis was bunk. How could a journalist truly embed herself in the life of the impoverished when it was for the purpose of a book that would make her — if she wrote it — wealthier than ever? When her experience of poverty was nothing more than a Halloween costume? How is one to teach such a book honestly?
A mixture of emotions are experienced as the coins rattle and the figures tally on the screen:
Excitement. The same type of excitement you experience when you’re a kid at an arcade and you’re pushing all your quarters into that machine. You know, the one where there are a bunch of quarters piled on a platform that is pushed back and forth, and if your quarter falls just right, then a shower of quarters falls and you are rich! rich! rich! What I mean is that it’s the excitement that comes with the knowledge that you are also being truly screwed.
Desperation. No one visits Coinstar® who is already well off, not when Coinstar® takes a tithe off the total. Sure, there’s the possibility of a voucher that allows you to donate your bounty to a charitable cause, but…come on. If you’re at a Coinstar® machine, it’s because you are a charitable cause. Salvation Army™ has denied your application once again because you didn’t fill your address right, or you didn’t try to get services from this or that government agency first, or because they just don’t like the look of you. The local Archdiocese, bless their souls, already took care of the electricity bill last month, so they’re no longer an option. And family? Either they’re also too poor or they’re sick of being asked, and who can blame them?
Shame. It’s the strongest emotion of all. Poverty is humiliating. You don’t need to be told you are a drain on the social safety net in order to feel it. It’s a stench you smell on yourself all the time, like the smell of those cigarettes you shouldn’t be smoking, but what the hell else do you have? How else to relieve the anxiety? Some sort of medicine that ends in –pam? The poor know better than anyone that those aren’t anti-anxiety drugs, they are simply narcotics with a prescription, more addictive than whatever weekly scourge the network news is talking about — Oxy, Krokodil, Bath Salts, Spice, etc., they come and go, but Mother’s Little Helper remains. It’s all fine and good when you’re popping them in your 4 br 2.5 ba, you can get away with it then, but not if you’re living in a 1 br 1 ba or sleeping on a sprung couch that belongs to an in-law. The poor know what the –pams really are: oblivion for those who can afford it.
And so the coins are sorted, and I pray (there are no atheists on an in-law’s sprung couch) that there are at least a few dollars’ worth of quarters in there because Food Stamps only last half the month if we’re lucky, and the people that the IRS refers to as my “dependents” are hungry.
And the next day, it’s back to the Office of the Poor and Benighted where they will check once again that I am looking for work. They will ask why don’t I take this-or-that job? I will try to explain that they told me I am overqualified, or that it was clearly a scam in which I will “sell” vinyl installation services at Home Depot™ all day but the company will declare bankruptcy before I receive payment for my work, or that it’s only for so-and-so dollars an hour, and they’ll only give me 10 hours if I’m lucky, and so I will spend more on gas than I will make in gainful employment, and I’m better off using that time to look for a better job — that the math doesn’t add up — but they insist their computer systems know math better than I do, and they’re right — I suck at math — but they’re also so very very wrong because their math is based on false assumptions.
Such is life when you are Coinstar® Poor.
And the change rattles in the Coinstar® machine. At first in large denominations, jumps of dozens of cents, passing into the double digits, and then things start to slow down — both the sound of the coins being sorted and the tally on the screen — slowing from jumps of quarters to mere pennies, slower and slower, while the empty etrog holder gets heavier in my hands, and I should know if that’s irony or not because I have an MFA in writing after all, I have become that much of a cliche, so at the very least I should be an expert at irony, but being Coinstar® Poor forces you to question all your preconceived notions, including your belief that poverty is a systemic issue and not a moral failing.
All too soon, the sound of the coins rattling in the Coinstar® machine’s belly ends, all the (metaphorical) bones have been ground, and a voucher prints out on slick white paper, the tally of a month of squirreling away coins from larger purchases, and it’s somewhere in the low double digits, which isn’t bad. It’s not good, but it’s not bad. A package of Bar S® (as in the grade of meat?) hot dogs. A package of cheap, enriched (as in irony?) buns.
I take that voucher to the Customer Service desk, looking at the lottery machine and literally nodding my head no (“a tax on the poor,” academic people call it, but what they want to say is “a tax on the ignorant” even though they play Powerball® when the jackpot is large enough) because Coinstar® Poor means you’re too poor even to play the Powerball® (two dollars per play?!).
The Customer Service Specialist takes the voucher and opens the register in that insouciant way he has, never smiling, because he smells the Coinstar® Poor on me well enough without the voucher that acts as proof, and he gives me my measly few dollars because I insist on singles not for any particular reason other than the fact that it is fatter than a ten and a few ones, and that is it — except, “you forgot my change,” I say.
The nickel and the few pennies go back into that etrog holder, and the cycle starts again.
Nicky Pessaroff is editor-in-chief of Pen World Magazine. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in October Hill Magazine, NonBinary Review, The AutoEthnographer, Magazine-1, and Audience Askew literary anthology. His debut novella, A Constant Distance, is forthcoming from Serving House Books later in 2026.
