West, meaning forty-five minutes if there's no road construction and I don't get caught behind some sundazed Canadian tourists. So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience and go for a $500-a-month 'efficiency' thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key Still, it is a shock to realize that 'trailer trash' has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to. Who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond No screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord's Doberman pinscher.

In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes-like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour-which, from the want ads, seems doable-I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600Īnd still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas.

My first task is to find a place to live. I am 'baby,' 'honey,' 'blondie,' and, most commonly, 'girl.' In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: duringĪ month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. I am terrified, especiallyĪt the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Soon realize, is that it's not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich