Today I learned that I lived in a homeless shelter when I was a baby.
In telling me the story of how my family came to live in Maryland briefly after I was born, my mom informed me that we had to live in a shelter for a few weeks when we moved to the state so that my father could do some special training with the National Guard. I always assumed our move was to avoid Vietnam, but the war was over by that time. We moved because we were broke.
Times were tough in mid-1970s America almost everywhere. Having lost his job in the mobile home factory in Alabama, my father decided to move the family to Maryland so he could earn while training. When our family of five arrived at the military base for the six-month stint, my mom learned that my father hadn’t planned a single thing regarding the move. Finding housing was the responsibility of the soldier and he hadn’t done his duty. (I should remind readers that women only earned the right to own a credit card without a co-signer in late 1974. So it’s doubtful my mother had the ability to sign a lease.)
The fact that I had never caught wind of this detail of our family history was enough to know that I didn’t need to dig further. It’s sad to think about the situation. But this new piece of information gives me a more solid understanding of my family and class status—or lack of status. My family history—of having been teetering precariously on the lower margins of the middle class—is humbling and I certainly have hazy memories of growing up amidst the dirt lots, used cars, family farms, and football games. But now that I am older, relatively well-educated, and have had the great fortune of traveling the world, I know that my roots as a poor white American from the Deep South gives me some insight into the subject of class in America.
Why am I writing about class anyhow? Mostly it’s because I recently saw the band Pulp perform in DC and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Pulp and its frontman Jarvis Cocker are best known in the US for the track “Common People”—an anthem about class warfare that you can dance to. It became one of my favorite songs because it was one of the first songs that told me that my tastes and sensibilities are just as good as anyone else’s, despite how much money anyone had. Indeed, my mother had been saying this for years. But it didn’t count for me until the singer from Sheffield, England, confirmed it.
About halfway through the recent show, Cocker announced,
“The next song is about some people I met in London and I never could have written it if I hadn’t come from Sheffield.”
“Common People” is about a rich kid—in this case, an international student from Greece—wanting to live (temporarily) like a common person (or the university version of it). The lyrics tell us that, just as sure as the rich student has a capsule collection picked out for a DJ weekend in Ibiza, she also has a checklist for living like a commoner:
✅ Rent a flat above a shop
✅ Cut your hair and get a job
✅ Smoke some fags* and play some pool
✅ Pretend you never went to school
*Fags = cigarettes in British slang, but the addition of this word in the lyrics makes sense in this context. Double meaning?
Can you absolve yourself of privilege by getting down and dirty with the masses? “Common People” laughs at you and says, “Ha, you’re so funny.”
“You just wanna have you fling with like the guy from the other side of town. Then you're going to go off to Stanford, you're going to marry some rich prick who your parents will approve of and just sit around with the other trust fund babies and talk about how you went slumming too, once.”
My sense of self and style was far from fully formed in 1995 when I first learned how to sing “Common People” at the top of my lungs. While I knew back then that the lyrics scoffed at privilege from the POV of a much poorer kid, they were also a call to action:
“You’ll never live like common people, you’ll never do whatever common people do.”
Meanwhile, as the song’s narrator sings about the starter kit for slumming it, i.e., an easy check list of achievable goals, those of us in his shoes are told the outcome that awaits us—living a life with no meaning or control, watching our lives slide out of view. “Vicarious poverty,” it turns out, lacks the existential anguish of the real thing.
You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning or control
And with nowhere left to go
Living one’s life with no meaning or control is the default for most people.
But how do you find meaning in your life when it already feels out of control at 12 or 16 or 21?
“If you called your dad, he could stop it all,” goes the line. But when I was in college, instead of calling my dad to stop it all, I was filing a report with the campus police to stop my abusive dad from calling me.
"I don't feel any bitterness towards him at all. I feel sorry for him,” Cocker told The Independent when speaking about his own father when he met him some 30 years after he’d abandoned the family in England and moved to Australia.
I was energized by Pulp’s set at The Anthem in DC and wanted to see if I could catch them again before their North American tour ended—maybe even before the week ended!
Suddenly, I found myself in “hustle mode,” trying to figure out how to see the band in not-too-far Philly. Clocking around 2-2.5 hours from DC as the eagle flies, Philadelphia is the perfect distance for this kind of story. But could it be done? In the USA?
“Wait—I could pitch this marketing idea to Amtrak!” I thought, as I went into freelance writer action mode in the only way an unemployed, under-insured American can. Over the next hours, I crafted a pitch for Amtrak and a shorter one to send to Pulp’s team.
The idea: a common person takes the common man’s transportation (the train) to see Pulp. I thought it was pretty inventive and it checked some boxes for me, bringing together:
✅ Live music
✅ Public transit advocacy
✅ A job contact I could list when I file the week’s unemployment benefits claim
✅ A writing idea I was excited about.
I stayed up until 4am writing the pitch, then allowed myself some sleep before sending it later that morning. Within seconds of hitting send, the auto-reply appeared in my inbox. “It takes the media team as much as three months to answer promotional requests,” read the message, which had links to fill out a media form that now redirects to the front page. So much for that idea!
Undeterred but still high on my own self-awarded genius, I then pitched the story to a few media friends.
“What a great story this would be!” I said confidently. “How can you not see how clever this is?” I laughed, my idea sounding better to me with every self-deprecating stammer, giggle, and occasional sip of cocktail. “Yeah yeah, I know it’s a cheeky idea. But I would want to read this!” I continue, as if under the impression that my enthusiasm while chatting with an—I assume—“well-connected” journalist friend will get me a gig. Or, at least, I’ll get more than just a chuckle and figurative pat on the head for always keeping things interesting and fun.
At first, I failed (like a common person) to see that this pitch had a few flaws, chief among them travel logistics. With an upcoming trip to Germany, where train travel reigns supreme, I wanted to challenge myself to take the train more often in the US, too. But I was expecting too much from rail travel in my country, despite the fact that Amtrak just unveiled 28 new Acela trains.
I also killed my own pitch before it could ever leave the station. “The common people can’t afford to ride the train,” I wrote, pointing out that a one-way ticket from DC’s Union Station to Philadelphia’s Penn Station ranged between $26 and $232. I knew the snarky aside wouldn’t win me any friends in the Amtrak PR department. But some people in the U.S. still don’t have cars, they can’t drive, or they can’t fly out of fear or financing.
I probably met my maternal grandparents only four or five times in my lifetime because they lived too far away. Our family couldn’t afford the airfare to visit and Grandma was afraid of flying. When she was well beyond capable of doing so, my grandmother took a days-long solo train trip in the middle of winter from Denver to Washington, DC, to visit me at college.
Reading that detail back to myself, I have to give myself another hash mark in the “common” column. What a sad little fact! But my life has gotten better by all measures, most especially because of my “thirst for knowledge” and growing up in an era when the world became more connected thanks to more affordable travel and the internet.
‘Everybody Hates a Tourist’
Most of you reading this now know me because I have spent most of my career in travel and tourism. It’s a profession I broke into by accident while still on the path to working in international relations. Seeing new things, meeting new people, and hearing the rhythm of a language other than English were the things that drove this Alabama girl to want to travel far and wide and as often as possible.
Of course, travel and tourism have contributed to many of our modern problems, such as the lack of affordable housing and climate change. I plan to write about this particular topic in depth in a later post. It’s hard to turn my brain off when it comes to trying to create a travel angle out of any story because I’ve trained myself to send out pitches each time I have a bright idea, despite the fact that I have never had an editor accept any of my pitches in more than 25 years. And yet…I keep trying and failing. “Maybe I’ve finally figured it out this time?”
Pitching stories is what freelance writers do and here was a “unique first-person perspective” that could entice an editor and possibly get me another night watching Pulp perform. It would have been too perfect had I been able to make it work. But I wasn’t even sure I wanted to attempt the trip. All I really wanted was acknowledgement of a good idea. My idea.
The biggest dilemma of my pitch was the identity crisis it gave me. Would pitching this “travel article” and attempting a train journey in my quest to re-live a boozy Saturday night listening to live music just turn me into the tourist that Jarvis warns about? Would my self-serving article provide readers with a service?
“I want to live like common people!” my pitch toots, like a clueless Ralph Wiggum. “I want to do whatever the common people do!” The Wiggum boy’s high-pitched voice pops into my head and I make myself laugh. It’s the same kind of silly humor I have long used to charm, woo, or smooth over a situation.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. But as I age and begin to see the pieces of my life in the valley of time below me, I remind myself that the most important thing is to make a joke right when it’s time to be serious. Because there’s nothing else to do.
==
Thanks for reading! I plan to write more about train travel in the next post. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d love it if you subscribed.
Until next time,
Melanie
It’s interesting to me that even the train experience has been segmented by social class—the experience of taking the Acela, or the FrecciaRosa,etc is very different than taking a local train that doesn’t connect to a major city. From sports events to train travel, there’s almost nothing that is a common experience between people of all social classes. Except maybe a Pulp concert. Very insightful, thoughtful post.