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You know, they give us foodstamps because they don't trust us with real money. We might get high or somethin'. Truth is, if a person is goin' to get high, they'll sell the damned foodstamps and then their kids will really starve. Why don't they just help those people stop using if they're so worried?
Now, I've never sold foodstamps but it would be nice to be able to buy toilet paper or dish soap with them. We run out of those things too. If it's something everyone knows you need from the store, foodstamps should buy it.
I hear back in the Reagan years some guy in the agriculture department and his family all lived on what a foodstamp family would get for one month. But they only did it for one month. I could do that. Give up all the fancy food and just eat plain? Sure.
I'd have like to seen him do it for a year, month after month. I know they couldn't do it. Their kids'd drive them nuts, begging for pizza or candy. Sooner or later they'd be doin' the same thing we all do; buy a few nice things at the beginning of the month and eat rice or potatoes at the end.
And I'm sure they didn't empty their middle-class cupboards when they started. At the end of the month, ours are bare. They should have started out the same way. I've seen middle-class people's cupboards, cleaned a few. Shit, you could live for a couple of weeks on what I saw.
Last ten days of the month are the hardest.
You start running out of the things you need and have to figure out ways to make do. Like you have macaroni-and-cheese mixes but no milk or butter. But you find a little sour cream left and use that instead. Or you find out your sugar is gone when you're making oatmeal, but you have some apple butter or pancake syrup in the fridge. You make it work, somehow.
Finally, by the last three or four days, you're down to rice or potatoes or whatever you saved for the end of the month. You can't just eat, you have cook everything.
I try to have a different end-of-the-month food each month. After several days of potatoes, you never want to see one again. I'm a good cook, but there's only so many things you can do with potatoes at the end of the month when you don't have much to put with them or on them.
Meanwhile, I read cookbooks, dreamin' about what I'll make when I get my 'stamps. Next month, I want to learn to make quiche. It sounds expensive with all that cheese, but I can afford it just once a month. The first of the month, we always have a special dinner. I guess we're celebratin'. We made it through another month.
You know, I'd like to invite the President to eat with us, and maybe Reagan and Bush, too.
On the last day of the month.
An early version of this story appeared in Porter Gulch Review in 1994.