Folks, today Im taking a break from FIRE material and instead exploring the opposite end of the finance spectrum: poverty. What follows is a personal essay about my cousin Juan who died young, poor, and misunderstood. There are no FIRE lessons here – FIRE is an incredible privilege and this story is about the exact opposite.
I’ll never forget the time my older cousin Juan convinced me to steal toilet paper from the gas station next door, while he muttered and cursed at his embarrassed misfortune atop the toilet in his crummy apartment.
Perhaps even funnier was my attempt to pretend like I was shopping for candy to avoid the watchful stare of the cashier, while Juan sat glued impatiently to a toilet next door hoping and praying his teenage cousin would pull through for him in his hour of need.
The ridiculousness of the situation only got worse as soon as I entered the foul-smelling bathroom: the rolls were locked into an industrial stainless steel contraption, and I didn’t have a key.
Improvising, I emptied the roll around my hand one revolution at a time, before hitting the flush lever and moseying out of the store with a giant wad of toilet paper stuffed into my jeans like a giant codpiece.
Juan and his sarcastic wit, his enormous friend circle, and his always-ready-to-fight bravado was always the one in the spotlight, but that day, I got to be Juan’s hero.
Just six months later, the spotlight was back on him. Or what was left of him.
I sat numb at his funeral, too shaken to look at his road-ravaged face and ask myself why Juan chose to live like a tightrope walker without a net, until he fell face first into a tragic death.
The pot-bellied mariachis strum furiously at their beat up instruments and wail “Amor Eterno.” Every muscle in my jaw strains as I struggle against the grief welling up in my throat.
Juan would have picked the Animal’s “House of the Rising Sun.” The chorus plays in my head. “There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God I know I’m one.”
But that’s not the last sound that washes over his earthen body. Instead, its a soul-wrenching mariachi wail that speaks to his elders, but not to him.
The casket is lowered to its final rest in the same blighted, small-town soil that birthed him and the same dirt he couldn’t escape.
Juan’s young life was shattered by cold concrete, but that wasn’t the only time life left his body broken.
He once landed face first onto a rock after jumping off a rusty train bridge. The muddy river that meandered under that bridge was the same river that witnessed his final swan dive onto the dark highway.
A few years prior, he shattered his shinbone after crashing a buddy’s dirtbike into an oncoming truck. He hobbled on crutches for months as bone healed around a metal rod. But that didn’t stop him from hobbling on one leg over to bust Stevie’s Howerton’s nose with a vicious headbutt in the school lunch line.
“I was sticking up for family,” he went on to tell the principal. True of course; I was the family member he was defending. But also true was the principal’s retort that Juan was all too happy to find a reason to fight. He was expelled, again, for the final time, sent home to heal up his broken leg as a high school drop out, just like his mom and most of his aunts and uncles.
I’d never seen Juan so proud. We were on a country road hemmed in by cornfields, driving in his first and last car: a rusted brown beater. He’d been doing well with roofing work, and his boss gifted him the rusty abomination, which cost a whopping $400, so he could get to work on his own.
“You have to really stomp the brakes,” he advised me during my test drive. Too late. I threw gravel as I turned, narrowly avoiding a ditch.
“Juan, this car is a piece of shit,” I laughed.
“Yeah, and she smells like ass. But she’s mine. All mine,” he said with that familiar twinkle in his eye that could make anyone laugh.
And that was Juan for you: the most simple things in life brought him joy and laughter – nothing more so than time with friends and family. But finding time for relationships was getting harder, with most of his peers still in school, and much of his days occupied with hard work.
Much like the father who abandoned him when was a toddler, Juan worked and struggled like an immigrant, but he always seemed to appreciate the little that he had, and rarely complained about what he didn’t have.
Juan knew he came from nothing, he knew he had nothing, and he had no delusions that a surprise fortune awaited him in the future, yet he seemed to have no idea he was dirt poor. He had a real job, a shitty car, a little side scratch selling drugs mostly to friends, and his own apartment, and that was enough.
A cloudless sky and blazing white sun looks down on the crowd of mourners. It looks like the whole town is paying their respects. Their numbers are rivaled only by the sea of unfamiliar browns who came in from Mexico to pay their own respects to a child born away from them and who didn’t survive long enough to return.
Not in the crowd are some of his ex-girlfriends who were drawn to his exuberance but not his squalor. Nor was the ex-stepfather who molested him when he was 11 years old – the man who mutilated his innocence, forever thrusting a child to live broken and alone in an adult world.
The mariachis are sweating profusely as their set drags on too long. It feels appropriate, as if Earth is saying “Keep singing. I’m not ready to return this one to the dust yet. Its not his time.”
But their set comes to an abrupt end, as it must. My ears ring from standing too close to the mustachioed trumpeter. It’s time to say our final goodbyes and leave the gravediggers to bury Juan and the lingering questions surrounding his death in dirt, never to see the light again.
Poverty is a dirty, empty cupboard, except for a half-eaten loaf of bread and a peanut butter jar you have to meticulously scrape to salvage the last spoonful.
Poverty is a warm flour tortilla smothered in butter by a grandmother determined to feed you when you can barely feed yourself.
Poverty lingers forever like a musty old basement, not unlike the century old dungeon of a basement at my grandfather’s house. It was just too small, too dank, and too dark to put up a troubled teen like Juan.
He was too full of life and too full of color to accept charity anyway. He’d stand on his own two feet and forge his own life, even with a half empty cupboard and a loose wad of stolen gas station toilet paper.
Juan’s entire adult life spanned the ages of 17, when he was expelled from school for good, until he died at 21. This sort of life was always one emergency room visit away from bankruptcy, one hangover absence away from layoff, one paycheck away from eviction, and one more wild night away from incarceration.
He knew poverty and he knew want, but he simply had no vocabulary for it. A few years before he died, he tried to find the language for his plight in life, when his mom kicked her troubled dropout out of her house and he went to reconnect with his immigrant father 1000 miles away.
He found no healing there, and the experiment was abandoned in short order. He reclaimed some lost Spanish, but he came back proficient in a different language: poverty.
When he returned back to town, Juan wore a shaved head and the nerdy glasses he’d sworn off since middle school, and he sucked it up and got his first job to rent his own place. My older brother dubbed him the Mexican Malcolm X due to the shaved head makeover, but the real change was on the inside.
Still just a teenager, Juan had accepted a sentence of early adulthood sin dinero. He flew the nest to find his life as a penniless adult and never looked back.
Did he look back at the speeding jeep he fell from, just before crashing into the concrete, and wonder how he ended up here, suspended between life and death with mere inches between him and cold, unforgiving road?
Or was it over too fast, much like his short adult life, a struggling seedling pulled from the patch and discarded before it was given a chance to blossom into the flower it was born to be?
I always identified with my cousin Juan when I was a teenager. Biracial, but green eyed like my white mother, people would say I looked like Juan but couldn’t put their finger on what was different. “Half-Mexican” was the best I could ever retort, but I never liked the sound of that and didn’t even know what it meant. I wanted to be all-Mexican like my cousin Juan.
There was no mistaking who Juan was. He was the ultimate cool guy: tough as nails, charming, quick to laugh, with jet black hair and unmistakable brown skin. When he walked into the room, all eyes were on him like he was some kind of adored prom king, except this was the prom king’s brown-skinned alter-ego from skidrow – the one who proudly wore his squalor like royal garments.
I had two older brothers to look up to, but I always idolized my cousin Juan instead. My eldest brother pissed away an academic scholarship to college to keep living off mom and dad, while fatherless-too-proud-to-beg Juan strutted proudly around town in his $400 piece of shit car, as confident as some rich guy in a Mercedes.
Both of my brothers were good athletes; Juan wasn’t, but his toughness and grit was legendary. He invaded a neo-Nazi house party with friends, and started a massive brawl that left a group of skinheads in heaps, while his crew walked away blood-covered heroes, like Viking warriors returning from a successful conquest. Small town, white-trash Vikings, but with a battle-hardened brown champion in their midst foisting the head of his enemy on a pike.
Juan seemed to court calamity and death everywhere he went and somehow came out the other side in one piece. I was both repulsed and mystified by his continued waltz with misfortune, yet I admired him fiercely for following his own heart, no matter the consequences.
He seemed to have a special and unique relationship with everybody he knew, but he was especially close to the 3 half-breed cousins he grew up with. In my brothers, he saw comrades and peers bonded by blood; there was no fight he would refuse and no shirt he wouldn’t rip off his back in loyalty to them. But to me, he was more like a protective big brother, and he respected that my path would lead somewhere else.
Both of my brothers antagonized me in my depressed teenage years, belittling me for retreating to books and my guitar. Not Juan. Bad-ass, simpleton Juan told me to go chase those big ideas and “go to college and get the fuck out of this town. Don’t you dare end up like me.”
And I did. I left town just 3 months after Juan died. I had no idea what future awaited me at college, and I had no idea how I was going to pay for it on my own. But I was determined not to end up in a grave next to Juan, forever trapped in this blighted town.
This town was a prison that only the privileged escaped. The rest of us were left with the ruins. The dead factory jobs weren’t enough to satisfy the town’s brutality. It sunk its blackened hooks into the the hearts of the young and destitute, it smashed all their hopes and dreams, before it left their bodies smashed and lifeless on a dirty, pothole-strewn road.
A skinny old man in his best denims stands outside the church smoking a cigarette. I see it in his eyes. I’ve never met him, but I know he must be Juan’s paternal grandfather. “Lo siento,” I try to offer in what little Spanish I know. He flicks his cigarette and retreats back into the church without a word.
It’s the meal after the graveside service, and it’s eerily quiet in the church cafeteria. The white Priest who never knew Juan had of course sprinkled in the word familia a few times at the eulogy and spoke of Juan’s Catholic indoctrination in his youth. Surely, Juan hit the checkboxes and will still go to Heaven, despite how he lived, the Priest had suggested in the tenderest way possible.
I still feel angry at the priest for offering little more than religious rote, and my appetite sours. If Juan was misunderstood in life, he is even more so now. But the priest’s words are already forgotten, and those who truly loved him are left to their own thoughts.
I have some of the same thoughts myself. Why did Juan have to die? Didn’t he know how much he was loved? What could have prevented it?
A father who never left? Sure. What if his mom hadn’t kicked her teenage son out of her house? Possibly. How about a high school that tried to meet him in his place instead of one that greedily culled him from the herd at the earliest opportunity? Maybe.
I overhear two older men whispering far too loud. “You know who’s really to blame? Juan, for breaking his poor mama’s heart.”
I want to scream, “We all failed him. We are all to blame. His death is this whole town’s shame.”
I think if the situation was reversed, and it were Juan at my funeral, he wouldn’t have those words. But he might have punched that fucker’s lights out instead.
My hands sweat as I clench angry fists. I wipe them on my pants and walk out.
To this day, nobody knows why Juan climbed onto the hood from the passenger side of a doorless jeep hurtling down the highway.
His friends never wavered from the lie they told his mom that Juan must have “ just nodded off and fell out.” Multiple witnesses said otherwise, as was published in the local newspaper covering the spectacle.
Juan’s friends still never fessed up, leaving his mom to believe to this day that his friends accidentally killed him by putting their drunk friend in a doorless jeep with no seatbelt. It was a painful, painful lie, but maybe more merciful than the truth.
Those who know the truth of his failed attempt at Jeep-surfing don’t ask how but why. Why did he do something so stupid? The easy answer is drugs and alcohol. But what about the girl he broke it off with that night, the one who didn’t even come to his funeral?
The ex was probably a factor too, but it wasn’t the first girl he broke it off with, and if he had lived, it wouldn’t have been the last. He wasn’t known as “Juan the Don” for nothing. No, Juan was far too much of a lone wolf to have been cut down by heart break.
If Juan hadn’t fallen from that Jeep, I think he would still be alive today. He’d have moved out of abject poverty and desperation and found the stability that was denied him in his youth. He wouldn’t have many material things, but his life would be rich in friendships, family, and experiences.
I’ve no doubt, at a moment’s notice, he’d have the whole room in stitches, as he told hilarious stories of his young adult exploits that he barely survived. The legend of his crazy youth would be ten times bigger if he were around to tell it himself. He lived and died poor but joyful, aimless yet still growing into a better version of himself.
He was like a mascot of the town that birthed him, trapped him, and then buried him. No jobs, no affluence, no hope. The population left got a little browner, a little more angry, a little more broken, but full of irreverence and grit to wander past the boundaries. Juan was as much the destitute son of an illegal immigrant as he was the destitute son of a blighted Midwestern town.
In the end, I believe a life cursed with hardship drew Juan to the boundaries, and the edge pulled him into the abyss before he realized he had strayed too far from those who loved him. It was a stupid, tragic accident that no one meant to let happen, least of all him.
Juan deeply loved people and he loved life, even when all that his life and the people in it could give back was a car that smelled like ass, a roach-infested apartment, and a wad of stolen toilet paper.
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