Half of lower class Americans literally can’t afford to sleep
Sleeping on subway
WRITTEN BY
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic
September 16, 2014
If it’s a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, Sam McCalman wakes up in his tiny one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush well before the nearest Starbucks opens for business. He catches the 5am bus to the John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens. From 7am to 3pm, he works there as a wheelchair attendant, gently rolling disabled and elderly travelers from gate to gate. Between clients, he is not permitted to sit down.
After a 30-minute break, he starts his second job wrangling luggage carts for Smart Carte. At 10pm, his shift is over, and he takes the B15 or B35 back to Brooklyn. He often falls asleep on the bus—so much so he frequently misses his stop and has to walk the last few blocks back home. By the time he crawls into bed, it’s nearly midnight. Four and a half hours later, it’s time to do it all over again.
McCalman immigrated from Guyana, a small country that borders Venezuela and Brazil, in 2010. His mother was already here, and he describes himself as the kind of guy who always wanted to come to America. It presented “a better opportunity to do something,” he said.
He got the wheelchair job a few months later, and picked up the second in 2013 when he realized he needed some extra cash. A series of exes bore him four children—two of whom still live in Guyana—and he sends them a total of $400 each month. He also owes $900 a month for the packed, non-airconditioned apartment, which is decked out with religious iconography and vinyl-covered white furniture.
We met on a Monday, his only day off. By Tuesday afternoon, he can hardly wait for Wednesday, when he only works one job. Between the two jobs, he brings home $500 a week.
The tight schedule lends McCalman a heightened awareness of how seemingly minor changes—a missed stop here, a traffic jam there—shave precious minutes off his sleep. “If the buses are messed up, I’m not getting that four hours,” he said. “If I had my own transportation, I might only need an hour to get to work.”
By 2pm each day, McCalman finds himself “literally falling asleep. I’m with a chair, and I’m waiting at the checkpoint, and because I’m waiting, my eyes start closing.”
McCalman’s life reveals a particularly sorry side of America’s sleep-deprived culture. Though we often praise white-collar “superwomen” who “never sleep” and juggle legendary careers with busy families, it’s actually people who have the least money who get the least sleep.
Though Americans across the economic spectrum are sleeping less these days, people in the lowest income quintile, and people who never finished high school, are far more likely to get less than seven hours of shut-eye per night. About half of people in households making less than $30,000 sleep six or fewer hours per night, while only a third of those making $75,000 or more do.
McCalman doesn’t regret moving to America, but he says it’s not quite what he expected. He was surprised that it took him four months to find a job. He was surprised he only gets paid minimum wage. He was surprised that one minimum wage salary didn’t cover his rent and bills.
“Back in my country, you don’t have to do two jobs,” he said. “Why do I have to pay a lady $1,000 for a little apartment? In my country, I’d be having a mansion with a swimming pool.”
For a while, McCalman was taking classes to try to get his GED. But the GED class was in the mornings, and he couldn’t afford to quit the wheelchair job. Now he’s slogging through the online coursework necessary for a commercial driver’s license—a Hail Mary attempt to become a truck driver, a job he hopes would come with a better schedule. The time he spends learning how to back up big rigs comes out of the roughly 80 total weekly hours he’s not at work or on a bus. And that means it comes out of his sleep.
He’s optimistic, but his speech is punctuated with aspirations about a time when things will be different.
“I’m hoping that one day I can get some more sleep,” he said. “I’m hoping that I can get at least five hours or six hours.”
“I have some hope that someday I’m going to be removed from this situation.”
