In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.
When I originally came to the U.S., my mother came with a couple hundred dollars to her name. I didn't know we were struggling because she hid that from me. But it was definitely a struggle to get through life and get through school.
When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.
When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.
At the time me and X met, we weren't homeless, but we were basically homeless.
So I went to Miami in '74 with my family and while I was there it became obvious that we needed money and we needed to do something, because my family, we left without anything really, and we didn't have any money to begin with.
The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need, it's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you'd do anything to lift that burden.
Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that's it.
I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving for to-morrow.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.
I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.
Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.
I recall the hard work that my family went through just to continue to live the lifestyle that we were living, which wasn't by any means a great lifestyle.
I got songs about being broke, being on welfare, being poor, Section 8.
We had to leave Norway and go where it was all happening, which was London. We loved it there, but it was hard. We had no money - we were literally starving. It started to get ugly.
I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.
Our typical customer is a local guy who needs the money to get by for the week.
It's easy to struggle in New York. I think New York is a bit expensive.
There were times when I couldn't even buy a loaf of bread.
Everybody was in struggle, in the grind trying to make it.
The only difference between me and a homeless man is this job. I will do whatever it takes to survive…like I did when I was a homeless man.
We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we'd pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off.
I don't come from a rich family - it's not like we lived in a cardboard box, but we didn't have a ton of money.
