When you understand a people’s culture, you know their values — how they’ll act, what they’ll think, how they’ll feel. As a writer, you can transport readers to a world they may not know, or provide them with a greater understanding of the world they inhabit. Such is the case with author, poet, and cultural critic Noah Cicero, whose work documents life in the American Rust Belt. His characters are the poor, the blue-collared…

Ben Kharakh: What sort of adjustments would someone such as myself, who is middle-class and living in a suburb, have to make in order to adjust to blue-collar life?

Noah Cicero: In the blue-collar world, you have a lot more freedom. If you feel like listening to rap, metal, or classic rock, no one cares. If you feel like playing Dungeons & Dragons, video games, or hunting, no one cares. I’ve met welders with hybrids and welders with SUVs. No one really cares about how things look. The first step would be remodeling your house. White-collar people’s houses are new looking; everything is perfect and nice, and there’s a sitting-room. Blue-collar people don’t have sitting-rooms. I want to say that black people in general have really nice looking houses when they are blue-collar. Black people and Italian people dress nicer and usually make up their homes better than white, blue-collar people. That is cultural, though, and depends upon race. I’m Sicilian, so even though I’m blue-collar, it is totally normal for me to have three-button collar, short-sleeve shirts, and khaki shorts…which I have. And the blue-collar black and white people recognize I’m Sicilian blue-collar, and this is what we wear. So since this is America, you have to find your racial niche and dress appropriately. Probably the two main things would be learning how to speak blue-collar and to be treated like a child by managers, owners, and white-collar people — and like it. First, to speak blue-collar, you have to leave all the Gs off INGs — like screwin’ and blowin’ and laughin’. You have to learn to say ain’t; you say “bof” not “both.” You have to talk in phrases, not communicating with compound sentences. They do not sit and talk about life and feelings. They hate their life and they hate their feelings. Second, you have to allow yourself to be treated like a child, like you’re dumb and stupid and can’t live without your bosses and owners and the capitalists. You hate it, you know you hate it, but you have to do it to get paid and buy stuff.

BK: What would the transition to poverty be like?

NC: I make $11,000, but I make that because if I make any more, I won’t be able to go to the hospital. If you make less than $11,000 in Ohio, you can go to the hospital and community clinic for free. You can also get half of college paid for. Poverty is a mindset. A Buddhist living in Tibet is poor and he doesn’t care. Medieval farmers were poor, but their Lords still didn’t live long, had no teeth, and were cold in the winter. An American who is on welfare is poor, even though they have a television and central heating and running water. A person in Haiti is poor and they don’t have a television, running water, and garbage is everywhere. What we have in America isn’t “poverty” but “injustice” and “greed.” It is an injustice that someone is a billionaire just by being born one, and someone is poor just by being poor, or someone can use government money to go to a state university, but someone with more money can go to a better school and get a better job just because they went to that better school. For example, where I live, we have Youngstown State University, and anyone can go there and get a Pell grant and a loan. But YSU doesn’t compare to Yale or Harvard or Columbia. I know people that got straight As at YSU and couldn’t get into most grad schools, so people are blocked from going to a top school. But a person can get a degree from YSU and get a good job, health care, and live in a nice two-story house. A poor person can go to the hospital, but they can’t just go to a doctor. If you don’t have health care, you can’t go to a dermatologist or any specialist; they won’t take you. You have to go to a hospital and the ER doctor will look at you for two minutes, give you a pill, and leave. What I mean by “greed” is that Americans watch television and always want more. This culture breeds “wants.” We have the antithesis to a Buddhist or Catholic culture which, although both in different but similar ways, tells their people that it is okay to be poor — that just because you don’t have everything doesn’t make you an asshole. What I’m trying to say is that being poor in America is not the toughest thing in the world. If someone really wants to be poor, they should just camp, because that is what real poverty is — camping. Go buy some land, grow your own food, camp in a shack, cut down trees for firewood, and cook using the fire, because what Americans view as poverty is just how people lived before oil. Americans view everyone that existed prior to 1950 as horribly poor. Even kings didn’t have health care before 1890 because there was no real medicine or x-ray machines. And if they wanted to go all the way, they could throw garbage everywhere and shit in their bathing and drinking water.

BK: You mentioned, in our Gothamist interview, that, “I live in a small mill house. A mill house is a house built by the steel mills for their workers… My roommate’s parents got the house from a dead person and we don’t have to pay rent. We only have to pay utilities. We can afford to have phone, DSL Internet, and budget gas.” Would you be able to get by on $11,000 if you didn’t have that house?

NC: I think I could. I don’t think I would be able to take a vacation out west in the summer, but I could survive.

BK: What is it that you think makes Americans so greedy, and what can get them to change? What sort of effect would being less greedy have?

NC: America is greedy for a lot of reasons:

1) There is no group ethicity America; everybody is in it for themselves;

2) We have some form of Spanish gold worshiping conquistador thing going on. We view objects like medieval people viewed holy relics, as if they contain some magic that leads to everlasting life;

3) Things have come too easy for Americans. Of all the land in this hemisphere, this land is the best, concerning resources — we have tons of farmland, tons of coal, we had lots of oil, we have a pretty good climate, the east has lots of water, we have the Rockies and the Colorado River which supplies water to the southwest. Americans got really lucky. We also got lucky because we got those weird Founding Fathers who wanted democracy and freedom from a king. And the Indians, even though it took several hundred years to totally subdue them, required only for the Europeans to cough on them and then they died pretty quickly. Look at the history of how Europeans conquered the Indians. It involves coughing — not huge military campaigns. If our diseases didn’t kill them so easily, we wouldn’t have this land. Things have been too easy for Americans, and because of that, they never had to work in a group, really, so they began to take things for granted;

4) People who have come to America, and who are coming now, come to get American money and things. Instead of becoming a politician or joining a rebel group to make it better in their own country, they opt out — take a boat ride to America and live the easy life. People don’t come to America to take part in it; they come here for indoor plumbing. A lot of immigrants have come to America for nothing but things, and that kind of attitude doesn’t breed anything but greed. The only thing that can get them to change is for the oil to run out, and then they need to be forced to deal with reality. Personally, within our lifetimes — could be next year, could be ten years – America will be priced out of oil and they will have to live differently. But then it won’t even be America. So this conversation loses context because then I might be an Ohioan or maybe a Rust Belter, and the effect will be that we will be the new Indians, the new savages, living off The Three Sisters and potatoes like the Natives did, having little local democracies with shamans and chiefs, and probably a small military that protects the farmers so they can do their work.

But who knows…let’s focus on the phrase “taking things for granted.” If you take things for granted it, affects your happiness. People who take things for granted will never be happy; they always want more, without concern for who or what gives it. Americans should be praying to oil gods right now and conserving oil like the Anazazi Indians stored corn. They should be praying to the soil in the Midwest for supplying so much food, but instead we are overusing it and turning it into sand. We should be thanking truck drivers every time we see one for delivering the products we need. Instead, we show them in the media as fat men who don’t wash. As for seeing Americans happier when being poor, I’ve seen it. Being poor requires working together as a family unit. When you have money, you call someone to fix your roof or put in your water heater. But when you are poor, you have to do it together — the son works with the father and they build a real relationship, as opposed to what white-collar parents do with their kids. They go into their kid’s room and say, “Hey, wanna go to Disneyland?” Then, for one week a year, the parent spends time with the kid. Kids want to work with their parents. In my opinion, it is programmed into them. Children, as soon as they hit, like, three, start trying to work with their parents in the kitchen and in the yard. Humans are meant to work on small tasks when they are as little as four. If you look at tribal communities, they start giving kids something to do when they are little. Humans weren’t meant to sit in their rooms, go to a giant public school, and then start working with strangers when they are 16 or 18. Families are happier when they work together. Happiness starts with family life. But a lot of our parents are forced to work stupid factory jobs. The problem with the modern factory isn’t that it’s hard work but that the work requires a human to be indoors, standing, pushing random buttons, almost doing nothing. Modern office work is stupid too — sitting at a computer. Humans weren’t meant to do those things. It creates neurotic creatures that go home and teach their kids the habits of mental illness. And during all this, they are wanting more, always taking things for granted, never being happy. Look at Thanksgiving — a time that used to represent a summer’s worth of hard work in the fields, then the picking of the harvest. It was a celebration of hard work. Now it’s this deranged family function where everyone bitches at each other and sits at the table waiting to go back to their room and watch television or play video games.

BK: In Treatise, your most recent published work, the character of Mariya Dolzhikov is surprised when the workers in a pizzeria use their increased income to acquire immediate satisfaction, rather than making investments or going to college, or for what people refer to as “getting ahead” or “the American Dream.” It seemed as though she was completely unaware of cultural difference as well as the possibility that people may have different values, wants, and needs from her own. How aware of these cultural differences do you think people are?

NC: I think blue-collar people are more aware. They see white-collar and daydream, even though most of it is illogical and convoluted, about being them and having their things. But a poor blue-collar person doesn’t think, “I want to be white-collar so I can go to a nice college and travel to Paris.” They think, “If I had their money, I would get the best water heater Home Depot has to offer.”

BK: What sort of thoughts does the term “American Dream” conjure up for you?

NC: The American Dream is to live in a two-story house, have a sweet 401k that just went up 14%…but I doubt most of them even know. They have a sweet house but constantly think about selling it for more money in five years. They have a job that doesn’t involve using any muscle tissue. They believe in capitalism but couldn’t write a page on how it works or how stocks work. They have nice health care and don’t mind other people not having it. They vote Republican because “that is what rich people do.” They aren’t rich; they aren’t anything. Their lives are narcissistic nightmares where they take painkillers and drink booze to get through the day.

BK: How do you see American culture changing?

NC: I work with Grow Youngstown in Youngstown. It’s a group of people trying to bring gardening and farming to Youngstown, where there are a lot of empty lots. We’re trying to get people involved in turning these into gardens. I worked there last Monday and there were ten people there walking around. There were people from the newspapers there. There are other gardening groups in Youngstown too. One out of every three houses in my neighborhood, including my own, has a garden. There is a large and growing group of citizens beginning to grow their own food. Also, the gardens are collectives — not one owner telling workers what to do. The national media is covering this, but the information isn’t hard to find online and in local newspapers.

BK: I find some passages from your writing to be quite funny. Is the humor in your stories intentional, or does it emerge unconsciously because much of life is absurd?

NC: Life is absurd. I don’t try to be funny. I never think, “I want to be funny.” I think, if someone laughs at something in books, it is like laughing when reading Erskine Caldwell. It’s like, “That is sad but still funny.” I poke at blue-collar people a lot, I think. I made that whole list of employees at the pizza shop, listing all the insane shit they did. That, to me, is funny, and to some blue-collar people who have a sense of sarcasm and of what the absurd is, they would think that’s funny too. People need to notice that the blue-collar poor people’s thinking patterns are completely different than what second — or even more — third generation, college-educated, white-collar people have. It is a totally different frame of reference.

BK: What is funny to you?

NC: Wes Anderson movies make me laugh. I like that scene in The Darjeeling Limited when the three brothers are saving the boys in the river. Adrian Brody says something like, “I didn’t save mine.” That is really funny to me. I think that’s because it is so real.

BK: What are some other things that people think but don’t say out loud?

NC: A few nights ago, I almost got a DUI after leaving a strip joint. When the cop pulled me over, I didn’t say anything but, “I only had one-and-a-half beers. Please don’t give me a DUI. I’m sorry.” But I was thinking, “I went to the strip joint, I was really lonely and wanted to look at a girl. Girls don’t get naked for me. I’m weird and getting older, and I contemplate suicide. Please don’t give me a DUI because I never get laid and it won’t help my desolation. It will probably cause long-term panic attacks.” But I couldn’t say all that out loud. I think the cop could tell I was lonely and sad, and he could have said, “You seem like the saddest little fuck, I can’t even give your lame ass a DUI.” And he didn’t.

BK: In Blue-Collar Boy, you say, “To this day, Noah Cicero still only reserves storytelling for those he likes and loves.” Your blog, however, is filled with stories you share with strangers.

NC: I know. I like writing to strangers. I can’t talk like I want to in my environment. As I said earlier, long conversations don’t occur in my world. If you came to where I work and watched me, you would see that I don’t talk. I don’t go to bars and talk. I probably fill up, like, ten minutes of talking time a day. Most everything I say is in short, sarcastic sentences. I think I need to get things out, and I like how blogs are personal. People who come to your blog repeatedly are coming because they like you in some way. I can talk about politics, literature, even my bathroom habits on my blog, and people are okay with it. If I worked for a newspaper, I would have to focus on the local police force or the mayor. But on a blog, I can speak freely.

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