Day 19: June 19, 2009 (Samuel Jackson's cocaine use, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, the burden of fat, and $10 parasitic errands)

Position: Driver

Soundtrack: Fresh Air on Stage & Screen vol.2   

Number of Deliveries: 10

Sales: $302.69

Tips: $37.50 (+ $10––see story below) 

Hours: 4.55

Total Wage: $18.43

Even though it's a Friday night, the deliveries are slow and we're stacked with drivers. On one of my early runs, I arrive at a house with a welcome mat that says, "A pilot and a normal person live here." When the man answers the door, I ask him if he's the pilot or the normal person. As he signs the credit card slip, with his back turned to me, he says, "Oh, I'm the pilot." I ask for whom he flies, and he says, "I'm what they call . . . a private pilot." I mention my brother's a pilot for Continental, but the man pretty much ignores me and hands back the credit card slip. This is one of the hobbies of the wealthy: flying planes. When my brother was a flight instructor he had all kinds of "rich retards" who wanted to fly planes and didn't realize it takes more than money to learn how. "Those people almost killed me," my brother says.

As I drive around tonight, I'm listening to a Fresh Air with Terry Gross CD compilation. During her interview with Samuel Jackson, he openly admits to his past cocaine use and his devilish behavior. The only reason he's able to say this is because he's wealthy and already successful in Hollywood. At this point, nobody's going to deny him a role because of his past cocaine use, even though, according to people I know who've used, there's no such thing as someone who "used to" do cocaine. Money buys you the freedom of being honest, and since Jackson still has the power to make other people money, he can say and do pretty much what he wants. If he were a poor, struggling actor, or a teacher, he would never admit to cocaine use in public. In some things, wealth puts you beyond reproach.

The whole episode reminds me of August Wilson's play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, where Ma Rainey has earned enough power and wealth in the 1920s to behave as she pleases during the play's memorable studio recording scene. She comes into the session an hour late and demands a Coca-Cola before she'll sing, and the white producers beg her to begin recording without the drink. She refuses, and when someone goes to fetch her the Coke, she says to a band member, "They don't care nothing about me. All they want is my voice. Well, I done learned that, and they gonna treat me like I want to be treated no matter how much it hurt them." Wealth, or the ability to create wealth, endows one with the power to behave in certain ways we might find unconscionable in the poor. 

Later in the night, a customer calls and tells the manager he left his credit card in the restaurant. He asks if a driver can drop it off at his home in Fairbanks, one-and-a-half miles away. The manager tells the man he can come pick it up, but he's not sending a driver out to drop it off. "Oh, come on," the guy says, "tell him I'll tip him." The errand falls to me, and I'm cool with it, because I only have a "single-bagger" at the time. 

When I arrive at the mansion, I can't pull into the driveway, because he has both ends blocked with plants in flower pots evenly spaced across the entrances. I jog from the street to the door, and a built/chubby man in his early 40s with longish black hair greets me. I hand him his card and he slips a $10 bill into my hand. I can't believe he just paid me ten bucks to drive his credit card 1.5 miles. The act pushes my tips to a respectable level, but it also has an offensive undertone that his time is more valuable than mine. At least I'm at work. I think it's the excesses of the rich that are the most fascinating yet upsetting to the middle class and poor. It's what drives shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and MTV's Cribs ("Wow! 50 Cent's entire bed end is a flat screen TV!"). 

But this man's act of laziness is more reminiscent of Plato's observation of the wealthy in his Republic: "As for themselves, luxurious indolence of body and mind makes their young men too lazy and effeminate to resist pleasure or to endure pain; and the fathers, neglecting everything but money, have no higher ideals in life than the poor." Plato then asks what will happen if the poor and wealthy are thrown together in battle, and answers, "The rich will have no chance to feel superior to the poor. On the contrary, the poor man, lean and sunburnt, may find himself posted in battle beside one who, thanks to his wealth and indoor life, is panting under his burden of fat and showing every mark of distress. 'Such men,' he will think, 'are rich because we are cowards . . . These men are no good: they are at our mercy.'"

In America, the poor live under the illusion that by either hard work or lottery luck, they someday will be the wealthy. If this is the case, then there's no need to criticize the wealthy, because the poor will only be criticizing their imagined, future selves. And if it weren't for acts of wealthy excess, I wouldn't be able to live the life I'm currently living. I'm a parasite feeding off of the rich as much as I'm feeding the rich. And the money I'm earning––which is more than double what I earned teaching at the university as a grad student––allows me my own freedom: I'm about to take two and a half weeks off and travel to Mexico, where I hope to indulge in my own excesses of food and drink and sunburn my own burden of fat.