Day 57: July 27, 2009 (bad tips, dry landscapes, beetle-destroying wasps, and expensive trees' last stand)

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 10

Sales: $529.63

Tips: $48

Hours: 3.02

Total Wage: $23.89 per hour

My first run of the night goes well, with each of the two deliveries giving me $5 tips (one order was $29.58, and the other was $36.22). When I get back, Bis, a driver from Nepal, says to me, "You're lucky tonight," because I line up with a $232.82 order. I tell him you never know what you're going to get with these "whales," and since I'm delivering it as a one-bagger, my next hour almost exclusively depends on the kindness of these strangers. When I get to the house, I'm directed to the kitchen to unload all the food, then I wait for the hip, 30-something-year-old dad, who's dressed like a teenage Moto X star, to come pay me. He counts out $248 dollars and asks if a $14 tip is cool. I say yeah, but don't point out he's giving me a $15.18 tip, nor do I tell him, actually, that a 6.52% tip sucks.

I'm still doing alright, since I've made $24 in the first hour of work. But I've done something to upset the delivery gods, and the night goes on with less than lucrative tipping: $1.37 on $22.63 (6%); $2.10 on $27.90 (7.5%); and $3.71 on $57.29 (6.5%). I could really use a weekly sermon about how good I have it right now. Instead, I'll end up leaving work early, thinking about how much I should have made.

Midway through the night, I get a delivery to the Black Mountain Road area, a place I've never been at the southeast corner of our delivery zone. Upper Donaker St. contains 3-4 bedrooms homes built in the late 1980s, currently selling in the mid $200,000s, which is inexpensive for San Diego. While the ethnic shift in this neighborhood from the whiteness of Rancho is noticeable––an Asian man stands on a ladder messing with his roof gutters; an Indian woman strolls down the street––what's strikes me most is the change in landscaping. The occasional dry or uncut lawns, sparse vegetation, and less exotic plants not only indicate less income, but they're also more representative of the four years of drought that San Diego is currently experiencing.  

I spend so much time driving through the eucalyptus forest that is Rancho Santa Fe and delivering to homes with regularly maintained, regal lawns and yards shaded in tropical canopies of expensive palms and banana trees, I sometimes forget what a middle-class yard looks like. While both areas are currently regulated by the same level 2 drought condition restrictions, you'd never know it in Rancho Santa Fe. 

The Santa Fe Irrigation District, which provides the water to Rancho and Fairbanks, as well as Solana Beach, may list the same restrictions and politely remind their customers on their website to "continue your efforts to meet our 6% voluntary reduction target," but I don't see evidence in the lush, green yards of any water use reduction. I doubt the issuing of a warning letter followed by minimal fines would prevent anyone with a yard worth tens of thousands of dollars from watering their tropical paradises and golf course-like lawns. Some would say the rich can afford the water, which is an insane concept when it comes to common natural resources: they should be an equally shared, inalienable right.  

I'm thinking the water districts should adopt something like the Finnish sliding scale

used when issuing traffic tickets, where one is fined relative to one's income. This allows for traffic tickets with astronomical amounts, such as $71,400 and a record $141,661. The thinking behind such a law is that a traffic ticket should hurt each person equally, and an across the board $75 fine for speeding, say, hurts a poor person much more than it does a rich person. Therefore, the fine discourages only the poor person from speeding in the future. The same goes with water use.

But, right now, the people of Rancho Santa Fe are much more concerned with saving their beloved, unnatural, Australian eucalyptus forest from the longhorn borer beetle, also of Australia, which you can read all about in this L.A. Times article. The residents have given U.C. Riverside $20,000 to conduct a study whereby the entomology department introduced 100 Syngaster lepidus wasps from, you guessed it, Australia, because the wasps destroy the beetle larvae with their own young. That's $200 per wasp. Not only are the residents of Rancho Santa Fe willing to shell out another $20,000 for each of the next two years to save their 100,000 eucalyptus trees (that's $6 per tree, if you don't count the already dead trees), they are carrying on a time honored European tradition of introducing non-native species into a habitat, then introducing more non-native species to combat the unforeseen problems caused by their tinkering with mother nature in the first place, which, in turn, usually creates more unforeseen consequences (see the English's rabbit/ferret introduction problem in New Zealand for an example).

As I drive around Rancho the rest of the night, I pay closer attention to the yards, calculating how much a stand of exotic palms costs in this yard, the expense of up-keeping a football field lawn at that house, and I realize that water flows not toward the path of least resistance but toward the money. (I feel like I'm having a Chinatown (1974) Jake Gittes [another Jack Nicholson character] realization here.)  From now on, I'll be listening for the tell-tale crackle sound of longhorn borer beetles plowing deep into the eucalyptus bark, and praying that a plague of wasps doesn't soon fill the air and consume me.

Day 56: July 26, 2009 (my easy job, happy happiness and the artists who portray it, Gene & Patti's remodel, & Brad's surprising public disclosures)

A.M.

Position: Manager

Hours: 6.73

Tips: $0

Total Wage: $14 per hour

I'm covering a managing shift this morning for the guy who took over my part-time manager position. It's one of the slowest Sundays I've ever seen, so it's nice that my girlfriend, Etel, stops by in the afternoon for lunch. She even gets to see my favorite Pizzeria character, Marsha, whom I wrote about back on Day 4. After a quick conversation I have across the room with Marsha, Etel comments that she's not really like how I portrayed her: Marsha speaks with pauses and punctuation, she says. I offer some lame excuse about how she isn't witnessing the full Marsha experience, but I should have said I portray Marsha in my writing the way I subjectively experience her in life. Anyway, it's good to see Marsha and hear in one minute the entirety of how she and the real estate market are fairing.

Etel also makes the comment, since I'm sitting down and sharing lunch with her, that my job seems nice and easy, which it is. There are those moments managing when all is chaos, thirty things happening at once, and you want to walk out the front door, but on the whole this job is easy, especially compared to the nine-to-five (sometimes more) grind of my girlfriend's job. So I ask myself, Why do I feel driven to "accomplish" something greater with my life, which leads to anxiety and a sense of failure? According to William Vollmann's book, Poor People, the average daily wage in the U.S. was $103.47 in 2003 (I'm assuming it's about the same, if not less, right now). I'm earning that nearly every night only working four hours at a time. I'm twice average, then. So why can't I be happy/content with this, especially after visiting the Imaginary Island and seeing the abject poverty of other people's lives? Why not enjoy what I have in this life while it lasts? Why can't I remember to appreciate everything?

I guess it's the same reason people need to attend church weekly and hear the same message over and over: you leave inspired, but by Tuesday you've forgotten everything you heard Sunday, so you need it repeated to you every seven days. Maybe I need to post a sign over my desk that says, "You do not live on the Imaginary Island. Be content with your life." Or maybe every Sunday I need to head out to Thich Nhat Hahn's Buddhist monastery in Escondido and hear the repetitive dharma talks: "Live in the here and the now"; "Breathe"; "You are home, you have arrived. Relax."

P.M.

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 13

Sales: $399.58

Tips: $68

Hours: 3.70

Total Wage: $29 per hour (including 2.43 hours of overtime)

On my second delivery run of the night, I notice a sculpture I've seen before at another mansion: a full-sized, bronze child rearing back, marching enthusiastically, with his mouth wide open, while gazing at the American flag in his hand; it looks like something master-sculpture-of-affluent-white-American-images, J. Seward Johnson, would make, minus the color. I'm instantly reminded of a comment poet Philip Levine made about Norman Rockwell while visiting one of my poetry workshops a couple years ago. He said something about Norman Rockwell not capturing the reality of life in America. "[His images] had nothing to do with my experience growing up in Detroit," he said. I think this sculpture, like Rockwell's paintings, projects an image of how wealthy white Americans see this country, or how they want to see this country: everyone happy and overly patriotic. The country's problems and real solutions to those problems are conveniently left out of the frame. And like television of yesteryear, many Americans can't find their reality, or faces even, in those images.

When I get to the door, another sculpture in the same style, but of a happy man reading a newspaper while sitting on a bench, greets me. The nearby welcome mat says, "Welcome to Gene and Patti's Ultimate Remodel," which is clearly an inside joke at this happiest of houses. The house is so large and luxurious, I would hate to speculate how much that joke cost them. I ring the doorbell, and it makes some strange dialing noise, but nobody answers the door. I try it two more times, as well as banging on the massive wooden door, before calling from my cell phone. I get a busy signal. I try the doorbell one more time before walking back toward the patriotic, flag-waving child and my car, when I finally hear a "hello" come from the door. This blond, curly-haired woman in her sixties must be Patti. "Our doorbell goes through the phone," she says, "and he's on the phone." I'm assuming the "he" here is Gene. I don't ask her why the hell you would ever have your doorbell wired through your phone, because I assume her answer would make about as much sense as why her sculptures are so happy. She pays, and I return to my less-than-elated life and reality outside of the Fairbanks Ranch gates.

A little while later, I arrive at an electric gate with––surprise––no gate code and no last name. Since I can't find "Armando" in the directory, I dial him on my cell phone. When he answers, I say, "I'm stuck at your gate with no code and no last name." He apologizes and says, "It's 2451." Beep. I'm in, but I'm still baffled how people who live in gated communities can order without giving their gate codes or last names, as if it slips their minds that they live in a gated community. I would like to see some statistics on how many people have died while an ambulance tried to navigate through the patient's gated world.

On this same delivery run, I pull up to the guard gate at Rancho Pacifica, and the female guard hands me a pass without asking any questions. I find this strange, since they usually make you tell them exactly where you're going, and I think they even call the home owners to make sure you're legit. I assume she's being lazy and decided to recycle a random pass, since we're always in here. I don't ask questions, and drive on. When I get to the door, I ring the bell, which, like the house earlier, sounds like it's dialing into their phone. "Hello?" a man's voice says from the box (an inordinate amount of wealthy houses have speaker boxes at the door instead of the regular, plain doorbell). 

"Yeah, I have a delivery from THE Pizzeria," I say.

"Oh, I'll be right there," he says, as if he is expecting me. If he's expecting me, then why the "hello?" like he didn't know who was at his house in this tight-security, gated community? It must be the whole doorbell to phone phenomenon that wasn't a well thought out technology. A large, cheery man, who looks like he could be a college football coach, answers the door. I'm tempted to drop the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) comment to Chief Bromden on him: "God damn, boy, you're as big as a mountain. Where'd you play your ball?" The man in front of me wears a Notre Dame T-shirt, so I assume maybe he played some ball there. I don't ask. 

On my way out of the development, I notice the pass that the guard gave me does have the right address on it, which means he must have called down in advance and let them know I was coming. This baffles me even more, since he answered the doorbell with that hello followed by a question mark (I'm not thinking about the stupid doorbell/phone line thing at this time). I also see for the first time that the pass has everyone in the household's name on it: Brad, Nora, Alexa, and Michael S____." I wish I would have asked for Michael or Alexa when he answered the doorbell: "I have a delivery for Alexa." Then I would have baffled him. 

Out of pure curiosity, I Google the dad's name at home to see if he coaches football somewhere. I don't find that out, but what I do find helps clarify one of my biggest questions while delivering out here in Rancho Santa Fe: what job pays you enough to live here? Brad owns a "European Bath/Kitchen Tile & Stone" business with twenty employees. (He's also donated thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party, including $3,000 to Obama's campaign last year, which surprises me. He might be burned at the stake if his neighbors find this out.) Maybe I need to get into the tile & stone business while I'm still relatively young. I mean, it seems like J. Seward Johnson could make a sculpture of Brad answering his door for the pizza guy, he seemed that happy. 

Day 54: July 24, 2009 (cell phoneless night, running like an idiot, misjudgments, wrong addresses, and interracial encounters)

Position: Driver

Total Number of Deliveries: 10

Sales: $358.51

Tips: $60

Hours: 4.52

Total Wage: $21.27 per hour

On the way to work I realize I forgot my cell phone. I'm too far to turn back, but it might be worth being late to have the security of my phone while delivering. When I first worked this job twelve years ago, I didn't have a phone, no one did, so I figure I can do it tonight. But I know I'm cursing myself; something will happen. 

In the 9 1/2 months since I started back here, I don't believe one new person has been hired. Now that school is out and people are moving off to college, we've had a rash of new hires. Having new counter girls taking orders combined with not having a cell phone proves to be a bad combination. My first delivery of the night says right on the ticket, "Call when you get there." Since I can't call when I get there, I call them from the store before I leave, since it will only take me five minutes to get there. The address reads 3875 Old El Camino Real, except 3875 does not exist. I drive all the way to the end of the road, turn around and start driving back. There are numbers such as 13768, so I think maybe I can add a one to the address and find it. But I can't. The feeling of not having a cell phone these days is something like the dream when you arrive at elementary school only to discover you're naked, possibly wrapped in your favorite light-blue blanket. I'm just about to give up and drive the five minutes back to the Pizzeria to call the people for the correct address, when I see one last horse farm on the right. I pull into the driveway, and there, slightly obscured by bushes, is 13875 on the entrance gate post. This must be it, I think.

There are buildings all about the property, including various stables and whatnot. Maybe they wanted me to call so I could find them in one of the barns or stables. A slight panic sets in. I park behind the cluster of cars near what looks to be the main house, and as I get out, a man and his son walk away from me and pretend I don't exist. Maybe I have the wrong place. I approach the front door, and finally I hear a man nervously acknowledge my existence: "The pizza guy's here." He repeats himself, pulling on one hand with the other, as if he might be reprimanded for bothering the boss. A blonde woman who looks like she runs a horse farm––tough, sun-worn, capable––appears at the door in a rush, signs the credit card slip, and hustles off. The whole episode makes me melancholy: my pathetic dependence on cell phones; her lack of courtesy; her nervous energy, the need to always be in motion, doing; no one can relax in her presence.

On this same run, I get an order to Sandown Way, which looks to be off Old Carmel Valley Road (it's funny, wherever they created new routes for roads around here, they left the old section and called it "Old _______"). One of the experienced drivers marked the cross street as Seabreeze, which didn't seem to make sense. So I approached it from Old Carmel Valley only to discover that, yes, Sandown does technically touch Old Carmel Valley like on the map, but there's one of these weird road blocks of semi-permanent pillars stopping me and my car. I don't have a map, so I have no idea how to drive around to Seabreeze and access it that way. And, of course, I can't call the manager and have her guide me into the neighborhood. I look at the first address on Sandown and see that it's 13005. My delivery is 13099; it's far, but not too far. So I do what I'm best at: I run. A good way to feel like an idiot: get a polo-shirted pizza outfit on and a pizza bag in your hand and run one-eighth to one-quarter of a mile through a residential neighborhood. A woman walking her dog does a double take, but I keep running like Forrest Gump. I deliver the food, and run back out of the neighborhood, avoiding eye-contact with the dog walker lady as I pass her again.

Later in the night, I get an order that's a single, medium cheese pizza with a note: "Double slice: 16 slices. Slice all the way thru." I check that the pizza is double-sliced, but I'm not going to inspect whether or not each slice is cut all the way through, which people often complain about. I think, If this lazy woman complains about the slices not being cut all the way through, I'll tell her to pull on them, like the perforated part of her phone bill, and they will magically come apart. When I get to the door, I'm prepared for a pizza slice inspection and confrontation. It would have been easier to check the pizza before I left, I know, but a point needs to be made. A man who looks like Adam Sandler rolls up to the glass front door in a wheelchair. He tells me to enter, then says to add a $4 tip to the credit card slip and initial it "TJ." I look down and realize he's paralyzed on his left side and only has the use of one hand, which he uses to take the pizza and place it in his lap. God, I hope those slices are cut all the way through. I thank him profusely, then walk out to my car feeling like a complete asshole.

On this same delivery run, I have another customer inside the Santa Luz development. I drive way, way up Run of the Knolls Road, speed limit 25 mph, only to discover there is no 8449. I knew the missing cell phone would kill me, but this is ridiculous. I pull down into the courtyard of town homes where there's an 8447 and an 8439, thinking maybe the phone girl was one number off. I begin honking, hoping the person who ordered will emerge from their house. I do some circles, pull out, and back into the courtyard before honking some more. I sit. No luck. What the hell should I do now? The Pizzeria is a good ten minutes away. Ah, I decide to drive back down to the gate guard and ask him to call for me. I wind back down the hill at 35 mph, and ask the gate guard to call. He asks for the last name instead, then returns from his shack and says, "The address for them is 8559, not 8449." By this time I've already forgotten the lesson of compassion taught to me by the wheelchair man, and I want to strangle a 16-year-old girl back at the Pizzeria. I wind back up the hill ten miles per hour over the speed limit, cursing the little girl the whole way. A nice baby sitter with the pep of a high school cheerleader answers the door, tips me $8.50 on $18.49 after I explain my situation, and all is forgiven. 

I return to the Pizzeria at 9:15 p.m. and am bummed to see there are still more deliveries, because all I want to do is get off work and hurry to see my girlfriend, who is probably being twirled around a Salsa dance floor by a hunky, Ricky Martin-esque, Latino man right this minute. 

After popping into Crosby for a delivery, where the gate guard types out the wrong address even though I repeated it two times, I head out to the limits of our delivery zone, to 4s Ranch. I quickly find the apartment, and the door is answered by a husky, giggling, African-American woman in her mid-twenties. It's rare to see African-Americans in this area, so this house full of three generations of African-American women makes me happy for some reason. I take the time to look at the framed pictures hanging from the walls, because, though I'm one of those gringos who claims to have African-American friends, I've been in few African-American homes in my life. This is the sad truth of growing up in America. I even remember being sort of awe-struck when Oshawn Jackson, who befriended me in high school because I liked Public Enemy, invited me over to study at his parents house while we were at Fresno City College together, and I realized it was one of the first African-American houses I'd ever been in. The Jackson 5 made-for-TV movie played on the set, a framed poster of Martin Lither King, Jr. hung above the fireplace, one of Abraham Lincoln (am I remembering that right?) was above the TV (man, I thought that was cool and patriotic), and Sean's cousin and sisters sat on the couch and either ignored me or giggled at my presence.

Now, standing here in this brand new apartment, with the carpets already stained from children's feet, I see on the wall a picture of the woman who answered the door being held by a young African-American man wearing an all-white, U.S. Navy uniform, not unlike the one my grandfather wore in WWII and my father wore in Vietnam. The woman's little girl runs by while her own mother sits on the floor holding the woman's other baby. She returns from her bedroom and apologizes for taking so long and also for the handful of change she's about to give me for the tip, and I want to say I'm sorry her man's not here, that he's out there somewhere for both of us, but instead, I say, "It's okay. It all spends the same."

Day 53: July 23, 2009 (density versus destiny, poor people's fatalism, and our bad decision making)

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 13

Sales: $443.62

Tips: $68

Hours: 4.48

Total Wage: $23.18 per hour

Sunday and Monday I worked day shifts serving and night shifts driving. People ate food, and I made money. Other than that, not much happened.

At the end of the shift tonight, when I think I'm all done, I return past 9 p.m. (closing time) to see I have one more run, including an $83.39 order to Del Mar. I've already made $57 in tips by this point, but this order, coupled with another, could put me over the $70 mark. The first house, after I miss the driveway in the dark and have to turn around, gives me a $5 tip on $22.58. Now for the big fish . . . 

Earlier in the day, the George McFly malapropism from Back to the Future, "My density has brought me to you," inappropriately popped into my head while reading William T. Vollman's book, Poor People, before work. The reason it emerged from the grey goo of my mind is because poor people around the world say destiny is the number one reason (among others) that they are poor, just as rich people like to believe hard work and destiny made them wealthy. In the first chapter of Vollman's book, he has this heartbreaking conversation with a Thai woman named Sunee, who makes $3.56 a day as an office cleaner in Bangkok:

Why are poor people poor?

Just destiny, she said, politely half smiling, twisting the paper to shreds in her swollen-veined hands.

Can you change your destiny?

Impossible. Always poor. (11)

Her fatalism, as is that of other poor people around the world, is compounded by her religious beliefs. In her case, it's Buddhism (and the belief in reincarnation), though it could easily be Christianity (Matthew 20:16: "So the last will be first, and the first will be last"), and her daughter offers this explanation for their poverty when asked why some people are poor and some people rich:

From the life before. If you do a good thing you won't be poor.

Then did you do something bad in your previous life?

No, said the girl slowly, her knees politely folded, supporting herself on her palms.

In that case, why are you poor?

She smiled and cocked her head, scratching at her mosquito bites. ––Maybe last time I was very rich and so this time I must be poor. (17)

Though the mother spends many of her waking hours drunk to ease her pain, I assume suicide is not an option for the same reason Shakespeare's Hamlet cries out: "O that this too sallied flesh would melt,/ Thaw, and resolve into a dew!/ Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd/ His canon 'gainst [self-] slaughter!" 

In other words, religious beliefs keep people alive and poor. And while many Americans can quote, "To be or not to be, that is the question," I think few know the lines about action versus complacency that follow: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing, end them." As you may or may not remember, Hamlet takes arms against his sea of troubles, namely Claudius the King, and everybody dies. 

Vollman raises the idea of action with Sunee: 

"When I requested her opinion on the broader question of why so many people in this world were poor, she replied that too few people owned too much money, so I then asked whether a revolution to kill the rich would better the majority, and this woman, who was brown, strong, freckled and in an impersonal way[,] which never affected her capacity for friendliness[,] very bitter, hesitated, trying to decided whether to trust me, which I took for a token that like so many of her countrymen she did in fact advocate violent revolution ([an] Algerian woman, as beautifully unworldly in her way as any Buddhist, cried out in horror [at this same question]: But it's not right to kill people just for money!)." (10)

In America, when the news of high unemployment was coupled with the excessive executive bonus stories and the Bernie Madoff case, my brother and I both predicted some middle-aged, white, unemployed man was going to storm one of these executive's houses, drag him into the street, and shoot him. What would he have to lose? But maybe Americans prefer their violence to remain overseas, a remote control click away from the public eye. Being a fan of Ghandi, King, and Chavez's nonviolent movements, I don't advocate violence of any kind, but all those leaders proved action and civil disobedience bring about change. Destiny is not why people are poor, basic human decisions (and consumption habits) are why some people are poor and others are rich. 

When I arrive at the  final delivery of the night, I can hear men cheering from the third floor Del Mar apartment. I assume I'm about to walk these four pizzas into a poker night of some kind. When I make it to the apartment door, I see at least ten sunburned men gathered around a TV, watching baseball. They look like they've spent the entire day golfing and drinking. "Hey, the pizza guy!" some shout. The man of the house hands me a non-collated stack of money, then asks if I have parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes. I tell him I'll check in the car, but I don't have any on me. As I walk down the stairs, I count the money. There's only $90, which leaves me a 7.93% tip. I figure I'm not even going to bother to search the car, much less report back; I'll just drive off. But I do search the car, anyway, and find only one, useless pack of parmesan cheese. I'm hoping he'll poke his head over the balcony railing so I don't have to walk back up there. I think about driving off, again, but I decide on a middle compromise. I call him. "That's cool," he says. What's not cool is your tip, I want to tell him.      

I lied. Something did come out of driving last Sunday night: this quote from George Bernard Shaw on the Writer's Almanac: "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That's the essence of inhumanity." Maybe George McFly's malapropism isn't a confusion of words: our density––our mass of molecules––is what propels us toward action and is the only possible vehicle for change. 

Day 48: July 18, 2009 (the interminable depths of idiocracy, let the servants talk amongst themselves, and more gate trouble)

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 11

Sales: $536.25

Tips: $64.50

Hours: 3.63

Total Wage: $25.77 per hour

On my first run of the night, I end up in a confusing place. I find myself staring at an apartment leasing office in Solana Beach. It's dark inside, and the plastic board, window clock that says, "We we'll return at:" has it's arms set to 9:00. I assume it means a.m., since they close at 5 p.m. and it's now almost 6 p.m. I can't see anyone inside, but I knock several times. Nothing. I look at the ticket, 701 S Nardo, and back at the wall that says, "Leasing Office" with  "701" underneath. I call the number on the ticket twice, and get a voicemail twice. Maybe it's a prank. I phone my manager and tell her what's going on. She says the call was weird and at first they gave a different number––the same number but with a four at the end. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of the time and deliveries I'm possibly losing while standing around this apartment complex looking like an idiot. I realize there's a pool around back, so I make my way down there, where a man and his kids play in the water. This makes more sense, but I feel bad since I didn't bring plates and napkins. "Hey," I yell over the fence, "did you order pizza?" Nope. Damn. I walk around the building, poking my head in each doorway: laundry room; closet; nothingness. I decide to try the number my manager gave me. 

"Hello." 

"This is Eric from THE Pizzeria. Did you order food?"

"Yeah."

"Well," I say in a stern voice, "I'm standing in front of the leasing office and no one's here."

"Oh, you can keep driving past the office and . . . or I can meet you there. We're in the same complex." 

His tone makes it sound like I'm lost. "You can meet me right here," I say. I'm tempted to take his pizzas out of the bag to let them cool on my car's trunk. I stare at the large apartment buildings on the right, thinking he'll emerge any second. Two minutes later, my phone rings. 

"Hey, I'll meet you out front by the sign. Just drive out the way you came in."

I'm about to lose it. How the hell can he be out front by the sign, when he told me to drive deeper into the complex? I throw the pizzas in the backseat, and drive toward the entrance, where his thirty-ish, fat, video game-playing ass stands there like a security guard in shorts and a T-shirt. He pays in cash, and I don't say a word except an ironic "thanks" as he, get this, walks in the complete opposite direction of where he originally told me to drive. We have no chance of surviving as a species.

On my second run of the night, I ring the doorbell to a mansion in Fairbanks Ranch and wait. And wait. This is one of the things I've been noticing about the rich: their houses are so large, they don't even know when a car pulls into their driveways; they also don't seem to anticipate the delivery driver's arrival, though they phoned in the order. A young Mexican girl answers the door, and I speak to her in English, which she obviously doesn't speak. She manages a "one minute," before disappearing into the house. I glance around the tall, white entranceway, taking in the large, crystal-tear drops chandelier and the two, gold-trimmed, ornate white chairs placed next to a round, white entrance table, all of which looks like it belongs in Buckingham Palace. Why didn't I speak to the young girl in Spanish? I just spent two and a half weeks listening to and trying to speak Spanish. While I'm standing here, a middle-aged, blond woman drifts by in a white, pool robe and pink flip-flops without even acknowledging me. A minute later, another Mexican woman, whom looks to be the first one's mother, shows up at the door and hands me a twenty. I guess the Queen Victoria II of the house prefers to let the servants deal with the servants.

I don't get the whole having a staff in your house thing. I want to be alone in my house, to crank up my boombox and dance in my underwear. I want to eat cereal on the couch. I want to kick an impromptu handstand here and there. If there were people around all the time, I would feel like I'm on reality TV and that I couldn't relax and be my ridiculous self. Who knows, maybe it's a way for the wealthy to feel less alone and isolated in their large houses.

My last run of the night is back in Solana Beach, at a gated condo complex along the coast. I'm stuck at the walk-in gate, since the woman only listed her first name on the order and the gate operates by last names, which is one of my biggest pet peeves of delivery: you know, you have to know, your gates always operate by last names, so give us a last name or the damn gate code when placing your order. 

Using the handy map at the gate, I can see her lit-up place right there through the wrought iron fence, but there's no way I can get her attention. A man passes by inside, and I ask him if he'll let me in. He tries, but says the gate's stuck. "There should be a button to release the lock," I say. He says he's pushing it, but nothing happens. Now the semi-trashy woman (she's wearing one of those weird terry cloth, spaghetti strap tops and matching shorts combo) is out on her deck and sees me, and, with a scratchy smoker's voice, orders her chubby, little boy down to let me in and pay me. And she's now hit on a second pet peeve: making your kids do your dirty work. The bill is $55.13, and the boy hands me $56.13, which means she knows exactly how much the bill is and how little she's tipping me. The boy walks off with the food, and her terry cloth silhouette yells, "Thank you," from the dark deck. I want to yell back that she can shove her 1.81% tip down her surely cancerous trachea, but I choose to go with my more cowardly regular response of the silent treatment.

Days 46 & 47: July 16 & 17, 2009 (reentry to the land of cash rolls)

Thursday  

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 10

Sales: $391.61  

Tips: $68.50

Hours: 3.28

Total Wage: $28.88 per hour 

Friday

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 8

Sales: $309.22

Tips: $48.50

Hours: 3.85

Total Wage: $20.60 per hour

The reentry back into the U.S., especially the wealthy part of the U.S., has been disorienting after visiting Mexico and the Imaginary Island. I forgot to mention that everyone on the Imaginary Island only makes $20 per month, so everything is measured according to a month's salary. As in, That cab ride I took just cost a month and a half's salary for an Imaginary Island resident. You never hear that a diamond engagement ring cost two months salary on the island; that is a purely Western equation devised by DeBeers, and most American women would laugh at a $40 ring, anyway. 

Anyhow, I've combined my first two nights back working, since they feel like a continuation of the same bizarre dream. Amy Krouse Rosenthal best describes the feeling of returning from a long vacation in her book, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life: 

"I am here, yes, but there has not yet lost its hold on me. It’s really something, to return home after a month away. It would seem that the world should have changed in some way, out of courtesy, We understand your journey was illuminating and significant, and because it affected you so, the universe, too, is making a slight but noticeable shift: Chairs will now have five legs, people will walk sideways, and raindrops will be seven percent larger and pinkish in color (172)."

Sure, I was only gone two and a half weeks, but the sentiment's the same. And a strange phenomenon occurs over these two nights: people flash their money rolls. It first happens Thursday night. I arrive at a mansion in Fairbanks, and the man who answers the door is as disheveled as the inside of his house. This, you never see around here, because the houses are usually spotless and managed by an entire staff from Latin America. The man's uncombed, wild, graying mop of hair surrounds his droopy face like a halo of flaccid electricity. He's wearing wrinkled shorts and a dark blue collared polo shirt, as if he can't be bothered to dress properly. He looks like . . . he looks like . . . a writer! Then I realize he's either moving in or out, the items cluttering the floor wrapped in paper or bubble wrap. But there are several empty packs of Coke near the door, and he's ordered a six-pack from us. It looks like his wife died and he just can't get it together: the house has been this way for a month, maybe more. He pulls out a wad of fifties, twenties, tens and fives, and I can't calculate how many months of salary that equals on the Imaginary Island. He fishes a fifty from the outside of the roll and a five from the inside to cover the $54.88 bill. Then he peels around a little more until he releases a twenty from the wad. Holy crap, he's tipping me a whole month's Island salary. 

It happens two more times Friday night. A couple who looks like lottery winners from the Midwest––not tall, not beautiful; average, Wal Mart ad stuff––answer the door of a mansion in Cielo, and the bald man whips out a light brown wallet/billfold thing with perfectly folded cash inside. He gives me a twenty and a ten (a month and a half's Imaginary Island salary) for his $23.77 bill: $6.23 tip. Hell yes.

Then a man in the Crosby development answers the door holding a collection of bills, which begin falling like abscised leaves when he tries to thumb through it. "I'm dropping money everywhere," he says. "Here you go, that's about sixty-three dollars." It's actually only $62, but I'm not going to complain about a $9.33 tip. 

Are they doing this on purpose, this showing of large amounts of cash? Am I just more sensitive to it because I've come from the Island? Is this a primate, alpha male, power display? You don't see women doing this sort of thing. Being a beta or omega male myself, I don't think I've ever given over to this type of behavior. I'm just glad the Imaginary Island people can't see these displays; someone might get hurt.

On my last run of the night, a kid pulls a classic "bait-and-switch move," to borrow a popular political term. This is when the parents leave money, usually in a neat stack, near the door. The child's job is to pick up the money, hand it to the driver, and take the food. But what happens instead is the child decides to correct his/her parents' act of generosity, and either out of cunning or malice, pockets the extra money, leaving the driver with little, if any, tip. The common bait-and-switch species is usually between the ages of 8-12. So I was surprised to have a six-foot-four, zit-faced, near adult hold up and count through the cash by the door, only to remove two fives from the fan of bills, leaving me a $4 tip on a $60.13 order. Thanks.

That's still 1/5 of an Imaginary Island resident's monthly salary, so I'm not complaining. Sorry, but I just can't get back into the mode of conspicuous consumption and dealing with the wealthy so easily, and I keep thinking of those nice island people. This capitalist system might be flawed and corrupt and racist, but I still think it works better in the long run than the Imaginary Island system, and the residents there know it. What's the use of being equal if everyone is equally poor? Does anybody have a boat I can borrow?

Days 29-41: June 29-July 11, 2009 (vacation to an imaginary island)

I haven't been able to get the concept of greed out of my mind since that special I heard on NPR and wrote about two posts ago. There are extreme cases we can point to, such as Bernie Madoff, whom I think we can all agree was greedy when he stole $65 billion from clients. But what about the rest of us operating in the ordinary world? My father is, and paternal grandfather was, a successful business man, but I wouldn't say either were driven by greed. In fact, while they may have been motivated by an above average entrepreneurial ambition, both are (or were, in my grandfather's case) quite humble, hard-working men who happened to succeed financially. No country clubs, no Bentleys, no mansions, just the basics––nice basics but basics.   

And I don't think Pat Robertson's greed/lust analogy quite fits either, because wanting something one doesn't have and wanting it now is what drives most human pursuits, and one can work hard toward a goal and still be greedy. (Madoff worked diligently toward his goal over a period of many years.) No, I think greed is an abstract term (we know it when we see it: "don't be greedy") that's situational and independent of class. 

While on vacation, I decide to try an experiment and travel to an imaginary island, something like Plato's Republic. On this imaginary island, everyone receives the same pay, no matter what their jobs. Their basic needs are taken care of––eggs, flour, sugar, etc. are provided––but there's nothing superfluous, though the island does produce beautiful, ornate wooden boxes, which many people in the outside world want. While there are tight controls on the media and information (no internet!), the island people still sometimes see images of the outside world, which they are banned from visiting (though tourists from the outside world can visit the island). The people are free to marry whom they want, become whatever profession they want through free education, and health care is provided. The imaginary island seems ideal since, free of monetary worries, the people are able to pursue, in Plato's words, "the gold and silver in the composition of their souls . . . drawing them towards virtue and the ancient ways."

But as Plato accurately predicts the deterioration of his Republic, you can probably predict the problems of the imaginary island. Plato writes, "[A young man's] father tends the growth of reason in his soul, while the rest of the world is fostering the other two elements, ambition and appetite. By temperament he is not a bad man, but he has fallen into bad company, and the two contrary influences result in a compromise: he gives himself up to the control of the middle principal of high-spirited emulation and becomes an arrogant and ambitious man."

And this is exactly what happens on my imaginary island: people want to emulate the ambition and appetites they see in the outside world. So, in the name of "survival" not greed, the island people begin finding ways to create and hide wealth. Some overcharge foreign visitors to stay in their houses; some steal the ornate wooden boxes from the factory and sell them to visitors on the street; and many women become prostitutes, selling the commodity most readily available to them. And this is where the moral water gets murky. I would say anytime you steal anything, no matter how small the item, you're driven by greed. Unless, of course, you're starving and stealing is your only means of survival; then you're being a human motivated by self-preservation, which is the innate drive of every cell in the planet's biosphere. But the line of greed is hard to draw and easy to cross.

So things fall apart, and the island residents turn into mini-entrepreneurs, forgetting the ideals and virtues that founded the island. They hassle foreign visitors, begging them for their brand-name jeans and shoes, which are unavailable on the island. The resourceful residents find ways to steal the Internet and cable TV, allowing them wider access to the outside world, fostering more avarice and emulation. They think life would be so much better out there, where one's free to buy cars and accumulate untold amounts of wealth and eat anything they want. They can't see that these things create their own problems: pollution; insatiable avarice; and obesity. And so what are the island people to do but push forward toward that ever-blinding light of prosperity that guides the outside world toward its own self-fulfilling prophecy of apocalyptic delight? 

Man, I'm going to need a vacation from my vacation.

Day 28: June 28, 2009 (first class vacation)

Position: Traveler

Number of Drinks on Plane: 4-5

Plane Ticket Price: $50-$70 

Hot Towels: 1

Hours: 1hr 53min

For my vacation, I'm headed to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Since my brother is a pilot for Continental Express, I get ridiculously cheap flights anywhere Continental flies. I hop a regular standby flight to Houston, then, while trying to trade my Cancun standby pass in for a seat, the gate agents ask if I want first class. "How much will that cost me?" I ask. Ten to twenty dollars. "Why not?" 

I get to board early with all the other first class passengers, and the flight attendant immediately asks if I'd like something to drink. I think of the nicest beer I can. "Heineken, please." It's been a long time since I've had Heineken, and it tastes wonderful. The other passengers begin boarding the plane and have to pass by me and the rest of the first-classers drinking our cocktails and beers. I feel a mixed sense of pleasure and guilt, a little, "Look at those poor suckers," and, "God, I feel like an asshole; does anyone want some of my beer?" But I have to say, I also feel special. I imagine each person passing by notices my less than impressive wardrobe––brown cords with worn knees and a hole from my bike chain, hand-me-down collared shirt that appears in the last three years of family Christmas photos, and dirty running shoes––and thinks, He must be someone famous; that's why he can dress that way. The rich can be as eccentric as they want.

After take-off, I order another Heineken, and it's served with, what's this, cashews not peanuts. Cashews seem so upper class while peanuts now seem somehow pedestrian. I look out my window and realize I don't have to deal with some pesky wing obscuring my view. Even the views are better in first class.

The pilot announces the crew will be through the cabin shortly with a beverage service, while first class will be getting a "cold plate." Jesus, are they trying to start a riot? We don't want those poor fools in coach to know what's going on up here. The pre-flight drink rub-in-the-face was bad enough. Oh, and now my beer is served with a real glass glass, not one of those wasteful plastic cups that holds a little more than a shot of soda or water.

Then the hot towels come. There's no other way to put it: the hot towel is the best kept secret of first class, worth the extra cost itself. We all wipe our faces down, like we've been working and sweating all day, in preparation for our cold plates, which makes its own kind of sense. We throw the now tepid towels wherever we want––arm rest, tray––and the flight attendant picks them up with silver tongs.

I ask what comes on the cold plate, and then order mine without meat. The cold plate is served on a bed of lettuce covering a white, ceramic plate. There are a variety of cheeses, a fruit bowl (containing strawberries, cantaloupe, grapes, and melon), crackers, a cucumber slice (how silly of me to confuse it with a proletariat pickle slice), an empty space where the meat was supposed to be, and a nut brownie bar. I unravel my real silverware from the green, cloth napkin and attack the cheeses and fruit like a homeless man who hasn't eaten in a week.

Though my beer is still nearly full, they offer red or white wine with the cold plate. I choose white. It's summer, why not? So I'm double fisting in first class, and I glance around to see how my fellow first-classers are doing. I'm looking for that knowing nod the wealthy use among themselves. We're all in this together. We get it, they don't. But all I see among the chosen twenty are mostly white people, half of whom could be firmly placed in the husky to overweight category. They lift meats and cheeses to their mouths or swish wine. 

After they remove my plate, I order another Heineken and settle into my large, comfortable seat, thinking a nap is in order. When I'm halfway through my beer, the super cool, African-American flight attendant walks down the aisle holding a bottle of each kind of wine in her hands. "Hey, y'all, we only got twenty-five minutes. Who wants some more wine?" Everybody laughs, and I ask for more white. It's like a party up here. 

So this is what being wealthy is all about: getting the good stuff and feeling special, one big party. I wonder to myself: Were the three beers, wine and cold plate worth the extra $50-$110 for the other first-classers (turns out it was only "business class"––the gate agents misspoke) and $20 for me? That's almost the same price as drinking in coach. Yes, it's only money (if you have it), and there's no guarantee this bird isn't going into the big drink today.

I stretch out my legs and pine for another hot towel. Then I look out at the beautiful, aquamarine water surrounding a coral reef in the ocean below, while a soldier on R&R with his wife in row one talks about the military suicide rate in Afghanistan to another passenger, and I think I might order one more bag of cashews to tuck away and eat in my $8 hostel room tonight.

Day 23: June 23, 2009 (On Greed)

Position: Driver

Number of Deliveries: 11

Sales: $406.25

Tips: $72

Hours: 4.17

Total Wages: $25.26 per hour

Not much of interest happened tonight delivering, other than one door was answered by a man who looked like a Miami Vice bad-guy: greasy, slicked-back hair; a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned enough to reveal his hairy, tanned chest and gold chain; an obscure accent, possibly Lebanese. In other words, a customer that begs the questions: what the hell have you done with your life to become so wealthy? How are you different than I am?

Amy Krouse Rosenthal answers that second question in her hilarious, experimental memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, where she realizes, while standing in an insanely wealthy individual's house, that "the only thing that separates the insanely wealthy from the rest of us is that the insanely wealthy enlarge all their photographs . . . the rest of us, on the other hand, make do with our fridge frame magnets; our five-by-seven frames from Target" (208). In my room I only have one photograph––me and my niece and nephews––and it's only 3" x 7". Which, of course, must make me poor enough to qualify for a free STD screening at Planned Parenthood.

Those of us who operate by reason think the difference between the wealthy and the poor has something to do with ambition and greed. We walk around with a simple equation/analogy in our heads: rich = greedy as poor = needy, which doesn't hold up. I began contemplating all of this because of a BBC World Service discussion on greed I listened to while driving around tonight. The first interview of the program was with televangelist and sometimes insane apocalyptic prophet (homosexuals cause hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and possibly an earth-bound meteor), Pat Robertson. He says, "Self-interest is good, and it creates prosperity. There's not anything wrong with people looking out for themselves and in the process looking after others." I think back: was I greedy when, as a child, I would starve myself by skipping school lunches to save the money ($1.25), accumulating a roll of twenties I kept in a coffee can on my shelved headboard, or was self-interest creating prosperity and a deferred reward in the American tradition? Did it only become greed when I loaned that same money to my less financially responsible and less sacrificial siblings and charged them interest, or was I looking after them? Oh God, please don't let me agree with Pat Robertson.  

But then Dr. Pat goes on to equate greed with lust, and says, "Sex within marriage is a wonderful thing, but the idea of unrestrained sexuality outside of marriage can lead to terrible problems: unwed pregnancies and disease and so forth." I like the greed/lust analogy, but is he saying the financial crisis is a diseased, unwed mother? Does that make the government bail-out plan a syringe full of anti-syphilitic fluid? Or an abortion doctor removing the unwanted greed? Or, perhaps, a condom-wielding liberal who says, "Greed happens, it's best to be protected"? You lost me, Pat.

The second part of the discussion includes a round-table of less-metaphoric guests, including Socialist ex-mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, Enron whistle-blower, Sherron Watkins, hedge fund manager and confessed greed hound, Alpesh Patel, and BBC's moderator, Steve Evans. While they all make excellent points, their arguments boil down to Watkins's statistics on the character of human beings: 10% of employees will do right, 10% are "wired" to do wrong, and the other 80% will go either way, depending on the control system. Regulation is the only way to check greed, though Alpesh argues that greed is good, because wealth creates altruism ("There's only so much I can do with what I'm accumulating; the rest, I have to give away"), and he points out that Bill Gates has given away more money than anyone in the history of the world. But then Sherron counters with historical child labor abuses, worker safety issues, and environmental pollution (she forgot Gates's aggressive and illegal business practices) as being the cost of unchecked greed. But my question is, can you be wealthy without being greedy? Can everyone be a pre-sell-out Ben & Jerry's, or like Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard, who explains his "liberal" business philosophy in his book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Business Man.

I think Ken Livingstone makes the best point in the discussion: "We all want security." But we in the English-speaking world, as Ken puts it, think that money equals security and social status, versus, say, a non-English speaking world (?) that builds security on close family ties, acts of bravery, and social reciprocation. Ken argues that hard earned social position, such as being a teacher or Doctor minus the money, should determine one's value to society. I would argue with Ken that I make decent money, more than I did teaching or my pilot brother makes, but it affords me no social status among my English-speaking friends or family, because the position I'm in isn't respected. A reasonable communist would agree with Ken, pointing out that when everyone makes the same amount of money, no matter their job, then the only thing to create self-worth is the position accomplished in society.

Then what am I to do with my life? I'm self-interested but not greedy. I have passions but no ambition, no drive to turn my art into a commodity. As always, I turn to my books and their philosophies and quotes:

"To succeed one must have ambition, and ambition seems to me absurd." -Vincent Van Gogh from his Letters.

In Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie visited a fur factory looking for work with his father during the Great Depression, saw the poor conditions the workers labored under, and he made a "vow that he kept until the end of his life: he would never do any work that exploited someone else, and he would never allow himself to make money off the sweat of others" (78). 

And, again, from Van Gogh: "[The ideal is] to sacrifice all personal desires, to realize great things, to obtain nobleness of mind, to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of nearly all individuals is spent." 

What do I take away from all this: security is an illusion, and while money keeps the illusion playing on the cave wall (blatant Plato reference), it's best to be in the 10% that does the right thing all the time (I might have to start reporting all my tips, which would make my dad happy). Bill Gates and other "philanthropists" may do good (as was pointed out in Time Magazine's excellent article on Gates and Bono), but I think it's more about being in a position of power to decide whom gets the money (why not just pay your workers better and give them a better life?)––it's, like their business practices, driven by ego. 

Maybe Amy Rosenthal is right, that the wealthy somehow see themselves as bigger and more important, enlarged, like those pictures adorning their earth-tone walls and white, marble fireplaces.