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.
I heart Bill Vollman.
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