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.
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