Number of Deliveries: 9
Sales: $269.57
Tips: $39.50
Hours: 3.67
Total Wage: $18.76 per hour
While on day 61 I wrote that I'm becoming more accustomed to the luxurious houses and landscapes of Rancho Santa Fe and, therefore, numb, I'm still amazed by some residents' extra luxuriousness. Tonight, I pull into a driveway in the Crosby, and when I cruise up to their round-about with the ornate fountain in the middle, I notice they have two garages facing each other. One contains a brand new, white Maserati (triggering the Eagles lyric: "My Maserati does one-eighty-five" in my head), and the other garage houses a black Bentley. Neither have license plates yet, and both cars cost well over $100,000 each. Tall, black, horse-riding boots stand idle behind the Bentley. As I approach the front door, I gawk at the all-marble portico with somewhat Moorish tile designs in the pillars. A pleasant, bleach-blonde woman over six feet tall answers the door. Her lips look cosmetically altered, and I think it's safe to assume the two bulges pushing out her tight white T-shirt with the horse and rider design in diamond-looking sequins are artificially "enhanced." She gives me a decent tip, and I can't help fantasize about the ease of her life––the expensive cars, the horse riding, the marble portico, meals delivered nightly. But it's not my fantasy. I would prefer a modest house, a car-less existence, a nice vegetable garden with fruit trees, dirty boots by the back door, and a cosmetically unaltered woman to share it all with. I would even prefer my current life as, what my maternal grandma would call, a "beach bum."
Later in the night I deliver to a home on Poco Lago which looks like something that belongs on the cover of an architecture magazine. A minimally-slanted wall facade made of semi-polished limestone (?) slabs obscures perpendicularly slanted metal roofs shooting out into the sky, giving the appearance of five separate structures beyond the wall. The impossibly wide front door looks to be copper or brass, and I can hear a dog with a deep bark on the other side. Even with all my experience, I can only distinguish large dog barks from small but not attack dogs from Frisbee-fetching dogs. I hear a woman approach from the other side, saying, "No. No. Stay. Go to your bed," but the mean bark continues. The weight of the door makes it open slowly, and I hear a "no," before seeing a white blur of a dog come running out. I stiffen, and hold the pizza bag ready to shove in its jaws. But, luckily, it's a large, furry terrier who just sniffs around me. "We're trying to get him to not do that," the woman says.
Her motherly, Mexican servant helps get the dog inside before the woman closes the door and asks me how much she owes. While she digs through her purse for cash, the largest diamond I've ever seen shines from her ring finger. Her dual-faced watch also blings with a diamond-encrusted outside ring. And this is when I can feel true compassion for the wealthy and the poor at the same time: she's the victim of the most successful wool-over-the-eyes ad campaign in the world, De Beers's "A Diamond is Forever" ads (you can read the history in this article from The Atlantic), and she remains entirely ignorant and indifferent to the reality her purchase may have caused (which you can read about in National Geographic's article, "Diamonds: the Real Story," or this shorter article about conflict diamonds on Amnesty International's website). When I see diamonds, I see suffering children in Africa, think of exploited, HIV infected workers in African mines, and I hear family arguments about where my deceased grandma's diamonds ended up. Diamonds are not a girl's best friend, nor are they forever, but the worldwide and familial conflicts they cause, as well as the environmental degradation, can last generations. This isn't to say I'm not a consumer hypocrite, because, like everyone else, I am, but diamonds strike a special nerve in me
As the woman hands me the money for her pizza, I can't help but feel that instinctual, human longing for shiny things, something like a pack rat's (Neotoma cinerea) inexplicable need to gather shiny objects in its nest, as her hand and wrist sparkle in the fluorescent light of her entryway.
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