Number of Deliveries: 10
Sales: $278.13
Tips: $49
Hours: 3.53
Total Wage: $21.88 per hour
About halfway through the night, I power up a driveway in Fairbanks and park before a marble, double staircase entrance to a mansion. I ring the doorbell, and through the side window I see a man scuffing toward me, past dark, silhouetted objects littering the floor. He manages to turn on a light and open the large front door. With his unshaved, salted beard, uncombed mop of hair but nice, cable-knit sweater, shorts and sock-less loafers, he looks like a rich vagabond. A large picture of Marilyn Monroe's face leans against the plant on his round entrance table. Below, items lie around in paper and bubble wrap. The scene is similar to the writer-looking guy I described back in the Day 46 & 47 post.
He asks me what he owes. "Twenty-twenty-nine," I say. I can't smell alcohol, but his jerky movements are definitely hampered by it's consumption. He hands me a twenty, then starts peeling through the fattest money roll I've seen to date, all hundreds and fifties.
"You can keep the dime," he says.
"I'm not sure what you mean," I say, while Jim Croce's "Operator (That's not the Way It Feels)" echoes deep inside my cranium.
He sways back and forth. "What have I given you?"
"Twenty, so far."
"Oh." He digs through the hundreds and fifties, finally locating another twenty, and hands it to me. "I'm not into finance right now . . ." he says, his voice slurring and trailing off. This makes me think he's going through a divorce, where money loses its meaning and nights are long, full of drinks and guilt and self-loathing. But then there's Marilyn Monroe, the girlfriend of the world. He'll always have Marilyn. He asks me for ten dollars change, leaving me a $9.71 tip (almost ten dollars). One of those tens must be the dime he's talking about, though the meaning in Jim Croce's song got lost a long time ago when pay phones started charging a quarter.
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