A Working Stiff's Manifesto (6 page)

The hard part is learning the route. I'm working Philadelphia's Main Line, once again servicing rich people, many of whom have mansions for houses. Families of three or four live in eighteen-bedroom castles, with new sports cars in every driveway. I drive around and wonder what these people do for a living. Where do the rich come from? Do all these houses belong to geniuses, inventors of rocket engines and cures for diseases? Did they have one great idea, like Post-it notes, and capitalize on it? Is there some fascinating story behind this great surplus of money, or have they simply inherited a factory that makes toenail clippers for the armed forces?

One thing's for sure; they believe they deserve it. I don't know many rich people, but I've met enough to know that even the ones who were handed a trust fund think of themselves as special, not lucky. They reinvent the past to include details of their own forbearance and fortitude to anyone who'll listen, and someone always will because they're rich. It's always more entertaining listening to the rich, because there's always a chance you'll be asked along to the Bahamas or given a sports car for the weekend. The fact that they're usually stingier than the people I hang out with takes a while to sink in.

The other great fact about rich people is that their kids are always fuck-ups. Not the kind of lovable fuck-up who works down at the gas station and tells you he can fix your car and then destroys it. No, rich kids are shady. They're the kind that dream up a brilliant illegal plan, just to show their dad a thing or two; then when you all get caught, they beg their dad for a great lawyer and never talk to you again. They were born into money, and they know money will take care of them. This security gives them a whole different value system, one the rest of the world never quite gets.

These half-empty houses, I notice, are mostly dark and quiet, like the set from
Citizen Kane
. Housewives putter around in the kitchens, and I see their coiffed heads through the window as I hook up my hose to their oil fills. They are usually alone. They never wave. The third great fact about rich people is that they don't talk to the help.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
was bullshit.

The hardest part is learning where the oil fill for each house is located. Each delivery notice provides a little map, but the fill itself is a metal pipe about five inches in diameter, and they are often behind bushes, under rocks, or buried completely in the snow. Sometimes the little fill maps are wrong altogether, and I spend fifteen minutes digging around in a prickly, snow-filled bush before noticing it on the far wall of the house, while the bemused housewife peers through her kitchen window wondering what I'm up to. Sometimes the driveway is configured so that I can't get the truck within a hundred yards of the oil fill, so I have to pull the hose across the front yard. Sometimes the hose feels like it's made of lead bricks. Sometimes the hose knocks over expensive lawn ornaments and I watch them shatter all over a cobblestone driveway. Sometimes the fill map is wrong because I'm delivering to the house next door, and I give them a hundred free gallons of heating oil before I realize this.

Instead of a map, one house has a delivery slip that says simply, “Fill at the donkey's nose.” I pull up the driveway and notice a huge statue of a donkey in the front yard, so I go over and examine its nose. The donkey must be a heating oil tank, I decide. Its cement nostrils are large enough to accommodate an oil hose, though I don't see any threading in which to screw the gun. I jam the gun up its nostrils as far as it will go and turn on the oil full blast.

Immediately, the donkey's head explodes and I am showered with home heating oil and concrete. I grope around blindly for the hose, which is whipping around like an epileptic anaconda, spraying diesel fuel across this neatly landscaped yard. After taking a seventy-five-gallon-a-minute blast in the face at least three times, I manage to wrestle the hose to the ground and shut it off, having swallowed about a cupful of fuel. Choking and soaked, I limp back to the truck and call them on the radio.

“Yeah, I'm at 1105 Chester Springs. Their heating tank just broke.”

“What do you mean it broke?” Charlie, the dispatcher, has been a deliveryman for fifteen years. He knows every delivery by heart.

“It just blew up all over me.”

“That's the one beside the donkey, right?”
Beside
the donkey? What did that mean? “Yes,” I say cautiously.

“I'll get someone out there.”

I put the radio back and run over to the headless, oil-soaked donkey. I scrape madly at the ground underneath the donkey's nose, and my hand hits metal under the snow. I sweep the snow aside, and there, laughing at me, is the oil fill.

“Fill is a noun and a verb,” I explain. “Fill at the donkey's nose is ambiguous.” I am sitting in Charlie's office, but he wants to get me out of there. Everyone wants me out, because I am soaked in heating oil and making them gag.

Charlie has been around a bit. He's not going to fire me because he's seen things like this before, and also because I am not the stupidest employee he has working for him today. That honor goes to another new guy named Dave, who filled a five hundred gallon septic tank with oil until diesel fuel sprayed out of the toilets and all over the bathrooms of a million dollar house in Kimberton. Then, while backing out of their driveway, he slammed into a pole and knocked their electricity out. So now these mansion dwellers are living in an oil-soaked cave, and Charlie has bigger things on his plate than a headless donkey.

“Get out of here,” he tells me. “See you tomorrow at eight.” When the oil is pumping in, you hear a whistling sound, the air being released through a small vent as the tank fills up with oil.

When the whistling stops, the tank is nearly full, and you shut the gun off. The problem is, I soon learn, that mice often crawl into the vent holes, which prevents the air from escaping. What happens then depends on how fat the mouse is. If you've got a nice thin mouse, he'll pop out and run off when the air starts pushing him out of the hole. A mid-sized mouse might make you think the tank is already full because you never get a good whistle and he's half stuck in the air tube, so you don't make the delivery. A nice fat mouse will stay in there, jammed, until the air pressure builds up enough to fire him out like a bullet.

After being shot with two mice on consecutive deliveries, I decide it's a good idea not to lean over the air holes. But this makes it hard to hear when the tank is filling up, and if you miss the gurgling sound that indicates fullness, oil comes spraying out of the vent. Often this doesn't matter, if it's a small quantity and the ground is just dirt. But when you get seven or eight gallons squirting into someone's prize-winning rosebushes, there's a problem.

About two nights a week I go home soaked in oil. One night, I do my laundry all together, work clothes and regular clothes mixed, and now I have an entire wardrobe that smells like diesel fuel. I have a girl over and she asks, “Is there a truck with a leak in the garage downstairs?”

The repairmen who have to keep answering spill calls are getting exasperated with me. Even Charlie is starting to take my mistakes a little more seriously. He asks me to work Christmas and New Year's Day, and I say yes, worried that refusal will send me back to another water filter meeting. I spend Christmas determined to be cheerful to everyone. I wave through the windows to the families inside, but nobody waves back. New Year's, I deliver oil all day with a raging hangover.

Then something happens. I get the hang of it. One day in February, Charlie is handing me my paycheck and he says, “You know what? You haven't had a spill call in a while.” It's true, I realize. I've mastered oil delivery. The next time he hands me my paycheck, he tells me he's going to let me go.

“It's warm out,” he says. “Business is dropping off to nothing. I only need one driver for all our routes.”

I nod.

“Seasonal work, you know how it is. You did a great job.” He pats me on the shoulder.

Back to the classifieds.

I have a friend whose dad needs his garage painted, and I figure the money from that will help while I search for something else. While we're driving to get paint, he tells me about his life.

“I bought my first house for nine thousand dollars,” he says. We are in a car that cost twice that. “It was a nice house too. Nowadays, you couldn't get a crackhouse for nine thousand.”

He has worked most of his life selling air conditioners. That wouldn't bring in enough now to live in a one-bedroom apartment, even for a gifted salesman. Where has the money gone, and when did it go?Was it the Trilateral Commission, the Gang of Seven? Reaganite defense contractors, yuppies, the Japanese? Is that the money they're talking about when they discuss the National Debt? Was that four trillion dollars the money that would have gotten me paid enough to live in a cheap house? How did the National Debt occur? How do I get my share back?

Everybody has a different theory. He's decided it's Reaganite defense contractors. That sounds about right to me. I don't know enough about it to argue.

Someone took all the money, that's for sure. It's got to be around somewhere, there was so much of it. Maybe it was the trickle-down theory of economics in reverse, the trickle-up theory. It just slowly bled away from the American people, as one careless decision after another allowed the millionaires to carve off a bigger piece every day. The wealthy philanthropists, the Andrew Carnegies of yesteryear who lamented the plight of the poor, have been replaced by a new breed of millionaire, the rich born-millionaire who doesn't know that poverty exists. It's every millionaire for himself.

One factory moved to Mexico today, one pay raise for Congress tomorrow, one government official turning a blind eye to the phone companies raising their rates the day after that, and pretty soon, everybody's scraping by. The home builders see an opportunity to jack up the prices, and no one tells them no. Where was the guy who was supposed to say, “No, that wouldn't be fair”? Was there ever such a guy? Did the authors of the Constitution neglect to include a paragraph on what should happen when wealth started to separate from the people into the hands of an elite few?

If you ask the rich why you're not capable of supporting yourself, they'll tell you it is your fault. The ones who make it to the lifeboats always think the ones still in the water are to blame. Weren't quick enough, sharp enough, weren't on the ball. Didn't see the economic shipwreck in time. Should've invested in computers. Should've started learning about computers when you were eight. Should've taken computer classes instead of baseball elective in seventh period, then you'd be where I am now.

I pour the paint into the pan and get to work.

It's easy enough. Too easy, actually, and the line between working and accepting charity quickly begins to blur. I work for about two hours and my friend's dad asks me if I want a dip in the pool. I try to stay businesslike and tell him I have to work.

He shrugs. It's all the same to him. I'm his son's friend, and I'm getting paid whether I go swimming or finish the garage. I try to do an excellent job, but there's no real challenge, and upon completion there's nothing to appreciate. The garage has a new coat of paint. It'll last a few more years.

Later in the day, after returning home, a neighbor asks me if I know anything about cable television. I'm handy enough, and I figure his cable has gone out, so I offer to have a look.

“I'm trying to get hooked up,” he tells me.

“Ah-hah.” He is looking at me with the apprehensive glance I'm familiar with, the questioning look to determine whether you are in the brotherhood. I am.

A few years ago, I worked for a tree service, and the owner, while trying to teach me how not to electrocute myself, was kind enough to give me an unwitting lesson in cable theft. He was a hardworking, honest man who had spent his whole life working up around telephone, cable, and electric wires, and he carefully explained to me the nature of each. It takes me about five minutes to get my neighbor a connection, and he slips me fifty bucks.

The next day, one of his friends calls. Then another. Then friends of theirs call. Everyone is clamoring for free cable. One guy actually has his legit cable shut off and then calls. Apparently, I have become the unofficial cable installer in my neighborhood. I'm over at a girl's house getting drunk one night, and she is lamenting the poor quality of network television, and the next thing she knows, she has cable. My friend wants to watch a sporting event that is being filtered out with his cable package, so I unscrew a filter and we settle down for an evening's entertainment.

Contrary to what the ads would have you believe, stealing cable is an act of civil disobedience which would make Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi proud. The word “pirates” is often ascribed to cable thieves, a word used by the media, most of which are owned by the same people who own the cable networks. They try to convince us that cable thieves are eroding American morality. Closing profitable factories, laying off hundreds of workers and reopening the factories in Mexico with cheaper labor is not indicative of an erosion of morality. Paying mushroom pickers four dollars an hour is not illegal. Watching
Pop-up Video
for free, now that's a crime.

This is my rationale for stealing cable. My term for people who steal cable would be “Robin Hoods.” I'm standing in line here at the Time-Warner office in Durham, North Carolina, with a girl who has come to pay her cable bill. We are behind a young black couple who are begging to have their cable rein-stalled, even though they have fallen behind in their payments. The girl behind the window is as heartless as any of the Sheriff of Nottingham's men.

“You need to make good on the $63.95, then we'll send someone out. And there'll be a $23.95 reinstallation charge.”