"You're a Very Unusual Rinse Driver:" Why We Loathe Acknowledging Social Class

Two years ago this week, I did not yet have any ghostwriting gigs. I was still working for Trader Joe’s, and I was moonlighting as a laundry delivery driver for Rinse, Inc.  My shifts at the store started early, either 5-1 or 6-2. Four nights a week (Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday) I’d drive to East Los Angeles, stuff my Hyundai with bags of clean laundry, and deliver those bags to clients all across the county.

The bags often weighed 75 pounds or more. I often carried them up several flights of stairs. I shlepped and sweated from Brentwood to Bradbury, Tarzana to Temple City, Gardena to Glendora. I was paid $15 an hour, plus mileage reimbursement and tips.  The average tip was $2.  It was a good night when I cleared $100, and I would often not crawl into bed until after midnight, knowing I’d be up to open the store in just three- or four-hours’ time. It was unsustainable, but I couldn’t think of anything else. 

Two years ago this week, I delivered a few bags of dry cleaning to a penthouse apartment on the Wilshire Corridor. In the Rinse app, customers could specify if they wanted the laundry dropped at the front door or if they wished you to knock. This client requested a knock, and I did as instructed. After a moment, a woman about my age answered the door. Her black hair was pulled back. Her sweatsuit was a subtle lavender.  I could see into the vast apartment behind her. She had tapestries on the wall, art books on the coffee table. One of them was labeled, Magritte. The woman asked me to hang the dry cleaning in an alcove off the hallway. I did as she asked, and we made some small talk.

Perhaps she saw the way I assessed the style of the living room.  Perhaps it was the way I walked or spoke.  Whatever it was, as I turned to leave, she said, “You’re a very unusual Rinse driver.”

I laughed, “Goodness. What are our drivers usually like?”

“I think you know what I mean, Hugo. Good night, and thank you.”

My name, of course, was on her Rinse app.

I think you know what I mean.

I did know, instantly, and as I drove off to my next stop, a scene from Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” popped into my head. When I got home that night, I checked to make sure I was remembering it right. I more or less had:

We exchanged a few pleasantries as we climbed a narrow road between tall trees, he inquiring after how I had slept at the Taylors and so forth. Then he said quite abruptly: ‘I say, I hope you don’t think me very rude. But you aren’t a manservant of some sort, are you?’

I must confess, my overwhelming feeling on hearing this was one of relief. ‘I am indeed, sir. In fact, I am the butler of Darlington Hall, near Oxford.’

‘Thought so. All that about having met Winston Churchill and so on. I thought to myself, well, either the chap’s been lying his head off, or – then it occurred to me, there’s one simple explanation.’ Dr Carlisle turned to me with a smile as he continued to steer the car up the steep winding road.

I said: ‘It wasn’t my intention to deceive anyone, sir. However …’

‘Oh, no need to explain, old fellow. I can quite see how it happened. I mean to say, you are a pretty impressive specimen. The likes of the people here, they’re bound to take you for at least a lord or a duke.’ The doctor gave a hearty laugh. ‘It must do one good to be mistaken for a lord every now and then.’

(Pip Torrens as Dr Carlisle and Anthony Hopkins as Stevens in the movie adaptation of the novel.)

The woman in the Wilshire Corridor penthouse wasn’t remarking on my race, or my age, or my name. There are plenty of middle-aged white guys who drive for Rinse in Los Angeles. She wasn’t commenting on my attire: I was wearing sneakers, jeans, the Rinse t-shirt, and a yellow vinyl vest. (The last of these helpful when double-parking and dodging in and out of traffic at night). I had a Rams cap on my head.  And yet, she had nailed me as belonging to a particular social background as surely as Dr. Carlisle nailed Mr. Stevens as a manservant rather than a gentleman.

When I told my then-wife the story, she said it was impossible. “It’s pretentious to think your upbringing comes off you like that. She was probably flirting with you.”  When I told another friend, they too doubted it.  “Maybe she thought you look Jewish, and there aren’t a lot of Jewish Rinse drivers.”

Americans, as a rule, love to talk about race. They like to talk about money.  They like to talk about social class only insofar as it involves talking about race and money, and perhaps education. The idea that someone from the upper-middle class might walk differently than someone from the “middle middle,”  or pronounce words differently, or make eye contact differently – that strikes them as absurd if not offensive. We accept that the English are obsessed with class as something distinct from wealth, but we insist on believing that Americans (and above all, Southern Californians) don’t have a concept of social class that goes beyond the purely economic.

Sometimes, you can get people to draw distinctions between, say, “old money” and the “nouveau riche.” Many people have this vague idea that the former favors discretion and subtlety, while the latter want display and garishness. On some level, they get the idea that there still exists a group of people for whom privilege functions primarily as an obligation.  “Country club WASPs” haven’t run this country in a very long time, to the extent that they ever did; the elder George Bush was perhaps the last to be unembarrassed to conduct himself in public as a man of his station.  (He was mocked more than admired for it, though lots of people remember that he really did have a thing about writing thank- you notes.)  But ask people to believe that one’s background can be read as easily on Wilshire as in Wiltshire? That social class is, in fact, a thing even in Los Angeles?  They get doubtful first, and then indignant.

Sometimes, when I talk about this subject, people ask me to analyze their background. Perhaps they think it’s a little like 23andMe or another ancestry app – they spit into a cup, and I tell them their class rather than their ethnic origins.  I tell them it’s not that easy, first of all, and it has far more to do with instinct and intuition than science. At that point, they roll their eyes, call me a snob, and we change the subject.  I am usually grateful to do so.

When I started working at Trader Joe’s in 2017, I posed a question to a few friends. At what point, I asked, could I consider myself to be working-class? I was making minimum wage, and I wore my name on my shirt instead of on an office door.  I showered after work instead of before, learned to deftly wield a box cutter, mastered the pallet jack, the cash register, and the deferential bonhomie for which Trader Joe’s crew are justly famous.  As I’ve written before, the friends who knew me well told me the answer to my question was “never.”  No matter how poor I got, no matter how much I sweat, no matter how much I joked with my beloved crew, I would always be a “gentleman down on his luck.”

If I had any doubts about it, my co-workers cleared it up. I had told them almost nothing about my past. After a couple of weeks, one by one they began to ask, “So, what’s your deal? Are you undercover, writing a book?”  I was both slightly hurt and slightly relieved. I was hurt that I so obviously stood out like a sore thumb. I was relieved that some essential part of me hadn’t been lost in all the chaos that had surrounded my public fall from grace. Either way, I was who I was.  When I got the courage to ask what made me stand out, some said it was the way I spoke, but one memorably replied, “I dunno. It’s just kind of obvious where you come from.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

My co-worker shrugged. “From somewhere where your family never thought you’d end up here.”

I am no aristocrat. I’m a half-Jewish sixth-generation Californian. My people are not in Burke’s Peerage. (They are in the Social Register, which many people don’t even realize still exists.) I am what I am: a five-times divorced writer in late middle-age; a brain-injured sober alcoholic; a father, a brother, a son, a cousin. I don’t walk down the street quoting Milton or Keats or Miss Manners, and as many of my clothes come from Target as from Brooks Brothers. And yet, somehow, two years ago this week, I was seen – not for the first time, or the last, but certainly in one of the most unexpected circumstances I could have imagined. 

We are who we are, and perhaps, whether we like it or not, class is part of it.