I'd already heard stories about how some Chinese were leaving Hong Kong for other places – and that it wasn't the folks living in the slums, either. If her folks had enough money and horsepower to get into the U.S., I didn't figure she would have grown up poor. It also gave me a little understanding of her attitude: if she had grown up having money, it wasn't unreasonable to think that she could well have gotten somewhat spoiled along the way. I had a passing temptation to turn her down, just to 'show' her that I wasn't somebody that could be 'bought', before I recognized it as an almost reflexive response that a lot of people have to people with money. Instead of turning her down, I decided to try a different tack.
"I think I would like to spend a couple of days with you; but instead of staying at a hotel, how about if we just go back to my place? That way, it doesn't cost either one of us anything, I don't run the risk of getting in trouble with the hotel – remember, they do know me as a cab driver – and I'd feel a lot less like some kind of male escort or something."
Hearing that last part, I could see on her face as she suddenly realized that her offer to pay for everything might not have sounded quite as 'sociable' as she'd meant it to. But she didn't let it fluster her too much, and answered "If you're willing to let me into your life like that, then it's fine with me. I hadn't thought about you being in the hotel maybe being any kind of problem or anything for you."
"As long as we stayed in room, it probably wouldn't be, since I know how to get around in most of them. But since you want it to be a couple of days, and I don't figure you want to spend all that time cooped up…"
She smiled and said "No, I don't want to stay inside all the time. Would you really get into trouble, even if you were there as a friend of one of their guests?"
"Oh, they wouldn't call the cops on me, or anything like that. Shucks, they might not even call the company I work for. But I'm 'just' a cab driver, and I'm expected to know my 'place' – which is not wandering around the inside the Hilton, the Kings Arms, or any of the other high-end hotels in town. Like I said, they wouldn't necessarily do anything right then or there, but I might start finding it hard to get fares from there, or they might start calling another cab company if one of their guests didn't explicitly call mine. There's all kinds of things they could do to let me know they were unhappy with me."
"Why, that's terrible!" she exclaimed, before adding "Can they really do that? Isn't that, like, illegal or something? That's just wrong; they shouldn't be able to do stuff like that if someone invites you into the hotel!"
"Maybe it is wrong, and terrible, and all that. But that's how things work down here on the streets, Jenny."
At that, she dug a cell phone out of her purse and proceeded to make a call. It was to the Hilton, and I couldn't help but hear as she cancelled her reservation before she put the phone back and told me "Well, if they're going to be stinkers like that, then we will go to your place. I'll never stay in one of their rooms again, if that's how they are!"
I got her eye in the mirror and told her "Don't get yourself too worked up about it, Jenny. It's not just the Hilton. That's true for pretty much all high-end places – not just here, but all over the world. And much – or even most – of the time, they're probably right: us peons that can't afford places like that don't have all the social graces and all that that the Hiltons and those kinds of places expect. The one and only suit I have cost me $200, and that was on sale; it would never pass muster among the thousand-dollar Armani jobs I see coming out of the Hilton and Kings Arms. Sure, there are probably some of us out here that have enough manners and class and all that to pass muster. But it's just easier for those kinds of places to just keep all of us lower-class drones out, rather than have to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. If I was a waiter or bellhop or other employee of the Hilton, I could go anywhere I wanted – because they would have trained me to be as surface refined and polite as a proper servant should be with the guests they have there. Right or wrong, fair or not, that's the way it is. Better to face up to it, and deal with it on those terms. Sure, we can try to change it; but it isn't going to happen fast, or easy. Besides, it's less a question of the Hilton doing it because they want to, and more a case of the guests insisting on it: too many folks have too much money, and don't know, or don't care, or have forgotten, that everything they have is the product of someone else's – that is, one of us peons – actual labor. They have a lot of money, usually inherited, and think that makes them somehow 'elite' or better than the rest of us – never stopping to consider what their lives might have been like if they hadn't been born into wealth. I'm a damn good cabbie, and I've driven a fair number of rich people, and you know something?"
"What's that?"
"Of all the friendly, sociable, just plain nice wealthy folks I've driven, almost every last one of them earned their money themselves. They started out middle-class, or even poor, and made a success of themselves. It seems that the farther back the family fortune was made, the more the person that inherited it seems to think they're some kind of royalty. It's a little game I play with myself, sometimes, when I get some particularly obnoxious weenie: trying to figure out how many generations ago their family got the money. The few times I've checked to see if I was right, I wasn't more than ONE generation off."
She laughed, but I could see that she was also thinking about what I'd said. She was also paying attention when I dropped the flag on the meter and called in to dispatch to tell them that I was going off-shift. After the dispatcher acknowledged my call, Jenny asked "Aren't you going to get into trouble for turning off the meter that way?"
"Nope. I waited until I'd driven far enough for the fare to be the same as to the hotel; as far as they know, that's where I took you. Besides, I lease this rig from the company, so as long as they get their percentage of what the meter shows, they don't care."
"How much will they expect, then?" she asked. I told her, and she said "Then I'll give you the money to cover it. If my paying for things would make you feel like a kept man, then you paying would make me feel like a prostitute."
I grinned at her via the mirror and said "Point taken", and got a smile in return. Fair enough – each of us had staked out our 'territory' in the relationship we'd have over the next day or two.
When Jenny first stepped into my place, I could see from the expression on her face that it wasn't anything like what she'd expected: it was clean, neat, and somewhat spacious. My furniture wasn't antiques, but it wasn't beat-up garage sale rejects, either; I had simply bought the stuff with quality and comfort in mind, not with any idea of impressing anyone. Along the longest wall in the living room was a bookcase that I was continually adding on to – at the time, it was 12 feet long, 6 feet high, and full, with another couple dozen books stacked on the floor at one end. I was already planning how to add to the shelves by going around a corner and building more shelves along an adjacent wall.
In one corner was my 'reading' chair, an extremely comfortable recliner, with a small table next to it, that sat under a short section of track lighting with halogen lights aimed at it from the back. Nearby was the sofa-bed that I slept on when I first got started as a cabbie; once I'd had it re-upholstered, it was amazingly comfortable. Across from that was what I suppose could be called my 'entertainment center': another set of shelves that held my TV, VCR, stereo system, and all my videos and music.
Scattered around were small-to-medium paintings that I'd bought. Most of them were from 'unknown' artists – but it was the paintings themselves that had gotten my attention: a landscape, a portrait, a couple of impressionist pieces, and even an abstract.