The Uber Diaries
By: Eduardo Jones Corredera
Tags: Los Angeles, Uber, Lyft, Welfare, Homeless

At 8am, along the trail of Route 66 that crosses Pasadena, a Starbucks is full of future space engineers and homeless people. The eyes of Caltech students are locked into their computer screens, their bodies pale and rigid like gargoyles, but everywhere around them fairies are dancing to the tune of arrhythmic harmonies. Two homeless people are taking flight, dressed in colourful rags, zigzagging across people and tables. One of them, a white woman with dreadlocks and a face covered in stale makeup, wears tight knee-length yellow trousers and a black and blue jumper, and makes suggestive comments to the men around her. The other is a white man who resembles Jack Sparrow, with his long and tangled black hair, his black clothes, and an overgrown beard. He stretches, hops, leaps, and smirks wildly at those around him. He paces up and down the coffee store as if it were his home, flying in the face of the discomfort of those around him. This is a carefully choreographed dance: the employees are not paid enough to act as security guards, the customers are safe in the knowledge that the pyrrhic punishment for any act of violence or larceny serves to neutralise the desire to act, and the homeless, with nowhere to go, no narrative to their lives, no purpose to their steps — the homeless waltz. The man and the woman meet each other’s gaze and walk towards each other; an overblown discussion erupts, there is talk of betrayal and forgetting, and the two quickly separate. The future rocket engineers perform their own oblivion; eyes lost in space orbit around their starry-eyed thoughts.

***

In Los Angeles, sidewalks, parks, and public spaces are the towns, colonies, and de facto properties of the homeless. During the day their bodies rest covered by rags and cloths of varying thickness, like cocoons awaiting their metamorphosis. At night they repeat the cycle. They exist outside of the gaze of most citizens, whose eyes have adapted to the speed of driving, the civic politics of rush hour, and the economy of avoidance.

As a PhD student researching the Jesuits in California at the Huntington Library, I gravitate to the original settlement — El Pueblo. Next to the train station stands the old town, hosting a statue of the Spanish King Charles III, who founded Los Angeles, the last Spanish colony, in 1777. Dwarfed by the skyscrapers in the background, he still towers above a square full of homeless people. At night, between the square and the slope that reaches the dazzling LA Opera House a colony of tents mushrooms out of nowhere. Walking away from the skyscrapers and into the colony, I notice a few of them lying down on the floor staring at their phones, scrolling through Instagram.

During the day, Starbucks, the nation’s coffeehouse, can often appear as an extension of these spaces. Bereft of mental health institutions, lacking public transport to enable the poor to get to work, and having frayed their family relations, homeless people wander in and out of America’s rented sitting room.

On a sunny Sunday morning, a scrawny white man covered in dirt with a bushy brown beard, a head full of hair, dressed in brown t-shirt and brown oversized trousers, walks in. As a castaway, Scooby Doo’s Shaggy has turned into a preacher, and he immediately begins to deliver his sermon. He approaches a number of customers waiting in line. A sweaty plump white man in running gear staring at his phone replies to him without noticing his appearance. A few seconds later, he looks up from his phone and regrets his move. He tries to disengage himself from the conversation, and succeeds. A homeless black man wearing a yellow coat, a baseball cap, and a walking stick, joins the queue. He interrupts Shaggy and, in a calm voice, tells him to shower. Shaggy’s speech now erupts into a philosophical discourse, which he directs at the unwitting man in running gear — divine punishment for ordering a decaf caramel latte, naturally. The man cows in the face of the strident and incoherent declarations; the personal, ‘I have three friends in this world’, quickly rises to the heights of the transcendental and the political, ‘I was born in one of the thirteen states, one of the thirteen states’. He is pacing up and down now, delivering his sermon to all those bodies staring at their screens. ‘One of the thirteen colonies’, he repeats, without ever saying which one. The black man in the yellow coat shakes his head and walks out of the store, while the man in running gear begins his own meek dance to avoid any further engagement with the preacher.

***

The people of Pasadena stare longingly at cyclists. It seems to be a lost art, a walk along memory beach which slows one’s steps, a piece that no longer fits the puzzle of the city’s streets. It seems acceptable to ride on the pavement because everyone knows that drivers are not careful. In fact, drivers dither when they encounter a cyclist on the road, and they seem torn between hesitation and abrasiveness. When I rent a bike in a store I am warned that it will probably get stolen. They hand me two locks to secure the front and back wheels, and I am told that the back one is more expensive.

One day, I stumble into an old books store. The owner is a chatty man, with a ponytail and a grey beard. He tells me he spent his life sailing around the country, but then the crisis hit and he had to find a job. The next day he spins a different story: he spent twenty years touring the country’s finest antiques shows. The best in the country is one in Massachusetts, he declares. There is no good time to remind him that the day before he told me to come back so he could show me his room ‘full of old books’. ‘I am not ready to do that’ he says softly after I ask him. I wonder if I too will, at some point, approach life with a heightened capacity for speculative fiction.

‘I own a convertible Porsche now, though’, he tells me, his face beaming with a rare smile, and proceeds to recount stories about how every Sunday Pasadena hosts what he refers to as ‘an antique show’. The next day I walk over to the antique show, which is a flea market in an immense carpark. A shirtless slender man with a snake around his shoulders walks around holding a blaring radio, a child plays with a vinyl, and two men have a slow academic conversation next to books whose value has been emptied by time.

Two days later, I move to a quiet part of town. Altadena is on the top of a hill and the red lights of downtown LA flicker like incandescent candles. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is located at the side of the mountain. Its engineers once built the first American satellite and today they work on a project to explore Mars, known as Mars Insight. The neighbourhood is suburban and quiet. To cycle to the Huntington would take fifty minutes, and the cycle back would be an uphill battle. After relying on the LA Metro and my bicycle, I come to accept the fact that over the next week, I will have to use Uber or Lyft more often. That night I head into town to meet a friend.

When I get in the Uber, Laura (the names have been changed to preserve their anonymity), a Mexican woman in her fifties, mumbles something back when I try to talk to her in English. I explain that I was in fact born in Madrid in order to pivot to Spanish, and a whole new dialogue flourishes — she opens up about her life, and is full of suggestions. Subsequent South American and local Hispanic drivers have similar reactions. During my time in LA, several videos emerged of white men threatening Spanish-speaking individuals with deportation.

Laura is friendly and, for most of the ride, she wears a smile on her face. As we encounter the phenomenon that is LA traffic, I stare out at skyscrapers that can weather earthquakes. Laura speaks positively and at length about the gig economy. She discusses Uber’s cooperation with the city authorities, and makes the company sound as if it were a branch of the state. It is a regulated service, she tells me, and they work closely with the local authorities to monitor drivers, pick-up spots, and the general service.

Before driving for Uber, Laura worked in a SpaceX factory. She portrays Elon Musk as a kind of saviour figure. He takes care of his employees’ wellbeing. The factory’s kitchen offers dozens of options and all the food was intended to be healthy. Musk, 46, had single-handedly revamped the city of Hawthorne, where the company is based, and brought unprecedented wealth to the region. He is responsible with the environment, she tells me, and ensures that, where possible, his rockets land on earth so they may be inspected and reused. Musk has promised to reuse a rocket within twenty-four hours in 2019. Laura’s homely view of the digital economy was a welcome contrast to the usual narrative surrounding the high-speed digital economy, and its mission to ‘disrupt’. Her story was a hopeful tale of assimilation, both cultural and technological: start-ups are domestic forces in LA.

She is happy to work for Uber, she tells me, and some people make a lot of money by driving strategically. Uber also provides regular drivers with incentives to reach a certain number of miles a day. The journey, estimated to last fifty minutes, takes over an hour and a half. Technology can deliver employment and catapult people into space, but it cannot fix LA traffic. This is seen as a perennial feature of the city and the region, beyond politics, technology, and economics. It is easier to allow the star dust to trickle down the economy than it is to draw up a concerted municipal reform of highways and city streets. Musk’s dreams, and the excitement over passenger travels to the moon, goes hand-in-hand with people’s fatigue about politics. Technology will outpace the rot of politics.

And yet, many point directly to the tech craze as the root cause of the skyrocketing property prices in the region. Average incomes have not kept up with the spike in house prices. A Guardian report from December 2017 declared this to be the Silicon Valley Paradox, as a ‘26.8% of the population — almost 720,000 people — qualify as “food insecure” based on risk factors such as missing meals, relying on food banks or food stamps, borrowing money for food, or neglecting bills and rent in order to buy groceries. Nearly a quarter are families with children.’

In an article for US News, journalist Janie Har suggests: ‘The booming economy, fueled by the tech sector, and decades of under-building have led to an historic shortage of affordable housing. It has upended the stereotypical view of people out on the streets as unemployed: They are retail clerks, plumbers, janitors — even teachers — who go to work, sleep where they can and buy gym memberships for a place to shower.’

A number of solutions, ranging from the construction of more housing to the expansion of services, have been proposed. However, technological solutions have also entered the conversation. An NGO created a website which draws on the “coordinated entry system,” a website for the homeless which links them to the county’s social services. The L.A. Housing Authority, the Chamber of Commerce and others have put aside $213 million to pay for the new site as well as for housing vouchers.’

In an article for the American Enterprise Institute, a Conservative US think-tank, an author proposes ‘equipping homeless with smartphones’. The goal is as follows:

‘free smartphones and service plans in exchange for providing daily information on themselves through a specialized app-including their sleeping locations, use of services, and personal outcomes. The possibilities could transform how we understand and confront homelessness. With the ability to track individual outcomes regardless of where people sleep, we could answer important research questions. We could test new ideas using randomized controlled trials, sending interventions directly to individuals via their smartphones and tracking the results in real time. We could empower homeless individuals with data-powered pre-diction tools that recommend concrete actions, and we could use the data we collect to hold service providers accountable for helping individuals achieve sustained positive outcomes’.

***

Many drivers tell me that, you could, ‘if you wanted to’, live in the streets of California. By living people mean surviving — you could survive on the streets of California. Life’s components — health, friendships, relationships, purpose — are not available to the homeless. And yet the homeless nonetheless appear as ever-present figures who have somehow hacked the system by shedding their shame. Both completely outside of everyday rhythms and a routine sight during working people’s everyday interactions, their liminal existence is sometimes interpreted as a form of freedom.

‘When I was homeless you used to be able to buy lobster with your food stamps’ explains, Joe, an African-American Lyft driver in his thirties with a patchy beard and a white t-shirt. ‘I lost my way and was homeless for a few months. We would trade bulks of food stamps for cash — three-hundred dollars’ worth of food for fifty bucks of hard cash’. Joe’s car is worn but his hopes are up — ‘I am saving up to open up my own food-truck business’. He tells me he still knows people living homeless, people he grew up with, ‘who have chosen to live that way because it is easier’.

A few days later, Jeff, a white man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and slicked back silver hair, races past valleys and hills, and he tells me that the homeless spark fires.

‘We have seasonal fires, but we also have homeless people cause fires’, he declares, ‘but these don’t get any attention because they just affect middle class families. But when a fire burned a bunch of fancy houses in Beverly Hills, everyone watched in awe, and the investigation found that homeless people had done it’.

This is not the first time I have heard this. Alison, a fast-talking recovering alcoholic in her forties, and a Lyft driver, tells me that the homeless come from all over the country, and in the absence of shelters they take to the forests. Jeff goes into greater detail: The homeless live in the forests and set up barbeques for the friends. The image of homeless people finding a way of congregating in a hill, buying the materials for a barbeque, and gathering there for the night is an unlikely one. ‘They pay no attention to their surroundings or the signs — and they just burn the whole forest down’. He tells me ‘a while back a space the size of Rhode Island burned down’.

This view of homelessness is complex. The homeless, at the margins of society, are free to rise to the mountains like Zarathustra and inflict pain on nature, civilisation, and the rich. The heady mix of the supernatural with the quotidian reminds me of the early modern creation of witch-hood. Old, single, or widowed, women were overwhelmingly likely to take care of children while the able-bodied parents went to work. High infant mortality rates meant that, more often than not, children would die while in the care of these old women. The way that a society that was not ready to assimilate the implications of chance and risk dealt with the issue was by creating the narrative of witch-hood. Today, men and women wander the streets talking to themselves ignored by their fellow citizens. They are all free to do so. ‘The truth about California is’, Jeff tells me, ‘because of the weather you can live outside in the streets’. ‘You mean it won’t kill you?’ I reply. ‘Yeah, you can live outside’, he declares, ‘if you want to’.

***

Night-time Lyft rides across Los Angeles are a type of time travel. Drivers cross huge distances with a vast understanding of those veins of the city that are permanently clogged during the day. They are at ease with zig zags and always ready for roadblocks and U-turns. California is made up of thousands of historical experiences that criss-cross and overlap. But there is one historical experience that dominates most accounts of these nomadic drivers: the economic crisis of 2008. The crisis was the wolf that blew down the house of their dreams.

Mike looks my age, 26. A microwaved bitterness dogs his otherwise crisp sentences. His blond hair and beard dot the roundness of his face. He drives a little too fast and his body is a testament to a diet of sleepless nights. Jeff studied journalism but found ‘there were no fucking jobs in that’ — so he went into banking. His eyes dash back and forth, hoping that speed will stall anxiety. He wanted to ‘buy a home near his parents, and I was working towards it’ but in the time between his graduation and today the house prices have increased fivefold. ‘I grew up thinking I would have no problem buying a house near my parents’ place, but 2008 fucked everything up’. As he overtakes three cars he explains his wife just had a son, and so he has taken up this as a night job, and reiterates that he still can’t afford a house. I sympathise with him and can see myself having gone down a similar path not that long ago. I ask if he enjoys anything about banking, hoping to turn the conversation more positive and help him slow down, but he has no interest in either of those things. He tells me that he hates his job — ‘it’s one of those bullshit jobs. It’s paper pushing’. He’s managed to cut the trip short to ten minutes and I can’t help but try to deflate the tension by saying that the only way for our generation to move forward is to focus on the small things. He sighs and yields, ‘yeah, there is no other way. There’s no other way’.

The following night I meet Keith, a white man in his mid-thirties, who wears a Dodgers cap and a friendly smile. He speaks of having travelled the world and his voice that suggests he is saving his energy for better days. His build and his face are those of a bouncer, and contrast with his quaint insights about his time in Hong Kong. He loved it there, and hopes to travel to Asia again, maybe to Thailand. I tell him about my time as a teacher in Shanghai, and about my job as an editor and a writer there. His interest transcends politeness, and as we safely twist and turn down the California highways he asks for more practical information, methodically and with a clear purpose. After a few minutes, it becomes clear that his demeanour is that of a soldier, and he explains that he travelled to Hong Kong with his regiment. ‘I went to university to study and in this country the military pays for your studies and provides a stipend. In exchange you work with them for a few years, and so I did’. The script swerves: ‘I had a plan, and I knew what I wanted to do, and then 2008 hit’. He asks me further information about Shanghai and I try to paint a clear and concise picture: English-speakers are in high-demand and working hours are generally easy. He asks me about agencies, tells me that he will definitely check it out, and goes quiet for a few minutes.

He breaks the silence mid-thought: ‘I saw a job ad for a job as a messenger for diplomats. You travel the world delivering highly classified information to embassies’. It strikes me the job would be lonely and rudderless, but there’s a spark in his voice that makes clear that he enjoys the prospect of escaping. ‘Your record has to be squeaky clean though, squeaky clean’. His tone is so disarming that it is only after the ride that I notice his image on the Lyft app, and the left side of his face is heavily damaged, most likely by a military accident.

A third night I hop into a car with Marcus. Marcus is a chatty white man in his forties. His baseball cap covers a head full of hair. He asks about my night and about the girl who was next to me at the stop. I explain she is just a friend, and he drives the conversation to an overpopulated land shaped by countless revolutions of disappointed expectations:

‘Man, I thought that once I married my wife the desire to fuck earlier women would go away. But it’s a hunter’s instinct. It has nothing to do with love. Men are no longer expected to hunt or kill, or have multiple partners’.

By now he’s on a roll: ‘it’s hard because you see that other person every day and you want to be there for them. I have a daughter now and I see girls her age walking around USC and I still feel like I felt in my twenties, you know?’

***

Miguel, 36, drives me to the airport. I leave two hours for what Google estimates should be a forty-minute trip, but it takes an hour and a half. Miguel tells me he picked up ‘a hot chick’ earlier that day and got her number. ‘I live in a rough neighbourhood and I saw some guys walking towards her, so I told her to get in the car’. He tells me girls throw themselves at him at night, and sometimes he gives them their number. Once one got in with her boyfriend and she would not stop flirting with him, he tells me. The boyfriend wanted to fight him and he just stopped the car and told them to get out: ‘This is my house’, he tells me.

Miguel describes himself as ‘the quiet guy in high school who gets along with everyone’. The LA way — a man defined according to his life as a teenager. Forever young, he explains that he is going through a rough patch. When he was eighteen he fell in love with a girl in his high school. ‘The day I went to tell her I liked her she told everyone she was pregnant’. He got married and she switched partners regularly. Eventually, he asked mutual friends to put them back in touch, and they began an affair. For eight years the two met secretly. A phone call after months of silence would trigger a meeting that would last an entire weekend.

One day her husband found out. He called Miguel’s wife, who ambushed him when he got home. He refused to discuss it. The husband started issuing threats to Miguel, and eventually called him to tell him to stop seeing his wife altogether. Miguel asked whether she was in the room, and said that if she told him to never see her again, he would stop. She stayed quiet. This was his vindication. Miguel left his wife and she promised that, once her son graduated high school, she would leave her husband.

Miguel had kept track of these dates. They had not spoken in two years, but in June her son graduated and he called her. She said she was not interested anymore — ‘she once told me it was about his money’. At this point, Miguel recounted how he went on a cruise during his honeymoon, how his wife barely wanted to do anything with him, how when she got home from work as a hairdresser — ‘she made good money’ — she was always too tired. She tried to make it work between the two of them. Both attended couple’s counselling and one day they went to church to renew their vows. They both stood in the altar and ‘she read a long speech about love and I just stood there frozen. I couldn’t handle it so I ran out’.

As we approach LAX, I look back at the LA skyline and catch a glimpse of hundreds of cars navigating this shelter.

‘I lost my house to my ex-wife’, he tells me. His long-time lover had lost interest in him, ‘I spoke to my best friend about it and he told me to let her go, man’. This was an opportunity to build a new life: ‘I am at a point now where I am going to wait two weeks, and if she doesn’t reply to my calls, I will move on. I know there is someone out there for me, someone that can make me happy. I am done waiting. I want to find a home’.

*