Lost At Sea Part 59

"He gets paid every two weeks," says Rebecca. "For state and federal taxes they take about a hundred eighty dollars. Then for health insurance they take about three hundred seventy-five."

"The health costs go up every year," says Dennis. "And not just the regular four percent for inflation. It could be ten percent, seventeen percent ..."

I ask them if they feel worse off than they did a few years ago. Rebecca says, "Yes, a little. The cost of everything, like health insurance, gas, and groceries, has been going up by leaps and bounds. Some things have even seemed to double. Versus our income not changing that much."

I tell them about the health system in my native UK-free health care for everyone. I say I remember Glenn Beck trying to scare America by saying that if Obamacare went through, things would end up like Britain, with a savage, failing, socialist health-care system.

"But it's not failing," I say. "It's great. And n.o.body has to pay anything." (Actually, it's funded by national taxation, and some parts of it work more efficiently than others, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a Brit who doesn't feel essentially proud and defensive of the system.)

Dennis and Rebecca look at me warily, as if I might be pretending for some nefarious European socialist reason that the UK National Health Service is a functional thing. But it really is.

So they're going nowhere for their anniversary. Instead they've started seeking help at the local Food Pantry, a charity offering food to the needy. Rebecca says she was amazed that somewhere like Urbandale even needed a Food Pantry. But it does. And when she queues up, she doesn't see only derelicts. She sees middle-cla.s.s families just like them.

Dennis says he wishes they were better off, but there are positives about being poor. It makes people community-spirited, he says. Plus, money can turn a man wayward. Dennis runs a church support group for s.e.x and drug and alcohol addicts. Why did some of those men fall into a hedonistic abyss? "Because they could afford to," he says.

This is a little heartbreaking to hear. It reminds me of Frantz. He rationalizes his place in the ecosystem by saying it's manageable as long as people talk to him respectfully. Dennis rationalizes his position by saying that, if he had more, who knows what pleasure-seeking sc.r.a.pes he might succ.u.mb to?

And there's something else Dennis and Rebecca have in common with Frantz. They, too, say they leave the house only for work and church and to go to the park. They haven't been to the movies in a year.

"I hope you're not offended," I say, "but your lives seem unexpectedly similar to Frantz's."

"I don't find it surprising that we have the same struggles," says Rebecca.

"How do you feel when you hear stories of the super-rich getting away with paying hardly any tax?" I ask them.

There's a short silence.

"I'd probably do it, too, if I could," Dennis shrugs. "But I can't." He pauses and shrugs again. "So."

FIVE TIMES Dennis and Rebecca, there is me. I make $250,000, double that in a good year-if, say, George Clooney is turning one of my books into a movie. Which doesn't happen often. Just the once, in fact. Being a panicker, I live my life convinced poverty and disaster lie just around the corner unless I constantly and frantically work. Which I do.

But I have none of Dennis and Rebecca's struggles. I can vacation anywhere. I haven't noticed rising gas and grocery prices other than hearing myself murmur a vague "Oh. That seems a bit more" and then forgetting about it. I have never felt so rich and so fortunate as I do as I drive away from Urbandale that morning.

THE WOMAN who makes roughly five times more than me-$1.25 million in a bad year, up to $3 million in a great one-wants to remain anonymous. I'll call her Ellen. She's a New York producer: movies, TV, Broadway. I meet her in London. She's over on business. She's bra.s.sy and loud and restless and alarmingly energetic and tough-looking and she talks incredibly fast. She says it would be "too weird and stressful" to reveal her name to the world in the context of what she makes. If you're super-rich or super-poor, everyone can see that. But in the top-middle, one stays covert. Plus she doesn't want letters begging for money. She once had one from her father, who is a "pathetic gambler."

"How does it feel to make what you make?" I ask her.

I notice a strange tone in my voice. The usual chirpy sense of inquiry isn't there. Instead I sound weirdly tense, as if the true reason for our meeting is for me to discover what I'm missing out on.

"Good," she says, nodding. "Happiness is having twenty percent more than what you need. The trick is not to be too rich."

"Why not?" I ask her.

"People want to go on your private plane," she says. "You fall asleep in the middle of conference calls. There's a certain dis...o...b..bulation when you have too much."

Maybe Ellen's right. Maybe it would be bad to have your own plane. But for a second Dennis flashes into my mind, with his own imagined perils of having more money. I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people-his idea that the elites keep the ma.s.ses subdued with illusory happiness. But Dennis and Ellen have both suggested to me, surely fallaciously, that greater fortune might lead to unexpected sadness. So we're actually very good at inventing our own opium.

Personally, I wish I was better at opiating myself. Instead I'm sort of glaring at Ellen in a hostile manner, wondering how I might scramble up to her level.

"So what can and what can't you do in terms of luxury living?" I ask her.

"If you're really rich, you can buy your doctors," she says. "Mike Ovitz famously bought a couple of cardiac surgeons."

"You don't have anything like that, do you?" I say.

"No, of course not," says Ellen.

"Thank G.o.d," I think. Becoming aware of what's just out of your reach can pull the rug from under your feet. It's comforting to know that having my own doctors would be ma.s.sively out of my reach.

"But I know a guy who knows a guy," says Ellen. "I'm at a level where I don't have to suffer. I've been sick. I had cancer. If you have money, you call the guy who knows the guy who's the head of the department. The truth is, rich people with cancer versus everyone else with cancer? Longer life! And I didn't think about bills at all! I have a bill? I throw it in the box. And that box goes to my business manager. This is a key item if you have money. You don't look at the bills. When I got money I vowed, 'Never again will I suffer the small stuff.' To me, paying a bill is the small stuff. 'I don't care how the f.u.c.k it happens, someone pay that f.u.c.king thing!' It's a good feeling."

I listen and nod and think, "I very much need a business manager." "How much do you pay your business manager?" I ask.

"A very small amount of money," Ellen says. "A hundred thousand dollars a year."

There's a silence. "That's a lot," I say.

Ellen looks at me surprised. "No, it's not," she says.

She explains that her business manager performs many tasks for her: He runs her office, does her bookkeeping, oversees her investments, files her taxes. And even though she pays him what can amount to 10 percent of her income, she has some money in the bank, so she can afford him.

Rarely has an interview awakened in me so many dormant desires. Before meeting Ellen I had no idea I needed a business manager and a friend who knows top surgeons personally. I was a lot happier before this interview began.

"I still worry about bills," I say, sadly. "And I get knots in my stomach when the tax is due. Really big knots. Have you worked out how to pay less tax like really rich people do?"

"No," Ellen replies. "I pay forty-two percent."

"Good," I say.

FIVE TIMES Ellen is a man named Nick Hanauer. His taxable income is, he tells me, "tens of millions. In a bad year it can be ten million." We speak via Skype. I'm in London. He's at his home in Seattle. What little I can see of it looks lovely. He's in some kind of an office/den with an electric guitar in the corner. His parents made good money from the pillow trade. After college he set up a few OK businesses, but then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy. She said, "You two are going to be friends."

The guy had a business idea. Nick loved the sound of it. He invested all the money he had in it-$45,000 cash. The guy was Jeff Bezos and the business was Amazon.com.

Nick asks me about the woman beneath him on my income list. "Is Ellen a highly paid salary person?" he wonders.

"Yes," I say.

"She has to go to work every day?"

"Right."

"If she stops going to work, she's out of business?"