Cash and Carry, by David Sedaris

“Are you coming from work?” I asked the woman, suspecting that she was retired but wanting to hear it from her own mouth.

“Oh, I stopped all that a few years ago,” she said. “I’m on my way home from pickleball. Do you play?”

I’d heard of this game, but I tend to tune out when the topic turns to sports. Thus, I had no idea what it actually was. Tennis with pickles would have been my first guess, but if that were the case I’d likely have smelled vinegar on the woman’s clothing.

“It’s a great way to meet people,” she continued. “I had colleagues at my job, but they weren’t exactly friends, if you know what I mean.”

She told me that she was born in San Juan but moved to New York as a child.

“This city is nothing like it used to be,” she said, frowning at a high-rise apartment building that had recently gone up. “My neighbors now, they’ll see someone bleeding on the street and walk right by. That would never happen back where I’m from. In Puerto Rico, if someone’s hungry, you feed them—end of story.”

I thought of all the people who’d passed this woman as she’d tried to carry the cabinet by herself. Some, undoubtedly, were elderly or had children with them, but what of the others? I know my brother Paul would have stopped to help, and my friend Mark. But would Amy? I wondered. Would Hugh?

“New York is just for the rich now,” the woman complained. “They run the show. It’s all about them.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by “rich” because, of course, it’s subjective. Would I have qualified, or was she talking about people with billions? In the paper earlier that week, I’d learned that Elon Musk was on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. I think that if you have that much money you should at least be forced to sit down and count it all. From what I read online a few hours later, dressed for my show and riding the elevator from my apartment to my building’s lobby, if Musk recited a number every second, it would take him more than thirty-one thousand years to reach a trillion. A regular lifetime wouldn’t put a dent in a figure like his. One of his children would have to take over when he died, followed by one of their children, and on for a thousand generations. By that time, a trillion might get you a chicken wing and a bucket of house paint. A nonillionaire is what you’ll want to be in the future. That’s one followed by thirty zeros. I looked up how long it would take to count that high and was presented with a math equation.

Counting my money, by contrast, would take around five hundred days. After a week, would I say, “That’s enough! I’ll forfeit the rest. My freedom is more important than sitting in this chair,” or would I picture something I really wanted to buy—a gorilla on five acres of land, maybe—and keep going? At what point, if any, would I decide that I had enough?

This question was on my mind as I waved good night to my doorman and started walking downtown, in the direction of my first New York apartment, which was in the West Village. It wasn’t mine, technically—rather, I was the roommate of a guy named Rusty, who’d had the lease for thirteen years. We both smoked a lot, but he liked to keep the windows shut, which left the place smelling sad and stale. When the outside temperature dipped below seventy, he’d turn up the heat as high as it would go, the way they do in nursing homes and in tanks where bearded dragons live. My half of the stabilized rent was three hundred and fifty dollars, an astronomical sum to me in 199src. The first time I was late giving Rusty his money, he said firmly but not unkindly, “This can never happen again. Do you understand?”