Uber economics. All the anxious calculations I made on the back of an envelope at home late at night. Say I picked up a trip to LAX from downtown. That would cost the passenger about $40, I’d net around $32, the rest going to Uber. But if the passenger added 20 percent – that’s eight bucks – then that would make up the deduction. However, the majority of people who took Ubers never tipped. And I’d find myself some weeks working sixty hours and only earning $465 because I was only getting short $7 and $8 trips. Kids going to the mall from their house. Gym runs. Late-night staggers from bars when the car has been left behind to avoid an inevitable DUI. Shopping trips to the local supermarket. Etc. Etc. Etc. If I got two of these an hour I could hit the $15 per hour goal that I liked to set myself. But it was more likely that two of these came along every ninety minutes. What I was also calculating was gas – which I have to pay for – and insurance and everything else to do with the vehicle, like upkeep. When I drove for twelve hours I was probably using over $40 worth of gas – around a tank and a half for my Prius. My insurance is $58 a month. Twelve times $12 (a normal hourly yield) is $144. I lose $40 for the gas. $624 for the week. Just under $2500 for the month less $58. And the car needs a service ($350) every 10,000 miles. I drive 1200 miles easily every week. 4800 miles a month. That’s like driving to the East Coast then turning around and getting back as far west as Santa Fe. Only in my case I was doing all that driving in one town and going nowhere. And I was driving an eight-year-old Prius and would have to replace it in two years to keep it under the ten-year Uber rule. How I was going to do that was beyond me. Our little house was paid off. I had little in the way of debt. But my wife Agnieska hadn’t worked for over fifteen years. It was me and me alone who had to make our monthly nut.

I accepted this as part of the deal. According to the code that I was raised with: the man picks up the tab. Even if the woman is working, even if she has a career, the responsibility for keeping the roof over everyone’s head comes down to the man. Klara has often joked that, in that corner of the San Fernando Valley where I was raised, all the big social movements of the sixties and seventies had passed us by. My response was:

‘Maybe it was just my family who never moved beyond the 1950s.’

‘Maybe your church had a hand in that as well,’ Klara shot back.