The Prisoner
Heading home. His voice was gentle, his Beamer spotless. His hair was a slicked black. A slender, 28 year old man from the Middle East. We made small talk until he opened up about his gambling addiction. He made $2000 per week driving long hours for Uber. He lost $2000 per weekend at the casino. He couldn’t help himself, he said, sometimes trading in a week’s worth of earnings only to find himself surrounded by a pile of losing scratchers at the end of the night. He sounded genuinely upset: surprised his foolproof investments hadn’t made him a profit; intentionally oblivious to the tendency for scratchers to stack the odds against those who play them. He let out a deep sigh, his eyes flitting between the road and my face in the rearview. He swore he was done gambling now, and that he had been for a while.
“I’m depressed.”
My driver had immigrated recently with no friends or family in the area. His only sense of excitement came from the rush of putting his labor on the line, even if it meant losing it all. I asked what neighborhood he lived in, why it’d been difficult meeting new people. His answer was something along the lines of there not being many people his age around.
To make things worse, he’s locked in a predatory rent agreement, living with a landlord who verbally abuses him. He told me his landlord installed a password protected thermostat, preventing him from using the air conditioning during one of LA’s hottest recorded summers (he pays for utilities). His apartment is constantly dark because the landlord insists on turning off any unused lighting. His English proficiency only exacerbated his problems. He’s looking for a new place to live.
When we finally pull up to my house, I stay in the back seat for a few minutes longer and muster up some sort of pep talk for him, wishing him the best of luck in his housing search and reiterating the urgency and importance of him getting out of what’s obviously an incredibly fucked situation. He thanked me profusely for listening to his struggle. He hasn’t found anyone to open up to in this city of 18 million. I shake his hand, thank him for sharing, and leave the car.
