Lost At Sea Part 58

They had nothing. His father got a job winding coils that went into refrigeration units. Wayne grew up in East Los Angeles, went to college, joined the navy, drifted around. For a while he worked for unglamorous-sounding businesses with names like the Frieden Corporation, but nothing stuck. He got married, had two children, and wasn't thriving. He had to do something.

And then he had an idea.

Maybe "idea" is the wrong word. He had a realization about a very no-frills aspect of American life: "You could rent a storage unit out for more than you could rent an apartment out, and with none of the overheads."

"How come?" I ask.

"Supply and demand," he replies, shrugging. "People needed them and were willing to pay for them."

This was 1972. He put a down payment on a building in San Diego and divided it into two hundred units. "After that, it was just building the units up, one at a time. For years and years. That's all. You don't get money unless you have a lot of talent, which I don't have, or you work hard, which is what I do. We don't have any golden touch here."

"How many buildings have you got now?" I ask.

"Maybe twenty-three hundred," he says. "With five or six hundred units inside each."

Wayne says he never once stopped to contemplate the amount of money he was making. "I was just looking at getting the best locations I could and getting the buildings opened and getting the tenants and getting the cash flow and on and on," he says.

"You never once thought, 'This money is cascading in. I am worth FOUR BILLION DOLLARS?'" I ask.

He shakes his head. "I don't spend any time at all thinking about my personal wealth. I suppose if I had nothing I might think, 'I have nothing.' But when we decided to go public and I saw how much money there was, I was very surprised."

In 2006, Wayne was America's 61st richest man, according to Forbes, with $4.1 billion. Then the recession hit and now he's now the 242nd richest (and the 683rd richest in the world), with $1.9 billon. He's among the least-famous people on the Forbes list. In fact, he once called the magazine and asked them to remove his name. "I said, 'It's an imposition. Forbes should not be doing that. It's the wrong thing to do. It puts my children and my grandchildren at risk.'"

"And what did they say?" I ask.

"They said when Trump called up, he said the number next to his name was too small."

When Wayne is in Malibu, he stays in his daughter's spare room. His home is a three-bedroom farmhouse on a working stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky. "I have no fancy living at all," he says. "Well. I have a house in Sun Valley. Five acres in the woods. I guess that's fancy."

I like Wayne very much. He's avuncular and salt of the earth. I admire how far he has risen from the Grapes of Wrath circ.u.mstances into which he was born; he's the very embodiment of the American Dream. I'll return to Wayne-and the curious way he views the world-a bit later.

But first let's plummet all the way down to the very, very bottom, as if we're falling down a well, to a concrete slab of a house on a hot, dusty, potholed street in a downtrodden Miami neighborhood called Little Haiti.

THE AIR IS SO DRY it hurts your teeth, unlike Wayne's Malibu air, which is enlivening. As it happens, the view down the street includes not only used-car lots but also storage facilities-the idea that made Wayne his billions.

A young man peers into a crack of sunlight that emerges from behind one of the sheets that block out all his windows. His name is Maurose Frantz, but he goes by Frantz. He can't afford air-conditioning, hence the sheets, so it's very dark and stuffy in here with old air. Six people live here-Frantz and his parents, grandparents, and little brother-and it's the size of my living room.

"Outside is dangerous," Frantz says. "One time someone pulled up and said to me, 'Do you need a gun?' He showed me a gun! I said, 'I can't hear you, man.' Another time my grandpa-they jumped him. They took his wallet. They slotted him. He cried, he cried, he cried."

Frantz is Haitian. His accent is very strong. Throughout our time together, I'm constantly asking him to repeat what he said.

"They did what to your grandpa?" I say. "They slotted him? Slattered him? Sorry?"

"Slapped him," Frantz replies. "Slapped."

Frantz washes dishes at Miami's Capital Grille restaurant, a posh steakhouse right on the harbor in Miami's financial district. He makes $180 to $200 for a twenty-seven-hour week. That means he makes in an hour what I make in 2.4 minutes, and what Wayne makes pretty much every time he breathes in and out.

At the end of the week, Frantz gets an ATM card with his pay already loaded onto it. He receives no health benefits or sick leave or anything like that. Sometimes when he clocks out at the end of the night, he finds he's already been mysteriously clocked out by someone else. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), a restaurant workers' advocacy group, say this practice has been reported in Capital Grilles across the country, so they've launched a cla.s.s-action suit against Darden-the restaurant chain that owns Capital Grille-for such "wage improprieties." Frantz says he's repeatedly requested some kind of paper breakdown of how many hours he's been paid for and how much tax has come off, but they never give it to him, so he's stopped asking. He's also stopped asking for a promotion to busboy. He says they told him they'd let him know, but they never did. According to ROC, the Capital Grille is notorious for denying promotions to dark-skinned people. It's possible for a black worker to become a busboy, Frantz says, but he's never seen a black server.

Last night, one of Frantz's coworkers threw away his shoes.

"I checked everywhere," he says. "I checked in the garbage but I couldn't find them. I called the sous-chef and I told him, 'I put down my shoes. Somebody threw them away.' He said, 'Frantz, you know me. I'm cool with you. I treat you like a man. I give you all the respect you need. I talk to you about your life.' I said, 'I know, Chef.' He respects me, the sous-chef. He said, 'I don't know what happened to your shoes. I can't tell you nothing.'"

Frantz talks a lot about respect and the opposite of respect-humiliation. Like the other day, he says, he was working so hard the busboy told him, "Look at your face. You look like a slave." He says that insult really stung. It's as if he's lowered his ambitions to the level that he can take all sorts of awfulness as long as people talk to him with a little respect. It occurs to me that his life would be better if he spent less time worrying about feeling disrespected and more time actively working to improve his conditions, but then I realize he is doing all he can. Putting his head above the parapet to talk to me is a brave step. (ROC asked for volunteers on my behalf and he was the one to agree.) But I can't see how his life will improve anytime soon. According to ROC, he receives no food stamps or government a.s.sistance of any kind. He's so far down America's financial ecosystem, he barely registers on it.

I ask Frantz to show me his neighborhood. He says there's nothing really to see. He rarely goes out-only to work and church and to play soccer. Everywhere else is too dangerous. When we head outside, I scurry from his front door to the car. A smashed-up police cruiser lies abandoned on the corner. We take a drive past one place on earth he has some fun: the soccer field in the public park. Six miles later, we reach the Capital Grille. Usually he catches the bus, which takes an hour. When he works late and misses the 1:00 a.m. bus home, he has to stand there until the next one comes at 4:00 a.m.

"Do you ever wonder what the customers' lives are like?" I ask.

"I don't know nothing about the customers," says Frantz. "I've never seen them."

I look at him. "You've never seen a customer?" I ask.

"Never," he says.

"Do you know how much the steaks cost?" I ask.

"I never saw a menu," he says. "They're in the restaurant, not the kitchen."

His last words to me, before I leave to go and visit someone who makes five times what he does, are "If I get money, I'm going to leave."

FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES away from Frantz's neighborhood is a lovely, leafy, middle-cla.s.s Des Moines suburb called Urbandale. There's mist and dew and the lawns are so green they look painted. Any slapping that occurs in this neighborhood will be child-on-child slapping, quickly dealt with by the parents. It's 7:00 a.m. and deserted and unseasonably cold-a tornado will pa.s.s through in a few hours-but I'm sure in warmer circ.u.mstances I'd see children running around, in and out of one another's homes, and riding their bikes to school. Sometimes I dream of raising my family in a place like this. In poorer-and richer-neighborhoods, people isolate themselves. The $900-a-week family that lives here-Dennis and Rebecca Pallwitz and their two babies-has a ground-floor apartment on a nice block with a communal pool. Most of the properties here are detached family homes-theirs is an exception. I sit in their kitchen and tell them about Frantz.

"Oh," gasps Rebecca sympathetically.

"I know," I say. "Imagine living in Miami and earning a fifth of what you earn. The stress must be unbelievable."

"It's another world," says Rebecca.

The Pallwitzes' fifth anniversary is approaching. "We'd like to go to the east of the state where we had our honeymoon," Dennis says. "But"-he glances at Rebecca-"that would cost gas and food and a bed-and-breakfast stay, so maybe we'll stick around here, save the gas money, and get a hotel room for a couple of days."

"You can't afford to drive across the state?" I say in a startled screech. I sound like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. In fact, last night in New York City, I got to see something Frantz has never seen: the inside of a Capital Grille restaurant. (I'm guessing Dennis and Rebecca have never been to one, either.) It was delicious and I didn't even think about what it cost. There were stag heads and sculptures of horses and fine oil paintings of generic earls and lords and foxhunts. The milieu was very English country gentleman, although an English country gentleman would never put an "e" at the end of the word "grill." Almost every waiter was light-skinned, but I did see one dark-skinned black man serving. So that was nice.

"But there's lots of stuff to do here in the Des Moines area that we still haven't done," Dennis says, brightening. "So ..."

"I know what I want to do," says Rebecca.

"What's that?" says Dennis.

"The drive-in movie theater and then the Incredible Pizza," she says. "The Incredible Pizza's got games and a buffet. You can pay thirty dollars, eat as much as you want, then play games until the money runs out. They have this tunnel thing going on. That doesn't cost anything. Our son can take his shoes off and run in there for a while... ."

Dennis smiles, but I can tell he thinks Rebecca has evoked a c.r.a.ppy way to spend a fifth anniversary.

Dennis installs, maintains, and repairs "a wide variety of home medical equipment, oxygen equipment, wheelchairs, a smattering of everything." Rebecca stays home with the children. She says their problems are twofold: taxes and health insurance.