<\/p>\n
(This is a good one. It was originally published in <\/em>City Journal 12\/24\/15).<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t<\/strong><\/span> like rich people,\u201d said Irwin, the singer in my klezmer band, as we loaded in our sound equipment at the country club. The club manager as usual made us go through the kitchen door. At the luncheon\u2014a bar mitzvah\u2014she wouldn\u2019t let us eat the chicken fingers at the kids\u2019 table and would only serve us lemonade, not soda pop. Definitely no beer. We were service-industry workers.<\/p>\n Didn\u2019t the club manager realize Irwin and I are middle class? Irwin is a retired middle-school art teacher. I\u2019m a landlord. We dabble as working class several hours a weekend, period. Forty-four percent of Americans self-identify as middle class, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. \u201cUpper middle class and upper class\u201d account for 15 percent. \u201cLower middle and lower\u201d is 40 percent. Nobody says rich.<\/p>\n At my apartment buildings, many of the tenants are food-service industry workers, and some don\u2019t like me on principle; I\u2019m the landlord. These tenants all lived rent-free as children, and now, in their twenties and thirties, they have to pay for walls and a roof. About 5 percent of the tenants don\u2019t pay on time. Many of the servers and bartenders come home late and begin partying at 3 AM. When I ask for the rent, the tenants sometimes get sassy: \u201cYou want the rent? Let me pull your coat to this\u2014my bathroom ceiling is still leaking.\u201d Luckily I know some jazz slang.<\/p>\n My older<\/strong> <\/span>son said I seem miserable in my real estate job. I said to him, \u201cNobody said the job was supposed to be fun. It\u2019s a way to raise a family and hopefully provide decent housing.\u201d Real estate is not music.<\/p>\n In the music biz, weddings are the Rolls Royce of gigs. Nobody wants to be a wedding singer except real musicians. They die for wedding gigs. The money is good and there\u2019s often salmon. One musician in my band brought baggies to gigs. That was particularly useful at buffets. Was he middle class, working class, or just hungry? I seem to go through a couple social classes a day. I suspect most poor people don\u2019t.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a part owner of a medical office building. There, some of the tenants play golf on Wednesdays. The doctor-tenants complain unhesitatingly and often. Irwin\u2014the artist in my band\u2014put up six original paintings in the medical building lobby. A doctor texted me: \u201cIf you\u2019ve got money for pictures, then paint my door.\u201d So we painted the door. The door painter said to me, \u201cIf you gave that doctor a gold-plated key to heaven, he\u2019d complain the lock was broke. He\u2019s Dr. No.\u201d<\/p>\n The medical<\/strong><\/span> building was a house of pain and uneven temperatures. Very few patients were in a good mood there, unlike at bar mitzvahs and weddings, where everybody is happy (except the club manager). I visit neighboring office buildings and say to receptionists, \u201cI have a general question for you. How\u2019s the temperature in here?\u201d Everybody is too hot or too cold. I read how women and men react differently to air conditioning and heat. Apparently everybody needs their own personal bubble. I\u2019ll probably never get the temperature right.<\/p>\n Irwin has memorized all of Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201clist songs.\u201d Driving to a gig, Irwin sang this for me: \u201cYou might be somebody\u2019s landlord, you might even own banks. But you\u2019re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed.\u201d When we got to the country club, we went through the kitchen door.<\/p>\n Dr. No was late with his rent, on purpose. He was punishing me. I was in his corner office, the area with the family pics and diplomas. Dr. No said, \u201cTake a seat.\u201d I sat, he stood, and he lectured me on climate control. He was hot, and I was sweating the rent. Eventually he handed me the check.<\/p>\n At weddings, I work with a photographer who writes \u201cno wraps\u201d in his contract, meaning no sandwich wraps for him. He insists on a hot meal. But sometimes you get it cold. If my food-industry tenants could have seen me in Dr. No\u2019s office, they would have loved it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (This is a good one. It was originally published in City Journal 12\/24\/15). \u201cI don\u2019t like rich people,\u201d said Irwin, the singer in my klezmer band, as we loaded in our sound equipment at the country club. The club manager as usual made us go through the kitchen door. At the luncheon\u2014a bar mitzvah\u2014she wouldn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landlord-biz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29843"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29846,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29843\/revisions\/29846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}