Of caviar and coronavirus: defining what’s essential

So get this: In late March, a photograph circulated of a mob of delivery workers crowded around Carbone, a small Michelin-rated Italian restaurant in the West Village in New York City. Like many other high-end restaurants, Carbone has a takeout menu during quarantine, featuring items such as their Branzino for $95 a serving, Porterhouse steak for $95 and their “special” wine of the week, “Dirty French Rose Bottle” limited release for $75.

“Their Branzino is to die for,” my friend Mira tells me. “It’s just what you need after a day of homeschooling, trust me. And, like, four bottles of that Dirty Rose.”

But Mira didn’t mean she would die for that Branzino. That would be a risk she would outsource to a courier service known as “Caviar,” while she waited for her $450 meal for her family of four from her socially distanced loft in TriBeCa.

“Oh, here we go, Claire,” she told me, annoyed already.

But let’s call it like it is: A mob of mostly black and Hispanic men crowd around a high-end restaurant waiting over an hour to pick up and deliver orders of caviar and steak while the NYPD yell at them to keep 6 feet apart. Some wear face masks, some do not. The Caviar algorithm for pickup times went haywire because so many people were ordering at the same time, and eventually the police had to tape up the sidewalk to keep everyone a safe distance apart. The tape didn’t work, people started to fight, the police went berserk, and Carbone had to shut down for the night, while the delivery guys went home without being paid.

This is not a scene from a sci-fi dystopian vision for our future, nor is this a look back at pre-revolutionary France. This was less than 40 days ago, less than 30 miles from where we live.

“But let’s face it, Claire,” Mira shot back. “If Greenwich had Carbone, it would be even worse.”

In the early days of the BC (before corona), when we started to prepare for the worst — which ended up being worse than that worst — and then worse than that worst — until worse became a sliding scale that plummeted day by day — a lot of us gave a whole lot of thought to what we deemed “essential workers.”

On one of those quixotic nights of yesteryear, betwixt and between moments of liberal toilet paper use and the wild abandon of leaving the house with no face mask, a friend called to “catch up.” She was driving with no children and I had been allocated a 30-minute slot if I chose to use it. School had just closed; people were asked to stay home — so where the heck was she driving?

“You’re leaving him and the kids,” I said, half serious.

“I’m helping a family in the Bronx,” she told me.

“Oh my gosh, Amanda that is so great,” I gushed, feeling like a complete idiot.

And in my admiration, I started to ask follow-up questions like how she found this family, how much was she doing it, where could I join — until finally she broke.

“OK fine,” she snapped. “It’s my housekeeper. I’m driving her home to the Bronx because she can’t take the train, and I really, really need her.”

Essential workers. What’s essential really and who decides at the end of the day?

Danesha is a mentee I met through the Harlem Tutorial Program 20 years ago. She was the best maid at my wedding, and although people always tell me how great I have been to her over the years, it’s really been Danesha that’s been great to me.

Danesha is working as a security guard at New York City midtown hotels that are offering rooms to homeless shelter residents and public hospital patients with lowlevel COVID-19 symptoms. The program is part of the Department of Homeless Services and The Health + Hospital Corporation’s efforts to keep down infection rates and overcrowding in New York City’s public hospitals and homeless shelters. The city has lined up 500 rooms in four hotels but won’t tell anyone where they are to maintain shelter residents’ privacy. And it’s making a whole lot of people a whole lot of angry.

“Why THE HECK are you not wearing a face mask?” I shouted at Danesha as she FaceTimed from a hotel stairwell during her 15-minute break.

Danesha is a single mother with asthma and two kids

“OK fine,” she snapped. “It’s my housekeeper. I’m driving her home to the Bronx because she can’t take the train, and I really, really need her.”

at home, among other issues.

“They ran out and I can’t not work, Claire,” she told me. “Minimum wage barely covers the train, the kids, the food, but what am I supposed to do?”

She is not alone. Her friends who “scored” jobs at Amazon are down to 30 hours a week with no health insurance.

“Some companies have rolled out ‘hazard pay’ for employees, but in many cases, it amounts to about $2 more an hour,” Olga Khazan wrote in her recent article in The Atlantic. “One Walmart employee used up all his attendance ‘points’ while sick with the virus and was fired upon his return to work.”

Then there is my cousin who is an ER doctor in California, my niece who is a nurse in Westchester County and all the other health care workers who are literally watching their co-workers drop like flies to the illness, while they make harrowing decisions on who gets the ventilator and who does not.

It’s great that Marvel and DC Comics have made our essential workers into comic book heroes and that Mattel has opened a toy line honoring them. I hope they make a lot of money doing so, that this will help all of their employees out in this time of mass layoffs and not just the guys at the top.

But when everything is said and done, there is something much bigger and darker going on here. It’s something that’s been around for a while now, it gets worse by the year, and COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore. And it’s those who can see it, own it and think long and hard toward change who are the heroes in my comic book. And every one of us should put on that cape right now.