Testimony of a Fruit Man

I left my job last week.

I was a deliveryman for the nation’s premier provider of cut fruit bouquets. You know the one. For the last few years, if you were in a specific part of upstate New York, you might have seen me delivering fruit bouquets to people’s homes, workplaces, weddings, schools—at all times of the year, for all kinds of occasions. And of course, recently, that meant delivering fruit bouquets during a pandemic.

If you’re like any of the sensible people I’ve mentioned this to, that might have made you pause. Maybe you’re wondering something like: didn’t New York close all non-essential businesses? How the hell are Consumable Presentations an essential service? You’d be right in asking, if you are. I was wondering the same thing when I was informed that we would, in fact, be staying open, only about twelve hours before the shelter-in-place order went into effect. I still have a hard time digesting it. The things I’d spent years delivering weren’t groceries. They weren’t meals. They were chocolate-covered, overpriced novelties, bought for the recipient’s sake less often than for the customer placing the delivery order, so they could feel content knowing they’d spent enough money to show they care.

But hell, you could eat them. Apparently, that’s essential enough.

I thought about calling it then. In a country with inadequate testing for a disease you can carry while asymptomatic, in a state that was piling on tens of thousands of new cases each week, in an ongoing shortage of protective supplies—it felt indefensible, bringing something I didn’t believe was necessary to someone’s door, when I couldn’t be confident in what else I was bringing with it.

I didn’t give corporate enough credit. They had, through one dark art or another, found a way to profit that was just respectable enough to tolerate: they’d started selling boxes of uncut produce, whole fruit and vegetables as we got them from our suppliers. That, at least, I could justify. If I took all the right precautions, I could bear bringing the produce that people might have sent to their needy, housebound loved ones. And quitting, in its own way, would have set off my guilt complex regardless. People were already losing their jobs in droves. Quitting mine, when they didn’t have that option, felt like I’d be slapping them in the face. I told myself I could find a way to stand it.

During the first delivery of my next shift, I watched from a six foot distance as the woman I delivered to broke into sobs. In a world without coronavirus, it would have been her wedding day. This set a tone.

I need to explain the region a bit here. New York’s Southern Tier is its own ecosystem, a kind of county-spanning liminal space. There are pockets, tucked in between the hills and the rusted, abandoned hulks of Old Industry, where you can convince yourself that you’re still in the year 2020. We even have a couple Tesla charging stations. But a five minute drive south puts you where civilization isn’t measured in blocks or streets, but in twisting backwoods roads with names like “Horan Hollow,” roads which lead you out into woodland where you could spit over the state line into Pennsylvanian wilderness. The decades fall away by the mile here, each one marked by yet another collapsed house or ancient tractor that was apparently left at the end of a workday and never retrieved.

When it was clear that COVID-19 was going to be a whole thing, it was that upstate disconnect that scared me. The rural New Yorker has a particular talent for refusing the idea that the outside world can reach them. Whether or not I could trust the people in my community to do the right thing—to stay home and stay apart—was an open question. And in a county where there are plenty of yards with Trump signs, the man’s daily efforts to minimize the threat didn’t leave me hopeful about what the answer to that question might look like.

Luckily, that first day out soothed some of those fears. Aside from those of other essential workplaces, parking lots were empty. The roads were mostly bare of other traffic. It was an inversion of what I imagine the experience of empty streets is like in a major metropolis, places that are fully designed, human landscapes—unsettling because the people who should so clearly be there, aren’t. Here, while the boundaries in between are just as artificial as anywhere, nature takes up more volume. When they’re empty, the human spaces themselves look out of place, like a collection of up-scaled, half-finished dioramas, an incongruity of hard angles between green hills. They look unconvincing, flimsy, harder to justify when they’re going unused.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who would’ve found those sights eerie or depressing. To me, they were hopeful. This was one of the few cases where people’s fear was something you could take heart in. You could feel it weighing on their psychology, see it in how, early on, people would start to automatically close distance to greet you, catch themselves in the act, retreat back. You could see it in the apprehension with which people opened their doors, the relief when they saw I’d left their delivery at the porch and didn’t want their signature. Those who clearly didn’t want me around were a source of comfort. There were other things, at the edges, to buoy my spirits: my coworker’s partner taking the time to sew makeshift masks for us, just how grateful the grateful recipients were. And nothing did more for my mood than the instant, deep camaraderie I felt every time I locked eyes with another deliveryperson, and the commiseration in exchanged calls of “stay safe out there.”

But those heartening moments were mostly distractions. Running deliveries in a pandemic is a rat’s nest of anxieties, twisting back in on themselves before feeding into others. There was never a moment where I wasn’t wondering about the chances that the virus was lurking on the fruit, on the packaging, on me or my gloves or my mask. Every surface I couldn’t avoid touching, every doorway into an apartment complex and fence gate, a part of me would anguish over. That part of my brain would continue working throughout the day, churning out worst case scenarios, hypothetical sequences of “if They were infected and touched That and I brought it There...” until there was no room for anything else. It was maddening. And there were other, secondary concerns, like the vague fear about showing up, uninvited and masked, to households who proudly hang signs with pistol silhouettes and declarations that “IF MY DOG DOESN’T GET YOU, MY .45 WILL.” I can also report that impostor syndrome is alive and well in the pandemic, even between service industry workers. The twinge of shame I felt when a woman who’d been handing out meals to those who truly needed them thanked me “for all I was doing,” when my next delivery was a pile of obnoxious melon pieces in a cupcake-shaped vase, is one I never want to feel again.

Worst of all were those people who weren’t taking the threat seriously. I count too many of our customers among them. I wish I could say that our delivery numbers had gone down over those weeks. But for my shifts, at least, they had increased, and continued to do so. That alone would be bad enough, but the majority of our deliveries had always been surprises, and that hadn’t changed. When you order something for yourself during the pandemic, you’re making a threat assessment. You have the opportunity to weigh whether it’s worth the risk to have a potential vector for infection show up at your door. By ordering a surprise delivery for someone else, you deny them that opportunity. It would almost be tolerable if the majority of our orders had been the aforementioned fresh produce boxes. Then, at least, you could wash what you received, and I could convince myself that someone was getting something they needed. But that wasn’t the case. Nine out of ten deliveries were the standard fare of cut fruit bouquets, prepared and delivered by hand—not to fill any need, but for an aunt’s birthday or because “this virus is keeping us from golfing this weekend.” One message from a delivery’s attached card has continued to haunt me, in particular. It read: “Congratulations on the positive pathology report! Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery!” What were they thinking? What were any of them thinking?

Easter was the breaking point for me. It was everything hard about the shifts that preceded it, but amplified—in number, and intensity. Orders had come in by the dozens, some customers ordering three or four deliveries at once. Most of mine were to elderly recipients, parents and older relatives who couldn’t be visited, some of whom barely able to lift what I’d brought them. I’m not a Christian, so I can’t say whether observing the holiday would have made it easier to bear. Having something to pray to might have helped. As it was, I left each with a fear that I’d just delivered a death sentence.

I was only tipped once during those weeks.

But all said, I got off easy. So many genuinely essential workers had it, and continue to have it, worse than I ever did. That I could even think about pulling out of work to decrease my anxieties is an incredible privilege that countless workers we continue to rely on don’t have. And that’s to say nothing for those actually suffering the disease itself.

Already, I feel like we’re forgetting their ongoing service, if we ever honored it enough. Too many people are content with reopening the country, having never offered the truly essential workers anything more than empty gratitude. And if our complacency leads to another spike, a second wave, they’ll be expected to face it all over again—stocking our shelves, delivering our food, caring for our sick, having never stopped in the first place.

In the meantime, be smart. Be safe. Think about what you’re ordering and who’s delivering it. Don’t send any surprises. For the love of god, tip often and tip well. And, y’know, if you’re hiring, let me know.

Stay safe out there.