Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Angels and Demons 27 Oct 8:00 AM (2 days ago)
They're heading to a show in their Halloween costumes, though I have my suspicions as to whether they're drinking age or whether they have fake IDs. They're college girls, I think, considering one of them lives in my building and my apartment is across the street from the campus.
“Can you guess what our costumes are?” one of them asks, for some reason. One of them is an angel and one of them is a demon and it's obvious. A four-year-old could guess it.
“Are you my conscience?” I ask, and they give me a weird look. I clarify, “I recognize you from my shoulders every time I have to make a difficult decision.”
They laugh.
Years ago, I wrote a novel called One-Night Stan's, which took place on “afterlife night” at the titular strip club, with all of the performers dressed as angels and demons and dancing to appropriate songs. Thinking of this, I put on Heaven and Hell by Black Sabbath and tell the girls it's their song. I think they're too young to know it, but Demon Girl in particular rocks out to it anyway.
“You should clock out and come hang out at the club with us,” says Demon Girl.
I tell her no thanks. For one thing I've been running people to this venue all night and it's clearly a shoulder-to-shoulder kind of event with various DJs playing so loud you have to scream into the ears of the people next to you to be heard—not my scene. I also need to make money and the weekend is the best time to do it. But the excuse I use is that I'm almost finished with a sober October and it's too late to mess it up now.
In a beautiful piece of irony that I seem to be the only one to notice, Angel Girl starts going, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Get those last couple days in,” while Demon Girl says, “Pff, who cares? It's two days. You basically succeeded already. Come get a drink. It's Halloweekend.” They become the angel and demon on my shoulders like I labeled them when they first got in the car. It makes me smile. One of those real-life moments that, if you wrote it into a movie, people would go, “This is pretty on-the-nose. Can’t we find a more subtle way to do it?”
I don't go to the show with them, but a part of me wonders whether it was the right call—whether I’m too in the habit of making practical choices over fun ones.
However, the next fare I pick up is a couple about my age, who are leaving the show. They say, “Oh God, it sucked! It's so crowded you can't move, and the music is way too loud. You can't get to the bar, and if you do, everything costs a fortune. I don't know what the hell we were thinking!”
I nod a silent thanks to the angel on one shoulder. There but for the grace of God go I.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Mad Brew | A Horror Short Film 25 Oct 12:45 PM (4 days ago)
Happy Halloween-ish.
As I mentioned back in February, I made a short film last year, which I submitted to several festivals throughout 2025. With the days of horror hitting their annual peak and the season of scary festivals coming to an end, it seems like the perfect time to show it to everyone. So without any further ado, here is Mad Brew (followed by further ado).
(More videos, including my standup special, will be coming to that YouTube channel very soon, so if you’re interested in my video work, consider subscribing.)
Mad Brew recently played at GenreBlast Film Festival, Nightmares Film Festival, and From Beyond Film Festival. The film was originally made as part of the h48 film competition, in which participating teams have 48 hours. Teams are assigned a sub-genre, a prop, and a line of dialogue that they are required to include in the film to make sure they can’t cheat by starting early. In our case, we had to make a paranormal horror film that included a pair of knitting needles, and a character saying, “Nope. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
As a standup comedian, I have often worked with Mad Swede Brewing, and they were kind enough to let me film at one of their locations, including in the actual brewery where all the equipment is. When you’re making a movie on 48 hours with no budget, it’s helpful to have access to a location that’s a little more interesting to look at than your own apartment. We spent a long day filming in the brewery, with a group of people I know from Boise’s standup and theater communities.
I hope you enjoy Mad Brew. While I write all the time, it had been a long time since I had directed. I hope to do some more of it soon.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Idea-Cucking 20 Oct 11:29 AM (9 days ago)
They're coming home from a Halloween party—three of them, all women, all in their twenties, all loudly drunk. They spend the trip complaining about the party they just left. One of them says, “I feel like I went through the seven stages of grief at that party,” earning raucous laughter from her friends. I’m pretty sure there are only five stages of grief, but who’s counting?
“That would be a good theme for a party,’ I tell them. “The stages of grief.”
“Oh my God!” one of them says. “We should use that as the theme for next year's party—the seven stages of grief!”
Everyone agrees, then she adds, “I always have the best ideas when I'm drunk!”
Her friends pat her on the back and concur that, yes, she really does have great ideas when she’s drunk. I stare ahead, grinding my teeth, and thinking that I was the one who suggested it as a party theme.
I have heard the word “hepeat” used in reference to the moment when a woman expresses an idea that goes ignored, then a man repeats the same idea as though it is his own, and everyone heaps praise on him. By that token, what’s happening in this car could be called a “shepeat”, but this is why using gendered language to attack behaviors that aren’t necessarily gender-specific, shall we say, chaps a lot of people’s balls.
Allow me to mansplain.
It starts with a word like “mansplain” entering the lexicon in order to call attention to men who condescendingly explain things to women. It has its value, but some of the people who latch onto it are misandrists who deploy it cheaply to dismiss criticism. This grates on many people, but misogynists are the ones who take exception most loudly, and along comes another new word: “femsplain”. Much like “mansplain”, accusations of femsplaining are sometimes fair, but sometimes deployed cheaply and derogatorily. So misogynists and misandrists get busy tallying up mansplainers and femsplainers in one of 70 million stupid arguments that make up the current war of words between the wokes and the anti-wokes. Meanwhile, condescending explanation crimes of the man-on-man and woman-on-woman variety go largely unremarked upon, their perpetrators unshamed. Thus, a rift becomes wider, a problem becomes uglier, and we probably could have saved a lot of heartache by just using “splainer”. Often at the heart of our squabbles, we are not actually as divided as we seem. Man or woman, woke or anti-woke, nobody likes a splainer.
Which brings me back to “hepeat”.
I don’t want to say this woman is shepeating me. I also don’t want to take off the gendered prefix and just call it “peating”, because that’s a little confusing, and possibly offensive to people named Pete. My father is a Pete. My middle name is Peter, and while I’m clearly being a splainer at the moment, I like to think I’m not a peater. We already fucked things up for a lot of Karens who probably did nothing wrong, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to reverse course on that one, but let’s at least not do it to the Petes. Instead, let’s invent a new term.
I’ll nominate “idea-cucking”. That seems like a good way to describe the feeling when you have an idea that you love and cherish, and then some other asshole comes along and has their way with it right in front of you.
Nobody likes to be idea-cucked. And if the women in my car weren’t so drunk and loud and impossible to get a word in with, I might remind them that a Stages of Grief party was my idea, and then splain to them that there are only five stages of grief, but I don’t have the energy for that.
And anyway, they’re trashed. When they roll out of bed the next morning with their Halloween makeup smeared on their pillowcases, staggering their apartments in search of coffee and fried food, they really might go through seven stages of grief. But I would bet money on one thing: they are going to forget all about my (yes, my) party idea. And that gives me a happy feeling.
Male or female, there is a name for that happy feeling that I don't have to make up a word for. That happy feeling is called schadenfreude.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Scared Guy and Funny Guy 13 Oct 8:00 AM (16 days ago)
I am trying to watch a classic horror movie every day for the month of October. Right now, I’m living in one. Rain is coming down in sheets and every now and then a streak of lightning ignites the sky. The streets are deserted, and only a few people are visible through dimly-lit windows.
I pull up outside a bar and two men in their twenties run to the car, hunched over in the rain. They get into my back seat as quickly as they can and I begin to drive.
One of them, who clearly sees the night the same way I do, asks me, "Are you going to take us to our destination? Or are you going to take us to the middle of nowhere and kill us?"
"Don't ask that!" the other guy whispers sharply, sounding scared.
"It's funny you bring it up," I tell them, "because I watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre earlier tonight, about some people who get killed in the middle of nowhere."
"Don't kill us," says Funny Guy. "We're good Catholics."
"That's funny too," I say, "because yesterday I watched The Wicker Man, about some people who kill a good Catholic."
Scared Guy isn't amused by any of this, but Funny Guy is, and Funny Guy is the one who used the app, the one who will rate me and decide my tip, so I follow his lead. When I make a turn (which the app told me to make) and he fakes a scared face and asks, "Why are you going this way?" I stare straight ahead and say in a menacing tone, "Don't worry. I know a shortcut."
Scared Guy hasn't seen many horror movies, or he’d know that Funny Guy almost always dies before Scared Guy, and since Scared Guy is in a car with two Funny Guys and there's no woman here to be Final Girl, his odds are actually really good.
The writer in me kicks in and I say, "What would really be ironic is if you requested a ride to the middle of nowhere, and then when we get there, you kill me."
They both laugh at that, and it reverses the dynamic. For the rest of the ride, they imply they’re going to kill me. Scared Guy becomes another Funny Guy, and I become the new Scared Guy, which perhaps increases my odds of survival and lowers his.
I drop them off and we go our separate ways without any of us being murdered, though I’d like to think, as soon as they get into the house and out of my sight, Scared Guy’s face will drain of all emotion and he will hack Funny Guy to pieces. That's clearly the best twist ending.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Polaroid 6 Oct 8:00 AM (23 days ago)
She says she is on her way to a steakhouse to sit on the patio and drink wine. She is mid-thirties, attractive, and dressed like this might be a date or a business meeting.
She asks how my day is, and I tell her it’s been uneventful and lacking in crazy people. She asks about crazy passengers and I tell her a few stories, including the one about the alien abductee, which gets us on the topic of aliens. She says she doesn’t believe most people’s stories, but she definitely thinks there’s other life out there.
“I’m the same,” I say. “A lot of people are clearly just lying for attention, and with a few people, you can tell they believe it, but it’s hard to believe it yourself. But, once in a while, there’s a story that’s simple enough to be believable but weird enough that you can’t explain it, and you just sit there going, ‘Wow, I wonder what the hell it was you saw?’”
She is silent for a long moment, then says, almost shamefully, “I had a thing like that.”
“What happened?”
“Eh, I don’t know. You said it was a ‘no crazy passenger’ day.”
“Well now I’ve gotta know.”
She shifts in her seat. Takes a deep breath. Leans forward.
“Okay… So, when I was in high school, I was asleep because I had class in the morning, and all of a sudden I woke up in the middle of the night to a bright flash. I looked over toward my closet, and I saw a silhouette that looked like somebody standing there with one arm raised up over their head. But I was half-asleep, so I didn’t fully process it. I lived with my mom and my sister, so I guess I just thought it was one of them, and I knew I had to wake up soon, so I just turned over and fell right back asleep. Then, when I woke up the next morning, there was a Polaroid photo sitting right in the middle of my closet of a girl I’d never seen before.”
“Whoa. That’s creepy. How old was the girl?”
“About my age. I still have the photo. It’s basically a selfie. I think the flash from the camera was what woke me up, then I saw that silhouette with the outstretched arm, and that’s how she was standing when she took the photo. But this was like 1995. Selfies weren’t really a thing yet, and you didn’t see many Polaroids anymore either. I showed the photo to my mom and my sister and asked who the girl was, but they didn’t know either.”
“Wow,” I say. “That story is scary even if it’s not supernatural. Like, yeah, you could go the ghost route, but it could also just be some girl sneaking into your house and taking a picture of herself in the middle of the night. And that’s kind of equally unsettling.”
“Yeah. Like, why would someone do that?”
I hesitate. “It makes me think of something, but it might be overly dark.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I told you my crazy passenger story,” she says, and I guess it’s a fair point.
“Okay. I read a book about Charles Manson once, and his cult used to do these things they called creepy crawls. Basically, they would go into a house at night and sneak through it, but not to steal or to hurt anybody. They would just go in while the family was asleep, and maybe rearrange furniture or take some minor items, just so the people in the house would be able to tell that somebody had been in their home during the night. They just wanted to make people uneasy, and let them know the sanctity of their home had been invaded. Taking a photo of yourself and leaving it behind feels right along those lines.”
There is a pause, then she says, “You’re right, that doesn’t make me feel much better about it.”
“Well,” I tell her, “You said it was in the nineties. That’s long after Manson, at least.”
“True. I’m just gonna go with it being a ghost.”
“That’s a good choice too.”
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a weekly series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Broken Foot 29 Sep 8:01 AM (last month)
He comes out of the hospital on crutches and asks if I can move the front seat as far forward as it will go so he can sit behind it. He puts the crutches next to him.
Normally I ask people how their day is going, but I’m never sure what to say to someone whose day clearly sucks. Still, he seems to be in a decent mood in spite of it—a good-looking guy in his late twenties with an accent I can’t quite place.
“Boise seems like a nice city,” he says.
“Oh yeah? You here visiting?”
“I guess you could say that. I just got Life Flighted in.”
That’s a new one. “Did you get injured in the mountains?”
“Yeah, my friend and I came out for a two-week hiking trip. Day one of the trip, I got my foot stuck under a tree root and fell to my side. My foot stayed in place and my whole body twisted. I could feel the bone snap before I even hit the ground.”
“Oh man, first day of the trip?”
“Yeah, about four hours in. I told my buddy he could keep going without me, but he didn’t want to. He’s catching a flight home today and I’m getting one tomorrow morning.”
“Man, that’s a miserable trip.”
“Eh, you win some, you lose some.”
There are two stops on this ride. The first is a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for pain pills, the second is a hotel. When we get to the pharmacy he asks if I can take him through the drive thru. I do, and they tell him it will take about ten minutes to fill the prescription. He asks me if that’s okay and I tell him it’s fine. We pull into a parking space.
We sit there for ten minutes and swap travel stories. His travel is based around hiking and work (he has some kind of job in communications that I don’t manage a good understanding of) whereas mine is more tourism, but we’ve both been to quite a few places.
After ten minutes, we try the drive thru again. There has been some kind of problem. Now it’s going to be another twenty minutes. They take his phone number and say they’ll call him. His superhumanly positive demeanor is finally showing signs of bending under the pressure. He asks me again if it’s okay for us to wait, and while waiting around this long on a ride is not good for my pay, I don’t like the idea of bailing on an injured guy who is trying to get medicated at the end of a trip from hell, so I tell him it’s fine.
This time, as we wait, he starts telling me about working as a contractor for the US military in the Middle East. He says shortly after arriving for the job, he and a few of his coworkers were taken into a van at gunpoint, where they were interrogated and slapped around a bit. “Not enough to do any real damage,” he says, “but enough that it felt real.” At the end of it, he came to find out that it was a staged kidnapping, and that they were being tested to see how they handled themselves under pressure. It sounds terrifying to me, but he’s sort of laughing it off as he tells the story, the same way he can laugh off breaking his foot at the beginning of a planned hike. It’s a kind of toughness of character that not a lot of people have.
After about half an hour, his phone has died, and we hit the drive thru a third time to ask if they can call my phone instead, but we find out the medication is finally ready. It’s only twenty bucks, but when he goes to pay, he realizes his wallet has gotten lost somewhere along his nightmare of a journey. He says he’ll use Apple Pay, then remembers his phone is dead. He asks the pharmacists if they have a charger that will fit his phone.
I tell him, forget it. I’ll pay the twenty bucks. When he gets his phone charged at the hotel, he can Venmo me. He comes off as an honest guy, and frankly, if this whole thing was a con to get twenty bucks out of me, this motherfucker has earned it.
We get the medication and I take him back to the hotel. I help him get his bags inside and get to the front desk, where I wait around a minute to make sure they’ll let him check in. They do, and we part ways. Sure enough, he sends me seventy dollars on Venmo, making it more than worth the hour and a half I spent with him.
My next ride is a husband and wife arriving at the airport. The wife gets in the back and says, “Can we put the seat back and let him ride in the front? He broke his foot on vacation.”
I laugh to myself and put the seat back.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” I tell them, “but I had the seat all the way forward because the last guy who was in the back also broke his foot on vacation.”
This new guy, with the new broken foot, is unamused. Like most people at the end of a trip from hell, he is unable to see past his own misery.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Greg Sisco Fan 22 Sep 8:00 AM (last month)
He’s disheveled, with baggy eyes and that stale cigarette smell—the smell where you can tell he smoked half a cigarette, snuffed it out, and put it back in his pocket. I’ve never understood why people do that. It’s the difference between smelling like you’ve smoked a cigarette and smelling like you’ve lost control of your life, and you get, what, twelve extra drags out of it? That cost-benefit analysis shouldn’t hold up for anyone but the most desperate of people. If you’re sleeping under a bridge and pilfering half-smoked cigarettes out of ashtrays, by all means, do what you need to do, but if you can afford a ride home from the bar, you should be good to leave that half-smoked ciggy in the ashtray for the bridge-sleepers.
“What do you do besides this?” he asks me.
I don’t like where this is going. I drive, I write fiction, and I do standup, but drunk and disheveled men who smell like their lives are falling apart are the last demographic you want to tell that to. If you tell them you write fiction, they want you to pitch them a project while they interrupt you seventeen times and then criticize the idea without having really listened. If you tell them you do comedy, they want you to do a private show for them while they interrupt you seventeen times and then tell you what they’d do differently, explaining that they watch a lot of Kill Tony so they know what they’re talking about.
“Mostly just this,” I say.
“Okay, but, like, what about for fun? Are you a sports guy? What?”
Dammit. I’m trapped. I have no life outside of these three things.
“I don’t know. I watch a lot of movies, standup, whatever…”
“You ever go to local standup shows?”
That question hits a little closer to home and I decide to take the chance. “Yeah. I do standup locally, so I’m part of that whole scene.”
“You’re a comedian?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit! I might’ve seen you. I haven’t been to a show in a while though. The last thing I went to was, uh… Comic of the Year. It was, like, a competition. Did you do that?”
I grin. At the time this is happening, it has been about four months since I won Comic of the Year.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I won that competition.”
“Awesome!” he says, “What was the name of the guy who won the finals?”
I’m confused. “No, I mean, I won the finals.”
“Well,” he says, “the guy who won the whole thing, I guess. He’s, like, a really tall guy with a beard, always wears a leather jacket.”
This is getting absurd. I have not shaved the beard. I am literally wearing the same leather jacket right now that I was wearing when I won the competition. I’m pretty sure I even did jokes that night about being a rideshare driver.
I’m about to try to ram this home harder when I remember that I don’t want to do a private show for this guy in the first place, so I decide to switch gears.
“Oh, yeah,” I tell him. “That’s Greg Sisco.”
“That’s it!” he says. “That guy’s hilarious!”
“Yeah, he’s a fucking genius,” I agree.
For the next few minutes, I talk about myself in the third person, as this guy tries to tell me his favorite Greg Sisco jokes—a few of which are badly misquoted, and the rest of which aren’t mine at all. At one point I try to quote one of my jokes and he corrects me with a less-funny punchline.
When I drop him off, he tells me to keep up the comedy. Then he looks at the app and says, “Oh, your name is Greg, too? What’s your last name? I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
I think for a minute, then say, “Giraldo.”
“Greg Giraldo,” he repeats. “That sounds familiar. I think I’ve seen you before.”
“I’m sure you have,” I tell him.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Bartender and the Michelob Rep 15 Sep 8:07 AM (last month)
He comes out of the bar pretty toasted. Not in that sloppy way that a lot of downtown drinkers are, but in the way of a seasoned drinker who knows his limit, knows it’s high, and knows he’s just about there.
“How was your night?” I ask him.
“Ohh, it is ready to be over.”
“Celebrating something?”
“No, no… I got into a drinking contest with the Michelob rep.”
I laugh. “A beer rep doesn’t sound like somebody I’d want to get into a drinking contest with.”
“Well, I’m a bartender, so I thought it’d be a fair fight.”
I instantly love this story. It sounds like a folktale, an urban legend, a story joke. Dale, tell that one about the bartender and the Michelob rep who get in a drinking match.
“Who won?” I ask.
“Well, she could hold her own. I’ll say that much.”
“Does that mean she beat you?”
“In the first round, she did,” he says. “We were drinking these things that turned out to basically be White Russians. I didn’t realize we were gonna go that hard and I couldn’t keep up. But the second round was shotgunning PBRs—the sixteens, not the twelves. That’s more in my comfort zone, so I turned it around on her there.”
My God! This story keeps getting better. It even comes in a classic, three-part structure. The Three Little Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Since we were babies, we’ve been conditioned into loving the rule of threes. Already I can hear this story in a classic joke structure. A bartender and a Michelob rep get into a drinking contest. She wins the first round because she can drink harder. He wins the second because he can drink faster…
We’re barreling toward the punchline! Don’t let us down now!
“And round three?” I ask, on pins and needles.
“Oh, that was enough. I was like, ‘Damn, I better call it after that.’”
I slump in my seat. What the hell kind of story is this? Two rounds?! The genie never offers two wishes! The farmer never has two daughters! Two ethnicities don’t walk into a bar! You need the third one! The third one’s the punchline, or the moral! It’s the whole fucking point! You can’t build the suspense right up to a fever pitch and then just bring the curtain down without relieving the tension! They tried that with The Sopranos and people were pissed!
“That’s it?” I ask. “You can’t just leave it there. One round each, with no clear winner? You need a tie-breaker.”
“Well, I gave her my number,” he says. “If she wants a tie-breaker, she can call me.”
Suddenly I like this story after all. Son of a bitch knew exactly what he was doing.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Late Ones 8 Sep 8:00 AM (last month)
There’s nobody there when I arrive. I double check that I’m at the right apartment, then put the car in park and begin waiting. A timer on my phone counts down from two minutes—the window that passengers are given to get out to the car.
Actually, they get two free minutes to come out to the car, then they get five minutes for which they are charged a small fee. Mostly, drivers are paid for distance, but we get a few cents a minute for sitting still. After waiting the full seven minutes, I can mark a ride as a no-show and move on without it affecting my scorecard. At that point, I’ll get a couple bucks for the no-show, but after seven minutes of waiting and however long it takes to drive to the pick-up point, I might be out twenty minutes and only get three dollars. It’s frustrating.
The first two minutes goes by, then the five-minute countdown starts. The app is supposed to notify her that I’m here, but just in case, I send her a message telling her I’m outside.
I groan to myself. It’s been a long week already. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, and I’m behind on money for the day. This is also a short ride that won’t pay much anyway. Having to wait six minutes for somebody to come out to the car so I can drive them two minutes down the road feels ridiculous.
You decide you want to go somewhere, so you request a ride, I tell myself. It’s two minutes away, but you request a driver anyway. The app tells you he’s on his way and he’ll be here in twelve minutes. You can see where the car is in real time on the map. You have plenty of time to be ready. Even if somebody drops a plate in the kitchen just as the driver is arriving, it takes two seconds to send a text saying, ‘Sorry. Minor issue here. Give me two minutes.’ People can be so inconsiderate.
I watch the timer count down from five minutes. Four, three, two…
I’m pretty much counting down the seconds at this point. I can’t wait to mark it as a no-show. Even though I won’t make much money, at least this passenger will be charged for making me wait. She’ll see that her ride is gone and she was charged a fee. She’ll be sad, she’ll be out a few dollars, and now she’ll be the one having to wait around for the next driver. Serves her right. Maybe next time she’ll be more respectful of other people’s time.
Then the door opens and, finally, out comes a ninety-year-old woman—on crutches, because she only has one leg—awkwardly trying to wheel a suitcase behind her.
“Oh,” I say to myself. “So I’m the asshole.”
I get out of the car and help her with her bag.
This happens all the time. The details change, and it’s not usually this pronounced, but a person on my phone is so much easier to hate than a person in my car, even if they’re the same person.
Here’s a more everyday version:
I start off waiting outside an apartment with nothing but a name for this person I’m giving a ride to. I think, "This is ridiculous. Kyla has no respect for my time. She thinks the whole world revolves around her. This is typical Kyla!"
Then when I’ve already waited six minutes, she texts, "Be right out," and I hate her even more. After all this time? Now, she’s gonna text me? She couldn't do it when I arrived? How does she live with herself? I start thinking I’m going to give her a one-star rating as soon as this ride is over, because the app will never match me again with someone I gave one star to, and God forbid I ever cross paths with Kyla again. Plus, other drivers need to see that terrible rating next to her name and be warned never to accept a ride for Kyla. I hope she’s Gen Z. Gen Z cares about their star-ratings more than anyone else, and I want Kyla to cry when she sees that she got a one-star. Fuck Kyla.
Then Kyla comes out and she's awkward and funny and wears a Goosebumps sweater and I’m like, "Oh man, Goosebumps books were awesome," and she's like, "Right?" and all of a sudden we’re both trying to remember the title of that one with the amusement park and it’s driving us nuts, and then Common People by Pulp comes on the radio and she's singing along with it and I’m like, "You know Common People? My passengers never know Common People," and Kyla's like, "Have you ever heard the Shatner version?" and I’m like, "Have I heard the Shatner version? What am I, a rube, Kyla? Of course I've heard the Shatner version."
Then I drop Kyla off and she tips me five bucks in cash because she says she doesn't want Uncle Sam getting his grubby little paws on it, and I close out the ride, and the app asks me to rate my last passenger and I’m like, "Kyla? Of course Kyla gets five stars! I love Kyla!"
And it’s easy—way too easy—to forget that, before she came out in that Goosebumps sweater, I fucking hated her. In fact, my brain retcons the whole memory to the point that, if you asked me about it, I’d say, ‘Oh, I didn’t hate her. I was a little annoyed, maybe, but it wasn’t that big a deal to me.’
I have heard about studies where people react more negatively to text than they do to speech. I have always believed it. But even knowing it and believing it doesn't stop it from happening. When the person is a name on the phone, or a line of text in a message, they are not a human being yet and it's easy to hate them. When they sit down and talk to you and you can look them in the eye, nine times out of ten, they're easy to forgive. The bitch in my phone is so self-involved that she doesn’t care one bit about anyone else’s time. But Kyla?—Kyla in the Goosebumps sweater, who knows all the words to Common People?—Time probably just got away from her. It happens to all of us. I’m sure she was trying her best.
I think of Kyla and the one-legged woman when I see people fighting online—people who live to fight online, who I unfollow or block because their whole online presence is composed of, "Fuck this person," "So-and-so is a piece of shit," "I have twelve mutuals with this asshole," and the like.
I find myself wanting to tell them, "Buddy, that ain't a person. That's a name in your phone. Put the phone down. Let Kyla be."
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Problem Drinker 1 Sep 8:00 AM (last month)
“Making my way closer to home, one bar at a time,” he explains as he gets in, traveling about a mile down the road, from one bar to another, around midnight.
“Sounds like a plan,” I tell him, starting to drive.
He’s a little wobbly, doing that slow-blink thing that tells you the booze is getting ahead of him and maybe it’s time to call it a night.
“I should just go home,” he mumbles. “But I’m gonna do one more bar.”
“You sure?” I ask. “We can change the destination if you want. It’s a slow night for me anyway.”
He seems to think about it. “Nah, I’m gonna have another drink.”
“Suit yourself,” I say. He should probably go home, but a guy in that shape doesn’t always respond well to a stranger’s judgment, and it’s not really my place to make a grown man’s decisions for him.
“I gotta quit doing this,” he says, as if reading my mind.
“Drinking?” I ask.
“Yeah… It’s getting to be a bit much.”
“Again, man, I can just take you home. You don’t have to go to another bar.”
Again, he thinks about it. Although he doesn’t really think. He just pretends to. If he were an actor and I was directing him, I would call ‘cut’ and tell him I need him to look like he’s really considering it.
“Nah,” he says. “I’m gonna get another drink. Wife’s gone, so I’m at home alone. You know, there’s only so much Netflix you can binge before you’ve gotta head out of the house, and this is always where I end up.”
It’s not clear whether he means his wife is out of town or whether he means she’s gone-gone, but I have a sense that it’s the latter.
“You don’t have any other hobbies?”
“I played pickleball for a couple hours, but you know, that’s not really a full day.”
“You don’t do anything lower energy? Playing music, drawing, reading… even video games? Nothing to keep you out of the bars?”
“I should start reading books. I haven’t really done that since high school.”
“Yeah, anything productive, or even just less destructive than drinking, is a good step in the right direction if you want to quit,” I tell him. “I’ve been cutting back in the last few years and I keep doing longer intervals. Like I took a week off, and then later a month, and recently six months. Willpower is like a muscle. If you work it out, it gets stronger.”
“I can go a day without drinking,” he says. “But I can’t go two.”
“Well, that might be a good goal then. Go two. Just work on that, and once you get good at two, try three.”
“It gets expensive,” he says. “Going out to two, three, four bars, taking rideshares between them. I’ll rack up a couple hundred bucks a night sometimes, and when you’re doing it four or five times a week…”
“A thousand bucks a week,” I tell him. “Fifty grand a year. You could probably do a lot with that if you managed to cut down.”
He nods, then asks, “Do you know who David Goggins is?”
“Vaguely. He’s like a fitness freak, right? Runs ultramarathons or something?”
“Yeah. He had a hard childhood and he says, like, he didn’t grow up really applying himself. And then one day he turned it around and started working out and running, and now he does all these ultramarathons and stuff. I find that inspiring.”
“Sure,” I say. “That’s an insane level of discipline though.”
“He was on Joe Rogan. And there was this other guy—I forget his name—he, like, moved to the mountains and just lived off the land.”
“Right, that’s cool. I just feel like those guys are… probably a ways down the road. I mean, if you can only make it a day without a drink, I feel like trying to be David Goggins is a years-long project.”
“I guess,” he says, seeming to deflate.
“That’s not to say you can’t do it; it’s just, that’s a huge goal,” I try, seeing I’m losing him and struggling to get him back. “You get to a huge goal through a lot of small goals, and you inevitably fuck up a thousand times on the small ones before you get to the huge one. But the successes on the small ones is what keeps you motivated toward the huge one. Instead of saying, ‘Dammit, I can’t run an ultramarathon,’ you’re saying, ‘Hell yeah, I can almost run a mile’. You know what I mean? Instead of saying, ‘Dammit, I tried to quit drinking and I failed,’ you’re saying, ‘Hell yeah, I made two days again. Maybe next week I can do three.’”
“Ugh. Yeah, even two is hard.”
“Sure, but you said you can do one. So now you gotta work on two.”
I pull up outside the bar and put the car in park.
“Last chance to go home instead,” I tell him. “You can change the destination if you know it’s a better decision.”
He looks at the bar, sighs, does that fake thinking thing again. “Nah, I’m gonna have another drink.”
“Okay, but listen,” I tell him. “Tomorrow and the next day, don’t go out. Don’t worry about the day after that. Just try to do two.”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve done two.”
“Just see if you can do it. Read a book. I bet David Goggins has written a book. Go get it from Barnes & Noble tomorrow. It’ll be cheaper than a night of drinking. Next thing you know, you’re going, ‘Hey. I’m reading a book and I made it two days without a drink.’ There’s your first step.”
“Yeah…” he says, staring longingly out his window at the bar, clearly just waiting for me to let him go. “I’ll have to see.”
“All right. Get home safe.”
I would like to be the guy who gets his number. The guy who says, “I’m gonna call you tomorrow to see what you found out about that book, and the next day to see how your 48 hours is going.” I would like to be that guy, but in the moment, I’m ashamed to say it doesn’t even occur to me. And even if it did, I probably wouldn’t follow through. I would probably worry about it becoming a burden.
But I do hope some of what we’ve talked about gets through, and he at least attempts 48 hours, or goes and looks for a book. At the very least, I hope the fact that we had this conversation leads to him having a similar one again soon. If he has enough of them, maybe he’ll start to act.
And I wonder, not for the first time, if there is a danger, in the digital age, of being oversaturated with the accomplishments of superhumans. I wonder if the ultramarathon champion on our phone drowns out the glory of the guy down the street who lost 30 pounds and did his first 5k at a brisk walk. It seems to me a lot of us might be better called to action by the guy down the street. Few of us will ever be David Goggins, but any of us could be the guy down the street.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Video Game Connoisseur 25 Aug 8:00 AM (2 months ago)
He’s a very large man with a neckbeard, still young but already losing his hair. If you asked a caricature artist to draw a gamer, and that caricature artist didn’t have a high opinion of gamers, this is the guy he’d draw.
It’s three in the morning and he is getting off his shift at Jack in the Box. I ask him how his night went and he says it was long.
“I’m not even going to play video games tonight,” he says, giving ammo to my imaginary caricature artist. “I normally unwind with video games after work, but I’m so tired I’m just gonna go straight to bed.”
“I feel you,” I tell him. “This’ll be my last ride of the night and then I’m going home and going to bed. I’ll still probably play twenty or thirty minutes of video games to unwind, but not much.”
He perks up. “What are you gonna play?”
Generally, when I run into gamer guys, they like Call of Duty and Fortnite—getting online to team up with strangers and shoot each other. I like RPGs (which are “geeky”) and platformers (which are “for kids”). So typically, if a passenger—at least a male one—thinks he wants to talk video games with me, his eyes soon glaze over, he says “Oh” in a tone that’s as polite as he can muster, and that’s about the end of it.
But this guy looks like a geek gamer if ever there was one. He looks like he collects Magic: The Gathering cards, has a weekly D&D night, and uses Monster energy drinks as fuel to stay up painting his Warhammer miniatures with a magnifying visor. He has to be on my side!
“I’m playing Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth,” I tell him.
“Oh,” he says, and his eyes glaze over in that familiar way.
Huh. Maybe he’s a Call of Duty guy after all, caricatures be damned.
“What are you playing?” I ask.
“The sister series of that one.”
“What’s that, Dragon Quest?”
“Huh,” he says. “At least you’ve heard of it.”
I’m not sure why that surprises him. If Final Fantasy is the Coca-Cola of Japanese RPGs, Dragon Quest is surely the Pepsi.
“I’ve played a couple of them,” I tell him. “I was always more into Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Breath of Fire… but yeah, I like Dragon Quest.”
The light is back in his eyes. He leans forward, like he’s been challenged.
“Which ones did you play?”
“Let’s see… I’ve played VIII, I’ve played the original…”
“Have you played XI?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Okay, well you have to play XI. Otherwise, that’s like saying you don’t like Final Fantasy when you haven’t played VII.”
I’m pretty sure I specifically said I did like Dragon Quest, but fair enough.
“It’s like modern and classic at the same time,” he explains, “with up-to-date graphics, but turn-based combat.”
“That’s cool,” I say. “You don’t see turn-based combat much anymore.”
Again, he acts like I’m challenging him. “Yes you do. Persona. That whole series.”
By now I’m starting to notice that the “Oh” and the glazed over look that I took to mean he looked down on RPG fans, was actually the look of a self-ordained RPG sommelier who sees Final Fantasy players as basic bitches.
He tells me about how Persona blends RPG mechanics with Jungian philosophy, how the .Hack series is another turn-based one I should look into, how there’s an animated series to learn all the backstory and I can watch all 12 episodes on CrunchyRoll or whatever obscure fucking streaming service I’d subscribe to if I was a real RPG lover.
Even when I get him to his apartment, he doesn’t get out of the car. He sits there another few minutes, telling me all the RPG series with turn-based combat he can’t believe I’m not privy to.
When he finally gets out and waddles to his front door, I find myself thinking, goddamn, that imaginary caricature artist was on point.
I go home and play my basic bitch RPG.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Not Jim Gaffigan 18 Aug 8:00 AM (2 months ago)
He looks like Jim Gaffigan. A lot like Jim Gaffigan. Actually, he looks so much like Jim Gaffigan, that for a second, as I am pulling over to pick him up, I am trying to remember whether Jim Gaffigan is doing a show here anytime soon.
He is heading to a tire shop to pick up a vehicle. He says that he is having the tires changed on all four of his family’s vehicles, and he has had to take all of them into the shop himself. “You’d think, in a family full of drivers, some of them would be able to take their own cars in,” he says, “but no, they’ve gotta Dad do everything for them.”
That settles it. He’s not Gaffigan. If Gaffigan told me that story, it would be hilarious. This guy just sounds tired.
When somebody looks this much like somebody else, you always want to tell them. I’m not sure why we have that impulse exactly, but we do. It’s not enough to just recognize a similarity in two faces, we have to verbalize it, and maybe ask if other people verbalize it on a regular basis. If they say they get it all the time, we feel validated. If they say they’ve never heard that before, we want to get out our phones and prove it to them.
The problem is, a lot of Gaffigan’s act is self-deprecating jokes about his own appearance. When one of my passengers yelled to a guy in the car next to us that he looked like Mark Zuckerberg, I told her that nobody wants to look like Mark Zuckerberg. I’d be a hypocrite if I told this guy he looked like Jim Gaffigan. But it’s so hard not to tell him.
He asks if I’m working much longer and I tell him I’m clocking out soon to do a standup show. He finds that interesting and starts asking me about places in town to see standup.
“I haven’t been to a standup show in a long time,” he says. “I wanted to see Seinfeld when he was here, but the timing didn’t work out. Oh, I know the last one I saw. That guy… um… what’s his name? The heavyset guy. Real pasty. He has a lot of jokes about how he looks.”
I can’t believe we’ve gotten onto this subject.
“Jim Gaffigan?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’s the guy! I saw him when he was here three or four years ago.”
“I bet that was fun,” I say, biting my tongue so hard it’s bleeding. “He’s a funny guy.”
“It was a good show,” he says. “The only thing that sucked was, when I went into the lobby, a bunch of people started coming up to me going, ‘Mr. Gaffigan! I’m such a huge fan! Can I get a selfie with you?’”
Somewhere inside me, there’s a spirit jumping for excitement, wanting to brag that I recognized the similarity from 150 feet away, when I was driving up. But he doesn’t sound thrilled about it, so I suppress the urge.
“Ehh,” I say. “I guess I can kinda see it. If I squint.”
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Octopus Fan 11 Aug 8:01 AM (2 months ago)
I start the conversation in the same lazy way that I do with all my passengers, by asking, “How’s your day going?”
He replies with an answer I’ve never heard before. “Not bad. I learned some crazy shit about octopuses.”
These people walk among us—the ones with no use for social scripts. They are out maximizing the potential of every interaction, as the rest of us pathetic organisms sleepwalk through our chances to meet each other, talking without conscious thought and saying nothing. “Hello.” “Hi.” “How are you?” “Fine. You?” “Pretty good.” “That’s good.” “How’s work?” “It’s fine.” “Love your shirt.” “Thanks.” “Your welcome.” “Have a nice day.” “You too.” What the fuck are we doing? Why are we boring ourselves and each other when it would take so little effort to say, “I learned some crazy shit about octopuses” and let the chips fall where they may? Why can so few of us present ourselves to strangers with that kind of reckless abandon?
“What did you learn about octopuses?” I ask, and if there is a human being alive who would not ask that question in that moment, I don’t want to meet that boring motherfucker, or fatherfucker, or, most likely, nonfucker.
“Well,” he says, “I watched this video called ‘Octopuses are making fish armies’. Apparently when octopuses hunt, sometimes they team up with a group of fish, and all the fish start looking at rocks to find one with mollusks under it, and when one of them finds one, they tell the octopus, and the octopus surrounds the rock so the mollusks try to escape, and it eats a bunch of the mollusks, and the fish eat the ones that escape. Plus, if the fish aren’t focusing, the octopus punches them. They showed a video of an octopus just hauling off and decking this fish in the fucking head.”
I drop him off shortly after that, but he sends me the video so I can check it out between rides, and it does indeed include an octopus decking a fish. It’s amusing, and a somewhat interesting wildlife video, but more than anything, I come away thinking, ‘I wish more of us wore our enthusiasm on our sleeves like that guy.’
“How’s your day going?” I ask my next passenger, a few minutes later.
“Good. Yours?”
I take a breath. “Not bad. I learned some crazy shit about octopuses.”
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Zark Muckleberg 4 Aug 8:01 AM (2 months ago)
“Look! That guy looks like Mark Zuckerberg!” she screams, pointing to the car next to us.
“Yeah, kinda,” mumbles her boyfriend.
I can’t see the guy next to us, so I don’t know. What I do know is this woman is so drunk it’s impressive she can even see the car next to us, much less the person driving it. She’s one of those excitable drunks, bouncing off the walls and getting distracted every three seconds like a dog with the zoomies. Her boyfriend is less drunk, lower energy, and has the air of a dad who is retracing the mistakes of his entire life after letting a toddler have too much sugar.
The woman rolls down the window. “Hey! You look like Mark Zuckerberg!”
“Don’t do that!” the boyfriend scolds, leaning over her to roll the window up.
“Why?” she asks.
“Nobody wants to look like Mark Zuckerberg,” I tell her. “Not even Mark Zuckerberg.”
“Now I feel bad,” she says. “But he did look like Zark Muckleberg.” She bursts out laughing at her own drunken slur. “Zark Muckleberg!”
The boyfriend and I both chuckle at that one. It is a little funny. But it’s clearly a lot funnier to her than it is to either of us. She begins laughing so hard she’s crying. It doesn’t help that she’s one of those people who snorts when she laughs, so we end up with a solid three minutes of hysterical laughter, punctuated by snorts every few seconds, and on the rare occasion that she can get enough air into her lungs to speak, she gives a high pitched, “Zark Muckleberg!”
The poor guy who’s with her keeps trying to change the subject, asking if she’s hungry, if she remembers where her car is parked, whether she wants to watch a movie when they get home. None of it gets through to her. She’s stuck in a laughter death-roll. She’d be on the floor if the seatbelt weren’t holding her in place.
The boyfriend gives up and turns to me. “How’s your day going, dude? What was your name again?”
My comedian brain kicks into gear and I can’t resist. “Well, now I feel self-conscious, but it’s actually Zark.”
She shrieks even harder with laughter. He sighs heavily and gives me a look that says, ‘Really, dude? You had to do that?’
She alternates between four actions in a randomized loop—laughing, snorting, apologizing, and calling me Zark—like a Bop-It device with only four buttons.
Haha, Zark, haha, snort, sorry, haha, Zark, snort…
“My friends call me Muckle,” I tell her.
Muckle, haha, sorry, snort, Zark, haha, snort, sorry…
In standup, you often have to work hard at a joke. Sometimes no amount of polish ever gets it working at the level you think it deserves. This is the opposite. This is so easy I feel guilty—low-hanging fruit that would get little-to-no reaction from a sober person, but instead, she can’t breathe. Why does no one ever laugh this hard at my good shit?
“Or Zarky, you know,” I tell her. “Zark the Muck, that’s an oldie-but-goodie.”
Zarky, haha, snort, sorry...
I pull up to their house and her boyfriend has to help her out of the car and support her—pretty much carry her—as they go up the driveway. She is perpetually on the verge of collapse.
“His friends call him Muckle!” I hear her whimper through tears of laughter as he pretty much pushes her through the front door.
Alone on the porch, he shakes his head, takes a deep breath, then follows her in.
I think he forgets to tip me.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Tour Bus Driver 28 Jul 8:00 AM (3 months ago)
He gets in confused about which hotel he’s supposed to be going to and I help him sort it out and get on the way. He says hotel chains with multiple locations make it confusing in some cities, even for someone like him who travels for living.
“What do you do for work?” I ask him.
“I’m an entertainment driver,” he says, with a thick southern accent. “Driving the tour bus for Guns ’n’ Roses at the moment.”
“That’s cool. How long have you been doing that?”
“Well, I’ve been driving bands pretty much my whole life, but I’m not a regular for these guys. I’ve just done a couple of trips for them recently. They wanted me to do last weekend too, but I said, ‘No can do. It’s my 50-year high school reunion and I wouldn’t miss that for the world.’”
“How was that?”
“It was the best. I saw folks I hadn’t seen in 50 years. I’m 68, but hanging out with all those old friends… I felt 58 again, if not younger.”
That makes me laugh. I fully expected him to say he felt 18 again, but nah, he’s not going crazy.
“Ran into a couple gals I fooled around with back when we were in school. The best-lookin’ one, I gave her my phone and said, ‘Put your number in. We gotta reconnect.’”
“Did she give you her number?”
“Oh yeah. She’s divorced now, so hopefully we’ll get to hang out again next time I’m back in town. And another gal, she grabbed me from behind when I was talking to some people and dragged me away. I said, ‘What are we doing?’ She said, ‘We’re gonna dance!’ I half-thought she was gonna rape me the way she grabbed me. Not that I’d have complained.”
I laugh. He may have felt 58, but he sounds 18. That rock and roll lifestyle, man.
“Did you get her number, too?”
“Yeah, but she lives up north, taking care of her mom. I said, ‘Sweetheart, you gotta get back down to Mississippi.’”
“That’s where you’re from? Mississippi?”
“That’s right. Tupelo, Mississippi. Birthplace of Elvis Presley.”
“Oh, that’s cool. Did he keep roots there at all, or just took off and never looked back?”
“Well, at one point they were gonna build a resort there in his honor, but what happened was Elvis said he wanted the pool to be shaped like a guitar, and they didn’t do it. They just put it in a regular square pool, and Elvis said, ‘Well, hell with all of you. I’ll never come back to Tupelo again.’”
“That’s a shame.”
“It’s a damn shame. Elvis could’ve done a lot for Tupelo. All they had to do was treat him right. But that mayor was a crooked son of a bitch. Probably just pocketed the extra money.”
“Did you ever see Elvis play?”
“I never did. My dad was born the same year as him though, and they went to the same school.”
“That’s cool. Did they know each other?”
“Yeah, they were friendly. Not enough to keep in touch, but they liked each other.”
“That’s fun. Too bad they didn’t keep in touch. He would’ve been quite a guy to know.”
“Funny enough, when he was first blowing up, he came through town at one point. My dad and my grandma were out on the street and he drove by in his convertible. So they both threw their arms up and waved. That’s how it was back then, everybody waved to everybody whether they knew each other or not. But Elvis didn’t wave back. My grandma turned to my dad and said, ‘That’s how people are when they become uppity.’ That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore. Uppity. But he told me that story and then another time she told me the same story unprompted, and neither of ‘em could lie for shit, so I think it must’ve happened.”
He tells me a little more about Elvis and Tupelo, but pretty soon we arrive at his hotel and he thanks me for the ride and heads in. Normally, when a ride ends, I’m glad to close it out and keep making money. But with him, as I drive off, I think I should’ve offered to buy him a drink at the hotel bar and keep chatting. I would’ve liked to ask him what other bands he’s driven, what other stories he’s got. I’m not even that much of a music guy, but I could listen to him tell stories in that baritone drawl for another hour easy. Alas, ten minutes is all I get.
If he ever writes Memoirs of a Tour Bus Driver, I’ll be sure to pick up a copy, but for now, I’m glad we got a crossover episode.
Next time he’s in Mississippi, I hope that lady-friend of his picks up the phone.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Curb Your Enthushiashm 21 Jul 8:00 AM (3 months ago)
"Edge of Seventeen" by Stevie Nicks is on the radio when he gets in, and he tells me it's funny if you sing it in a Sean Connery impression. When the chorus arrives, he demonstrates: "Jusht like the one-winged dove shingsh a shong, shoundsh like she'sh shinging."
I laugh, which turns out to be a mistake.
He proceeds to ask me if I know Sean Connery's favorite US state and then informs me it's Mishishippi. I tell him I've heard when Connery went to Canada, he was fond of Shashkatchewan.
Reasonably, that would be the end of the Connery jokes and we would talk about something else. Instead, he keeps going. Connery's favorite tongue twister is "She shellsh shea shellsh by the shea shore." His favorite Elvis song is “Shushpicioush Mindsh”. What if he sang this song, or that song? Half of them aren't even clever. It's stuff like "Danny Boy" that doesn't even have an abnormal number of s's in it.
I keep trying to ask this guy what he does for living, or where he's from, or what his hobbies are, or any ice breaker to get us past the Connery jokes, but no matter what I ask, he offers a one-sentence reply and goesh right back to hish Connery jokesh.
When you tell a joke to a four-year-old and he loves it, he often wants to hear it a hundred times, and it can be endearing, for a while, but even with a four-year-old, after a few minutes it gets tedious and you start going, "Okay, bud. Time to move on."
It'sh not endearing in the leasht when it'sh a guy in hish fortiesh, and you're shtuck in a car with him for twenty minutesh while he keepsh making the shame joke over and over, and wantsh you to keep thinking up new versionsh of the joke ash well. Twenty minutesh! Twenty minutesh of jokesh about a shpeshific shpeech impediment. It'sh exshaushting.
I finally drop him off, thanking God I'm finally away from this man and his one joke. Then, in a bizarre coincidence you’d be forgiven for not even believing, my next passenger has the same speech impediment as Sean Connery, pronouncing his s's as sh's. The unlikelihood of this makes it instantly hilarious to me and I struggle not to burst out laughing every time he talks. He probably thinksh I'm an ash-hole, and I don't neshesharily dishagree.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Mansion on a Hill 14 Jul 8:00 AM (3 months ago)
As I pull up the long driveway at 2:00 AM, I have the thought that it's a house where the bad guy would live in a Keanu Reeves movie, sitting on a hillside with white columns and giant double doors. I put the car in park and wait for the passenger.
It's a tall man, toned and well dressed, who comes out of the house. He has an icy expression on his face as he knocks on my window rather than open the door to get in. I roll it down.
"Are you the rideshare driver?" he asks.
I nod.
"I need you to leave."
I'm a little taken aback by both his tone and his word choice, a little more stern, more forceful than seem needed. I would think nothing of “I need to cancel” or “We had a change of plans” but there is something vaguely sinister about “I need you to leave.” Especially after what happens next.
“Here,” he says, and he passes a crisp hundred-dollar bill through the open window before waving me away and going back inside.
I drive on, forever to wonder what evil lurks behind those double doors, and whether Keanu Reeves is on his way to help.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Still Crazy After All These Years 7 Jul 8:00 AM (3 months ago)
She comes out of her apartment with a backpack, a suitcase, and bags over each shoulder. She’s around 70 years old. It’s 100 degrees outside, but she is wearing a sweatsuit and carrying a jacket over one of her arms. She starts loading her things into the backseat, seeming worn out, and I feel like I should offer to help, but I wouldn’t be of much use since almost all of it is attached to her.
“How’s your day going?” I ask, when she finally gets in.
“To the airport,” she says.
I pause, not sure whether she misheard me or whether she’s telling me to shut up and drive.
“Uh… Sure thing. You having a good day?” I try again.
“Ugh, I don’t even know anymore.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
“I’m flying to San Francisco where my son lives, and he’s meeting me there, then we’re flying to New Zealand.”
I nod. That sounds exciting to me. I’m not sure where ‘I don’t even know anymore’ comes into the equation.
“Yeah, that’s a long day of travel,” I offer.
“It’s cold there. Our summer is starting, so that means their winter is starting. That’s why I’m dressed like this. I look a little ridiculous, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
I ask if she goes to New Zealand often and she says it’s her first time. I tell her I’ve been to four continents now, but Oceania is still on my list. I mention I lived in China for a couple years in my mid-twenties.
“For me it was Switzerland,” she says. “But I was a nanny. I didn’t get out that much.”
I tell her that still sounds like a cool experience.
“I couldn’t speak the language very well. I eventually learned enough German to go out and wait tables, but it was tough.”
I can’t imagine. When I was in China I taught English to people who already knew English. I struggled to order a glass of ice water in Mandarin, never mind waiting tables.
“The crazy things we do when we’re young,” she muses.
She says her son’s girlfriend is Chinese American and her son regularly travels with her to China and all over the world. He tells her stories of scuba diving in Singapore or hiking in Australia and all sorts of adventures they go on together.
“I finally got tired of living vicariously through him,” she says, “so I made a plan for New Zealand. We’re going to see the village from The Lord of the Rings, some beaches, some of the sights. His attitude is, he’s up for anything if Mom is paying.”
“Wow, that sounds like it should be an amazing trip.”
The more I talk to her, the more I’m confused about the ‘I don’t even know anymore’ comment when I asked her how her day was going. Maybe she just meant that travel days themselves are stressful, which is certainly true, but this sounds like a day she should be excited about. Especially when she eventually says…
“The political climate here is getting to be something that I just don’t want to be a part of, so I started doing some research and New Zealand sounded like a place I might want to be.”
“Wait, you’re moving to New Zealand?”
“Well, right now I’m just going to check it out, but yeah, if I like it, that’s the plan.”
I drop her off and wish her safe travels. And while I’m not sure she has the right attitude about it all, it sure seems like she’s on a good path. Funny that a woman who waxes nostalgic about “The crazy things we do when we’re young” seems totally oblivious to the fact that she is no longer young, and that she’s still doing it anyway.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Best Voicemail Ever 30 Jun 8:00 AM (4 months ago)
It’s a quiet ride from a restaurant downtown to a house in the suburbs. She’s about my age, and we chitchat about the weather and the growth of the city. Potato chip conversations, you might call them—empty calories of human interaction that fill you up but don’t offer any lasting nutrition.
“Do you want to hear the best voicemail ever?” she asks suddenly.
“Sure,” I tell her, turning off the radio.
“It’s from my mom,” she says. “This was a few months after my dad died, and some of her work friends took her to Vegas.”
She gets out her phone, puts it on speaker, and the voice of an older woman babbles excitedly through a fog of inebriation.
“Madison! I’m at Caesars and it’s… there’s… I know it’s like… it’s late there, because it’s almost two here, so it’s… I don’t know… You’re probably asleep, I guess. We had a bunch of… Well… We went to Cirque du Soleil, but then we decided to have some drinks after, and everybody went to bed, but… Well… I guess you’re asleep. But call me when you get this...”
She rambles a little longer and I’m chuckling along with it, thinking it’s amusing to hear a woman calling her daughter and sounding like a college student who just discovered margaritas and doesn’t realize she’s barely coherent. It’s not the “best voicemail ever”, but it’s a little funny. I make eye contact with Madison through the rearview mirror and she is looking at me with that familiar expression that says, wait, it gets better.
And it does.
“Oh, whatever, I’ll just tell you over voicemail,” says the older woman’s voice. “They went to bed and I went into the casino and played some slots, and… Madison… I won! I hit the… I won two million dollars!”
Madison laughs behind me in the car, like she has listened to this a hundred times and she never gets tired of it. Which is probably exactly the case.
“Wait, what?!” I say.
“Right?”
“Is that real?”
“Yeah!”
“Your mom won two million dollars in Vegas?”
“After the taxes and stuff it was closer to one, but she paid off her house and retired a couple years early. She’s kinda set.””
Long after I’ve dropped off Madison, the voicemail continues to bounce around my head.
Every movie set in Vegas has a scene where an extra is winning big, and I’m sure I’ve seen videos of it happening for real. I’ve been to Vegas a lot of times, and I’ve probably even been in line for a buffet while somebody’s life changed a couple hundred feet from me, though if I have seen it happen, I don’t really recall it. It’s funny how even the smallest brush with the actual human being, a few minutes of conversation with her daughter and the sound of excitement in her recorded voice, makes it real in a way that it otherwise isn’t. You might smile when you see that person leap up in the casino and start weeping with joy, but much like in a Vegas movie, that person is usually just an extra. A few minutes speaking to someone whose life was touched by the experience, even indirectly, makes it hit a little deeper.
I keep imagining this woman telling her coworkers the next morning at breakfast. Did she invite them to play the slots with her and they declined? Did they warn her that nobody ever wins, and she went anyway? I make up stories in my head, about her flying the whole group to Vegas the next year, making a tradition out of watching Cirque du Soleil and then hitting the slots. The joy is contagious.
Madison called it “the best voicemail ever.” It’s certainly among the best I’ve ever heard, and I don’t even have a personal connection to it. For her, waking up to that voicemail from Mom, it’s hard to even imagine.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Soap Is a Scam 23 Jun 8:00 AM (4 months ago)
He gets in the back and settles into his seat without much more than a casual greeting. He looks at his phone as I drive, and for the first ten minutes of the twenty-minute trip, there is silence of the kind that makes one forget there is another person in the car.
Seemingly unprompted, he breaks the silence.
“Something interesting happened to me today.”
“Oh yeah? What was that?”
“So… I haven’t used soap or shampoo in a year, and I don’t wear deodorant either. But today at work, this girl came over and stood by me, and she was like, ‘You smell nice.’”
That seems to be the end of his story and there is a long silence because I can’t think of a reply.
“You ever hear of anything like that?” he asks.
“No,” I tell him. “I can’t say I have.”
He goes back to his phone. We return to silence for the rest of the drive.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.