49. Norwegian Wood

I picked up a man today with a large solid case. I asked if he was a photographer as I thought the case was carrying camera equipment and he said, in a thick Tennessee drawl, that he was a security consultant. And he was on his way to a client. And this was his gear.

As if to explain the accent, he told me he had only lived here for six months and was originally from Nashville. But the company he worked for transferred him to be head of their west coast operations and so here he was. They gave him a house (a really nice one!), a vehicle (gas included), and an expense account. I was truly impressed. He was in his 30’s and did not have a tone of braggadocio but spoke with full sincerity. 

He moved out here with his Norwegian wife who he had met in a Nashville bar six years ago. They were both divorced and hit it off. She was from a rich Norwegian family and he was just a southern boy. He couldn’t believe his luck. He said her first car was a Maserati and he told her he probably couldn’t match that and she was ok with that.

He really liked living here but had noted that the homeless were kind of an issue. Maybe that was because the population wasn’t that large to begin with and so they stuck out. His mom had been a drug addict and so he understood the plight of many of them. His new job had him visiting cities all across the west and he had enjoyed them all. I told them I had lived in the Bay Area and heard the homeless problem had gotten pretty tragic out there.  He said he definitely felt the presence but no worse than other cities he had been to. He felt that maybe it had been exaggerated. You could turn the wrong way down a street in any city and find yourself neck deep in transients. 

This brought him back to his mom. He said he didn’t have a great family life. He now had four kids and a wife who was a step away from Norwegian royalty but he grew up in a very troubled home. His wife was very family oriented and had talked about wanting to go back home to be closer to family. And he was ok with that. He had visited Norway on a number of occasions and loved her family and would go with her, no problem. 

But, in the meantime, his job was security. He said he used to make bombs but his conscience got the best of him and he had issue making weapons of destruction. And this took him to the current crisis in the Middle East. And I was definitely interested in hearing his thoughts. 

He was against the killing of innocents. On any side. He felt it was the leaders that put all the innocents in the crosshairs. And they should be the ones who have to shoot it out face to face and not make the women and children serve as human targets. Hamas’ actions were unforgivable and they should pay. Doesn’t mean that a whole city should be razed to the ground. The Israeli government knew that they were putting their citizens in danger and pulled back defenses to leave them even more vulnerable. 

He was very passionate about this. Too many victims as the scapegoats for leaders. It’s why he quit his previous lucrative job of bomb making. He felt he was making weapons for the leaders and there were too many innocents who were caught in their blasts. 

He talked about how each major news agency paints their side with no room for grey. Fox News fully supports the Israeli side and their “all Muslims are terrorists” rhetoric while CNN just shows the Palestinian victims with no talk of the Hamas criminals who kidnapped, raped, and beheaded Jews. 

His wife was a counselor and felt a lot for people and he hated that she was always watching the news, flipping back and forth between channels, being affected with what she was seeing. They tried to watch more neutral news such as BBC and they got a feed from Norway, but the Norwegian news was much more graphic in their coverage than anything in the US, and which was always censored to some point. 

He was quiet for a moment and then went on to say his next assignment was going to be in Reno. He had never been and so he was excited and he was going solo. Most of his travels he had gone with family including San Francisco and Las Vegas. He was looking forward to checking out Lake Tahoe. The one thing he missed from Tennessee was nature’s green. It always made him feel at peace. When he was in the Bay Area, they drove down to look at the Redwoods and he was in awe of the big trees. He said that Norway had a lot of unspoiled natural beauty even for the half the year it was freezing.

Yeah, he told me, if the wife wanted to move back to be closer to her loving family, he would have no problem with that. Being with a loving family in a natural wonderland away from tragedy and dying innocents… he would have no problem with that. 

48. I Hate Driving to the Airport

I’ve been doing the rideshare thing for a few months now as my major source of income. I’m figuring out the best times to drive, the best parts of town, and how to make the most of it. I’ve been working on making sure I can pay for the gas to keep me going as well as upkeep on the car and paying my bills with what I earn. I have also been working on putting some aside for other causes. 

Some days are better than others and while I am figuring it out, there are always factors that can turn what would normally have been a productive day into driving around aimlessly. 

You can reserve rides on the app, and people often do. If those people are going from somewhere in your vicinity (and it seems the algorithm based that on where you told them you lived), you will get a request for it. It goes out to everyone in the area, so it’s on a first come, first serve basis. 

While some of these may be people making sure they have a ride to work, most of these reservations are for people going to the airport.

I hate driving to the airport. 

While driving people to the airport may provide good fares, it can be a long ride back clocking up mileage (which really loses the point of earning the higher fare). Or it can be a long wait in the rideshare parking lot at the airport, hoping to take a passenger back to the city, which doesn’t pay as well as taking someone to the airport. 

Also, most of the passengers I’ve taken to the airport are not of the best disposition. They might have had some issue with their flight, or some issue at home they didn’t get to resolve before they left, or just have travel anxiety. Sometimes I get a family of four who wants to jam into my car but were too cheap to pay for the bigger vehicle and are insistent they can fit everything and it’s a crowded trip full of cranky people. So, they end up venting it out on the driver of the rideshare, because it’s that person’s fault for taking them to the dreaded airport.

If I’m lucky enough, I might not have to wait an hour for the next flight to come in with people who need a rideshare. Then I don’t have to sit to in the rideshare parking lot with my car running the AC, watching all the taxi drivers smoking and playing cards. And so, if I do get somebody going back to the city, normally, those folks aren’t exactly the happiest either. They might have had a long flight, are only using rideshare because something happened to their rental car, or they have four people plus luggage, and have to jam it all into my car because they didn’t want to pay for the bigger car or wait for one. Or  I might get someone like the gentleman I had earlier this week who asked me all about strip clubs. That’s always a long, fun rideZ

The reason I bring up my displeasure with going to the airport is because tonight I accepted five reservations for people wanting to go to the airport. Starting at 2:15a and going through to 11a. Which means I drive to the airport, then back to the city to they the next passenger and then back again… 

I normally ignore these requests because they either take place during hours that  I am normally asleep or for the reasons I stated above. I also do not enjoy taking reservations, because many are prone to cancel at the last second, after I have already scheduled time to pick them up and pounded some energy drink to keep me alert.

But as the year winds down, I am trying to earn extra money. Like Springsteen sang, “…but I got the kind of debts no honest man can pay…” But I want to pay them honestly. So, I am doing things like finding when the frats are having their parties, what are the big nights for the bars, and taking airport reservations. 

I have been trying to put money aside to to pay back people who have helped me get through the last two years, which were extremely rough for me. They helped me get through a number of expenses, including medical bills, rent, and basic survival. I hate being in debt to people who were good enough to help me. I am getting close to making the numbers I need to pay back the people who got me through.  I want to get that done before the holidays.

And speaking of the holidays, I know this year will be a lean one, but I do have some people I would like to get something special for, people very important to me who I doubt I could’ve gotten through the last year without. After I pay off my initial debts, I can put money towards that goal.

Then I can start putting away money for my new play which I am wanting to stage in LA. That looks to be a doozy of a deal, and it is my major project for 2024. I want to do this play right. I want everybody to get paid, I want to stage it in a good space, and I want it to be seen. It’s a project I’m dedicating to a lost friend and so I want to do it justice.

So, for now, I will take all the rides I can to the airport. I will hope that the people I pick up are looking forward to their travels. I am hoping they travel lightly. I am hoping they do not cancel at the last second. And most of all, I am hoping they tip well.

And I’m guessing they will provide more interesting rides to share. 

47. Positivity

Today, I will share the ride I had with a man I picked up from a dialysis clinic. He had just finished one of his three times a week treatments, which he told me took him from 7 AM to 2 PM each time.

As I pulled up, I noticed he had a wheelchair. My trunk cannot fit a wheelchair, but I thought I would see what we could do. I got out of the car and told him I could fit the wheelchair in the backseat, if he was OK sitting in the front seat. As he had already been waiting for a ride, and the previous two cars could also not fit his wheelchair, he said he was OK with that. 

That’s when I noticed that he only had one leg. He got into the front seat with no issue, and I folded up his wheelchair and put it in the backseat. We were then on our way, which just happened to be on the other side of town. As we started, he told me about his dialysis. 

He had told me he had been there since this morning, and that he always had to get these rides across town. They were training him at the clinic, though, how he could do ithe treatments himself so he could start  doing them at home and no matter re driving back and forth. This was going to take about a month.

As we drove on, he complimented the music. I was playing my easy listening mix, which is mostly easy songs from the 80s and 90s (think everything from Styx and Journey to Soul Asylum and Goo Goo Dolls). He said he was a big fan of 90s music (I’m guessing from looking at him he was ten years younger than me, so that sounded right). 

He asked if it would be OK if he took a nap and I said sure it’s a 30 minute ride. He said that a nice cool car, a comfortable seat, and great tunes were conducive to him falling asleep. After a full day of being attached to a dialysis machine, I had no doubt. 

But then, the next thing I know, he’s decided to ask me some questions. The first being, and kind of coming out of nowhere, is if I could live anywhere in the world, where would I live? I told him Bali. He was kind of shocked by that. He was not a world traveler, so he didn’t know anything about Bali, but he had travelled all across the United States. 

I asked him where he would like to end up, and he said “Montana.” He loved the mountains and the wide open space. Big country. He had gone hunting there years ago and fell in love with the place. That was where he wanted to end up.

I told him I liked the mountains as well, but was a little more partial to beaches as long as the water was warm, which it definitely was in Bali. I said if I had to pick somewhere in the US, it would be the Big Island of Hawaii because it combined mountains and beaches. He had been to Hawaii and said that was a good choice.

He asked me questions about Bali. What did I like about it? What was the food like? What were the people like? I told him I liked it because I felt it was a very relaxed atmosphere. The food was fantastic.  And the people were very friendly. He said that it sounded great. 

The next song that came up was the Sarah McLachlan song, “Possession.” He talked about how he loved her music and how it have gotten him through some bad times in the 90s. He stopped talking and listened to the song. 

Anytime a song came up he knew and liked he would punch me in the arm and laugh saying “Oh my God you have great taste in music!” He seemed really happy along the ride. He definitely radiated positivity and it was infecting me.

He asked me what my favorite three foods were. I told him that was a hard one, because I like a variety of foods, but I was a meat and potatoes guy first and foremost. He hit me on the arm again, and laughed, saying that a t-bone steak with a baked potato was on top of his list. I said almost any steak will do it for me, medium rare, and a loaded baked potato. His second favorite was barbecue, but it had to be Texas barbecue, as he was from Lubbock. I told him mine was Indonesian fried rice. It was different than most generic fried rices and I was always sentimental for it. My mom always made the best. For his third choice, he told me it was probably a salad, but that was only because he thought he should have vegetables in there somewhere. I laughed an I told him vegetables aren’t always necessary, but I could eat a salad… Maybe a steak salad! He laughed.

He then asked me if I had played football in high school. I replied that I had, but I wasn’t really any good. I asked him if he had played and what position. He was a lineman who played Ironman football, playing both offense and defense. He said he had about 150 pounds more than on him than he had now. He seemed to drift away as he thought about those days. 

He was wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey and pointed it out to me, saying how much he loved football and wished he could still play even on a touch football level. And he was a Cowboys fan through and through. I told him I was really sorry, as I was born outside of Philadelphia and that made me an Eagles fan. He laughed and said “Oh, that would make us enemies!” I told him that was too bad because I really liked him. He laughed back and hit me in the area and said “Yeah, maybe we can just have a friendly rivalry.”

As we approached his apartment complex, he told me I was the best Uber driver he had had in five years, and if I wanted to ever hang out, he would love that. He gave me his number. I told him that would be great and if he ever needed a ride to see if the drive share would allow him to select a driver, to have them contact me. He told me he got his rides through a health service agency, and so I told him to let them know.

We pulled in, and I took his wheelchair out of the back seat.  He jumped into it, and then extended  his hand. I took it as shook hands, and he  said, “Thank you very much. That ride was the highlight of my week.” We then did a fist bump and then he was on his way.

Considering all the hardships he was going through at the time, with the dialysis treatment and his leg,  it was really nice to see that he was in good spirits about life. It made me think about my own life, and think that I should be more positive. He was very inspirational indeed.

46. Cuban Sandwich

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45. A Not So Happy Indigenous People’s Day For This Passenger

Got a call to pick up a man from a medical facility and it was noted that he was with a service animal. I picked him up and he laid a bunch of napkins on my seat upon when she placed the small service dog. He sat down, breathed out and said, “I appreciate that your car is nice and cool!”

I like my car to be nice and cool, so I keep the AC at a low temperature. If someone is too cold, and they request me to turn it off, I will happily accommodate. But he seemed to like it’s cold, and that was fine by me.

He then went on to tell me that his last rideshare driver turned the AC off, and it seemed like the driver turned it off the minute the passenger got into the car. He figured the driver was a racist and didn’t like the passenger because he was Native American. I told him I was sorry that happened. 

He went on to elaborate further about the driver being racist. He told me that he gets a lot of ride share drivers who seem to be racist against his people. I smiled awkwardly and said nothing, hoping that I would not fall into this category by saying something stupid.

He complained that the car ride to the clinic had been so hot, but the driver would not turn on the AC because he told him that he was saving on gas. This infuriated him further because it shouldn’t have been about saving gas but it should be about the comfort of the customer and if he couldn’t afford the gas, he shouldn’t be driving. It was racism, simple as that. 

And to top it off, the man was sure that after he got out of the car, the driver did indeed turn on the AC… because he was racist.

After this comment, he went on to say that all Africans seem to be racist. I cocked an eyebrow. African? This was the first he mentioned that the driver was of African descent. He went on further about all the African drivers he has had. That they all tend to stink. That they probably don’t care about the AC being off because they are used to that heat in Africa. That the heat here was different than that in the jungle. And that they come here to his country and treat the Native Americans like they are the outsiders.

I wasn’t sure if he meant direct immigrants from Africa or African Americans, but at the end of the day, that didn’t seem to matter . He seemed to have animosity towards anyone who might look like they were, in his mind, from Africa.

It was odd to me, his anger towards Africans. In my brain, I thought, both African-Americans, and Native Americans have both been the subject of severe persecution in the history of this country. By the Caucasian-Americans. If anything, I would think they would see common ground. I did not say any of this out loud, because I had no answers (and I was one of those Caucasian-Americans), and didn’t want to judge the racial biases of others. 

As we drove on and got closer to his destination, the man said he was going to his reservation. As we pulled down the road the GPS was directing me towards, it was in an area behind one of the state’s largest casinos. I drove into the area, which was all made up of very nice houses. It was clean with paved roads better than most that I have driven over in the city.

It reminded me of the suburban community I lived in on the East Coast when I was a child. In Delaware, I lived in a place called Four Seasons, which was a little suburb of Wilmington. It was like Hill Valley in “Back to the Future”. Note: it should not be confused with the Four Seasons landscaping company that Rudy Giuliani gave a speech outside of thinking, it was a Four Seasons hotel.

I had been to a few reservations in the area and this was the nicest one I had experience. I wondered if it was because of the casino. I’m guessing so, that’s without direct knowledge. I just know that a lot of the other reservations were not as nice or as safe looking. 

I dropped the man off at his house, driving past kids playing in the street. He picked up his dog and the paper towels and got out and thanked me for the ride and for having the AC on.

I was going to wish him a “Happy Indigenous Peoples Day”, but I wasn’t sure how that would come across. Would he prefer to be called Native American or was Indigenous ok? In the end, I thought it would be safest to wish him a good day, and hope that in the future he gets drivers that will run the AC…

44. The 40 Year Old Vermin

Today I picked up two 40 year old men from a downtown hotel. How do I know they were 40 years old? At some point during the ride, one of them said, “Wow, we were 16 when we were talking about that and 24 years later we are still talking about it!” What were they talking about? I’ll get to that later.

The first thing that they talked about when they got in the car (without so much as an acknowledgment of me) was a girl that one of them knew and the other had met the night before. 

Apparently, this woman had 15 pound breasts. How did he know they were 15 pounds? She had told me and then let him lift them and said that they felt like 15 pounds worth of boobs. The other guy was astounded that she let him lift them. Then he commented that she must have huge areolae with tits that big. “They must be like saucers!”

His friend confirmed that they were big and said she had told him that she was looking to get breast reduction surgery. The areola critic then commented that would be odd to have small tits with saucer sized areolae. His friend told him that she told him that the surgery would also fix that to make them proportional. The critic said he liked small nipples and was sure the other girl he met the previous night had nice small nipples. 

Before they could change the subject to the other woman, the weight lifter noted that while the woman had 15 pound breasts, she had a big head and her face wasn’t that great. Mr. Areola said he was ok with a substandard face as long as she had great tits. So, gracious of him. 

Which brought him to the second woman with the perceived good nipples. She had good sized “mambos” and her nipples were always hard. He had tried to make a move on her using the line “I have a hotel room downtown…” but it didn’t work.

The weight lifter told him that he was sure that line would work. He knew that girl had gone home with “hundreds of guys”. How did he know? He could tell by the way she talked. And he was sure she loved a hotel room. He told the other guy that she probably turned him down because he was so sloppy drunk. If he tried again tonight, not as drunk, he would be good to go. The nipple expert thought that was a good idea and would give it a go.

They both agreed she didn’t have that great a face, either, but her head was more proportional to her body and her tits did look really good. Nipple King then laughed and said how they had talked about these things when they were 16 and were still doing it 24 years later. 

These guys were on their way to the college football game and figured there would be a lot of tits there with good faces but after the game were meeting up with the ladies from last night. They doubt they could score on any of the college girls at the game, but they were sure as hell going to try! Insert mutual laughter here. 

Looking at these two guys, it was very hypocritical that they commented on faces. Neither of them had square jaws or chiseled features or strong chins or full heads of hair or even sparkling teeth. They were two 40 year old schlubs. And they both looked like they might have some breasts of their own. 

I wonder if the women talked about these two in the same manner today. 

“Well, they did have breasts but their faces weren’t much… I’m not much of a tits on a guy type woman, but maybe they had more downstairs.”

“With those faces, they better have big dicks!”

Insert mutual laughter here.

For whatever features these women might have, I do hope they have a healthy dose of self-esteem and toss these two jackasses to the curb tonight.