Category: Ridesharing Confessional

A bizarre thing can happen at night when I get called out to a strange area, drop that person off, then get another call 15 or 20 minutes further away from home, take that person to their destination, and then get another call. Sometimes, I completely lose track of exactly where I am.

This happened a few weeks ago. I drove someone west, out of Lancaster, picked up my next customer and drove them a little further west, and ended with a call north of that, somewhere along the Susquehanna River. By then, I had no idea where I was. I pulled into a train station that looked deserted. I circled the parking lot once before spotting a man sitting alone on a bench. A misty rain had begun to fall. It was cold, and after midnight. The place was empty. It all felt rather strange.

He crawled into the car, swearing quietly under his breath about the weather. His destination was thirty minutes away, which was good and bad. Good, because that’s a nice fare. Bad, because, well, it was after midnight, his destination was in the opposite direction from my house, and I’d have about an hour drive home after I dropped him off. But there we went, driving north, into the cold and the rain that fell harder, and the darkness.

He was very eccentric. He told me about the five children he had with three different ladies, repeating that fact over and over again, then marveled at the fact that I have six children who share the same mother. He explained his job to me, how part of it was traveling home on his own dime from faraway destinations, how he used to drive a taxi in a previous life. Then he asked me a question that caused an eerie feeling to settle into my stomach.

“Did you ever see the movie Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro?” he asked at one point.

“No,” I said. “Can’t say I have.”

“It’s about a crazy taxi driver who ends up killing everyone,” he said, chuckling to himself, leaning up in between the front seats to tell me more. I was suddenly very aware of the man’s hot breath, the sound of phlegm in his throat.

There I was, in the middle of absolute nowhere, driving someone who seemed a little off kilter and was suddenly asking me if I saw the movie of the crazy taxi driver who killed people, oh and by the way he used to be a taxi driver.

I dropped him off at his truck which was parked on a side street in the middle of nowhere. The rain let up for a moment. He smiled and got out.

I always try to remember to confirm a passenger’s destination before pulling away from the curb. When a girl climbed into the car a few days ago, I said the name of the street she was going to.

“Yep,” she said, putting on her seat belt. Then, I confirmed the town, really as an afterthought. I don’t always do that. Usually the street is enough. The town she had selected as her destination was about twenty minutes away.

“What?” she exclaimed. I repeated the name of the town she had listed.

“No!” she said. “Is that the destination I put into the app?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Same street, but right here, in this town,” she said. I laughed.

“Good thing we got that ironed out. What would you have thought if I started driving you out into the country, in the complete wrong direction?”

It struck us both funny and soon we were cracking up.

“You probably would have thought I was taking you out there to kill you,” I joked.

“Yeah!” she said, giggling. “And I probably would have kicked open the door and jumped out while the car was moving!”

“And I would have thought, ‘What is wrong with this passenger?’”

By then we were laughing so hard we were almost crying. I pulled up to her stop, about five blocks away. It took all of three minutes to get there. I finally managed to stop laughing, and I sighed.

“Wow, that was great. Have a good day.”

“Thanks for not killing me!” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “Thanks for not jumping out of a moving vehicle.”

The rider canceled once, but I kept driving in their general direction because sometimes people cancel their ride request accidentally, or sometimes they want to try to get a driver who’s closer but it’s just not going to happen, so I try to save them some time by heading in their direction. Sure enough, the request came through again, and I accepted.

And then the person canceled again. Annoying, but I kept going.

Eventually, we got it straightened out. I pulled up in front of the house, and a man came out. He was Caucasian, but his skin tone was more gray than anything else. He had short, gray-brown hair, and eyes that were either sad or tired. I couldn’t tell, exactly. He seemed to be about my age. At the bottom corner of his right eye was the tattoo of a single tear, which made me nervous, because haven’t we all heard urban legends about exactly what that means? I always thought a teardrop tattoo meant you had killed someone. I looked it up later. It can mean that.

“How’s it going, man?” I asked him.

“Not too bad, not too bad,” he said. Once we ironed out his exact destination, I asked him a few of the typical questions. He told me he had moved recently.

“So, where are did you move here from?”

“Harrisburg,” he said, and the word came out in disgust. Then he whispered, “I had to get out of there.”

We talked about a few other things. He was recently in prison. He was on his way to see his girlfriend during her lunch break.

“Did you grow up around here?” I asked him.

“Nah,” he said. “Grew up in Harrisburg. Born and raised. But there was too much to get into. And don’t get me wrong, I got into all of it at some point. Eventually, I had to make a change. I had to get out.”

“Takes a lot of resolve, man,” I said, “Leaving your friends, leaving the places you’re familiar with. You should be proud of that.”

He nodded.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I could see where it was headed. I was done with that scene. Now, my exciting nights are watching TV and eating takeaway food.” He laughed.

“Sounds exciting,” I said, grinning.

“Boring as hell,” he said, laughing again. “But there’s nothing wrong with that.”

I picked them up in front of a nondescript science center, the name of which I can no longer remember. The mom was impatient and tired. The little guy, maybe eight years old, was only tired. They didn’t crawl into the backseat so much as melt into it, the mom immediately staring vacantly out her window, her son sighing and leaning in against her.

Small droplets of rain ticked against the windshield and the wipers streaked them into long arcing curves of white and red light. We were in Center City Philadelphia, everything glass and money and Friday night action. Couples dashed from this bar to that while groups of college kids swarmed the sidewalks. But these two had a different destination: southwest Philadelphia, deep in the grid.

We made the trek through the lights and the shadows, turning this way and that, the louder bumps snapping the little boy’s head forward or side to side, but he was asleep. His mother sat quietly, never turned her gaze from the window. At first, when there were streetlights every so many feet, the light flashed against her rich, dark skin and measured the distance we traveled, counted off the speed. But in the southwest it was darker, with fewer lights, and the shadows shifted as we drove through them, like underwater currents.

I pulled onto her street and slowly crawled its length. Even in the rain, even late at night, it was busy. The neighborhood kids were out on the sidewalks, standing around, straddling their bikes, and their parents shouted to each other, gathered in small huddles, stared at us as we crept past, their heads turning slowly on a swivel, suspicious of this strange car. I stopped. She opened her door. She tapped the boy on his shoulder and he leaned his way after her. I don’t think he ever opened his eyes. She led him through the people, through the shouting, through all of that late-night commotion to a small porch without a light. She unlocked the door. They vanished inside.

I drove away. But it was the kind of street I would have liked to have hung out on, the kind of street you want to find a rocking chair on a porch and just sit there, drifting front and back front and back front and back.

This was two weeks ago, but it wasn’t until tonight, when I sat down to type this out, that I realized she hadn’t said a word the entire drive.

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I had my angriest rider ever the other day. This is what happened.

Sometimes, it can be hard to find someone. Sometimes, a person’s location pin drops in a strange place, or they request a ride from the back of their house so it marks them on a neighboring street, or they request a ride and then walk to the corner. Sometimes, the choose a huge location, like a shopping mall, or a Walmart, or the moon, and I have no clue exactly where they are.

I got a request from a woman named Destiny. She was in a Walmart, so I pulled up and coasted the length of the store, looking for someone who looked like they were waiting for a ride. I didn’t see anyone except a very angry woman pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, inside the glass, waiting in the lobby.

Please let that NOT be my passenger.

I waited, but no one came out, so I called the phone number associated with the account. No answer. I waited five minutes – with Lyft, if you wait five minutes and the customer doesn’t call or otherwise let you know what’s up, you’re supposed to cancel the call and get on with your life. So I canceled the call and marked it, “Customer was a no-show.” At that point I drove to the back of the Walmart parking lot and sent some emails, then drove towards the exit.

Ping.

A ride request.

From Destiny.

Uh-oh.

I drove back around towards the front of the Walmart, again cruising slowly so I could find her. The angry woman I saw in the lobby came storming out, pushing a cart, shouting before I even got out of the car. She wasn’t just angry, she was unhinged. But I stayed calm and got out to help her load her things.

“I don’t know what the f*** is going on around here but your car was not the car described to me on the phone so that’s why I didn’t come out. I saw you sitting there but I didn’t think you were my ride.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I tried to call you.”

“My phone is dead,” she shouted, as if that, also, was my fault. But I could sense her anger dissipating when I refused to argue with her. “I just moved and my electric isn’t turned on. And now my phone is dead.”

I helped her load the air mattresses into the back of the car. She crawled into the front seat. You all know how I feel about front-seaters. She was the kind of person whose mouth doesn’t know how to stop. She was the kind of person who was angry at the world because everything, everyone, was out to get her. She had big hair, wild eyes, and teeth competing with each other to be the first to get out.

“You mind if I eat in here?” she asked, holding up her hot dog dripping with ketchup and mustard and relish.

For a split second I thought of my options, but I shook my head no because there are bigger battles in this world. I didn’t mind. Not on that cold day.

“It’s freezing in my house,” she said. “And the school called to tell me my daughter’s sick? Are you kidding me? I just told them there ain’t no f***ing way I’m walking all the way back over there to pick her up and bring her back to a cold house. No way. She’s better off at school.”

She waved her hand in frustration and set the hot dog down in the handle of the armrest. Food in the car! Dripping relish and mustard, two of my least favorite foods in the entire world!

“I can’t deal with all this,” she shouted. She stared over at me. “I was all ready to scream at you when you came back to pick me up.”

I didn’t say anything, so she kept on.

“I was gonna get in the car and shout at you to turn on the f***ing heat and scream at you for canceling my ride request!”

I nodded.

“But look at you, sitting there all calm, all chill,” she said, and suddenly she laughed out loud. “I can’t even get mad at you! Just sitting there, taking it. What’s wrong with you?” She laughed again, as if it was the funniest thing she had ever encountered, this inability to stay angry at the world. She shook her head again and looked exhausted. “God, I need a blunt.”

She devoured her hot dog. I dropped her off at her new apartment.

“I hope your heat gets turned on soon,” I said.

“I hope I don’t get charged for that first ride,” she said threateningly.

I shrugged. “You can contest it in the app.”

She walked inside. I sighed a huge sigh of relief and drove away.

“I’m surprised we could find each other,” the young man said, laughing. I stared at him for a moment and then laughed, too: we both had large, bushy beards in our profile pics, and we had both recently shaved those beards off.

He climbed in and we started back towards the city.

I asked him the normal round of questions: how he was doing, if he was ready for the big storm, if he liked living in the city.

“Yeah, it’s good,” he said.

“How long have you been here?” I asked him.

“About nine months,” he said. He paused, then continued gingerly. “I’m staying in a sober house.”

“Really?” I said. “Good for you.”

He seemed to take heart at my encouragement.

“Yeah, I had to get away from my old city. It can pretty much give you whatever you want, addiction wise. There was just no way out of it.”

I nodded.

“It was brave of you to cut loose.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I’m doing good now. Got a good job and I’m signing a lease on an apartment this week.”

I told him of the addiction and recovery mass our church just had. It was a beautiful service. The pastor who was speaking that Saturday night stood up in front of the congregation and said, “Hello, my name is Randy, and I’m an alcoholic,” and the entire congregation replied, “Welcome, Randy.” I suppose some people expected it, but it caught me off guard, nearly brought me to tears, that little moment of acknowledgement, that little moment of acceptance. The pastor told us he had his last drink in 1989.

I told this all to the young man sitting in the back of my car. Things got silent for a moment. “That’s really cool,” he said. “I’d like to come to that sometime.”

We got to his house and I dropped him off. I gave him my card.

“Listen,” I said. “No pressure. But if you ever need anything, I hope you’ll let me know.”

“Thanks, man,” he said.

Then I almost drove away without remembering to let him get his groceries out of the back of the car, because that’s how I roll.