It was slower than it’s been in a while last night out on the streets. Between the fog rolling in early, the cold air, the 9-5ers not getting paid this Friday and the encroaching rent next week, no one had any reason to be out last night and it showed.
Nothing of interest happened until I threw a snot-nosed entitled millennial douchebag and the girl he was trying to hook up with out of my car at midnight. He was amazed that I knew where Burnett Street was, telling me that he’d never had a cabbie know where he lived before without having to show them how to get there. He was impressed that I knew a basic street up on Twin Peaks but couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t turn the radio to 106.1 for him, the customer. After talking to me for one minute too many in that passive-aggressive way that assholes who don’t have enough balls to confront a situation that do, I pulled over in Ashbury Heights and told him that he needed to get another cab. He said he wasn’t going to pay me and then seemed surprised when I said I didn’t care. People who think that money is the only bargaining tool don’t know what to do when confronted with someone who doesn’t want the only thing they have to offer.
When they got out a half-dozen blocks away from Haight Street, I realized the poor girl was in a skirt and she was upset that she was going back out into the cold. Maybe when you get older you’ll realize that life’s too short to fuck assholes, honey. If she’s lucky, she started to realize that last night.
But somehow I doubt it.
An hour later, I took an old friend home from work, a short seven minute ride from the TL to the Panhandle. We sat in front of his house for twenty minutes and talked about business and his humongous eight-year old child that I had met at breakfast that morning.
“He’s halfway to getting his driver’s license,” he said and for some reason the way he framed the years made me feel old. It felt like just yesterday I was dropping off a sack of weed to him at work and he was showing me pictures of the kid when he was still breast feeding.
Soon enough we’ll be a couple of geezers in the nursing home talking about the good old days.
I drove the streets until after three AM, coming across hardly anyone, the streets so deserted that even cars were few and far between. I couldn’t help but be remembered of those late nights from my first years, stoned and driving ’til the bitter end of five AM, listening to NPR and chain-smoking cigarettes. That’s what it felt like last night as I drove Divisidero, the fog coming in off the ocean in giant clouds, the soft glow of street lights and oncoming headlights without a passenger in sight.
Unlike then, I know when to call it a night. I pointed my cab to the freeway and drove towards the garage and my bed.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
