Friday Night Jimmy

One of the nicer things about the cab company for which I drive is that they don't stay open too late. Only 10pm on Friday and Saturday nights, so we don't get a lot of serious drunks calling for rides home. The owners decided it just wasn't worth the hassles to stay open a few hours later, and having to deal with the headaches of dealing with these passengers.

What headaches? Drunks who call for a cab from two companies and take the first one who shows up.

Drunks who, when they call to tell you to pick them up, can't exactly tell you where they are, or conversely, when they get in the cab, can't tell you where they need to go.

And of course, there are those who can't hold their liquor, nor their urine, nor their dinner.

Some can just be plain belligerent, or accuse the driver of stealing from them when they can't find or correctly count their money.

So you see, there are a number of scenarios when dealing with the inebriated, and very few of them are good.

Oh, sure, sometimes you have a nice happy drunk who will tell you his Grand Philosophy of Life, and this can be entertaining as you drive and listen to them expound on the Deeper Meaning of Things.

But usually, it's better to stick to sober passengers. Even ones who don't tip.

So on this one Friday evening, the calls were running slow, and I was hanging out inside the dispatcher's booth at about 9pm. A slightly disheveled middle-aged guy walks in to the lobby. He's got a pronounced limp, and it's obvious he's "just not right." My dispatcher recognizes him immediately and greets him with a cheerful, "How ya doin' Jimmy?!" She then turns to me and tells me to take Jimmy home, up in Wurley Heights (not the real name of the place).

I lead Jimmy out the door and to the cab and we get in. Jimmy is hard to understand, and I'm pretty sure he's had some sort of stroke in the past. I'm chalking his strangeness up to some sort of malady. The stroke, maybe MS or Cerebral Palsy. Jimmy slurs the address to me and we head out for the short 4 mile drive.

I ask Jimmy what he does, and he replies that he used to be a cop, but now he's retired on disability. "Ahah," I think, "He was shot in the head, or had some sort of loss of oxygen to the brain, and this is why he's this way."

Wurley Heights is built on a couple of large hills, and Jimmy's street runs up and down one of them. The modest bi-level homes are built on stepped lots, where the 10 feet downhill of one lot's driveway is a sharp berm down to the flat of the next home's flat front lawn.

We pull up to a house, where Jimmy says, "This is it." He hands me a $20 bill for the $7.50 fare and says, "Keep it." "Jimmy, this is too much!" I reply, but he waves his hand and says "Don't worry abouddit," and gets out of the car. I stuff the $20 in my pocket and log the fare on my clipboard.

I'm about to pick up the microphone to radio in that I'm all clear, when I see Jimmy sort of stagger across the driveway I'm in front of, and then he takes a step off the berm and rolls ass over teakettle down the berm onto the lawn below. He lay there momentarily, fully splayed on his back. The little gym bag he'd been carrying being flung about 20 feet from him. I sit there for a second and watch as he struggles to his feet, but he's really having a difficult time. So I jump out of the cab and go over to help him.

He's now on his neighbor's lawn and needs to go back up the hill, but as I grab his arm to lead him, he motions to go to the front door of the house on whose lawn we're on. Apparently he'd told me to stop at the wrong house.

What I also realize, something I hadn't noticed up to this point, is that Jimmy stinks of alcohol. It dawns on me that Jimmy isn't a poor cop/hero who is paying the price for taking a bullet. Jimmy is just hammered!

I retrieve the far-flung gym-bag and hoist Jimmy under his right arm, and lead him to the porch. He stands there, wobbling, searching his pocket for his keys. At this point I'm still not convinced we're actually at the right house, but after a minute of watching Jimmy mutter to himself as he flicks through his key ring, he steadies himself with the classic forehead-on-the-door technique (also a popular technique often used at urinals) and the door pops open.

I head back to the cab, thinking that while I did get a nice tip, at least I earned it with a good deed.

I cue the mike and call in to dispatch. "Car 3, clear." Mindy replies, "Ah so what do you think of Jimmy?" I can hear laughter in her voice. I told her of my initial impression, and then how wrong it was, and how I had to rescue Jimmy to get him home. "Well at least you earned that tip!" Mindy guffawed. Apparently Jimmy does this every Friday night, but the other drivers know to just take the money, and of course, to drop him in front of the right house.

Intro

I'm not a cab driver. I'm not a van driver. But somehow, through a long set of circumstances, my career as a creative director and marketing exec seems to have stalled out after 25 years.

So since I do love to drive just about any kind of vehicle, I've been earning a paycheck for the past 6 months driving a cab for the local on-call taxi company in the exurban county in which I live. I also recently started to drive a full-size passenger van for the county government's work-fare program.

Both of these jobs have given me new insights, and a new perspective on the relatively poor people who've been in the back seats of my vehicles. And I thought this forum would be a good place to start expressing these insights, some of which are poignant, some funny, and some downright aggravating.

Enjoy......