Last week: I had a lot of drunks for a Wednesday. One was a regular who can barely walk who told me he graduated from East High in 1967. He made a joke about how our company's radio jingle should include the phrase "takes you from one bar to another." He said he turns 60 in January and he's gonna smoke 60 bowls of weed and drink 60 shots of ( Read more... )

Today, I had a deaf customer with some sort of physical impairment that forced him to move in large, exaggerated articulations.  He communicated with me through grand gestures.  Telling me to turn left, he held his hands like a wheel and made the motion of turning left.  Here's where I don't know if it's irony or not: his name was Marcel and he ( Read more... )

I know I have referred to it as "Bartender Syndrome" - the uncanny habit of my passengers to spill their beans (or whatever else they have to spill) while in my presence. However, I have no idea what spurs this reaction, and yet it is common, expected, and weird as all get-out. Perhaps the act of confession is some innate aspect of our psyche. ( Read more... )

I picked up another young girl from the detox facility. She was short, blond, and mousy with crooked teeth. She was wearing pink fleece pajamas with cute bears all over them and was carrying a couple bulging plastic bags, seemingly filled with all her worldly posessions. She couldn't have been more than twenty years old ( Read more... )

My first call yesterday morning was at Memorial High School.  I picked up four black kids dressed with the hiphop/thuglife/gansta motif.  The first thing one of them said was, "I've been a bad motherfucker this year."  I imagined that as the opening sentence to his yearly letter to Santa Claus.  Then he told his friends the story about how his ( Read more... )

It has snowed almost every day that I've worked in the past two weeks.  The last decade or so has been pretty mild.  In 1998 it didn't snow until New Year's Eve.  Last year, we didn't get snow for Generic Solstice-Derivative Gift Exchange Ritual a.k.a. Christmas.  This has been a "traditional" Wisconsin winter - a lot of snow.  I don't think we got ( Read more... )

Sometimes my passengers give me larger-than-life stories and I'm never sure whether to believe them.  Perhaps they are lying, but some of them have such details and chaos to them, and such utter tragedy that I really have no choice.  In general, I give them the benefit of the doubt ( Read more... )

School is back in session and 40,000 university students have flooded the downtown area, making traffic a veritable nightmare of congestion and jaywalkers.  As I drove through the mess with a sixty-something gentleman in the taxi, he got quiet and began to stare out the window ( Read more... )

I picked up a man in his early thirties at the hospital a few days ago.  His skin was a shade of espresso, his hair cropped short.  One of his front teeth was missing.  He had his young son with him, maybe two years old, smiling and rambunctious, full of loquacious gibberish.  As soon as the man sat down, he told me, "Man, I am gonna sue them ( Read more... )

Today, as I drove, listening to an NPR segment on astronomy, my passenger asked, in an annoyed tone, if I would turn off the radio ( Read more... )