Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: A Unique Self-Defense Strategy
Episode 18 in a series of true rideshare stories
She is traveling from one hotel to another at four in the morning, wearing knee-high boots, fishnets, and a mesh top over a black bra. She is in the middle of a cell phone conversation as she gets in behind me and shuts the door.
"Most people have to kill people they love, but they don't get angry about it," she says into her phone, not bothering to acknowledge me.
I can’t hear whoever she’s talking to. All I get is her side of the conversation, beginning from the middle, with no context whatsoever and no pause to clue me in.
"I don't know,” she says. “Jeffrey Dahmer? John Wayne Gacy?"
I begin to drive.
"Sad, maybe, but why mad?"
I glance at her in the rearview mirror. She is remarkably relaxed, looking at her nails as she casually chats.
"No, but, like, imagine if you had to kill your mom."
She’s either the least self-conscious person in the world, she’s playing a practical joke, or this is a defense tactic. If it’s the latter, I get it. A passenger in her late teens once told me about a rideshare driver who asked her to marry him, then locked the doors and told her he wouldn’t let her out until she accepted. She managed to get out and run, but it’s a scary story. And it’s not the only one I’ve heard. I like to to think I’m a nice guy, but I’m also 6’4” and 240 pounds. If you’re a woman who doesn’t know me and you’re getting into a car alone with me at night, especially while you’re wearing revealing clothing, I can see how your defenses might go up.
"Well if it's them or me, it's like, bitch, it ain't gonna be me," she says.
Sentences like that make me think this is a defense tactic.
"Yeah, it'd be sad, but I think you'd get used to it. Unless you get caught and you're, like, rotting in prison and shit, but that’s a whole different thing."
It’s fair to say I’ll never know what it’s like as a woman to be alone in a car at night with a man you don’t know. But I bet you don’t know what it’s like to be alone in a car at night with a person who is going on at length about the appropriate emotional responses to murdering your loved ones.
Not that serial killer stuff shocks me, really. I narrate true crime audiobooks, and I read and write horror fiction. I’m at home in the dark, and I’m sure I’ve had similar conversations. But she doesn’t know that. That’s what I’m taken aback by, more than anything: the possibility that this isn’t a defense tactic—that she is genuinely so comfortable in her own skin that she can have this conversation in front of a stranger and think nothing of it. If I were in her shoes, I’d be apologizing to my driver after every sentence.
"You just keep the bodies,” she explains, like she’s talking to a four-year-old. “Like, how many bodies did John Wayne Gacy have under his house?" A pause, then, "I don't know, but it was a fucking lot."
I don’t know either, but that sounds right.
Not to be cute, but I’d kill for this woman’s don’t-give-a-fuck—maybe not in John Wayne Gacy numbers, but goddamn. I get anxious just asking someone at the next table in a restaurant if I can use their ketchup. Last week I walked past a guy in the grocery store and he turned to me and started a conversation like I was an old friend, telling me he just learned ghost pepper mayonnaise was a thing. I was jealous of that guy’s lack of shyness. This woman is in a league all her own.
When I pull up to her destination, to my surprise, she actually does take a brief pause from her phone call to acknowledge me for the first time.
"Thanks!" is all she says.
Then she heads into the lobby, phone still to her ear, carrying on about where Ted Bundy fucked up.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.