Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Outlaw
Episode 47 in a series of true rideshare stories
He’s got long, gray hair and a leather jacket. He probably looks like I would look in fifteen years if I weren’t already going bald.
“This is a great car,” he says when he gets in. “Hyundai Sonata. Perfect rideshare vehicle.”
I tell him I’ve been driving it a couple years and don’t have many complaints. When the first lull in conversation hits, he looks out the window and shakes his head. It’s nighttime, but there is a lot of traffic heading downtown.
“Don’t know when this city got so big,” he laments.
As cities go, Boise really isn’t “big”, but it’s big in relation to what it was a short while ago. A lot of people who have been here a long time have a wistful, rose-colored memory of what once was. I think that happens often. Partly it’s just that change is painful. We all miss certain aspects of our pasts, and whether or not our cities are to blame, they make easy scapegoats. If life is chaotic, it’s because our city is chaotic. If it’s boring, it’s because our city is boring.
Many years ago, when I lived in China, I met a Parisian man in a cafe. I told him I’d never been Paris but that I hoped I’d get to see it one day. “Don’t bother,” he grumbled. “It’s shit.” It made me laugh. Even when you’re from one of the most romanticized cities in the world, if you spend enough time there, it’s shit.
Not that it can’t be true. I think it goes both ways. Your inner world reflects how you see the outer world, and the outer world reflects your feeling about your inner one. I think Boise is a pretty good city, but one man’s shit is another man’s Shinola, to mix idioms in the grossest of ways. And it’s true that the infrastructure here hasn’t been able to keep up with the population boom, so there is sometimes a feeling of crowdedness and there is certainly a frustrating abundance of construction.
“Used to be all farmland out here,” he says. “Traffic like this at ten o’clock at night… I don’t know. I guess I don’t have to tell you. You’re driving in it all day.”
“It’s not usually too bad,” I say. “Rush hour gets rough sometimes, but other than that…”
“Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting old. I turn 50 this year, and I’m making it a goal to get on my way before then. Been here my whole life, but it’s time to go.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Haven’t figured it out yet. Probably nowhere most people have heard of, though. I’m looking for a town, not a city. A village, even.”
“Gotcha.”
“Somewhere without a Walmart—that’s rule number one. No franchises at all, if I can help it. Gonna go out there with my dog in the back of my truck, buy a few acres, and build something.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
“It’s a plan, anyway. Don’t know if it’s a good one, but it’s something.”
“Are you gonna build the house yourself?”
“Oh yeah. That’s what I used to do. But I quit a couple years ago. Now I’m a rideshare driver, like you.”
“Oh really?”
We swap rideshare stories for a bit. He asks if I’ve ever kicked anyone out of my car and I tell him I’ve been close a couple times but it hasn’t happened yet.
“I only did it once,” he says. “This guy was trying to talk politics with me. It wasn’t even that I didn’t like his politics, it was just that I don’t like talking politics. But he just wouldn’t stop. I kept telling him I wasn’t gonna talk about it, and he kept demanding to know what I thought, and eventually I just pulled over and told him, ‘You can get out here. Good luck with the next guy.’”
I don’t try to talk politics with him, but I feel like I can guess his. He’s a manual laborer who is tired of the growth of the city, looking to move somewhere rural and take his dog with him in the back of his truck. But I could be wrong. And as passengers go, I agree with him that political ranters are some of the worst, so if he doesn’t like talking politics, I’m more than happy to oblige.
Eventually he circles back to his plans to move. “I figure if I don’t leave by the time I’m 50, I might not do it at all,” he says. “People get to be 60, 70 years old and they’re too set in their ways or their health isn’t good enough.”
“I think a lot of people wouldn’t even uproot at 50,” I tell him. “Not from somewhere they’ve lived their whole life.”
I mean it as a compliment, but he doesn’t seem to take it that way. “Yeah, well, it’s how it’s gotta be. This…” he gestures broadly. “This doesn’t work anymore.”
“No, I just meant it’s good that you’ve still got that adventurous spirit at 50. I think a lot of people don’t.”
“Well, I’m a healthy 50. Still get a lot of exercise, still eat right. Even go down to the bar every couple weeks and play some punk rock.”
That surprises me a little. “Punk rock?”
“Hell yeah. You don’t think an old guy can play punk rock.”
“It’s not that. It’s just… putting your dog in the back of a truck and moving out to the sticks to build your own house… I’d have figured you more for a country guy.”
He laughs. “Yeah, well… it’s a hair’s breadth difference between punk rock and outlaw country.”
I guess that’s true.
I mention that I’m a comedian and we swap stories of crowds and venues for the remainder of the drive. It’s interesting. Two performers in leather jackets, both rideshare drivers, both sick of hyper-political people, one going bald and the other going gray.
“The driveway is in the alley,” he says as we get close to his house. “Right up here. See my car on the left?”
I do. It’s a Hyundai Sonata. A little older than mine, and a different color, but at the end of the day, more or less the same thing.
“Perfect rideshare vehicle,” he says again as he gets out.
“Sure is,” I tell him.
So he’s closing in on 50 years old. That puts him 13 ahead of me. I wonder if I’ll have a dog and truck by then, and where I’ll be headed.
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.