Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Two Nates

Episode 48 in a series of true rideshare stories

“For Nate?" he asks through the open window.

“Uh, Nathaniel, yeah,” I tell him, looking at the display. I roll up the window because it’s starting to rain. He and his girlfriend get in the back seat. It’s two in the morning and the bars are closing.

As we drive, the rain falls harder. We’ve made it a quarter mile, just far enough not to be near any open businesses, when the app suddenly says “rider canceled” and the current ride disappears from my screen.

“Did you just cancel the ride?” I ask him.

“No.” He gets out his phone and checks the app on his end. “Wait… It says ‘driver arriving now’.”

He and I groan, both realizing what’s happened. She just looks frightened.

“There must be two Nates leaving that bar,” I tell him.

“Ugh. I should’ve noticed when you said Nathaniel. I am a Nathaniel, but I don’t think it says Nathaniel.”

“Let’s get out,” his girlfriend says. “Request another one.”

The rain is angry now, coming down on us like a beating.

“Do you have Venmo?” he asks me. “Could I just pay you that way?”

“That’s fine,” I tell him.

“No… We should get another one from the app,” she insists.

“It’s pouring rain,” he says. “He can take us. We’ll just Venmo him.”

“We don’t know who he is,” she whispers, quietly enough that I’m not supposed to hear, but, I guess, accidentally louder than that.

“It’s up to you,” I tell them. “I’m happy to work it out with Venmo, but if you’d feel more comfortable getting out, you can.”

I sound suspicious, even to my own ear. In horror movies and true crime documentaries, this is the part where the audience is rolling their eyes at the protagonists, maybe even shouting at the screen, “Get out of the car, you fucking idiots!”

If you have never been mistaken for a serial killer, what you may not realize is that, once you’re under suspicion of serial-killerism, it is nearly impossible to do anything un-serial-killery. You can’t say, “You’re totally safe, by the way.” That’s fucking terrifying. Remind them it’s cold and rainy out there and nice and warm in here? Serial killer. Try to soften your voice so you don’t sound threatening? Serial killer. Start whistling? Definitely a fucking serial killer.

Afraid to do anything that might seem serial-killer-ish, I pull over and stare straight ahead in total silence like a serial killer.

She is pretty adamant about getting out, and eventually, he acquiesces. I leave them on the side of the road, hunched in the pouring rain, dark and cold in the late night wind, with surge pricing kicking in on the app so that they will pay twice what they otherwise would have, plus the cancellation fee from their “real” driver.

Hopefully they know how to tell a story. If they can tell their friends about the creepy driver who picked them up in a rain storm, who almost convinced the boyfriend to give him their address, who probably had a trunk full of tools to dissect them—that story might be worth the miserable night. If they don’t know how to tell a story, and they had to stand in the freezing rain and pay a bunch of money to get home from the bar because they weren’t sure about their driver—they have my sympathy. Rough times have so much more value when you know how to tell a story.

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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.