Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Greg Sisco Fan
Episode 38 in a series of true rideshare stories
He’s disheveled, with baggy eyes and that stale cigarette smell—the smell where you can tell he smoked half a cigarette, snuffed it out, and put it back in his pocket. I’ve never understood why people do that. It’s the difference between smelling like you’ve smoked a cigarette and smelling like you’ve lost control of your life, and you get, what, twelve extra drags out of it? That cost-benefit analysis shouldn’t hold up for anyone but the most desperate of people. If you’re sleeping under a bridge and pilfering half-smoked cigarettes out of ashtrays, by all means, do what you need to do, but if you can afford a ride home from the bar, you should be good to leave that half-smoked ciggy in the ashtray for the bridge-sleepers.
“What do you do besides this?” he asks me.
I don’t like where this is going. I drive, I write fiction, and I do standup, but drunk and disheveled men who smell like their lives are falling apart are the last demographic you want to tell that to. If you tell them you write fiction, they want you to pitch them a project while they interrupt you seventeen times and then criticize the idea without having really listened. If you tell them you do comedy, they want you to do a private show for them while they interrupt you seventeen times and then tell you what they’d do differently, explaining that they watch a lot of Kill Tony so they know what they’re talking about.
“Mostly just this,” I say.
“Okay, but, like, what about for fun? Are you a sports guy? What?”
Dammit. I’m trapped. I have no life outside of these three things.
“I don’t know. I watch a lot of movies, standup, whatever…”
“You ever go to local standup shows?”
That question hits a little closer to home and I decide to take the chance. “Yeah. I do standup locally, so I’m part of that whole scene.”
“You’re a comedian?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit! I might’ve seen you. I haven’t been to a show in a while though. The last thing I went to was, uh… Comic of the Year. It was, like, a competition. Did you do that?”
I grin. At the time this is happening, it has been about four months since I won Comic of the Year.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I won that competition.”
“Awesome!” he says, “What was the name of the guy who won the finals?”
I’m confused. “No, I mean, I won the finals.”
“Well,” he says, “the guy who won the whole thing, I guess. He’s, like, a really tall guy with a beard, always wears a leather jacket.”
This is getting absurd. I have not shaved the beard. I am literally wearing the same leather jacket right now that I was wearing when I won the competition. I’m pretty sure I even did jokes that night about being a rideshare driver.
I’m about to try to ram this home harder when I remember that I don’t want to do a private show for this guy in the first place, so I decide to switch gears.
“Oh, yeah,” I tell him. “That’s Greg Sisco.”
“That’s it!” he says. “That guy’s hilarious!”
“Yeah, he’s a fucking genius,” I agree.
For the next few minutes, I talk about myself in the third person, as this guy tries to tell me his favorite Greg Sisco jokes—a few of which are badly misquoted, and the rest of which aren’t mine at all. At one point I try to quote one of my jokes and he corrects me with a less-funny punchline.
When I drop him off, he tells me to keep up the comedy. Then he looks at the app and says, “Oh, your name is Greg, too? What’s your last name? I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
I think for a minute, then say, “Giraldo.”
“Greg Giraldo,” he repeats. “That sounds familiar. I think I’ve seen you before.”
“I’m sure you have,” I tell him.
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.