Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Zark Muckleberg
Episode 31 in a series of true rideshare stories
“Look! That guy looks like Mark Zuckerberg!” she screams, pointing to the car next to us.
“Yeah, kinda,” mumbles her boyfriend.
I can’t see the guy next to us, so I don’t know. What I do know is this woman is so drunk it’s impressive she can even see the car next to us, much less the person driving it. She’s one of those excitable drunks, bouncing off the walls and getting distracted every three seconds like a dog with the zoomies. Her boyfriend is less drunk, lower energy, and has the air of a dad who is retracing the mistakes of his entire life after letting a toddler have too much sugar.
The woman rolls down the window. “Hey! You look like Mark Zuckerberg!”
“Don’t do that!” the boyfriend scolds, leaning over her to roll the window up.
“Why?” she asks.
“Nobody wants to look like Mark Zuckerberg,” I tell her. “Not even Mark Zuckerberg.”
“Now I feel bad,” she says. “But he did look like Zark Muckleberg.” She bursts out laughing at her own drunken slur. “Zark Muckleberg!”
The boyfriend and I both chuckle at that one. It is a little funny. But it’s clearly a lot funnier to her than it is to either of us. She begins laughing so hard she’s crying. It doesn’t help that she’s one of those people who snorts when she laughs, so we end up with a solid three minutes of hysterical laughter, punctuated by snorts every few seconds, and on the rare occasion that she can get enough air into her lungs to speak, she gives a high pitched, “Zark Muckleberg!”
The poor guy who’s with her keeps trying to change the subject, asking if she’s hungry, if she remembers where her car is parked, whether she wants to watch a movie when they get home. None of it gets through to her. She’s stuck in a laughter death-roll. She’d be on the floor if the seatbelt weren’t holding her in place.
The boyfriend gives up and turns to me. “How’s your day going, dude? What was your name again?”
My comedian brain kicks into gear and I can’t resist. “Well, now I feel self-conscious, but it’s actually Zark.”
She shrieks even harder with laughter. He sighs heavily and gives me a look that says, ‘Really, dude? You had to do that?’
She alternates between four actions in a randomized loop—laughing, snorting, apologizing, and calling me Zark—like a Bop-It device with only four buttons.
Haha, Zark, haha, snort, sorry, haha, Zark, snort…
“My friends call me Muckle,” I tell her.
Muckle, haha, sorry, snort, Zark, haha, snort, sorry…
In standup, you often have to work hard at a joke. Sometimes no amount of polish ever gets it working at the level you think it deserves. This is the opposite. This is so easy I feel guilty—low-hanging fruit that would get little-to-no reaction from a sober person, but instead, she can’t breathe. Why does no one ever laugh this hard at my good shit?
“Or Zarky, you know,” I tell her. “Zark the Muck, that’s an oldie-but-goodie.”
Zarky, haha, snort, sorry...
I pull up to their house and her boyfriend has to help her out of the car and support her—pretty much carry her—as they go up the driveway. She is perpetually on the verge of collapse.
“His friends call him Muckle!” I hear her whimper through tears of laughter as he pretty much pushes her through the front door.
Alone on the porch, he shakes his head, takes a deep breath, then follows her in.
I think he forgets to tip me.
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.