Maybe I've been living in NYC for too long because whenever I'm anywhere else in the country late at night, I am incurably baffled by the lack of 24-hour businesses. I always find myself asking,
"How is it that the only thing open within a 15 mile radius is a single gas station?!"
Somehow, my 20-something years of prior experience in Ohio with "normal" business hours has been wiped from my memory, replaced by expectations of convenience provided by The City That Never Sleeps, such as 4am bar closing times, liquor stores open until midnight, restaurants open all night, 24-hour grocery stores and bodegas...
This is, perhaps, indirectly why on a recent Monday at 4am, I was in the back seat of a pimped-out VW JettaWagen helplessly allowing myself to be carted at illegal speeds down the 405 from LAX to my hotel in West Hollywood by a random driver, who, I realized too late in the ride to hop out, was full of uppers.
I had been standing on the taxi pick-up curb for a while without seeing so much as a single car roll by. My flight had just landed seven hours late due to a combination of weather delays and two malfunctioning airplanes and I was exhausted. Five minutes felt like 50. The taxi attendant was absent and the phone at his station would not connect, much to the frustration of myself and the other passenger who was waiting next to me.
Just as I turned around to head back into the airport to check on other options, a man with slicked back hair, wearing dress pants and a button-up, holding a car service sign approached me and the other woman I had been waiting with, asking us if we needed a car.
"I promise you. You are not going to find a taxi this early. Not for at least another viente minutos..."
The other woman and I looked at each other and then at the still-vacant taxi lanes. A second later, we were walking side-by-side in silence, following this man to his parking spot, as he regaled us with a long-winded monologue about the lack of taxis at that time of night.
This might sound incredibly unsafe- to follow a random dude to his car and get in- and perhaps it was, but it is typical for off-the-clock drivers to try to earn an extra buck on their own by trolling the airports for commuters too impatient to wait in long taxi lines. For the other woman and I, there were no other options in sight. There were two of us (power in numbers) and we had both just experienced the same frustratingly long commute. We were not to be fucked with. Not at this hour nor after the day we'd just had.
BLIP BLIP
The sound of the car doors unlocking snapped me out of my jet lagged daze. My eyes settled incredulously on this pimpmobile of a car that was now being opened by our driver. I nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity of such a car being touted as a livery vehicle. From the chrome spinner hubcaps to the tinted windows and two-tone custom paint job to the rear-view camera and bottled beverages in the doors, nothing about it cried "professional car service!" I sensed the other woman's pace slow as she, too, realized what we were about to be driven to our hotels in. Again, we gave each other a look, which was cut short by our still-rapidly talking driver grabbing the other woman's bags and throwing them in the trunk. We both sidled into the low-riding back seats.
"I can't believe there were no cabs," she said, nervously watching the driver cross around to the driver's side door while she buckled her seat belt.
"This is the second time this has happened to me here," I replied, following suit and buckling my own seat belt.
"You've done this before then?"
("This" meaning hopping into the car of a random driver without a livery license?)
"Yes." But never one who drove a car like this. I omitted that specification. I didn't want her to feel any more nervous than she already appeared.
The driver hopped in, still chatting excitedly, lit up with a glow that I assumed was related to the thrill of nabbing two customers at the same time who were both traveling to the same area of Hollywood. We pulled out of LAX and he continued talking, barely pausing to take a breath. For a little while, I appreciated the non-stop conversation he was having at us. It kept at bay the awkward feeling of responsibility to keep up small talk for the duration of the ride. He was so cheerful that I allowed myself to laugh generously at some of his jokes. I sensed my riding companion begin to relax and even she contributed a few chuckles.
Then we hit the 405. And I watched with horror as the speedometer hit 100 and kept going.
"...and over there is South Central L.A.." The driver waved his hand toward some general direction off of the highway while I silently willed both of his hands to remain firmly on the wheel. "Some of the neighborhoods there? Not so good."
My amusement quickly turned to concern over the uncomfortably fast commute I was experiencing. Refusing to reveal my nervousness for the sake of my back seat friend's fragile sanity, I entertained the driver's haphazardly delivered tour of the greater Los Angeles area by nodding weakly back at his reflection in the rearview mirror and chuckling at appropriate intervals. The woman had fallen silent and I noticed her hand engaged in a white-knuckled grip on the door handle.
"What hotels are you going to again?" the driver asked us both.
We spouted off our hotel names for the second time. He had never heard of my hotel. I wasn't sure of the intersection so I whipped out my phone to pull it up on Google Maps, but he stopped me.
"It's okay! It's okay! I will just call the hotel and get directions from my route," he said, already dialing Information.
As his phone was dialing, I tried to give him the intersection details which were already pulled up on my phone, but he kept cutting me off, telling me he would get exact directions from the hotel. I was too tired to try any harder and just wanted him to keep his eyes on the road instead of on me in his mirror, so I let him make the call.
As his call was connecting, he had finally exited the 405. Hallelujah! We were on local roads again! He continued to push all silence out of the car and fill it with his endless monologue.
"Oh! You guys want to see where George Michael got arrested the first time?" He was so excited for this part of the tour that I humored him again,
"Uh, sure?"
"Sure!" the woman beside me echoed, a bit more enthusiastically than necessary. I stole a quick glance at her face and found it oddly lit up with interest. Ultimately, I chalked it up to her clearly being relieved to be traveling under 100mph again and, as a result, owning her new lease on life. Because, surely, nobody cares that much about George Michael?
The driver pulled up to a red light and pointed across the intersection at a small brick building.
"You see that right there? That's a public bathroom. That's where he got arrested. Can you believe George Michael was dumb enough to pull out his wiener right there? Right next to a busy street? Ha ha ha! Stupid! Dios mio!"
The woman beside me laughed uproariously. Sheesh. So maybe it was mildly funny (in more of a bizarre way) back in '98 before pop singers were frequently making public journeys out of the closet, but in 2010 at 4am? She was obviously slap happy now.
"And look! Right across the street from a police station, too! What an idiot! Ha ha ha," he laughed, exposing a mouth full of gleaming gold caps, while breezing past the LAPD station doing 20mph over the speed limit. Idiot, indeed.
As he finished chatting away about George Michael, I could hear a perturbed voice coming through the earpiece of his phone, saying "Hello? Helloooo?" before finally hanging up.
Five minutes later, the driver said, "Oh! I better call the hotel for directions again! I think they might be mad at me because I didn't answer! ha ha ha."
Ten minutes later, and not a moment too soon, we arrived at my hotel.
"That will be $56."
I hated to prolong the moment any more, but needed change.
"Oh yeah! I have change. One minute!" he said, running around back to the trunk.
Bidding the woman adieu, I got out of the car with my purse and my backpack, my only two bags for the short trip, and met the driver at the trunk, assuming that he was getting change for me back there.
"Which one's your bag?" he asked.
"Oh, I have both of them already. Do you have that change?"
"You don't have a bag back here? I could have sworn I put one back here for you!" He began digging around feverishly.
"No, just these two bags right here."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Are you positive?"
Good God, man! Just give me some damn change and let me go so I can get 3 hours of sleep before the day-long shoot ahead of me!
"Absolutely positive." I said, instead, with a strained, but polite smile on my face.
"Okay, let me get you change," he finally said and, to my disbelief, marched ahead of me through the hotel doors and up to the concierge to ask for change.
The concierge replied with a look of annoyance, clearly recognizing the driver as the man who called earlier, and disappeared in the back to grab change. The other front-desk attendant began my check-in process, but was repeatedly interrupted by the driver making small talk while drumming his fingers loudly on the counter. Seeing him face-to-face under the unforgiving brightness of the front desk lights, it was painfully apparent that he was probably brimming full with something a lot stronger than caffeine. I wanted to kiss the floor of the hotel lobby and thank all things holy that I made it. Bad weather and two faulty airplanes were nothing compared to the commute I had just experienced in the pimp-mobile.
The driver went on to make a show out of counting the bills before we finalized our transaction. I tipped him a little more than I should have just to get him out of there quickly and comfortably, but of course, it backfired. He ran back in the door twice more: once to tell me thank you and then again to give me his card. I sent an apologetic look to the other woman, who was still waiting in the back seat, and mentally wished her a safe trip down the remaining block to her hotel.
"...and make sure you call me when you're ready to go back to the airport!" he said before, finally, parting.
"Will do."
I most certainly did not.
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