Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/669874
104 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 BOARD BACK Astrid* jumps into the front seat, which is a little unusual for a solitary female rider. She's friendly but soon lowers her head. Is she staring at her phone? Is she distraught? After several miles of silence and immobility, she opens the window and juts out her head, like a dog does. I can't see if her tongue is fapping in the wind. When I pull into her apartment complex, she doesn't direct me verbally. She lifts a hand weakly and vaguely gestures this way, then that, like a mute and soused queen. We fnd her building and she pulls a twenty from her purse. "You deserve this," she says. It's my biggest tip yet. After pulling away and rounding a corner, I stop the car and walk to the passenger side. It's plastered in chunky vomit. Where did it all come from? If I were to describe her puking style, I'd call it ladylike. Nevertheless, the volume is impressive. No one will get in my car now, so I take it home and give it a hemilateral car wash. Revenue time lost: 30 minutes. When I head out again, I notice her phone on the foor. Ride Me Diary of a Lyft and Uber driver By Joey Harrison The drunken Belgian can't control his word- producing muscles. "What's your address, Jacques?" one of his friends asks. "Sehhh-bin." "Seven what?" "Meep meep meep." His friends ask for his phone and they call — and wake — one of their mutual friends for the address. On the long ride there, Jacques leans and swivels in his seat like Stevie Wonder at the piano. He commandeers my radio and cranks the volume. He stretches his head out the rolled-down window. (Please, God, no more puking.) When we arrive, I help him out of the car and steady him as he makes his way to the door. But he's got a hundred pounds on me, so my assistance is mostly show. Then he gestures for a hug. Then another. And another. Much later, when I'm back home and gathering my junk from the car, I see his phone on the foor. The next day, Jacques' wife contacts me and offers a generous cash gift to make the long drive to their house and deliver it. Dear drunk people: Duct-tape your phones to your arm. The passenger is in his driveway with a jumble of packing crates and a cello in a hardshell case. His name, in black marker, is visible. Hey, it's Ben Sollee! He and a drummer pal with a special cymbal suitcase are off to Montana for a show. Bree is headed to her job at Brownie's the Shed. Just the night before, I had a pickup there. The guy was a "tardy show" — someone who takes too long to emerge from the pickup location. Tardy shows are annoying. When he came out of the bar, he gave me the fnger — the "just a minute" index fnger. Then he strode over to a big- wheeled pickup and opened the passenger door. Inside was a young woman with long, copper-colored hair. He tugged at her arm. She pulled it back. Then he got more forceful, and she resisted more forcefully. Their tug-of-war went on for another fve minutes. I thought: Do I need to call the police? Finally, with a frm grip, he extracted her from the truck and coaxed her into the back seat of my car. I glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. She was silent and glum. I tell this story to Bree. She says she waited on them last night. The girl, she tells me, had been trying to get different guys in the bar to make out with her. Bree had heard all about the scene in the pickup from the truck's owner, a friend of hers. He told Bree the girl had tried to take his gun out of the glove box. I assemble the narrative components in my mind — drunk girl, jealous boyfriend, a gun — and consider how the scene could have unfolded just a little differently, right there on the wide screen of my little car. I learn that the two young women I've picked up are music students at the university. "Hey," I say, "do you know Ben Sollee?" Unison shrieks and an omigod. They are big, big fans and have seen him perform many times. They tell me everything they know about him, and then I pull out my trump card. "I took him to the airport," I say. They cannot believe it. I lie and tell the slightly more excitable rider that Sollee sat in the same seat she's in. That could have been a bad move, I realize. What if she had insisted on taking the seat with her? Luckily she's content to sit where he sat so recently that some of his DNA could very possibly be clinging to her jeans. "Derek?" I say to the guy who just got in the front seat. "That's me," he says. During the drive, he mentions several times to someone on his phone that he's taking a Lyft. But this is an Uber ride. Maybe he uses the words interchangeably. Or maybe he's just confused. The third time he says it, I say, casually, "You know this is an Uber ride, right?" "No, I called Lyft." We start sorting it out together. Turns out that two guys, both named Derek, requested rides from the same bar, at the same time, one on Lyft, the other on Uber, and both connected with a driver who owns a red subcompact. What are the odds? How can I guard against this sort of foul-up in the future? I'm thinking that maybe it's time for retina scans. Or cheek swabs. Something a little more certain than frst names. I head to Captain's Quarters for a pickup. A group of college guys and their dates are clustered by the front door. Surely they're not planning to squeeze into my Honda subcompact, are they? By the looks of it, they collectively exceed the available cubic footage. They move toward my car as a group, and I ask if they've got another car coming. Nope. Then, one by one, they insert themselves into the tiny space. One, two, three, four, fve, six, seven, eight of 'em. We're heading to the Galt House, a nine-mile ride. I make an executive decision to take surface streets the whole way. This is a trim group, but the collective human weight has got to exceed a half-ton, and I want to take the turns slowly. Just before we arrive, I ask if I can flm them as they emerge from my little clown car. I'll need some documentation when I write to Guinness World Records. *Names and identifying details changed throughout