While I knew I would be able to work while I was away, thanks to the wonderful world of telecommunications, I realized I still needed a shit ton of money in not a lot of time.
Enter Uber.
I had friends that between jobs drove around the Big Easy for them. Since I was used to long hauls as one of the jobs was being a disaster response “trucker,” I figured this hustle would be just as good as any. If Nikola Tesla could dig ditches to fund his projects, surely I could drive around tourists.
Since my current whip was purchased during the second Bush administration, it did not meet the company’s rigid criteria of it being 10 model years or less. Luckily for me, Hertz was running a program where one could rent a vehicle and specifically use it to Uber. It would cost about 25% of the earnings, but it was better than 100% of nothing.
My first rider was someone I picked up as soon as I turned on the app for my maiden voyage as a driver. He was a young African American man in Jefferson Parish that was without a car that I dropped off for lunch at a sandwich shop on Veterans Memorial Highway. I thanked him for being my first patron. He looked perplexed as he got out and shut the door.
In the ensuing four months, I would pick up roughly 600 people. I would drive seven days a week, from 8 am until 12 pm, stop somewhere and eat my packed lunch, and then would drive for another eight to nine hours. I made sure to curb my time at around 10 pm so as to avoid any shenanigans of those enjoying New Orleans a little too much.
One of the things that I appreciated most about driving was the fact that being in an international city; I would be able to get intel from my riders that were willing to share about their homes. A pair of Kiwis suggested I try a vineyard outside of Auckland. A man from Adelaide, after one to five too many G and T’s, made me promise him I would go to the central market and get a porchetta sandwich. And I met one lovely young lady from Warsaw that told me all about her home town, but that is not where our story would end.
Yet, despite my turning into a pumpkin at 10 pm, I pulled over twice for people needing to vomit. I picked up a hooker heading to one of her long term Johns. I picked up nurses both heading to and coming back from the night shift. Students heading home from class. Students at my Alma Mater heading to their sugar daddies. Students after a date that evidently went well as fellatio was performed in the back seat. I had my share of strippers, drug seekers, drug users, those high, drunk, and everywhere in between.
One man was thrown into my backseat horizontally by his friends on a Tuesday night at 7 pm. They told me to get him to their hotel as he was obviously done drinking while they were not. As I drove, I checked the rearview to make sure that this prostrate rider was still breathing, but not heaving. As we arrived at the hotel, I began wondering what I was going to do to get him out, pondering where and when does the responsibility of an Uber driver end? As I applied the brakes and put the car in park, faster than I could turn around, he sat bolt upright, opened the door, and like a drunken Lazarus miraculously risen from the dead, sauntered out into the lobby.
But in my hundreds of experiences of both the profound and the profane, there was one group of riders that would forever etch this experience in my mind. A group of middle-aged mothers, coming from one of the Carolinas to New Orleans for a girls’ weekend, decided I was to be their confessor of depraved debauchery. Without any indication of interest on my part, these five women went on to describe what could only be believed as a Penthouse Forum letter come to life. These women, with their husbands and children resting comfortably in their beds back home, decided that they were going to push the envelope as only this original sin city would allow. In New Orleans, there is a particular club that caters to a certain “adventurous” clientele. This establishment is known as Colette’s and is a swingers club. These five women shared the countless permutations of drinks, drugs, positions, toys, and the like that not only filled their evening but also their every orifice. They had sex with each other; they had sex with other patrons; they had sex with each other while having sex with other patrons. While in mid-sentence as we approached the airport about how she was being triple-teamed by a group of, and I am quoting here, “hung studs,” her phone rang. As soon as she saw who it was, she took a breath and answered. Like some sort of evil spell had been broken, in a saccharine tone, she replied, “Oh hi, sweety. Yes, mommy is on her way back home.” She and the rest of her partners in sex and crime, metamorphosed back into the dutiful mothers and wives as they all started following suit and calling their loved ones. As I dropped them off at the airport, I had a new appreciation for the vicissitudes of human nature. One of which I would become more acquainted on this journey.
