28 Feb UBER – BEGINNER by Danton Stone

UBER-BEGINNER

By Danton Stone

A man is sitting on the curb holding a towel to his ear. A policeman is standing over him taking his statement. The man is looking up at the policeman. It’s four fifteen-yesterday morning.  The curb sitting man is thinking out loud, moving his lips. ”I have a wife, but she doesn’t live with me, but I have a dog, a house, and a neighborhood. Also, a knife.”

The policeman asks him to speak up.

“This is not an emergency. Please don’t call EMT. It’s just an ear. These aren’t my brains spilling out into the towel. You know, if an ambulance comes to get me, we’re going to be taken to Saint Joseph’s.  In Burbank?  Oh, please. How much is that going to run me?”

The man on the curb looks at the policeman. The policeman looks at the man. And says:  “That’s probably a grand, or, at least nine hundred dollars.

“ I’ll keep the pressure on it.” The man winced.

“ You should get looked at.”

The sitting on the curb man said nothing.

“ Got any family? Wife? Kids?”

“ Sure. Former wife, college-aged daughter”

“Well,“ said the cop. The cop looks away. He looks at a parking meter. He looks at a building. He looks at another person, about twenty yards away. Then he looks back at the man.

“You’d insist that they get checked out, right?”

“ Yes, but. You know how hard it is to spend extravagantly on yourself.”

The Officer shrugged. The sitting man breathed in. Made a sound of distress and pushed the towel against his ear. ”Thank you for showing up so promptly, Officer,” he reads the name off his badge. “pronounced…KRAUTHAMMELL?” The Officer gave one quick nod.

   “Here’s my license, registration, yes. I’m Bruce Roseman. Yes, the car is registered to Margaret Nagy, my wife. It’s her car, and I have been using it for work. Yes, I was working tonight, driving. UBER.  This car is an Uber-cab. Second week. Tenth day. First week of night work. I really didn’t see this one coming at all…”

   There is quiet, except for the traffic moving on Riverside, very few cars.

     Officer Krauthammell reaches down to Roseman on the curb, and carefully pulls the towel away from his ear.  He takes a flashlight from his belt and shines it on Roseman’s head. He tells him it is not bleeding; it is just very red there is no blood at all. He writes something down in his notepad.

    Roseman looks up at Krauthammell; “   just got through talking to my daughter, telling my Marie, about how to approach your future, your working life.  She didn’t ask, by the way, this came up, unbidden, over waffles, when I dropped into her mother’s and her house. I just wanted to tell her. So I told her. ‘Marie. don’t pursue money, you should pursue experience.  Find the interesting experience, be open to it, but trust in your self-protective shell. You, me, people like us, have to listen to, like, an, an INNER TUNING FORK will buzz..…  So … you take risks, YES, but YOU STAY ALERT.  To your World. To the world around you.‘“

Krauthammell said; “Uh Huh”.

“Do As You SAY, NOT As You Do, Dad” She could call me on that, now.”

Krauthammell said, “Hush.”

“I think I thought I would be very right casting for this job. I thought the money would be better. . . but some of the people who need rides at night are not my kind of people. And I signed to drive to Burton Way to pick up a person named…Okay. I get the beep; I see the screen on the app flash and a name. And an address comes up … what’s the name? Why it was TUNA. I drive to Burton Way, and I pick up a guy, a man and his name says Tuna. Tuna says we have a few stops to make. I say okay, fine, he goes on to say: ‘Oh, Driver . . .  take a U-turn at the next corner, and drive me to the cleaners and wait for me to pick up my 401’s and a sports jacket.’ I look carefully, in all directions, and make a U-turn, drive maybe six blocks to The Sunny Day Cleaners, and we get his cleaning, and I wait for five, then he gets back in the car, and says, ‘Okay, now bust a U-turn, here, and drive to Ralph’s on Robertson so I can hop in and buy a barbequed chicken, Okay?’  So I take another careful U-turn and go to Ralphs on Robertson. When he comes back in, he’s already finger eating the chicken from its bag, and he says to me, yes he says again: ‘Okay guy, hang a U-Turn here, and take me back home.’ This time, just after I turned, I looked to see his face in the rearview. Okay? His eyes. His eyeballs rolled back in his head with . . . what? PLEASURE . . . gets to call the shots, and I get to drop him off and begin a new ride when this is over. Pleasure. The Tuna. Who calls, what kind of guy identifies as Tuna? THAT KIND OF GUY.”

Officer Krauthammell has stopped writing in his pad.

“ So tonight?”

“ My wife, Peggy, ex-wife, I mean, Margaret, she gave me the car for the job with the stipulation that I didn’t wreck it, or myself, otherwise ‘NO CAR.’  Marie just listened. Little pitchers have big ears.

“Twenty minutes or I would say, twenty-five minutes ago. I get a beep on my Phone App, and a map leading to a ‘Pin,’ which is a designated direction to an unspecified address to pick up a passenger, and his name on the top left clearly says DAGGER DICK.

“ Now some would take that as a warning. And I think I felt a little bump in my chest; it could have been joy, at getting a new call for a job, it could have been a little arrhythmia but it was only three blocks away, and I wanted the job, I wanted the money, and I pulled up to the pin, which was right on a ‘No Stopping ANYTIME ‘ area on Barham, but I stopped (nobody behind me yet), Yes, on my right, pulling open the door to the passenger seat next to me was, I believe, the man who called himself Dagger Dick. And two other guys, no three other guys sort of swarmed into the back seat.

“And having let them all in . . . having opened the door and let them all take their seats, I swiped the screen to ‘Begin The Ride,’ and the destination came up for Pasadena. I honestly thought to myself ‘Oh, I bet that’s at least a twelve dollar ride” . . . good money, here, ignore the vibe, the four guys, the two white, two black guys who smelled of refer, who started hissing at each other within two minutes, and my guts churned, and I thought I might say something like, ‘ I’m so sorry, this is so awful, but I have to have a really urgent bowel movement guys, so we have to cancel the ride.’ But then I thought, they’d just direct me to a gas station, and say use the head and we’ll watch your car, buddy.’ And they are really having words with each other now, and the voices are raising, and the heat is steaming up the little I’m not sure, maybe a drug deal? Maybe a transaction that involved some dashed expectation? Well, I heard the phrase ‘ Make My Money Right, Bitch,’  and the guy, the white guy in the front flicked his left hand across the back of my head, and popped the fellow behind the Driver’s seat, behind me.

“The three of them started throwing punches, and fists were flying, and I caught this shot on my head, and my right ear, and I was supposed to merge onto the 134th about right now. I am in the lane on Riverside where you turn left in the middle of the block with no left turn light. I had the presence of mind to check my right side and slide to the curb. And stop the car.  I went all Gandhi, then. I went passive. I shut down. I went limp, I played dead. Slumped in my seat. My ear felt shinning, or on fire, or just stinging with blood. One of the guys in the back, breathing hard, said, ‘Fuck it y’all. Let’s get out of the man’s car, this is his car.’

“I sat there, here; where I’m parked and the doors opened and then I heard three doors go slam, slam, slam.

“I would rather my wife, and Marie not knows this happened. They’ll make me quit.  I want to try again, tomorrow. I like my work. Any job has its dangers. And going to work, starting a new job all the time makes me think that I’m friendly with the idea of dying. Not like I want to die, but like maybe when, and if we do die we become part of the snow, or the air, or the dog shit that gets between the rubbers in my go-to-work-shoes. But this is goodness. This is knowledge. This is another day to – another day IN WHICH TO EXCEL.”

 Krauthammel thinks that this man is suffering from anxiety.  He thinks things will get worse before they get better. He almost gives the man his own cell phone number, but he does not. That would be too much. And he doesn’t want to catch what this man has by listening to him, even for another minute. So he looks at a sign on Riverside. Those days it was Taco Tango Mango. And to himself, he says the words, ”Bango Bango.”