Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Lord of the Strippers
A true story about a decidedly not-true story
He's been in the car all of ten seconds before he says, "I've got to get home. There are three strippers coming over to my house solely because they're horny."
I just nod and go, "Okay, dude."
He says, "I tried to say no, like, four times, but they just kept insisting."
If any fading ember of me still accepted the possibility that his story was true, it is extinguished by the attempted humblebrag meant to frame the situation as an inconvenience.
“Ah,” I reply, “I see…”
He keeps going. "I was hanging out with this one stripper and she was talking to her stripper friends and they were like, 'We've got to go find some guys tonight,' and she was like, 'I'm hanging out with Cody!' and they were like, 'Ohh, we should all go hang out with Cody!' and I’m like, 'Fuuuuck.'"
I’m not sure why Cody is hellbent on impressing a rideshare driver with his allegedly active sex life, but it’s not working. It's a twenty-minute drive and he spends the whole time trying to play up his fabled impending orgy as the kind of boring crap he always has to deal with. But anyone with a modicum of life experience and two neurons of social intelligence knows that if somebody can't stop telling you how much money they make, they probably don't make as much as they're saying. If they keep talking about how smart they are, they're insecure about their intelligence. And if they go on at length about their sexual dynamism...
"My friend and I used to go to the strip club a couple times a week just to hang out—we'd never even give them money—but every time, there'd be like two or three strippers who wanted to come home with us. We didn't even have any drugs or alcohol at home, but they'd bring all that stuff."
He's in his mid-twenties but he sounds like a fourteen-year-old who's never kissed a girl trying to brag about a steamy, imaginary spring break to blow the minds of his virginal schoolmates. Though even a fourteen-year-old might recognize that, if you're trying to impress a rideshare driver (or a server, or a bartender, or a stripper for that matter), bragging that you don't tip is probably a misstep. It also becomes comical pretty quickly that it’s always "strippers"—never "women" or "chicks", never a bartender or a florist or a district attorney.
Few people are this bad at lying, such poor judges of human behavior that they fail to recognize that, regardless of what your life is like, if you find aspects of it exhausting and tedious, you don't spend twenty minutes flaunting those aspects to the first person stuck listening to you. I think maybe he’s trying to bait me into hanging out with him, thinking, I don’t want to go home to my empty house. Maybe if I convince my driver there are three horny strippers coming over, he’ll hang out with me. Well, no thanks, bud. Not for ten strippers, and a florist, and a district attorney. You have fun.
He says he's been awake for 36 hours because of all these strippers who are keeping him awake. I was awake for 36 hours once. If I had taken a rideshare on that day, the driver would have had trouble getting a word out of me. I would have stared at the floor and said nothing, and probably fallen asleep to the point that he'd have to shake me awake when he got me where I was going. I’ve also known a few women who have worked as exotic dancers, and it's tough to picture any of them caught dead with this loser, but I don't tell him that. I just choke back laughter each time he talks and take notes in my head so I can tell the story later.
Perhaps my lack of awe has him toying with the idea that I'm prudish, and maybe that's why he keeps bouncing back and forth between bragging and lamenting. At one point he says, "I should grow up. But hey, you're only in your twenties once." I tell him, "I've heard thirty is the new twenty, so you might actually still be a teenager," but he doesn't process that I'm insulting him.
As the ride nears its end, he says, "They're probably at my house already, drinking all my booze. Damn it." As though this guy would care if he got to hang out with three attractive women and all it cost him was a bit of booze.
Still, it's pretty funny when, a moment after he says it, we pull up to a completely dark house without a car in sight on the whole block.
"Hey, you lucked out!" I tell him with feigned excitement. "Nobody showed!"
He gets out, insisting they'll be here any minute. And in his vivid, drunken dreams, maybe they will be.
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.