Episode 7: The same driver keeps taking me home at night even though I never once put in my address Titelbild

Episode 7: The same driver keeps taking me home at night even though I never once put in my address

Episode 7: The same driver keeps taking me home at night even though I never once put in my address

Jetzt kostenlos hören, ohne Abo

Details anzeigen
Submitted by Dee — Sacramento, California. 29. I need to say up front that I have never memorized a single one of my drivers' faces, and I think that is the whole problem. I bartend downtown. I close four or five nights a week, and I am not driving myself anywhere at two in the morning, so I take a car home. You get in, you say hey, you put your head against the window. I could not pick any of them out of a lineup. That is not a complaint. That is just how the back seat works. You are a body being moved from one place to another, and nobody looks at a body. There was a phone charger left in the back seat of one of the cars. A white one, the cheap braided kind, coiled on the middle cushion with the end tucked under the seatbelt so it would not slide onto the floor. I noticed it because I am always down to eight percent by close, and I plug in without asking anymore, the way you would use a napkin at a diner. Every car has one now. I plugged in, I watched the little lightning bolt come up, and I let my eyes go. Here is the part I did not think about for almost a year. One night my phone was dead. Not low. Dead, black, would not even show the charging screen when I pressed it. So I could not open the app. I could not call anyone. I stood on the curb outside the bar with my coat over my arm, doing the math on walking forty minutes, and a car slid up to the hydrant with the window already down. The guy leaned over and said, you getting in. Not a question, the way he said it. I was so tired I just got in. I plugged my dead phone into that white charger and I went home and I did not think about it again. Except I stopped booking rides after that. I want to be honest about how ordinary it felt. My phone would be dead, or nearly, and the car would already be at the curb when I came out, and I would get in and plug in and close my eyes, and I would wake up in front of my own building on Q Street with the engine running. I never gave him the address. I never gave him anything. For months I told myself it was the app, that it remembered, that these things sync. My phone was off. There was nothing to sync. Two weeks ago I finally looked at the charger while I was plugging in. The cord had a mark near the end, a little crescent where the rubber was chewed, and I knew that mark. My dog did that when he was a puppy, four years ago, before I gave him to my sister. I lost that charger in a car a long time ago and never thought about it once. I held it up and I said, quiet, this is mine. I asked him how he had it. And he did not turn around. He looked at me in the mirror, both hands on the wheel, and he said, flat, like he was reading a receipt: you left it the first night. I keep it charged for you. That is all he said. He did not explain it and I did not ask him to. He drove me to Q Street and I got out and I went upstairs and I have not been able to stop hearing the way he said the first night, like there had been a first night, like it was a thing that started on purpose and he had been keeping the days. I still take that car home. I want you to understand that I do not have another way. My phone dies, the car is there, I get in. I have thought about walking. I have thought about a lot of things. So this is really for you, whoever is listening to this on your own drive home. The next time you are standing on a curb with a dead phone in your hand and a car you did not call slows down and the window is already down — I need you to think, before you get in, about who already knows you will.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Noch keine Rezensionen vorhanden