Trying Times

In a stroke of good fortune, I wasn't the only limousine that our Country-Club Rappers had engaged for the night. There were two of us, from different companies. And the really good news was that the other driver was a very cool dude, an older guy who'd been around the business for way longer than me.

Guys like Robert have seen it all. Nothing gets to them. A few punk-arsed show-offs trying to impress the girls make no impression whatsoever, and neither do the girls. Watching him operate was a thing of beauty. When someone put their drink on the trunk he was there lifting it off - not saying anything, but reprimanding with his action. If one of the guys started doing something truly stupid, you could feel Robert's power from a distance, and the kid would stop. He was a kind of bouncer/enforcer...but one who magically acted from a distance, like he had a magnetic super-power that alerted dumb drunks that they were behaving like jackarses.

Eventually we went in convoy to Ybor City, to the most popular club there. Two stretched limousines stopped on 7th Ave will block traffic, so we tried to get the drunks out and ourselves moving as quickly as possible. But no, these dopey kids literally stopped as a group in the middle of the road, lighting cigarettes, flipping cars the bird, resisting all opportunities to exhibit civilized behaviour. The cops had seen enough of this after a few minutes and moved everyone on - including Robert and me - much to my relief.

By now it's 11:30 pm, but there's not time to slack. Instead, it's time to clean. Of course these numbskulls have made a maximum amount of mess in the back of the limo. I often wonder why it is that people so often feel the need to do this. They wouldn't do it in their own home, or their own car...or perhaps they would. Apparently part of the stretched limo experience is to create and wallow in a dumpster. I look at the soaked napkins, spilled drinks, trash everywhere, bottle-tops inserted all-over and wonder why they do this kind of willful destruction.

It takes me an hour to clean up.

I buy us some coffee and a sandwich from the gas station in which we're parked.

We chat.

Another limo comes along, but the driver's not as nice company as Robert, so I withdraw to the airconditioned car for a while.

Around 1:30 I get a phone call, and it's not my people. It's The Boss.



Havana pic from here [link]

Guardhouse Gangstas

All of which set me up for a surprise.

When I pulled up in the ten-passenger stretch at a few minutes before 10:00 pm, a knot of people was there already, and my, weren't they dressed!

My guess is that he had turned twenty-five, give or take, and as suspected, the birthday boy had organized the night. He and his buddies were in the modern young man's idea of Dressed Up. To my eyes it looked somewhere between late Jimmy Durante and early Groucho Marx, but what do I know? White ties and black shirts come and go in the fashion world like transmissions on a Cadillac.

But back to the business. I try, always, to start off the same way with every new customer. I'm polite, friendly and deferential. This only works with people who understand that this is a dance, and that I'm offering to lead.

I can help you negotiate this, if you put your arm out...like so...and follow these simple steps. I want you to succeed, young man, but you have to play along. We don't know each other yet, but if you trust, your life will be easier. For at lest the next six hours.

Who was I kidding?

A guy of twenty-five is at the top of his ego/responsibility ratio and reacted accordingly. After loading the car with booze, we hung around waiting for all the partiers to feature. Of course, we weren't going anywhere until the magic cash crossed my palms, but he strung it out. That's fine by me. Had he not paid, I'd be happy to drive off.

Whilst we sat around for forty-five minutes, I watched these guys. They were all from pretty well-off families. Beneath the tough-guy bravado lay an upbringing revolving around a private school education, a childhood in a 4,000 square-foot house on a golf course, and a security gate to keep it safe from bad guys.

And what was their unanimous music of choice? Gangsta. Hard, loud and rotten gangsta. I nearly laughed out loud. These prissy pretty boys with CZ studs and other crap in their ears and Jager shots in their hands fancied themselves urban crusaders.

Golf-Course Gangstas. Security Guard Bad Boys. Limousine Tough Guys.




There's more :-)

Back of the Clock

In our county, bars stop serving at 2:00 am.

Last drinks are drained at 2:30 am.

Everyone's in the limo by 2:45 am. (Fingers crossed.)

We're heading home at 3:00 am.

Someone wants food at 3:05 am.

Stop at Taco Bell at 3:20 am.

Leave Taco Bell at 3:45 am.

Last drop at 4:20 am.

Now is when I gas up, park-up, clean up, wash up, tidy up and lock up.

I might be home in bed by 06:00 am.

Another back of the clock night done.



Night shot from this excellent blog [link]

Puke

The Boss levies a $250.00 puke charge if ever someone loses their dinner in a limousine.

What he withholds from customers is that he doesn't pay for a professional cleaning of the limo. He expects we drivers to make the vomit disappear. Granted, we get the money, so a case could be made for us to encourage drinking to excess and barfing. But closer examination and common sense dictate what a bad deal it is all around.

Contemplating this whole cleaning business, I guess that when chauffeurs drove coaches with real horsepower, they were expected to clean up after the nags. Huh. I wonder.

The normal deal is that when we return a limo to the depot, we clean the interior. Oftentimes it will take an hour or more to ready everything so that the next driver need only add ice and be on his way. As you can imagine, the appeal of this at 5:00 am is limited. But if the car's going out the next (same) day, one has no choice.

Choice, however, is what I offer customers who do upchuck in a limo. This happened a few weeks ago, when the two women in a party of ten both barfed. The both attempted to make the window, and they succeeded to a point.

Naturally, no-one tells the driver that this has occurred. They'll hope I'll miss it, but experience is a valuable commodity. With some people, I check. So it was at 4:00 am that I was running my flashlight over the interior and came across the telltale drips and goops of vomit. Two areas. I pointed this out to the guys, and gave them the choice: You clean it, or I do it for $250.

That's how I came to be watching three drunken bums use six rolls of paper towel and a goodly amount of cleaning product to clean up their chicks' vomit. Just when they thought it was done, I'd point out a chunk or a dribble they'd missed.

How wonderful to see off-duty police officers grovelling.





Vintage Scottish chauffeur from this interesting site [link]

Groups Part 5

We're still forty minutes from home, and the night has taken its toll. After the grease and carbs of the fast food some of the drunks fall asleep, wedged upright, slack-jawed and slack-necked. There might be the odd one or two who share a beer from the bottom of the bar, chatting quietly to each other. But for the most part, the folks are spent.

They've spent their money too. One memorable night in a stretch SUV spanned 7:00 pm to 5:00 am. There's a world in one night on a night like that, and a world of money, too. The limo was well over $1,200. They started with a few hundred dollars worth of booze (and drugs too, I think) and who knows how much they spent in the bars, clubs and strip joints. I look in the mirror as I ponder this. I see twelve people who just proved that money does not buy happiness.

That's what I saw, but what I heard was the sound of kissing. In the seat directly behind me was the host of that particular night, who was noisily pashing his squeeze. The divider was down, part of a making-out-in-front-of-the-driver fantasy, presumably. His collection of friends tended to the rougher end of the spectrum. His squeeze, for instance, was a leggy blonde in her twenties, who turned out to be a stripper. She stripped at our local be-poled hotspot, paying her college tuition with the proceeds. That makes her a student with a part-time job, I guess.

I can't quite remember how it started, but the context of an out-and-out catfight in a limousine at 4:30 in the morning doesn't matter much. The stripper - sorry, student - took a quick powerful verbal jab from one of the other girls who said that she was letting the female side down by taking her kit off for money. She responded by allowing that stripping was okay, feminism-wise, because she had control. Oh, and by the way, the other girl would do it too if she had nicer tits and lost thirty pounds.

It was on. There were no actual real-life punches thrown, not that it mattered. The blood drawn was figurative, which can be worse than bleeding Shakespearean claret. The stripper, sorry, student, was louder and more strident in defense of both her moral and bodily superiority. The feminist made up for lack of volume with reinforcements, all the other women. They set about chopping up their target with finely honed insults backed up with dirty low blows.

The men had melted into the carpet. Not a peep. Not that I blame them. This was World Championship Catfighting that put feral cats to shame. Cats have only claws and teeth; these girls had verbal nuclear devices. Closing in on the house we left ten hours before, everyone had dished out as much punishment as they had energy for. One of them called for a truce, which resulted in a sullen silence for the last few minutes of their night. The stripper apologised for calling the other girl fat. The other girl apologised for criticizing the stripper's augmented breasts.

Stopping (at last) in front of the house, I have yet to see that many people disembark so quickly. They were all out and walking before I could put the beast in Park, open my door and walk to the rear to open theirs. They scuttled away in an air of sour booze and bad temper. Except for the host. He handed me a C-Note, and sped off in his Porsche with the stripper, looking to find some breakfast.




Photo from here.[link]

Also published here. [link]

Venezuela

This weekend is awful for anyone flying from the east coast of the US to anywhere else. Snow in the form of blizzards shut airports from Washington DC (Dulles and Reagan National) to Boston Logan. The knock-on effect has been awesome in its scale.

Weather is one thing, but political stuff-ups are another. Planning to collect a customer from Miami International last night, I lobbed in the carpark at 8:30 for his 8:15 pm scheduled arrival. It always take a minimum of thirty minutes to clear immigration and customs at MIA, so I was in good time.

Too good a time, as the monitors now showed the flight from Venezuela arriving at 10:30 pm. Great. Two hours and fifteen minutes late.

My natural instinct is to work forward to get a rough idea of my "get to bed" hour. If he arrives at 10:30, thirty minutes for I and C, fifteen minutes faffing around getting to the car, three and a half hours to his house, get gas, clean interior of limo, return limo, drive home. 04:30. Yet more good news.

My customer was in decent humour, and we chatted about his day.

"Everything is rotten in Venezuela" he said, a native himself and so qualified to talk. "Nobody cares. It's a ruin".

After mulling on that for the drive back, my 4:30 am crawl into bed didn't seem so bad.

Late night chat

At 4:00 am this morning:

Does that include your tip?

No sir, it does not.

So you're telling me it doesn't include the tip?

That's correct, Todd.

I need to tip you then?

Only if you think my service merits it.

Oh. Yes. You're right. Here's fifty bucks. Are we good?

Thank you very much, that's very generous.





I'd like to see the server's reaction to a 3.5% tip next time he sups in a restaurant.

7-Eleven

Becoming a connoisseur of gas stations is one more benefit of driving limousines. Not just gas stations, but the convenience stores that accompany them are part of my extensive experience. Circle K, On the Run, am/pm; I have shopped and bought coffee in them all. The King of the Conveniences (here in the United States) is 7-Eleven, the store with the opening hours right in the name.

The green and red monster is now my service station of choice, because they seem to have the cheapest gasoline. I guess they have buying power over the distributors, being as big as they are, but it might also be that the fuel is a way to get you into their stores. The gas is a loss-leader so they can sell you lots of other crap.

And crap it is. My observation of my fellow 7-Eleven customer is that they are in a hurry, they smoke, they drink and they eat a rotten diet. We need to face facts and note that there is nothing - not one thing - in those stores that could be considered a nutritious foodstuff. It's all high-calorie, high fat, high carb, low end of the food-chain junk. And you have to line up to get some.

Horrible working hours, long days and an inability to eat on the job all make for some bad eating habits. That's my excuse for past explorations into the nether world of convenience store food, an apt description, because I am certain that much of the protein comes from the nether regions of animals. But I have forsworn that stuff in the interests of living beyond fifty.

The inescapable truth is this: Poor people pay the most for the worst food. That's just the way it is.




Also published here. [link]