drove 12 hours. sorta cuz i needed to. sorta cuz i could.
maybe this is how it is with you too, but even when i don’t have any responsibilities, there’s still a major tug of war in my head between the things i wanna do and the things i gotta do.
i want to drive uber every day. i was obsessed when i began 10 years ago. im still obsessed now.
i wear copper-lined fingerless gloves to help heal my occasionally pained hands. and like a baseball pitcher, i take days off to rest my bones.
drove 12 hours today because it was 12 hours of pain-free joy.
they were all long trips, each one longer than the last, from far on this side of LA to way east of it.
took an 82 year-old man from a hospital near long beach to an inglewood funeral home, and i got his phone number because i need him on my dumb podcast, the second love of my life.
that thing is my demanding young wife who asks me to be home tuesdays and wednesdays to deliver our weekly baby.
my third wife is the rock ‘n’ roll i am blessed to be able to write.
this old man had so much life in him. mostly Black, the rest Cherokee. from miami but moved to LA in the ’50s.
he said Blacks back then werent allowed to have any good jobs so he was a janitor for a while and when the owners of nate and als found out he knew how to cook kosher they hired him.
how did you learn to do that?
boy, even back then florida was full of Jews. i came here knowin’ how to cook that food.
i then took a truck driver from LAX to his recently repaired 18-wheeler way out in commerce
every question i asked returned a better, wilder answer
what made you become a truck driver?
got thrown in jail and no one else would hire a felon
learn anything good in the slammer?
learned how to grow the best damn weed in uruguay
uruguay?
in 2013, they were the first country in the world to legalize it, so i moved down there to do what i was doing in the mafia run warehouses in jersey. but bigger.
was taking a leak at the target in duarte, when i got a lyft ping from the city of hope hospital to take someone to a hotel in el segundo
was hoping it was a lonely nurse.
ended up being an actual angel
a lively german woman who could talk and talk and talk.
she flies from bavaria to europe, australia, and the states delivering life saving stem cells in a small blue insulated container that could easily be confused as her lunch.
her job is twofold: make sure the thing gets to the hospital in 72 hours (usually takes just 48), and make sure it stays cold. easy-peasy.
i told her she has good mojo and asked if there was a german word for mojo. she said nine.
what about juju? also, nine.
sometimes she gets to spend a day or two in the city to chill, but usually she flies back the next day to pick up another box of stem cells to take to the next country and save the next persons life. the life is saved 80% of the time.
shes paid well, makes her own schedule and gets to keep the frequent flyer miles.
i said i’ve never had a saint in my car before. please put in a good word to the man upstairs bc i could use it.
she said, what? you’re such a nice young man. you call your mother, you read the bible, you drive people so far with such ease, and you listen so well. i can tell you care. why do you feel you’re bad?
im not that young anna, and im not that good. one of my biggest regrets is that i broke someones heart who was probably also, like you, an angel, and when she reports back, im in deep trouble.
anna chuckled and took a sip out of her water bottle.
no really, what did you do to her?
i made her cry. i wooed her. i whispered all these things all night under the streetlights in my car. and then when she fell in love, i broke up with her.
but why anthony?
because i knew i wasn’t good enough for her. i wanted a slut. i wanted someone who would dress up like a hooker and do drugs with me and invite other women home and play outrageous games and drink and pass out and — all the things she was not. i didnt want to change her, because she was pure, but every date we went on i corrupted her more and more. i had to stop it. id never met anyone so truly… holy. so when you report in with the boss, please tell him im sorry and ive been trying to make up for it.
anna asked, what do you think the odds are we can get to el segundo in time for the sunset?
relieved to change the subject, i glanced at the eta on my phone, asked siri when sunset was, and stepped on it.
thanks to waze, the car pool lane, and bypassing the 101/110 interchange by zigzagging through dtla, we made it to the 105/405 with 20 minutes to spare.
so i said, anna i never do this. ever. but el segundo is no place for a saint to take in her first LA sunset of the year
how about we drop your bags off at your hotel front desk, and i take you to manhattan beach pier 12 minutes away? on me.