Somewhere along the line, perhaps in a past life, I signed up to be a driver. I’ve driven across the U.S.A. about five different ways. I’ve even driven in Mexico without a passport. One could say I enjoy driving.

My first commercial driving job was in a city in the southeast known for blues music and BBQ. Living in LA did not turn out as I planned, and I caught a charge which resulted in one year of federal probation. So what does one do on federal probation? Naturally, get job driving a sixteen-seater pedicab. One of those “pedal taverns.” People sit on it and pedal while they drink. I steer the thing and take them around town from bar to bar.

Within my first week of work, I broke the garage door and had to pay my boss back which resulted in me receiving a speeding ticket on the way to the garage to let the repairmen in the building. A typical tour was two-hours long. A group would meet at “home location” and set off from there. There were two types of tours, a private party and a ‘mix and mingle.’ The mix and mingle were a conglomeration of smaller groups and singles in hopes to sell out the bike. Mix tours required me to act as a social glue to make the ride go smoothly.

We, the tour guides, were responsible for providing: a cooler, ice, and a Bluetooth speaker.

My first ride during training, the song on the Bluetooth speaker was ‘Back that Azz up’ by Juvenile, and one man fell off the bike while doing pull-ups on the handlebars.

My first night alone: a family of 30 something people rented two bikes to themselves. Me and the driver of their second bike raced the bikes downtown. The woman in the middle of the aisle grabbed my head and poured some Jose Cuervo in my mouth while I was driving. They also had a shirtless dance party in the street, pure debauchery. That didn’t scare me one bit. I stayed on with this job until the pandemic shut it down.

There were three rules to this job:

one: no minors under 16

two: if anyone pukes the ride is over

three: no glass.

One of the two times I allowed children under 16 ride the bike, the other family on board had a person throw up.

There I was, with two rules broken and not much time before my next tour. What did we do? We had somebody call an Uber for the person who puked, dropped the family with the kids (who were absolutely terrified by the way) off somewhere safe, and I made it back to the bar for the next tour with barely any time to spare. I never got caught and I never heard a word about it.

The second time I let kids on was much more innocuous, it was a mid-afternoon tour and I had two people on the bike. The Dad paid me $100 cash to just hop on with his family and ride around. I don’t even think they drank. The dad worked for a railroad and hipped me to the goings-on of the rail industry.

One of my favorite tours was this group of Nepalese people. They were really into the idea of pedaling. I took them down a very steep hill, and they challenged me to find an even steeper hill for them to pedal up. I didn’t even push the battery engine pedal those fuckers wanted a workout. They also blasted Nepalese rap, had me drink a beer with them, bought me a slice of cheesecake, and tipped graciously. The perfect tour honestly.

Another great night was the group who made me take the bike on an overpass. We had two fixed routes and one “freestyle” route designed to work with our bar partners. For some reason this group of older folks had touched my heart enough to give them the tour they really wanted. The city we were in has serious historical significance for black culture and its impact in America.
Unfortunately, this group struggled with the physical act of pedaling. Most tours were not like the Nepalese group. A typical tour involved the heaviest person immediately sitting on the bench with no pedals. The rest of the tour consisted of a great deal of whining from those who had to pedal. They would complain, “We really have to pedal?!”
Visiting their old neighborhood required a significant amount of pedaling and I think the youngest person in this group was maybe forty years old. We struggled but we made it. We even got to see some fireworks too, it was a very special tour which I hope they remember just as much as I do.

By this point in my job-hopping career, this was job number twenty something? Thirty something? I had long since detached my allegiance to the policies and procedures and replaced my attachment to giving the customer an unforgettable experience.
My mentality was, “fuck this company, love the people.”
I practiced what I preached.

I remember running every stop sign and traffic light downtown yelling “NO COP NO STOP!” One time we even got pulled over on the bike. One of the passengers dropped a wallet and the officer had picked it up and returned it. The horror.

There were two locations in town where we would give tours, downtown and midtown. Midtown tours were rather boring because midtown was an old neighborhood with two mini-entertainment districts and a couple of dives scattered in between. We did have to take the bike on a main road to go between the districts, and the local traffic loved us. Most of the tours in midtown were tame. At the time, I was dating a girl who worked in midtown. I picked her up from work one night in the middle of a tour. She rode back with me and the group I was with. When we broke up, I told one tour group to go in and say hi, and she did not like that one bit. I’m sorry.

Still sorry about how my behavior was with her. She deserved better, but hey, live and learn.

The notable events in midtown: 8 ball and MJG performed at the bar we stored the bikes at, and they completely blocked the street. I couldn’t park the bike or get my car because their Pimpala was double parked. There was no access to the garage. I joked that one day I will “sink the 8 ball” as revenge. I like their music.

On another midtown night a tour from Indiana blessed my seats. I dropped them off at this bar called the Slider Inn. I parked the bike and blocked the owner of the Slider Inn from pulling his U-Haul out. He gruffly asked me to move it, I obliged. The tour overheard the way he talked to me, causing one member of the tour group to jump on the back of his U-Haul and ride it like a train car in a Broadway production.

The train car incident sparked an entire weekend’s worth of phone calls, text messages, and meetings. U-Haul guy didn’t just own Slider Inn, he owned several restaurants, and terminated his relationship with our bike company.

Six months later I ended up working at one of his bars and he had no clue who I was.

During a Christmas parade with the bikes, I got Whiteclaw wasted while throwing beads at people. I let some total stranger hop on and ride with us. My bosses were looking at me like I was nuts, but I made him sign a waiver and they allowed it. We ended up doing an escape room and I broke two of the puzzles, it was a great time. Halloween I had some people dressed up like superheroes come on, one tour I had a bunch of moms get on and ask me to stop at their hotel and they all came out dressed like Elvis.

One tour we were driving down this hill downtown and we saw another bike so all the people were waving their hands out for hi-fives with the other bike. Come to find out the other bike had ran over a woman’s leg, and the cops were there. The woman who had her leg ran over had a warrant out for her arrest, and apparently tried to start a fight across the bike which was why she fell off in the first place. Just another day in the hood.

One particularly disturbing ride I gave was during a Sunday afternoon. The group was a small wedding party and they kicked off the tour by playing Luther Ingram’s, ‘if loving you is wrong I don’t wanna be right.’ The punchline was, the man on the tour had married his cousin. I think someone’s parent had recently passed away, the parent was the only person standing in the way of their union. The second I found out I shuddered and held my breath the rest of the ride. Uncomfortable.

I’ll leave it here: The last night I worked was the night before the big shutdown. COVID was like a brand new thing and we were doing a “soft open” This meant hand sanitizer being offered often, face masks, we were testing protective shields on some of the bikes for social distancing. The group of moms I drove were giving me over-the-pants-hand jobs, and at the end one shared her coke spoon with me. Too much, even for me.

At the end of the rides, I realized I don’t like being touched by strangers. The fantasy of being a sex worker or stripper of any kind was not in the cards for me. I clashed with the operations manager a lot, and the next day I quit when he tried to start an argument with me about something he did not communicate.

Most people I knew did not respect me whatsoever for working that job, I was viewed as a bit of a drunk, a bit of a bum, a little too wild. I was in community college at the time, it was an experience for sure.

I would never do it again.