I’ve always enjoyed driving. I’ve driven across the U.S.A. about five different ways. I’ve driven in all but ten states, I’ve even driven in Mexico without a passport.

Somewhere along the line, perhaps in a past life, I signed up to be a driver. My first commercial driving job was in a city in the southeast known for blues music and BBQ.

I had failed hard at living in LA, caught a charge resulting in one year of federal probation, and moved back in with my Dad. Naturally, I got a job driving a sixteen-seater pedicab. One of those pedal taverns. People sit on it and pedal while they drink and I steer the thing and take them around town from bar to bar.

This job lasted up until COVID.

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.

The gig was set up where people paid for two-hour tours. They’d meet at the one bar on a fairly famous street that would let us park our pedal powered monstrosities out back.

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

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.

Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t.

Those tours required me to act as a social glue to make the ride go smoothly.

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 this family of 30 something people rented two bikes to themselves. We were racing 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, there were shirtless dance parties in the street, pure debauchery. That didn’t scare me one bit. I stayed on with this job for almost a year (COVID truncated that year).

In that year I let two families with children get on the bike. 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 let children on, the other family that was riding had a person throw up.

There I was, with the 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 so they had me take them down a very steep hill, and 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.

One tour I won’t forget was the tour that made me take the bike on an overpass. We had two fixed routes and one “freestyle” route that worked with our bar partners. For some reason this group of older folks had touched my heart enough to give them the tour that they wanted. The city that we were in has serious historical significance for black culture and its impact in America. The problem was the physical act of pedaling. Most tours are not like the Nepalese group. A typical tour involved the heaviest person immediately sitting on the bench in the back that had 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. They were struggling. We made it, and 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. Long has my mentality been, “fuck this company, love these people.” This bike pedaling job was where 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. I was about to shit my pants but turns out one of the passengers had dropped a wallet and the officer had picked it up and returned it.

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 that had some gentrification splattered here and there around it. There were 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 that. Most of the tours in midtown were tame. I was dating a girl who worked in that area, one time I picked her up from work 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 were, one time the group 8 ball and MJG were performing at the bar we store the bikes at, and they completely blocked the street. Which meant I couldn’t get my car either because the Pimpala was double parked. There was no access to the garage, and that was the day they made an enemy out of me. I would joke that one day I will “sink the 8 ball.” I no longer hold any energy towards them, I like their music that’s about it.

The other notable event holds some humor and irony. I had this tour from Indiana, and they were chillin. I dropped them off at this bar called the Slider Inn. I parked the bike in a spot that blocked the owner of the Slider Inn from pulling his U-Haul out. He gruffly asks me to move it, I oblige. The tour comes back on the bike, but they overhear the way that guy was talking to me, so one of the tour group jumps on the back of his U-Haul and rides it like a train car in a Broadway production.

Holy shit if that didn’t spark an entire weekend’s worth of phone calls, text messages, and meetings.

That guy didn’t just own Slider Inn, he owned a pizza place, a few other bars, and he was just fucking done with our bike company.

Six months later I ended up working at Slider Inn and that dude had no clue who I was. But we’ll get to that in another story.

There were other crazy downtown tours, like the Pride Parade was pretty lit, I was in a Christmas parade with the bikes. I got Whiteclaw wasted throwing beads at people and let some total stranger 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 just fucked the whole thing up. I broke like 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 having a great time and 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 just 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.

I could go on about the debauchery, but I think you get the picture. 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, and that was the only person standing in the way of their union. The second I found that out I shuddered and held my breath the rest of the ride.

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 even putting protective shields on some of the bikes for social distancing.

The group of moms I had that night were giving me over-the-pants-hand jobs, and at the end one shared her coke spoon with me. That was too much even for me.

This job helped me realize that I don’t like being touched by strangers and that 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 that again.