It had been a really long day. We’d gotten up at 9:30am to make it downstairs to partake in the hotel’s continental breakfast. Which PS – had they not had a waffle-maker, I would have found NO justification to subject myself to the hateful, angry old people that were taking up 90% residence at our chosen hotel.
Which, let’s back up and talk about these old people… and old people in general. I am of the mind that I like the nice old people. You know the ones who have great stories, a pleasant disposition, and toss out some unexpected zingers that remind you they were not always old. Yeah, well… we were short on those this past weekend. In Louisiana (more specifically Shreveport/Bossier City) these old people were friggin ridiculous. Maybe gambling on a holiday weekend is all they have to live for these days or maybe they bet all their Social Security on black the day before and for a cosmic chuckle it landed red. I don’t know, but I have never seen so many angry old people in one place; more specifically around the breakfast buffet. You’d think that they were dying of starvation and I was telling them – eff off… this is the last waffle and it’s MINE ALL MINE.
Let’s just suffice it to say that there was pushing. Lines were forming in the middle of other lines – like getting in a buffet line was a new concept. C’mon now, these guys were probably around when the idea of a line met its birth. They were swarming the buffet line and making rude comments like – sure, just go right ahead… I guess you don’t know what it means to be next. I will say that this is probably only the 2nd time in my life that I thought I was going to have a throw-down with an old lady. And let’s keep in mind that I wasn’t provoking the situation and firmly believe that had it come to trading blows, the old ladies would be the initiators.
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The 1st time I thought an old lady was going to throw-down was at a hole-in-the-wall bar in Addison. I’d been shooting pool and goofing around with friends when an old man (probably in his mid-70s) walked up and bet me that I would miss the shot I was about to take. I just retorted with – well if I make it you have to buy me a drink. He agreed and an accord was struck. 10 seconds later he’s flagging down his waitress to buy me my champions drink. Well he got to hem-hawing and thought that one of the other gals there and I were beautiful. This resulted in him purchasing several rounds of drinks for our whole group. Now what I later found out was that his 70-something year old girlfriend had been waiting at the poker tables for this guy to return. Apparently there was a tournament going on. Whatever, I hadn’t even seen the poker tables – so the fact there was a tournament happening was news to me. Want to know how I got all caught up on the tournament? Well, his 5-foot nothing 70-something girlfriend got up in my face telling me she’d been waiting for her boyfriend at the poker tables calling me a hussy and a man stealer.
To which I’d been drinking a bit so I was retorting to her name calling saying really unhelpful things like – c’mon now, he knows he’s not getting laid by me… hey, I mean unless he has Viagra, this is all a pipedream for him anyhow, pun intended… does he have a younger son with a loose wallet too, because that’s more of what I’m into…
After I threw out a couple of really funny quips that I really thought at the time would appease the situation, it became inherently clear that she was ready to defend her man. She leaned into me with finger pointed and made it clear that this was her man, and she wasn’t having any of my young self. I mean, it felt like a bar fight was about to break out… as I’m all yes ma’am-ing it and saying it didn’t need to come to this.
Now, three things went through my head – 1) removing her semi-politely from my space would make me an ass who hits old people; 2) If she hits me and I hit her back, or at the very least shove her down or protect myself from her, I will look like an ass; 3) if I let her just beat the crap out of me, I look like the ass. No matter what, I was going to look like an ass. Awesome.
At any rate she got control of herself and her man and it ended up not escalating to a confrontation – well at least not more-so then it already had been.
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I digress… as usual.
Back to the long day we were having. So after a very eventful breakfast on the morning of the 4th, we had all planned to go out to the El Dorado Casino on the strip to hang out, gamble, check out the 4th of July festival and then see the fireworks go off over Red River. As it might be, we saw very little of the festival and ended up spending hours-upon-hours gambling in smoke-filled ill-ventilated casino rooms. We saw about 30minutes of the music performance at the festival, we’re over it and headed back to the El Dorado casino to claim steaks on our balcony positioning for the perfect firework viewing.
The fireworks seemed to go on for forever, which I didn’t mind as I was snapping pictures like crazy. The show was playing a calming down-period in our non-stop day. The rest of the group was semi on edge, hungry and generally ready to be done with this day all together. I didn’t blame them. As a matter of fact, Casey says something to the affect of – I’ve never been pissed off at a fireworks display… how long is this going to go on?! Hilarity.
Now, Amy and I had made it down to Shreveport a day before Casey and Dawn so we’d come up with a plan to entertain all of us on the 4th. We’d gone into town and asked locals where to go and what to do. Our plan was perfection… except the leaving of downtown part. It was packed after the fireworks. There was wall-to-wall traffic on all sides of the streets. Other streets had been closed down due to foot traffic. No taxis were coming in or out of the strip on the sole reasoning that they couldn’t fight through the traffic to get in there. People were complaining that they’d been waiting for over an hour for a cab, and still nothing. The 4 of us decided to try and find a place to eat before hassling with finding a cab; let some of the traffic die down.
We’d eaten lunch at the best restaurant in the El Dorado. It wasn’t all that great so no one really wanted to eat there again. We’re tired. We all had low blood-sugar and personalities were clashing. Food was paramount. Well that or a cab, and we all know where we were with the cab situation. We come up with walking down to Sam’s Town to see what restaurants they had. I’ll save you another long story and say – they had nothing everyone could agree on. More bickering and shortened tempers.
In the meantime Casey had disappeared. Which before we understood why, we were all annoyed that we couldn’t find him, couldn’t find a place to eat and couldn’t get a cab. Basically, not good. Then I see Amy frantically waving her arms at me… we’d gotten a cab. Somehow Casey had managed to find one, wave him in to the Sam’s Town taxi pick-up lane and was calling to the ladies to get in before someone else saw it and fought us for it.
Casey takes the front seat. Amy slides in to the left of me and dawn to the right. As we’re getting into the cab and I am taking a deep breath of relief, my nose catches something a bit off. So I say – wow, it smells like someone just fired up a blunt in here… man it reeks of pot… I’m going to get a contact high from this nonsense. To be clear, it was definitely pot mixed with a vent air freshener. It vaguely reminded me of when I was younger and tried to hide that I had smoked a cigarette from my parents by covering myself in Febreeze coupled with gum. I thought I was so smooth. I became acutely aware in that moment that I hadn’t been. I asked the cabbie if we could roll down the windows and to my dismay, he tells me – all the windows are broken. Awesome.
The cabbie asks us where we are going and we tell him which hotel to take us to. He says – do you want to take HWY 20 or HWY 220? I responded before anyone else could, saying – whichever way is faster. He opted to take HWY 220. Fine, whatever. Just get us there so we could figure out a resolution to the food situation.
Being that I was sitting in the middle of the backseat, I noticed that this cab had an aftermarket system in it. It struck me as being a little odd that the cab had that and I mentioned it to Dawn who in her nervousness was laughing herself into tears. Conversely, the mere idea that there was most likely pot in the car made Amy very uneasy which caused some stressing about our safety. Without asking, the cabbie turns up the music. It’s the most gangsta ghetto rap music littered with the N-word. Now, not that this in any capacity matters to me other than it made slightly uncomfortable with the music selection, but our cabbie was black. Which, the mentioning of his ethnicity will play into more of this story a bit later.
I’m uncomfortable. Amy is uncomfortable and stressed with head in hand. Dawn is just laughing and trying to get out her observations in between wiping her tears away and catching her breath. I look out the window and realize that I see nothing that I recognize. We were on some road that was lined with abandoned buildings, seedy people just milling about in areas where there could be potential traffic, little to no lighting and no end in sight to a perpendicular meeting of the highway.
I’m officially on alert.
Amy’s praying novenas.
Dawn’s inconsolably laughing from her "contact high".
Casey’s making small talk with the guy.
I lean over to Dawn and start saying things like – this isn’t looking right… I don’t know about this guy… where the hell is he taking us… I don’t think this guy is a legit cabbie. Dawn’s laughing and bopping her head to the rap beat saying a bunch of things that were not helpful like – I think I have a contact high… I have 911 pressed into my phone just in case.
Dawn then decides that she is going to build a report with our cab driver hoping that her efforts will lighten the awkwardly unsettled mood in the cab. She leaned forward attentively in manner and started making small talk. As she asks him some general questions, he begins to look back at her in the backseat to answer her, resulting in jerky swerving unsafe driving. In the midst of their conversation, she asks him how long he’d been a cabbie.
And I swear to you, I can’t make this up because it really happened – this guy responds with…
I’m not a cabbie. What about me makes you think I am?
Uh, dude WTF?! WE’RE IN A CAB AND YOU’RE DRIVING IT. It’s the simplest of inferences that even a 3-year old could make.
So let’s stop here for a second and do a quick recap…
1) The cab REEKS of pot. I mean like he smoked a doob right before picking up his fare – AKA us.
2) There is a general feeling that given the aftermarket system beat-boppin explicit rap coupled a few other blatant context clues, indicated that this wasn’t a normal cab to start.
3) None of the 4 windows work. I mean NONE.
4) He’s taking us down a road that is seriously suspect. I’ll put it this way – I actually said I was never happier to have Casey with us, if not for sheer male presence alone.
5) Our cab driver had just made the proclamation that he’s not actually a cab driver.
As we’re all waiting with bated breath for some clarification, the cab driver – scratch that, we’ll just call him driver – the driver says that actually he’d wrecked his other cab and he was borrowing the one we were in from his brother.
I’m sorry… whhhhat?! His erratic driving and swerving became screamingly clear as to why he’d wrecked his other cab.
We’ve now formally entered strike 6 against this guy.
I tell Dawn to stop talking to the driver because it was causing him to not focus on the actual driving. I mean, it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn’t a passenger that had fired up a joint in his car; we’re sitting at a 100% probability that our driver is stoned. His increasingly erratic driving coupled with Dawn trying to talk to him from the backseat was making Amy even more stressed and nervous. She sat back and pressed 911 into her phone and just hovered over the send key… “you know, just in case” (as she kept saying in between laughing).
Unbeknownst to me, Casey had taken out his iPhone and was GPSing where we were, to make sure this guy was really headed towards a highway. From what I gathered later, he was trying to do it on the sly so that he didn’t upset our driver to the point of actually doing something dramatic. Turns out the driver saw that what he was doing and started in on a story. Now, at the time, I could not understand why he was telling us this particular story; it was out of place and extremely concerning.
He tells us…
One time I had this old guy hop in the front seat of my cab and tell me to take him downtown. He says to the guy that he will need an exact location so that he can take him where he needed to be. Apparently this old guy who got in his cab was coming from a casino and was extremely intoxicated and was being unruly and uncooperative. The old guy, according to our driver, starts screaming at him calling him the N-word and being generally aggressive. Our driver repeated over-and-over again that he ignored his derogatory comments asking him to calm down. When the old guy wouldn’t, he then ordered him to get out of his cab, which eventually the old guy did.
The story didn’t end there. He went into EXTREME detail about what this guy looked like. He was an older dude in a cowboy hat – you know the good ol’ boy type. He had this kind of jeans on, he had this kind of accent, he had grey hair, he had… he had… he had… (I remember thinking that that was an awful detailed recollection of this incident and that made me a little uneasy.)
The old guy gets out of the cab and while still screaming the N-word among other things, he apparently walked over to the driver-side door and opened it up. Then our driver tells us that he tried repeatedly to abate it from escalating any further. At some point, the cab driver had had enough and then proceeded to tell us that he exited the cab, punched this old guy square in the face – not once, but twice – then left him unconscious in front of the hotel… and DROVE THE EFF OFF.
I don’t know if that story was true or not, but I damn sure wasn’t about to ask any inquisitive questions to find out; on the off chance he wasn’t making shit up.
Once I realized that he started telling that story after he’d seen Casey check the route on his GPS, we speculated that he told us that to let us know that he wasn’t dicking around and would handle his business if questioned and/or provoked. I guess he was pissing on his preverbal territory. Whatever, I say pee where ever the hell you want to – which this instance might be the only time in my life that I have even admitted having that thought.
10-4 big guy. My ONLY priority was making it back to the hotel; safely, in one piece, and with our sanity intact; which was questionable at this point.
After what seemed like an eternity, we see our hotel. I was just thinking in that moment – well I guess it’s safe to say that he’s not going to kill us. That was until I thought too soon…
Our hotel shared the same parking lot as Harrah’s Casino & Racetrack, which had also been doing a fireworks production for the 4th. There was a lot of traffic passing in front of our hotel in route to getting on one of the 2 major highways. The traffic was blocking the entrance into our hotel drop-off area. Our driver says – EFF (he didn’t censor) this… we’re getting in there because, and I quote, “them being stopped in front of this turn in was bullshit”. So he pulls out aggressively and starts to weave in between cars, some of which still in a forward motion, others he’s instructing to back the eff up so he can get through, and Dawn’s screaming – MY SIDE!! MY SIDE!! I thought we were going to get t-boned. We didn’t. But we all dropped about 20lbs of unnecessary adrenaline in that moment.
Once he made it through and we were in front of our hotel, everyone jumps out of the cab except for me because I was the one responsible for settling up our fare. Casey was standing outside of the open back door waiting on me to get out. I realize the 3 of them were just looking to fall out of that cab and kiss the motionless ground. The cab ride was $30 and all I had was $20s. So I hand him $40 and he asks if I wanted change and I said nope we’re all set here and proceeded to scoot quickly to get out. Screw getting change. You can have it… I’m outta here. That’s all I was thinking.
As I’m sliding out, he catches my hand that was on the front passenger chair and stops me. He says – I heard you talking all that pot talk when you got in here. I slid my hand out from underneath his as I laughed, uncomfortably. He says – I have all the good shit; you know all the best kind. I said something along the lines of – well good for you as I moved quicker to get out of the cab. He continued with – you wanna get some off me. And all I could think is – there isn’t one thing on you that I want to get off of you. I mean for shits sake, I was terrified the entirety of the duration of this cab ride and NOW… NOW you want to sell me pot. WTF?! I just responded with – I’m all set here – as I slammed the cab door and bolted for the safety of the hotel.
I mean… seriously… TRAUMATIC!!!
Which the ridiculousness of the evening didn’t end there… remember, we still hadn’t found anything to eat yet. I’ll spare you the very tension-filled ride of looking for a restaurant that was open at 10:30pm on a Sunday that was concurrently the 4th of July. Hopeless is what it seemed like. But like a mirage, I spotted a Chili’s that was open until 11pm. SCORE. There was drama there. Again, I will spare you that as well. But after we were fed and back at the hotel… that part… that part is worth telling!
We get back and we’re all standing outside talking about how much better we all felt since we’d eaten. These 2 older (probably mid-50s) guys come out of the hotel. One of them kind-of creeps up, uncomfortably close, behind Amy. To which I say – hey man, you don’t creep up on a lady like that… that’s how you get mace in the face! He says drunkenly – I was just admiring her tattoo. To which I respond with something like – regardless man, that’s inappropriate! The guy he was with must’ve thought – ah hell… he’s on his own for this one – and walks off about 50-feet away.
The one who crept up on Amy begins talking about his other buddy (the one who’d walked away) – his name was Jerry. He tells us that Jerry just recently had to have his prostate removed because he had tested positive for cancer. In the middle of telling us that, he tells us just how drunk he is and how many hours they’d been drinking. Well, DUH buddy. You’re talking about prostates to young hot chicks. Clearly you outside of your wherewithal – check, check.
He then proceeded to tell us in detail what that entailed fully equipped with vivid hand jesters (like we didn’t know where the prostate was); tubes in sensitive places, catheters, surgery… on and on. Then he tells us he’s potentially going to have to go through the same thing and that he’s got an appointment to be tested and checked out after the holiday weekend. He says that if it comes back non-cancerous, he was going to have them (and I quote) “microwave the bastard”. I was certain this was not the technical term and for reasons that should be blatantly clear, I wasn’t asking for a definition of what that meant.
Casey on the other hand, never let’s an opportunity pass him up. He says – so what setting is that on the microwave… popcorn? Drunk ass laughs and like he had completely forgotten he’d just told us about good old Jerry’s prostate, he starts in on the story again. In an attempt to prevent us from listening to the whole thing over again, I call out to Jerry – hey Jerry… you might want to come over here and get your friend because he’s telling personal stuff about you! Jerry drunkenly meanders over to where we are to see what is really happening.
Once he gets over there, I put my hand on his shoulder and say to him – I’m really sorry about your loss. He says – what loss are you talking about? I respond with – well, your prostate for one… I know you guys were really close. He says – oh my god… what’s he over here talking about. And I said – I would think that that was really obvious… your prostate.
After Jerry gets involved in the conversation, somehow and I am still to this day unclear as to how we made the leap from cancer, prostates and microwaving to where we landed… crabs. So the guy who was telling all of Jerry’s prostate business starts in with his recollection of the time that he had gotten crabs, but that he gave it to 3 girls before he even knew he had them. Then he says something like – boy, those 3 calls were awkward. To which I said – uh, THIS, THIS is awkward. I think it was at that point that Jerry realized the train wreck that his buddy was on and he wrangled him towards the door into the hotel. And all this guy was talking about was needing to clarify what ended up happening with the crab situation followed up with him asking if they were going to go drink more. Jerry said a very patronizing tone – yes… we really need to be drinking more. I think he believed Jerry, because he stopped putting up a fight and disappeared into the hotel.
By the time we got into our hotel room, we all poured into our beds and didn’t really say a word. It’s like, where do you start… and why recount ANYTHING that had happened in the last 3 hours?! I slept like a damn dream that night, I much I will tell you!
You crack me up!
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