I have transported a number of people who had been drinking and had a good alcohol buzz going on. No one up to this point had been really knee-walking, slobering on themselves drunk. I accepted the ride a bit after 10 pm. The pick up was in a really, really nice neighborhood mansions. The House had the kind of driveway that went up one side of the hill, crossed over the front and then descended the other side of the hill. There was a huge curved staircase leading up from the street to the house over the center of the hill. Needless to say the landscaping was out of this world.
When I pulled up there were people at the street level, people on the stairs and a Woman standing in the doorway of the house. On the curb, at the street level at the bottom of the stairs was a blue truck with both the front doors open. A man was talking to a woman and in the dark of night their voices carried over to me where I had parked across the street. The woman was distraught that the man wouldn't give her the keys to the truck and was complaining loudly. Then she turned her attention to a woman standing a about five or six steps up and implored her to let her go back into the house. Evidently the owner of the house had made her leave prematurely and she had forgotten her phone in some unknown location in the home. The loud woman was quite definitely inebriated. She was stumbling and waving her arms in a manner that was sometimes quite wild and out of proportion for what she was saying.
At some point a young boy that looked to be in about third or fourth grade came out of the backseat of the truck, crossed the empty street and got into my car after affirming that I was the Uber driver. He had a box of Dragon Ball Z crystals. There were about 12 glistening glass globes with red stars. He took them out on the backseat and proceeded to wipe and polish each one. The irate woman was his mother and evidently this wasn't the first time the young man had been in this sort of a situation with her.
The other gentleman who had been at street level eventually succeeded, with quite a bit of effort, to convince the drunk woman to come over to my car. Which she did, all the while loudly expounding her desire for her phone and her keys. Eventually she got in and fastened her seat belt and we took off. After only a very short distance she started flailing her arms and shouting at me in a foreign language. When she would pause the son would fill in the silence telling me about the things he had received for Christmas.
Not two miles down the road, the lady proclaimed that she had to go to the restroom and that it was an emergency. Luckily we were within spitting distance of a Starbucks although by this time it was nearly 11:00 and they were in the process of locking the door when we pulled up. She jumped out, crashed the door and they let her in to use the restroom to my relief.
We started on our way again and much to my dismay, she suddenly threw open the passenger door while I was driving! Fortunately she was still strapped into her seat belt, we were still on the surface streets and not on the freeway. I was able to immediately pull to the curb with quite a bit of consternation. I thought she was going to be sick but she proclaimed she wanted to get out and walk back to the house she came from. I was sitting there thinking in my head, "What about the kid! She's going to take off and leave me here with her kid!" At which point the boy said in English, "Mom, it's past my bed time and I want to go home." Then the whole issue of the cell phone and the keys came up again. The boy tried to explain to her that his grandmother was still at their home and would let them in. After some discussion, we got on the road again. Suddenly it was like a schizophrenic transformation took place and the lady started talking to me in a normal voice about things that were going on with her.
Finally, I got them to their home, which should have been, by rights, only a twenty minute ride and yet had taken close to an hour and a half with all the waiting and fiascos diverting the trip.
