WalMart to Shanghai

 About two weeks after I started driving for Uber, I got a call to pick someone up at a WalMart in Sherwood, a suburb on the far southwest side of town, around ten o'clock at night.

WalMart pickups are fairly common. Lots of people live in food deserts, places with no grocery stores, only overpriced corner stores, and many of them don't own a reliable car. So on their day off, they take the bus to a WalMart and fill a cart with groceries for a month, then call an Uber to take them home. It's normally a short trip, and plenty of Uber drivers will simply decline the passenger if they see it's a WalMart pickup, especially late on a weeknight, when the real money to be made is from drunk office workers downtown needing a ride home to the suburbs. That's where the tips are.

But I take these passengers, in part because I can imagine the gigantic hassle it would be to load six bags of groceries onto a bus, especially if you have to transfer, or wait at a bus stop. And they might have melting ice cream.

So I drive down to Sherwood, about ten minutes south on the freeway from where I was, thinking "this will be the last passenger of the night. After this, I'll shut down and go home. Twenty minutes, tops."

I arrive, and a young woman is there at the door with a cart full of stuff -- dry foods, a toaster oven, a coffee maker, a couple of large plastic bins. She gets in and says she's in the merchant marine, she's shipping out in two days, and has to run some errands tonight before having me drop her at the pier on the other side of the city.

This is a huge fare, and it will take an hour and a half to run to a UPS store where she can get her mail, drop something at her company's office, something else at a friend's, and then to a hotel where she runs in and gets luggage. We talk about her decision to join the merchant marine, and how she did it. She's originally from Florida, had been a legal secretary, decided she wanted something more lucrative and to see the world.

Finally, she says, "Let's go to the pier. There's an extra tip in it for you if you'll drive onto the ship."

So that's what we did. We got entry to the pier, and then drove a quarter mile out to the freighter. There's a loading ramp and I drive onto the boat. She directs me to take another ramp up to the deck of the ship, and suddenly I'm parked on the deck of a freighter, with a view of the St. John's bridge and the lights of the city behind me. I consider, for a moment, the possibility that she'll knock me out and I'll wake up two days later, hanging off the edge of the ship with a barnacle scraper, bound for Shanghai. That thought is not as awful as I might imagine, except for the dog. I immediately reject the idea of junking everything in my life and joining the merchant marine because I can't imagine the dog enjoying life on a freighter.

And then it occured to me that if the life I'm contemplating isn't fit for a dog. . . .

I help her unload. She tips me very, very well and says thank you.

I see myself off the ship, drive off the pier and then the fifteen miles home.

It's past midnight. My dog greets me and we sit on the back deck. Chile runs up and down the stairs, dropping a ball at the top so he can chase it as it bounces down the steps. I sip a glass of bourbon and think about the size of the world.

Skate Me To The End Of The World

 I had to go to a mall a few weeks ago. I got laid off in March (no big deal, I'm interviewing now and will likely have at least one offer in the next week) but driving for Uber in the meantime leaves me searching for bathrooms. I dropped someone at a city mall the other day.

Pre-COVID, I'd been there many times, to buy tennis shoes, or toys for Christmas shopping, or to see a movie at the multiplex, once to go ice-skating the first February I lived here. It's one of the mall skating rinks that Tanya Harding learned to skate in back in the eighties. The place was always pretty busy. There's a nursing home and assisted living place next door, so there were elderly mall-walkers at all hours of the day, and, like every mall, teenagers everywhere.

Now it's a ghost town, and it's creepy. They don't turn all the lights on, and the top floor was completely vacant. 90% of the stores on the first floor are gone, boarded up. Some of the storefronts have been taken over by one-off shops catering to one small ethnic group or another -- a Halal grocery store; another store seemed to specialize only in Korean pop culture trash. The guys working the little kiosk/carts looked despondent. One guy had brought in a lawn chair and was openly applying for jobs on a laptop while he sat there next to a cart full of dumb cyber pets. Most of the carts appeared to be manned by young men from Israel, judging by the prominent Israeli flags that adorned the carts.

After I hit the restroom, I walked the length of the place. I wanted to see the ice rink.

It was still operational, barely. Maybe a dozen kids were on or off the rink at any given time. But there was this old couple, had to be in their late sixties or early seventies, skating gracefully with each other around the rink, performing some delicate maneuvers here and there, practically waltzing. I watched them for a while, and the sunshine coming in from the skylight seemed to follow them around the rink. There was a soundtrack, obviously meant to attract teenage skaters, but after a few minutes it changed, and Miles Davis' "Freddie the Freeloader" floated over the rink. And this couple didn't change their pace at all, just held each other and waltzed on the ice in a ray of sunshine in the middle of a dark and dying mall.

Thoughts of fiddling while Rome burned flitted through my head. It's summer, a heat wave, and here's an ice rink with one couple on it meant for two hundred people, in an air conditioned mall that is 1.4 million square feet and currently serving maybe a hundred souls. There was something upsetting about the image. I imagined what it must look like to them, how they must have been coming to that mall to ice skate for thirty years or more, and a little thing like 90 degree heat outside and the mall's imminent failure were all the more reason to do so that July day, at 1:30 in the afternoon, on a Wednesday.

I felt disjointed, like I’d misplaced something, or maybe it was the loss of anonymity, of being one of so few people in such a large place. Leaving, I passed a custodian painting over graffiti on one of the plywood panels boarding up a closed store.