No, I didn’t get in an accident. A passenger had one.
I was twenty minutes away when I got a ping to pick up Carl. Then, when I got to the Granby Street location, it was a challenge to find him. He’d been walking.
When I finally located him, he was sitting on the curb. Carl is a young, white sailor from Chicago. He opened the front passenger-side door, but didn’t get in. He leaned in and asked, “Do you know a place where I can get some pants?”
“Pants? Now?” It was about 11:40. An unusual hour for clothes shopping.
“Yeah, I need to buy some pants real quick.”
“There’s a Walmart not too far that’s open till midnight, I think.”
“Yeah, that’d be perfect.”
“Well, get in. We have to hurry.”
“Uh, yeah, well, do you have something I can sit on? Something you don’t care about?”
“I’ve got a trash bag in the trunk; hold on.”
I put the trash bag on the seat and he sat on it and put down the window. Carl didn’t seem to be drunk at all.
“So, what’d you do, bud?”
“Oh, man. I had to piss real bad while I was waiting for you, but there’s nowhere to go around here because it’s all residential. I was sitting on the curb and thought maybe if I pulled back my shorts I could just let it go while I sat there. I tried to look casual, you know? So anyone driving by wouldn’t notice.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“No. I got piss all over my shorts.”
We got to Walmart at 11:58. The first door he tried was closed, but an employee told him he had two minutes if he used the next door down. I waited to make sure he got in.
My last view of Carl was from behind. He was literally sprinting toward the clothing department.
Umans of Uber 