Don't Sully My Seats

Trip length: 54 minutes. Trip distance: 39.8 miles.

Fare: $64.52. Year: 2016.

Song of the trip: “Public Transportation” by Satchel Grande

I'd stopped up at Buster's Cheesesteaks on Broadway (best cheesesteaks in San Francisco by my reckoning) for a dinner break and was ready to get back to driving, so as soon as I got into my car and turned back online, there was already a fare popping up, about twelve blocks away.

The couple is waiting for me at Kearney & Clay. It's good that they're ready when I arrive, because it's a dangerous place to try and stop. Both streets tend to be full of traffic, they're both one-way, they're both perpetually under construction and, most importantly, nobody wants to wait for you to pick up or drop off passengers. There's no shoulder or bike lane to pull into for just a few seconds to let someone get in or out, so there's inevitably people honking if you're stopped for more than fifteen seconds, any time, day or night. Never understood that about San Francisco. Your chai latte can wait a minute more. One of the many reasons I try to avoid driving in the city. One. There's a lot more. It's a thing.

“Car for Nathan, right?” He's a silverback, one of those business types in his 50s who thinks it's edgy to wear a bolo tie. He's a little tipsy, but not dangerously so. That's always a plus. Of course, it's hard to get too solid a read on people when they're standing outside of the car peering in. Hell, I barely have an idea what they look like at that point.

“Yep. I'm Billy.”

“Great,” he says, as he's holding the door for the woman, so I get a good look at her first. In her mid to late 40s, reasonably attractive, a bit Rubenesque for my particular tastes but not in a way that she isn't making work for her. She's in a billowy sundress, and her blonde hair has walked straight out of a 1980s glam metal video. I mean, it's a golden lion's mane that just shoots out in all directions. I can't even imagine how much hairspray it takes to get it to do that. She's overdone her makeup a little, but not so far over the top as to seem out of place. And good lord, the red of her lipstick is bright enough to be confused with a stoplight. He closes the door after her, and then saunters around the back of the car to get into the passenger's seat directly behind me.

I swipe my fingertip across the stripe on the bottom of the phone that says “START TRIP” and the destination pops up – a residence down in Mountain View. Thank Christ, I'm getting the fuck out of the city, and it's a good distance to boot.

There's some argument among drivers about which you'd rather have, a lot of short trips or a few very long trips. It matters where you're starting, naturally, although it's amazing how many drivers don't know that. See, the fares are significantly higher in San Francisco proper than they are anywhere else in the Bay area. That's why if you take an Uber from San Jose to SF and back, you'll find the ride back down south will cost you about 30% more than the ride up.

Personally, I fall in the camp that prefers long rides. Sure, Uber has these bonuses called “Power Driver Rewards” for hitting a certain number of trips each week, but they're often fool's errands to go chasing them, the high end anyway. To hit the top tier of them, which is usually 125 or 150 trips in a week, you have to be willing to put in 60-70 hour weeks at least, and at that point, you might be going insane too much to enjoy the money.

To get a lot of short rides to be more profitable than a handful of long rides, the rides have to be extremely short, and you have to be constantly getting them. There are times where you can luck out and do that. Bar close is your best bet, and that's helped by the fact that you get surge pricing relentlessly. But that's a flash demand, and as quickly as it appears, it disappears again. That level of demand is unsustainable. You'll never get it for more than, say, half an hour. And you have to count in the time driving to the fare itself, something Uber doesn't seem to think is important unless you're taking too long. We're still burning our fuel either way, not that they give a damn. So all that put together means sure, there's a hypothetical situation where you could be doing ten 3-minute fares a piece and make boatloads of money, but there's also a hypothetical situation where you buy one lottery ticket in your life and win fifty million dollars. I prefer to play better odds than that.

We also get paid far better by the mile than we do by the minute. Drivers don't like to be sitting around waiting because at that point, you're practically losing money. We need to be in motion. We're like sharks – quit moving and you die.

“Busy night?” Nathan asks from behind me. “Claire and I were just having a nice night out and it seemed like downtown was packed.”

“Well,” I say, “Saturday nights in the city are always like that. They're a pain to get around, a pain to find parking, a pain to get a table at any decent restaurant... but I don't usually drive much in SF. I'm a South Bay driver.”

“Oh?” Claire says. “What brought you up to SF?”

“Same thing that usually does – some people in the south bay needed to get north and called for a ride. So I'm glad you folks are taking me back south again.”

“I thought most drivers preferred it up here instead of down south. You don't like driving in SF?”

“Hell no. There's a lot of times people aren't ready when you get there, and in SF, you're running the risk of some idiot smashing into you because he isn't paying attention. Add in all the hills, the one way streets, the narrow streets, the fog, the pedestrians walking across the middle of streets... it's a warzone up here most of time. Besides, the city of San Francisco requires us to have business licenses if we drive more than three days a month up here, and that's money out of my pocket I'd rather not spend. Never understood why Uber doesn't have to pay that instead of us. So, no siree, I'm much happier driving in places where I'm not holding my breath a little bit every time I have to stop, and paying for the right to hustle.”

“Nate, my dress is itching still,” Claire tells her companion. I might have thought husband at first, but neither of them are wearing wedding rings, and they almost have that new couple vibe to them. “It was bothering me the entire time we were in the restaurant.”

“Well, the trip's about 50 minutes, based on the address you gave me.”

Oh ho. So he's never been to her place before. The plot, she thickens.

“You'll like my place,” she says. “It's cozy. We can go trampolining in the back.”

“I don't know that I'm dressed for it,” he says. He's not wrong – blazer, dress shirt, dress pants, expensive leather shoes.

“Don't worry, it's late and the fences are high. You can just jump in your boxers!”

“What about you, Claire?”

“Oh, I'll bounce naked. It's so much more fun that way.”

“Isn't it a little cool for that?”

“Are you scared of going on a trampoline with me naked?”

“I just don't want you to be cold.”

“Well, you can warm me up if I get chilly...”

“I was going to do that anyway, obviously.”

“Plus we can just get in the hot tub after we're too tuckered out from jumping.”

“I don't want you tuckered out from just jumping.”

“Well, duh, silly. That seemed obvious.”

It's going to be one of these trips, is it? Wonderful. Well, it's easy enough to ignore a couple constantly flirting with one another as I'm driving. They're in the back seat, and most of the time, I keep my eyes on the road or my side mirrors, and even looking in my rear view mirror doesn't give me too much visibility of what's going on back there.

“This dress was a bad choice.”

“You'll be out of it soon enough...”

We're just getting out of downtown and getting onto I-80 heading for the 101 interchange when I hear from the backseat, “Hey, you don't mind if I get naked back here, do you?” And then up and off comes the dress, without so much as waiting for my reply. This is certainly a new one. “Sorry, but that dress has been bothering me the entire time we've been out tonight, so I figured I'd just take it off.”

“As long as there isn't a mess in the back seat, it's your ride,” I say, cautiously. This is uncharted territory. I mean, there have been a few occasions when two people are coming home from the bar, and a guy is trying to load his almost unconscious girlfriend into the back seat and one of her breasts breaks free from her top, but as I glance over my shoulder to check and make sure my blindspot's clear, I can see she was completely naked beneath the dress. I also see she goes for the bushy look and blonde's not her natural hair color. As Craig Ferguson says, 'I'm not judging; I'm just being honest.'

So here I am, with a fully naked woman in the backseat with her boyfriend and...

“That's why I got into this line of work in the first place. If I could get away with being naked all the time, I'd absolutely do that, but lots of places still frown on public nudity.”

Line of work? Oh. Oh. Okay, this trip just got a pip stranger.

“And it lets me ease away people's loneliness for a while,” she says. She's still not put her seatbelt back on and it seems like that's not going to be happening any time soon, as she twists and moves to lay down in the back seat with her head in her companion's lap, bare feet pressed just below the window. Good, at least I won't have to Windex the window for footprints at the end of the trip. “I like soothing people's souls as much as I do their bodies. People today are so lonely so much of the time, especially out here in California. I don't understand that. I moved here from Toronto to get away from the cold, and I find that it's still here, but it's in people's hearts instead of in the air.”

“You'll just have to cure them of it one person at a time,” Nathan says to her, and I can hear the sound of his hand moving across her skin.

She reaches one of her hands forward to rub her fingertips across the back of my neck. “Are you a lonely soul? I can give you a card if you want.”

I'm torn between wanting to slam on the brakes suddenly or yell at her, but she's not wrong. I've been single so long you'd think I'd taken a vow of chastity. That said, I don't think I'd find much comfort in this woman's arms, even if I could afford it, which, based on the look of her companions' shoes, I doubt that I could. Defuse and deflect, Billy. “My problems are... more complicated than that.” It's vague enough that I hope it'll throw her off the scent.

“Oh. Well, I know some nice working guys as well.” Not what I was implying, but it gets her hand off me, so that's something at least. The last thing I want is for her to try and draw me into whatever weirdness they're planning.

“I think I'll do okay on my own, but thank you.”

“Hey, how much can you see back here?” Nathan asks me.

“You? Almost nothing, because you're right behind me. Her? A bit, but not as much as you might think,” I admit, wondering if I shouldn't. “I've got my eyes on the road, so they're adjusted to headlights and tail lights, and we're on the freeway, which means there isn't much in the way of street lights to illuminate the back. A lot of times, I barely get a chance to see what people look like when they get in the car. But if I'm checking my blindspots, I get at least a quick looksee, so I can make sure nobody's doing a rail of coke off my backseat or whatever. So enough to be safe, but not as much as I'd prefer. I keep thinking about getting one of those dashboard cameras, but I can never seem to find them cheap.”

“Okay, just checking.”

At this point, I very desperately want to turn the music up, but something inside of me just won't let me. I hear his middle finger flick out, I suspect against her nipple, because I hear her give a tiny little moan in response, and her body shifts on my leather seats. We're traveling along 101, and I suspect my looking back over my shoulder as I move to pass people and then back out of the far left lane is keeping his hands from drifting south of her waist. That means I'm continually adjusting my speed and coordinating around traffic so that I have regular reasons to make sure he's not fingerbanging her on my leather seats. If I'm not getting action back there, I don't see that anyone else should be.

It's around Millbrae that I start to realize what his question was about, to my severe annoyance. I missed the sound of the zipper coming down, but I can hear tiny wet sounds behind me. I even hear her smack her lips once, then hum a bit, with her mouth clearly up against something. I'm at that point where I desperately want to have to stop the car very suddenly, right now. I bought this car new a few years back, and I've never gotten blown in the back seat (or the front seat for that matter) of it, so it's infuriating that this random schmuck is the first person to get blown in my car, and by someone who might or might not be (but probably is) a hooker. I don't have anything against prostitutes – I just don't like the idea of someone else getting action in my car before me. Kennedy, my last ex-girlfriend, had a phobia about PDA in vehicles. Wouldn't even kiss in the car. Don't ask me. It was one of a thousand things about that woman I never understood.

I know a lot about traffic laws, more than your average Uber driver by a longshot. I haven't gotten a speeding ticket in 20 years. I haven't gotten into a car accident in longer than that. The last time I even got a warning, it was eleven years ago and I was driving on expired out-of-state plates because California and Washington were getting into a pissing match about where I legally resided. When the cop pulled me over, I explained to him the story and he shook his head said, “alright, just a warning then. I know how that shit is. Just keep trying to get it fixed.”

All of this is a windup to say that I have no idea what the indecency laws are in the Bay area. It's not something that's ever really been on my radar. Sure, I see the occasional story about nudists demanding the rights to walk the streets of San Francisco au naturale, but that's San Francisco.

Is it against the law to be naked in a moving car? Is it illegal to have sexual activity in a moving car if you aren't the driver? Am I breaking a law by allowing them to do this in my car? And most importantly, if that CHiP (sorry, California Highway Patrol, for those of you who don't know what CHiPs are) that I see getting onto the interstate a few lanes over from me pulls up alongside me and gets a gander of what's going on in my backseat, is he going to pull me over, and if so, who gets the ticket?

It's been a long, long time since I was blown, but she's being slow and leisurely about it, I can tell that much by the sounds. I think most men over the age of twenty can distinguish between blowjob-with-intent and blowjob-to-relax by sound alone, and those of you who can't, well, I'm sorry that you're both A) having such bad luck at dating, and B) are unwilling or unable to watch porn to compensate for that. It helps take the edge off, fellas; take it from someone who knows from first hand experience. Second-hand sometimes, too. What can I say? I'm not a small guy.

So at least she's not rushing towards the finish line, and he's unlikely to crest the wave. Because if I see a drop of cum anywhere in my back seat when they get out, I am taking pictures of that and getting a cleaning fee stat, and it had better be ridiculously high. I know it'll clean right off with some 409, but still. There's just some shit you don't do to someone else's car, you know?

The sounds aren't even all that erotic. I mean, it's clear he's having a good time, because he burbles a tiny moan every now and then, and she shushes him each time he does before she returns to her work. I'm not sure if they were making fun sounds that it would be better or worse. If they'd been completely quiet about it, they might have been able to get away without me even knowing they were doing anything, but instead, they drew attention to it.

I suppose the situation also isn't helped by their ages or appearances. They are who they are, and I realize it's unfair, but this whole thing would've been more palatable if they were gorgeous fit twenty-somethings who were simply caught up in the moment. Instead, she looks like a soccer mom who's never grown out of 1984 and he looks like a yuppie banker businessman, one of a million interchangeable assholes here in the bay. I can't put myself in his shoes, nor would I want to. When they're a couple of college kids making out, I can at least think to myself, 'Man, he's a lucky guy,' or 'I wish I was him.' There isn't any of that here.

It's... like stumbling in on your parents fooling around. And them not stopping. There's something inherently creepy about it, even if that's unfair. I can't help it. I mean, I know older people get busy all the time – I just don't have any interest in seeing or hearing it. Especially in my fucking car.

We're passing the University Avenue exit of Palo Alto, with the big IKEA visible on our left, when she says, “It's not too far now. You'd better zip up.” It's about goddamn time. As she lifts her head up a bit, she has to shift around in my back seat, and one of her legs kicks the front passenger seat pretty hard. She giggles about it, and doesn't apologize.

I regret I have but one star to give to these people.

It should be far less.

“Let me get your jacket,” she says to him, “I don't want to put the dress back on.” And I hear the seatbelt unlatch and slide off, before he slips out of his blazer and hands to to her, as she pulls it around herself. He makes a point of refastening his seatbelt immediately after. Bastard probably knows how tempted I am to bring the vehicle to a sudden stop.

I realize as we're getting off on Shoreline heading south that the blazer isn't for my benefit – we're entering an area with people up and about still, and suddenly when there's someone other than the driver who could get an eyeful, somebody develops a bit of modesty. Or, more likely, they're worried about Mountain View police seeing them and hauling their asses off to jail.

From the Shoreline exit of 101 to the woman's place is about a ten minute drive, because she's well off the beaten path. In fact, the residential area she's in doesn't have much in the way of street lights. It's pretty dark around the house, and there's a good amount of space in between buildings, so I imagine if they're going to go naked trampolining, they won't have to worry about looky loos.

I bring the car to a stop in front of her place, shift it into park and flick the hazards on. She gets out of the car and the blazer doesn't hang down far enough, so I get an eyeful of that large, bare white ass like a second full moon in the night. He decides he's going to slide out across the back seat and get out on her side, picking up her dress with his left hand along the way. “Nice ass, huh?” he says, as if that's supposed to make all of this better. Then he hands me a folded up bill.

There's a code among Uber drivers. If you think you've done some particularly horrible things during the course of your fare, give your driver some cash, and you'll salvage your rating at least a little bit. Even a dollar or two can save you from getting two or three stars. Give your driver a fiver or a tenner and you're probably going to get at least four stars, most likely five.

See, for a long while, Uber used to tell passengers, “don't give your driver cash, ever. Tips are included in the fare!” Drivers were also told to refuse cash tips, and only if a passenger insisted a second time that you'd earned it, then and only then you could take cash from a fare. Which is complete and total horseshit. Lyft lets passengers tip through the app, and while the majority of passengers don't tip for Lyft, at least the option is there. Then this whole class action lawsuit thing happened. I'll get into it later, but one of the practical upshoots of all of it was that Uber is no longer allowed to tell passengers not to tip. Drivers also don't have to refuse the first time. No, now we gobble that shit up and say thank you, because it's hard enough scraping by doing this that any table scraps the rich want to throw us will get gladly accepted.

“Have a good night, huh?” he says to me as he's getting out of car. “Me, I'm going to go fuck the shit out of that girl until my dick doesn't work.” Stay classy, Silicon Valley. He closes the door and starts walking with her to the house. I unfold the bill and it's a twenty. Certainly the very high end of a tip, and still...

If I'm not getting blown in my car, nobody's getting blown in my car.

I drag my fingertip across the strip on my phone's surface that reads “COMPLETE FARE” and the prompt to rate Nathan replaces it, those five empty grayed out stars waiting for me to decide. I may hesitates for a second or two, but no longer. I tap the single star on the left, hit “CONFIRM RATING” and the dialog disappears, as the app starts looking for my next fare.

I flip off the blinkers, shift from park back into drive and I'm rolling back into the night.