this weekend, summary

Saturday-

Was easy enough to explain. One guy gave me a huge tip, the first customer of the day. We went from the Lower East Side to Midtown near Times Square and after dropping off the extremely drunk old fellow at an extremely high end hotel, we went back downtown to SoHo to drop off the last of them to a high end apartment building there.

"Sorry about him" he said, "you're going to get a big tip"

I chuckle, "Okay"

I wanted to keep the meter going for the whole ride, because it keeps it cheaper by avoiding a second initial charge and a second surcharge, but the drunk said it was the end of his ride, so he paid with credit card and added a dollar or two in the tip. 

At the end of the whole ride, ride number two came to 12 dollars or 11 and change, he said he only had a hundred. 

"You guys are my first customers so I have no twenties."

"You're funny,"says he, "what if I paid you with a fifty"

"That'd be better"

"How much do you have?" he asks, ugh, starting to annoy me.

"I got 70 total here."

"How 'bout you make it sixty?" 

"What, sixty?" 

"uh hyeah," that's yes to you and me.

So I took his hundred and counted 40 real slow so that he'd hopefully know what he was doing. Yeah so despite the rest of the day being not as good as they had been recently, that ride right there made up for it. 

------------------------------------

But on Sunday- 

I got cheated out 43 dollars and an hour of my time. I took two guys to a remote housing project near Coney Island, Brooklyn, and they both ran out: 

"That's expENSIVE!" they ran out on ENSIVE, leaving their McDonald's meals behind, and a door open. 

I screamed the tires so the door would shut on it's own, found the belt parkway pretty quick and tried to put it out of my mind. But still doing a thing like that has got my head wrapped in it a little. How I may have to become a more selective cabbie. A place like that with no soul around, I could've been shot, and all anybody would say would be, "Jee I hadn't heard a gunshot in a while."  

Silver lining to this was I found myself down at the bottom of Manhattan where all the cabbies seemed to have forgotten about that night. I threw out the McDonalds in a garbage can, and grabbed a fare to JFK 45+tip, 55.