My Driver told me...

Friday night, 2:02 a.m.

It is late Friday night, I've been working for the Man for 12 hours, and I want to go home. Got big Saturday plans: the gym, banging out that draft, movie, 2 parties. Rush to bed for a magic Saturday.

I climb into the company car. Finally, one that doesn't smell like old feet. It does, however, seem to be playing New Age mood music, the kind with babbling waterfalls and waves.

This drive is my source of pride; even the most experienced drivers mess it up, so my pre-recorded directions are programmed to come on mid-way through the tunnel. Nevertheless, as we spring towards the toll booth, I see that we are about to make the error that all obstinate drivers make. To be frank, I kind of freak out.

"Trust me." He laughs a big Jamaican laugh.
"Sir, I'm serious!" He ignores me.

And indeed, he takes not the exit on the right (the path most traveled by Mitchissmo), nor the one on the left (the one taken by all drivers in err), but some twisty little exit in the middle, a new path altogether. I am amazed. No lights, even. More Jamaican laughter.

"Why can't you be patient?"
I shrug. "I dunno, just not a patient type."
"What you impatient about? Why?"
"Well, 'cuz time is money, and I ain't got much of either."
He laughs a big Jamaican laugh.
"Ah, but you have a million dollars, it not enough. You have two million dollars, it still not enough." He laughed on.

Somehow, as he winded through Long Island City to my house, the lecture sprawled into something about his wife and her lack of accounting and Donald Trump filing for bankruptcy for the third time in the Driver's 21 years living here...

I listen more carefully to the music. It is not waterfalls and waves. But no. I strain to hear the slow words about Jesus in Gospel song.

I had been taken for some kind of a ride, that was for sure.