Well.... Shit

I just got fired. I'm not driving drunks and drug addicts around anymore.

The job was getting weird. The center is a for profit operation and it hasn't been making a profit lately. I don't really believe the owner is sober.  For many years he's had the good sense to hire smart people and stay the fuck out of the place. Lately he's been around checking out every time card and receipt. All I ever heard from my bosses was nickel and dime bullshit. They used to be generous and considerate and they encouraged me to do my thing. Now they're looking for "team players" which in my experience usually means people who are willing to sell their souls for a nickel or two.

I suck at team playing, which is why I drive for a living, or at least I used to.

On my end, I was getting really burnt out. I have money problems. I have tax problems. I have car problems. I just had heart surgery. My father just died. This all piled up in a few months. I'll admit that I'm not as cheerful and energetic with the clients as I used to be. I'm tired and somewhat depressed. I need to be taking care of myself. It takes a lot. I mean a huge amount of heart to keep coming back for drunks and drug addicts. If you're not able to take care of yourself you can't very well take care of them.

Here's the cynical part. They were taking in all sorts of last gaspers and creepy assholes, not because their prospects were good but because they had insurance or money to pay. They were taking people back for their fourth or fifth pass through. Most of them didn't give a shit about sobriety. They were grown men with moms who kept taking care of them long after they should have been in the street. Or they were old drunks who wanted to be relieved of the consequences of their drinking so they could continue to drink in peace.

There weren't that many of them but the trouble was they were the ones I noticed. It got to where the people who might want sobriety, always a minority, were invisible. I just went to work and drove creepy assholes around.

I suppose the last straw was a guy who was blacked out when I got him. He had spent the day drinking and I had already driven a good three hundred miles on other jobs when I got to his house. He'd already been in there once and now his wife wanted him to come back in. When I got there he refused to get off the couch. He was abusing his wife. Shouting at her in Punjabi. The house was a mess. Everyone in the family was obviously worn down to nothing by his alcoholism. It took something like 45 minutes to coax him out to the car.

Shortly after we left his house he started babbling in Punjabi. Then he started screaming. Then he said he needed a cigarette. He wanted to stop and rest. He wanted the radio shut off. He said I wasn't allowed to listen to music and he proceeded to scream so I would not be able to listen to music. Then he started grabbing at me and making demands. I told him repeatedly to be quiet and to keep his hands off of me.

I pulled off the road once and called my boss because I didn't know what to do with him. My boss got on the phone and yelled at him. He quieted down for a few minutes then he started jabbing me in the ribs with something. I looked and saw that he had been digging through my bag. He had pulled things out of my bag and thrown them around the back of the car.

I pulled off the freeway and called my boss again. He told me to turn around and take him home. I looked at the freeway. The freeway heading towards the center was moving. The freeway back to his house was stopped. I figured it would take me two hours to get to the center or four hours to take him home and get back to the center. By then I had been driving around eight solid hours. I was too fucking tired.

I got him out of the car and stood him up. I told him to stop what he was doing in, uh, clear terms. He started telling me how much he respected me and how he loved me. He started bowing to me. I told him to keep that shit to himself until he sobered up. We got back in the car and he pretty much continued to scream and grab at me and make demands and light cigarettes and scream some more for the next two hours. I stopped a couple of times. He did things like start screaming that he needed to piss while we were stuck in slowly moving traffic on a freeway section with no shoulder and the next exit five miles away.  I finally got off the freeway, pulled down a country road and stopped by some bushes on the edge of a field. He told me couldn't piss because he needed a proper bathroom. I told him to look around. There was nothing out there but fields and vineyards and trees. He screamed some more and I got him back in the car.

I finally got him in there, but that was the beginning of the end. I had already fallen on the wrong side in a couple of personality conflicts with a couple of other workers. I could handle their eccentricities. We're all ex drunks and drug addicts after all. They couldn't handle mine. They're the kind of people who make up little rules and expect everyone else to follow them. My boss started telling me I shouldn't talk to anyone else on the staff. His boss and the owner started questioning my time cards. I kept an electronic log, even though I'm not required to. I said I'd be happy to show it to them but they weren't interested. They both like to drive long distances on their vacations so they knew all they needed to know about my job.

Then I found myself scheduled to drive a fourteen hour day. That's fourteen hours of driving. Probably around 16 hours at work. I pointed out to my boss that that was way more driving in one day than we had agreed to. I pointed out that if I was driving a commercial vehicle I would be in violation of a whole bunch of laws that I actually know quite a bit about. I told him that I was perfectly willing to drive part of job the night before, spent a night in a motel and finish it up the next day, only having to drive for ten hours.

His first reaction was to blow up at me. He actually yelled, "Just do what I tell you to do". Then he actually threatened to fire me or have the other driver take my hours. I finally got him calmed down but I almost quit right there. I ended up driving four hours that evening and ten hours the next day. I picked up a kid who lived way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. He looked like he was about nine years old but he was supposedly eighteen. He told me he took twelve Xanax when he saw me pull in the driveway. He was unconscious for the whole ten hour drive. I kept checking to see if he was breathing. Just before he passed out he told me he'd been using heroin since he was 12. He really did live in a little city over a mountain range and out on the edge of the desert. There's nothing there but that town and the biggest prison in the state. It's hundreds of miles from anything at all.

Two days later he called his dad and his family came and brought him home. He didn't like it there. They came and got him. He gave me the fucking creeps.

I'm supposed to be taking care of myself, following a strict diet and regular exercise program. I was struggling with it but then my father died. Our relationship was never good but that's a story for another time. He was still my father and I just plain needed to time to sort out the complicated feelings I was experiencing. I couldn't keep driving a thousand mies a week at a part time job. I told some staff people that I was getting burnt out but I wanted to hang on for another year. I've got a pension now. It's not much but in another year I can get social security and finally retire for real. I'm ready.

In the meantime I was blowing off exercise and craving comfort food. All I wanted to do was go to sleep. This was not going to work in the long run.

I took the drunk Punjabi home four days ago. He had successfully completed treatment and told me he was a new man. Two days later his family was begging us to come get him. He was drunk and behaving badly. Yesterday morning I left to take two people home and then go get the Punjabi. I was so nervous I was on the verge of a panic attack. His wife had assured the staff that he had errands to run and that he would be sober when I got there. I knew that was bullshit.

I got to his house early in the afternoon. He was a little drunk. His daughters were there. They clearly hated him. I told him no more bad behavior or I'd just dump him in a parking lot. He started apologizing way too much. I told him the more he apologized the less I believed him. He finally settled down. We stopped twice along the way. Once for him to piss. Once for me to piss. After each stop he was noticeably drunker, so I figured he'd hidden a bottle somewhere. By the time I got to the center he was passed out, which I appreciated. I woke him up when we arrived. He got out of the car and began dancing around and running back and forth. I was trying to get his luggage out of the car and the most anxious, hysterical staff person was alone in the office. She practically  shrieked but she got him rounded up. When I put his luggage away she told me to go talk to my boss.

At that point I kind of figured I was fired. My boss had stayed late, waiting for me. He never stays late. He told me I was unhappy and they were unhappy and I should just give him back the keys and leave. I kind of put a little fight but he's a good guy and I was burnt out and that's all there was to it. I'm gonna be hurting for money but it's going to be all right.

There are a lot of stories from that job that have gone unwritten. I'm not giving up on this blog just yet. In fact I'll probably write a bit more now that I have some slack. Eventually I'll run out of stories and shut this thing down.

I drove for a living for forty years, off and on. I'm tired of driving. I'm pretty fucking depressed today. I'd like it if I never drove again. That's how I feel now.