The boss called. “Mike, can you do a medical run in the morning? Eight o’clock pickup?
“Oh sure. Where to?”
“The surgery center in Cameron Park. Take the sedan. You’ll pick up a patient and his caregiver at that gated complex near Hurley and Morse. Know the one I mean?”
“Ooooh yeah. Geezer Gulch. Everyone there was born during the Taft Administration. The gate never works right. Yes, I know the place.”
“Good. Be there at eight. The guy is supposed to be in surgery at nine. You’ll wait, then bring him and the caregiver home.”
“What’s his problem?”
“Plastic surgery of some kind. People coming out of plastic surgery don’t want anyone to see them, so keep that in mind.”
“Got it. No bar hopping on the way home.”
“Good lad.”
The caregiver met me at the gate. The keypad code to open the gate did not work, and the patient was not answering his phone. I expected as much, except for the caregiver. She was not a Filipina. Almost all caregivers attending the elderly are from the the Philippines. I suspect they are grown there as crops, like plantains and mangoes. But this caregiver was a large white woman with a smoker’s cough and a messy car. Empty cigarette packs and fast food wrappers on the dash. She couldn’t get the gate code to work either. So far, events were unfolding in a normal limousine fashion. The clock was ticking, traffic was increasing and no one could reach the patient.
Then the world’s oldest living queen appeared at the gate. It was our patient. His age was indeterminate but very advanced. His hair was a shade I have only seen on the backs of orangutans.
“Hello,” he said in a voice so faint that it could’ve had feathers. “You were supposed to come to my door.”
I explained that his gate code didn’t work, so we couldn’t get to his building, and we had been trying to call him on the phone.
“Oh I had the gate access disconnected and I never answer my phone,” he said with the screwball logic of the elderly. “You should have come to my door. I’m 84 years old and I don’t like walking long distances.”
I’m accustomed to dealing with dotty seniors. I’m almost one myself. You can’t win. I simply apologized for my careless ineptitude and gave the old fruitcake the pleasure of being magnanimous and forgiving, then boarded him and his caregiver in the car. The caregiver asked, “Well, John, are you looking forward to getting your facelift?”
“Oh my yes,” John said, "I’m having my eyes done and my jaw done too.”
There is no vanity like elder vanity. And no one, not even an opera diva, is more self-absorbed about appearances than an aged homosexual. Not even me, and I’m pretty vain. I even admit to considering a face lift myself, looking in the mirror at the roadmap of life's turnpikes and dead ends on my once pretty little face, but discarded the idea. I might wind up with eyebrows permanently raised in astonishment, like Bob Dole after his facelift, or emerge from the surgical suite looking like a bald Joan Rivers. I'll just make do.
That night I drove the boss and his guests, two married couples, bar hopping in the 17-passenger Ford Excursion. The couples were in their late 30s. The women wanted to dance. The men did not want to dance. The women had a lot to drink. The men had a lot to drink. The more the woman drank, the more they wanted to dance. The more the men drank, the more they did not want to dance. The women found other dance partners. The men found more alcohol. This was not going to be a happy evening. What is it with women and dancing anyway? To me it's just a zipperless sex and not nearly as much fun as the real deal.
Their last stop was Harlow's on Sacramento's busy J Street. I dropped everyone off and hunted for a parking spot in limousine limbo, where I waited for the boss to call on my cell phone.
At such times we limo drivers catch up on our reading. We snooze. We review our lives. We reinvent memories. I was accepting my third or fourth Medal Of Honor from President Kennedy when the boss summoned me back to Harlow's. I double parked at the curb, taking a slight pleasure from boxing in Honest Mohammed's Jihad Taxi. Mohammed would try to hijack my passengers by grabbing their luggage when I drove airport shuttles. Now it was payback time.
The boss met me at the curb. “They’re fighting.” he said of his guests. No surprise there. The women had been housebound with kids for years. Their men were 90-hour-a-week piledrivers of high commerce. They now find themselves married to strangers. Worse, the strangers are drunk.
A voice shouted my name from a high place. I looked up at a second floor window to see one of my last week’s passengers dancing by the open window; a tall, beautiful redheaded stripper moonlighting from her job at Hooters. She was part of the entertainment in Harlow’s private party room upstairs.
“Hey, Mike Browne!” she yelled again, and did something interesting with a water bottle as she danced.
My boss was impressed: "Wow! Do you know her?"
“Not really,” I said. “She and her friends chartered a stretch a week or so back. I think they all work for Hooters. This one is probably freelancing. Just your basic, average Catholic girl trying to make bare ends meet in a bear market economy.”
“I’ve got an end I’d like her to meet,“ he said, staring up at her water bottle ballet. “She seems to like you.”
“Naah. She’s just playing. I’m older’n her daddy.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” the boss said. “Maybe you could wear makeup and look younger.”
“Or I could dye my hair orange and get a facelift.'
“What?”
“Never mind.”
-o-
