“Alright,” I said.
The girls were young, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen I’d guess. They had the standard ultra-greased, super shiny hair, pulled back tight into pony tails. They were both clad in the standard oversized t-shirts. I never got names because they didn’t talk much and it soon became apparent they were drunk and disoriented.
The white girl seemed to be the drunker of the two; she spent most of the ride leaning out the window in case she needed to throw up, but that never came to pass. We found the street relatively quickly and without incident.
Instead of turning down it, the black girl told me to drive down a block to Latrobe so they could go through the back door.
“Alright,” I said.
I stopped the car in front of a small white house, as they instructed, and the black girl told me they had to go get the money from their friend and she’d bring it back out.
“Alright,” I said.
I watched as she helped her eye-brow ringed friend along the fence line of an all dirt front yard, and disappear into the shadows beside the house.
Ten minutes later I knew there was little chance I’d ever see them again. I was still very new at that point; I hadn’t even bothered to ask for ID or any sort of collateral. They were too young to make me overly suspicious and maybe it was just too early in the damn morning.
Still, for some reason, I decided to knock on the door of the house they appeared to stumble toward. I followed a path of large cement tiles that cut the dirt yard in half from the sidewalk to the porch.
After a few aggressive knocks an older black man walked out to greet me with a steel plated pistol in his right hand.
“Who the hell are you,” he asked. He reminded me a lot of Chappelle’s character Leonard Washington, he looked like him, he talked like him, and so for the purposes of this story, this guy is also called Leonard.
I took a step back. “I’m a fucking cab driver, man,” I said, gesturing to the cab parked in the street.
Leonard grimaced and squinted at me. “You see that?” he asked, pointing to a US Marine Corps bumper sticker above the door, in the middle of the frame. His eyes got wide, and he wrapped his lips around the words “That’s what the fuck I am.” He gestured wildly toward the street as if it were imaginary, “The fuck is that?”
“That’s my cab…I’m just the driver, I don’t want any trouble.”
“I didn’t call you. Gimme your cigarette,” Leonard said, taking the cigarette out of my mouth.
“I know, I just dropped two girls off here and they haven’t paid me.”
“Not at this house,” Leonard insisted.
“Well I must be mistaken then.”
“Yeah, you must be mistaken.”
“They probably ran through your yard.”
“Crackheads.”
“Yeah.”
Leonard got pretty friendly after that. He was still holding the gun, but we shared a high five and he told me I could be on my way.
"Can I have my cigarette back?" I asked.
"Fuck naw. You trespassing," he said and turned to go back inside. His ten year old son was begging him to come back in (and not shoot me) and I could see his round wife calling him from the living room floor. "Stay on the path when you walkin outta here," he continued. "Booby traps."
