‘They’re our competitors,’ the guy said, aggression gone from his voice. ‘You know them?’

‘Yeah, I knew them … for twenty-seven years. Regional sales director for SoCal. Petrochemical production and distribution was my game. Flames sensors. Transducers and transmitters. Custom-engineered electro thermocouples.’

‘That’s fucking weird. ’Cause I cover just about the same territory – only my beat is Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana.’

‘Who with?’

‘Crandall Industries.’

‘Yeah, you were chasing the same client base as us.’

‘Twenty-seven years you tell me?’ he asked.

‘Twenty-seven years.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘A downturn,’ I said. ‘A bad streak. Three big strikeouts.’

‘And they just let you go?’

I glanced in the rearview. Saw the way that his lips were all scrunched up. I wanted to ask: is the reason you play the obnoxious shithead because, like me seventeen months ago, you too are having a losing streak? But I have a ‘never step out of line’ face that I show to the world; a face that parents and priests forced me to wear from a young age. I still wear it for all public transactions. Especially those that take place in my seven-year-old cream-colored Prius. In Uber World once a complaint is made against you then you are in the wrong. Which means: when dark thoughts show up at a moment like this I’ve to keep them locked down inside my throat. Instead saying: ‘Yeah, they just let me go.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Well, how about that? A moment of shared humanity. A moment that arose not from any kind of actual compassion, but his own fear that he too might end up behind the wheel like me.

The traffic began to move.

‘You gonna get me there on time?’ he asked.

‘According to the GPS … two minutes before your appointment.’

‘You said four minutes before.’

‘Things change,’ I said.

‘Tell me about it.’

He said nothing during those final minutes in my back seat. When he got out he also said nothing. When I later looked back on my app to see if the guy had tipped me … zilch, zip.

A rule of thumb in my game:

Guys who hate their lives never tip.

two

PICKUP NUMBER TWO of the afternoon was all talk. She got into the car in mid-conversation. Her telephone spiel was super-clipped, super-fast. An exchange finished within the ten seconds it took her to close the passenger door and me to pull out into traffic. Machine-gun talk: ‘We don’t make a habit of losing.’ End of call. She hit another number. On she went: ‘We don’t got a gun to our head … you do.’

A check in the rearview. The talker was in her mid-forties. With a hard face. Jet-black hair with gray streaks. No warmth in the immediate vicinity. Fatigued, disappointed by so much – but still up for a fight. And for saying things like ‘Don’t got’.