Story Time With Uncle Jesse

So, today I made a mid-day Publix run and was almost carjacked. Let me explain.

Since I am a college student, I pretty much live off of frozen pizza and Dr. Pepper. I was low on the liquid and out of the pizza, so to Publix I went.

It’s raining, which just makes driving even more awesome. I have this strange driving fetish where I absolutely love driving in the rain. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.

Anyways, I drove there, got my goods, and walked out. I was sitting in my car, engine running, buckling my seatbelt like a good citizen, and some dude, maybe in his mid-twenties, comes to my window with a slightly agitated look on his face. He’s saying something and since he presumably wants me to hear him, so I roll down my window.

“Hey man, can I pay you for a ride just up the street? It’s raining and I don’t want to walk.”

You should have thought of this ahead of time when you decided to be 25 and have no car I thought.

What I said, pretty much automatically, was “No man, I’ve got to go somewhere right now.” I mean, I’m in a car; that much should be pretty self-evident. But I wasn’t really interested in giving the guy a ride.

No, he wasn’t black. I didn’t deny a car-less black man a ride up the street. I denied a car-less white guy, in a jacket, a ride up the street. It’s not like he was naked and completely defenseless against the condensation falling from the sky. He wasn’t going to catch pneumonia. He wasn’t going to drown either. He had on boots, jeans, a ragged shirt and a jacket. I felt he was perfectly prepared to walk a little ways up the street, even if it was raining.

The fact that people don’t typically walk up to a running car and ask to pay for a ride wasn’t the thing that made me lock all the doors to my car when he walked away; there was a little bit more to it.

The fact that a guy who doesn’t have a car has money to throw around for rides struck me as odd. The fact that as I sat in my (now locked) car for another minute or so, watching him ask at least 5 other people if they could drive him “just up the street” was more what did it for me. If he was in such a hurry to get up the street and out of the rain, why not just START WALKING? Spending another minute standing around in the rain, which he was so focused on getting out of, didn’t make much sense to me. Once you're wet, you're wet; There's no 5 second rule.

Who knows. Maybe the man was just stupid. Maybe he really did just need to get up the street and was willing to pay someone for the privilege of riding in a dry environment. But I’m going to chose to believe he was trying to carjack somebody. Because that just makes the whole thing almost exciting.