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Editor's note: Back in the mid-aughts, Willamette Week ran a column called Night Cabbie, where a cabbie working the night shift wrote about driving people to internet cafes as they listened to R.E.M. on the radio and smoked. In keeping with the times, we now present Night Uber.
The first ride of the day was stylinâ. As she was getting into the car, I couldnât resist saying, âThose are some colorful tattoos.â
She was covered, shoulders to ankles, with bright floral swirls. I was sorry I couldn't just stop for awhile and look at her.
She talked. A lot. Maybe it had been three cups of coffee. Maybe she was just über friendly. Hair was quite important to her. She was disappointed because her boyfriend, who had "incredible" hair, had just chopped it off. "Why would he do that?" she lamented.
I showed her my pitiful tattoo and she was enthusiastically encouraging. âBut you know, I donât think they should let young kids have tattoos. They should have to be older. They make mistakes.â
I mean, really, here she was, an undulating canvas. She should talk. Her hair swept up dramatically. Metal pierced her skin.
I dropped her off in a residential neighborhood; she seemed a little vague about exactly where she was going. As I drove away, I could see she'd stopped to talk to someone walking along the sidewalk. They were looking at something she was holding.
The next ride was with another young woman, not nearly as stylin'. She was about the same age as the first rider and she too had tattoos, but she had no metal hanging from her eyebrows, and her tattoos had no color. They were mere outlines, sketches of what a tattoo could become. I told her about my previous ride.
"I never should have got these," she said of her tattoos. "It was just dumb. I didn't know what I was doing. I only started having them done, and then I quit. Now I'm older and I think, no way am I going to go have these finished. It hurts!"
She'd moved to Portland sight unseen, from L.A. "I had to get out of that town. Too many people."
They were twins, those girls, Twins from different parents. And they were nothing alike. But they both had the same message: Love doesn't last, but art goes on forever. Beware the drunken teenager.
WWeek 2015