Jealousy vs. Envy

“Okay, so here’s the question,” I told #43. What is the difference between jealousy and envy?”

Without hesitating he began to give his explanation in a couple of hundred words about how jealousy was a negative emotion, while envy was a positive one.

“The reason why I even brought it up,” I said, “was because I was listening to a radio talk show and one of the people on it gave this definition. ‘Jealousy is when you enter a contest and someone else wins it, and you want to take that victory away from him and make it your own. Envy is when you never even entered the contest, but want to take the victory away from the winner for yourself, after you never even entered the contest.’”

#43, disagreed with that explanation, and said that he stayed with his original statement of negative vs. positive. So I gave example of jealousy on the job, like when someone gets an out of town run, that you just missed. Number 43 pointed out that my prescription run to Dallas, earlier in the shift would qualify, since he would have had it if he were able to get through on the radio, but I beat him down. About this time #52 pulled in alongside us and got out of his cab.

“How is your night evolving?” Number 52 asked.

“Not bad,” I said.

Number 43 asked, “isn’t it getting a little warm to be wearing a long sleeve shirt, and driving gloves?”

Realizing that his attire was now out of place, since the temperature reached 80 degrees today, Trevor told him that he liked to keep the air conditioning on full blast to discourage drunks from puking in his cab.

“That makes sense,” #43 said. “It makes more sense than the space cadet that I picked up one Friday night, around 10:00 PM. I get this guy at the Flight Deck over on airport road, and he’s dressed in an American flag baseball cap, blue blazer, navy blue pants, white shirt and an American flag neck tie wearing sunglasses, after dark. When he got in and told me the Triangle, I started driving South West as he began telling me about co-piloting a flying saucer that hovered above the Earth, and behind the moon, where we couldn’t see it with telescopes from the Earth. He said that he was on a mission from God, and that God would decimate all non believers, and relegate them to the lake of fire. He implored me to give my life to God and when I told him that I already had, he began to hug and kiss me, until I pulled over and asked him to stop. On the rest of the trip he told me that every time that he ate a meal, he used an American flag tablecloth, in reverence of the sanctity of God’s creation.

After I dropped him off he asked for my cab number, which I gave him with some hesitation. Around 2:00 AM, I got a call for Dominoes pizza on South Commercial. When I arrived, there was a homeless man standing in front of the pizza joint pointing at the tables. I saw my passenger, still wearing sunglasses, removing an American flag from the top of one of the outside tables. When I pulled into the driveway, my passenger had the flag folded into a square that he placed in his coat pocket, as he got in and told me his destination. At least the guy tipped good.

Number 52 said that he had quite a few emergency room calls, both picking up and dropping off. There was everything from an 80 year old man, whose hip replacement popped out, to a 67 year old woman having a diverticulitis attack, and a 25 year old woman having a baby.

My most memorable trip of the night was a woman who just opened a modeling agency, where she discovered a gorgeous 18 year old young man, who had his life all planed out, but wanted to work his way through college as a model. When she found out that I was a freelance photographer, she tried to convince me to come and shoot their next session, up in Portland. I was interested, but hesitated, when she told me that it was soft core pornography. I told her that I didn’t photograph anything sexual, and she said that she used to be a Mormon, but got over it.

Then about midnight I picked up a guy who was going from South Lancaster to Wheatland Road up in Keizer. On the trip there he told me that he drove cab on Galveston Island, off the coast of Texas, for 4 years. Then one night he picked up a load of Merchant Marines who were out on the town, and gave him $100.00 to stay with them and show them around, on top of the fare. He said that they got him so drunk that he crashed his cab and ended up getting fired, but he miraculously didn’t get a DUI.

One of my last trips for the night was a pick up at West Side Station, but while I was waiting for my fare to come out, a bearded man holding a golf bag over his head was walking on the other side of the street. He looked like he was having a problem balancing the bag, and almost fell a couple of times. Then he put the bag down, and began dancing, as the music from the band in the bar filtered out into the street. He continued dancing for about 5 minutes, until he picked the golf bag back up and walked off, as my fare entered the cab and gave me his destination.