Chocolate-covered cherries.

So, I'm a limo driver now, right?
I drive people around from place to place to place. Yay. Thus far, I've driven a bunch of coorperate bigwigs, Dan Quayle, Bruce Springsteen, and Jimmy Buffet.
Fun stuff.
I wear nice clothes and greet people with a polite smile and a terse nod, introducing myself cordially, opening doors and hefting baggage.

But all is not sunshine and snowpeas in this world of mine.
No. There is a dark side, and a sinister thing it is indeed.

I also double as a taxi driver.
Which can be fun. Drunks are funny as hell sometimes. Especially when they can't remember where they live.
I get to mess with people in ways I never thought possible.

But all that changed, one fateful night....
I get a call to pick some lady up at one of many local taverns. This one's called "Suds 'N Grub." It's about nine feet wide and fifty feet to the back wall. A straight shot of nothing but bar.
It's some lady's birthday.
She's too drunk to stand upright.
It takes two of us to get her to the taxi. Some guy she was drinking with hands me a $20 and tells me where she lives. She sure as fuck don't know.
I start driving. She comments on various things that only make sense in the mind of a drunk. Calls herself Ol' Suze. She's part Navajo. About the size and proportion of Paris Hilton, but old and wrinkley. Smells like she grew up in a moonshine still. And today, she tells me over and over, is her birthday.

So. I drive her home. It's a few miles from the pub. She learns my name several times, and tells me I'm purdy. I smile politely and keep driving.
We arrive to her trailer.
I get out, and go around to open her door. Lord knows, she can't.
She spills out onto me. Laughs in my face causing my cordial smile to melt from the flammable fumes that issue forth from a relatively toothless maw.

I help her to her door, as she can't exactly walk on her lonesome, and I'd feel kinda bad leaving her sprawled out in the gravel drive, crawling to her tincan.
So I help her.
Door's open when we get there.
She pries herself in through the doorway and promptly begins to swear in no less than three different languages; English, Drunk, and Something Like Mexican.
Someone had stolen her stuff.

She sinks to her knees on the floor, babbling about her pa's chair, and her television and her ma's coffee table and her bed and...
it goes on a bit.

I hear a noise outside.
Glance out the door.
There's some scraggly-looking bloke hiding in the bushes by the stairs, barely keeping his balance. Looks like he's drunk too.
She notices me looking at something and asks me what.
I mention there's a gent in her shrubbery.
She goes to get her shotgun.

Holeee sheot.

At this point, what happened is kind of a blur of fuzziness and uncalculated manouvres. I got the gun from her somehow. Threw it to the ground and proceeded to stand on it. Her tiny little self found it impossible to move my six-foot, quasi-viking frame, so she proceeded to scream at me and beat on me with drunken little fists.
The gent in the bushes also started yelling.
Neither made sense.
I whipped out the cell and called the cops.

It seemed to take them forever and a day or two to get there.
Afterwards, I was stuck answerign questions for about an hour.
Went home.
Caught the end of Titus with my roomies.
Took a hot bath and treated myself to some of Mr. Russell Stovers' chocolate covered cherries.