One Time, My Uber Driver Fell Asleep While Driving

3 years ago, I went to play golf with 3 of my friends at the infamously hard Bethpage golf course. We had scheduled a 9AM tee time, and the course is a full hour’s drive out to Long Island, so we met downtown around 6:30AM. It was early spring, and my cheeks flushed and my eyes watered from riding a Citibike against the wind through the quiet, Saturday morning streets. But as I pumped my powerful quads, my golf bag bounced against my back and the clubs rattled happily, like a nest of baby birds chirping in anticipation of breakfast. It was the first round of the season, and poppa bird hits the shit out of the ball.

The plan was to get out there early, loosen up, buy 6 quarter-zips in the pro shop, and get a sense of the historic golf course that has hosted the U.S. Open and is considered one of the hardest courses in the country. Our foursome (not in a sexual way, although group sex can be fun so long as everyone agrees upon ground rules/swapping beforehand) convened on a TriBeCa corner. I was playing with 3 of my old Harvard lacrosse teammates, and everyone looked sharp in their golf trousers, oversized belts, and warmup quarter zips that would soon be stuffed in bag pockets the moment we found a new one at Bethpage. My friend Kevin handed out iced coffees as we waited for our Uber, and we offered predictions as to how we expected to play that day.

“My swing is a little rusty,” said Jeff, munching on a scone. He took a sip of his iced coffee in between each bite because eating a scone is like smoking a field of weed: it leaves your mouth so dry that if someone said, ‘let’s have group sex!’ you’d be forced to sit out of the oral portion due to a scarcity of saliva.

“I haven’t played since last summer,” said Christian, chewing thoughtfully on a bagel. Christian, impossibly, is Jewish.

“This iced coffee is going to make me squirt,” said Kevin, whose defecate is rarely solid.

“Oh look, a girl running in yoga pants,” thought I, inside my head, respecting women’s right to run without men commenting on it out loud.

Then, our Uber arrived. Against all odds, a Toyota Camry. We stuffed our bags into the trunk like logs in a fireplace. I settled into the front seat because I’m a big guy and I get car sick when these Uber drivers treat the gas peddle like it’s a base drum. Our driver–whom we’ll call Fahad because if that’s not his name, it’s close enough–asked where we were going. “Bethpage, Long Island,” I replied.

“Oh, wow,” he said wearily, pulling his sunglasses off his forehead and over his eyes as he shifted car into gear. “That’s far.”

We didn’t think much of it at the time, but that response should have tipped us off. Most Uber and cab drivers I’ve met tend to like the longer trips. I think the margins are higher for them, but I don’t know for sure. Either way, this guy was not pleased that we had a long drive ahead of us. But our group was jittery from the coffee and excited about the prospect of popping our annual golf cherry. We missed the writing on the wall.

Fahad weaved out of the city, through the tunnel, and onto the Long Island Expressway. My 3 friends in the back were squished together but everyone chatted happily about Harvard’s current season. They had started strong, winning their first 4 games. I tried to include Fahad in the discussion, but he didn’t know anything about lacrosse because I believe he was born in a country where the money they might use to fund lacrosse programs is instead allocated towards buying land mines for war. A young man who might have made a promising midfielder is handed an AK-47 and told to purge the city of infidels. It’s difficult to teach faceoff technique when the field is uneven due to bomb craters, and the local mall does not have a single Vineyard Vines store.

With 15 minutes left until our destination, the traffic had abated and we were cruising along the L.I.E. at about 65 mph. All of a sudden, our car started to drift left. We crossed into the left lane, and kept going… through the rumble strip. In the backseat, Kevin took notice. “Dude. Dude… DUDE? DUDE!” We were now going full speed in the breakdown lane and still drifting. Kevin’s last “dude” was yelled with such panic that I sprung to action. I grabbed the steering wheel just as our mirror came within 2 inches of the cement barrier separating the eastbound traffic from the westbound. I ripped the wheel back to the right and brought our car back into the relative safety of the road. Throughout the ordeal, Fahad’s hands had somehow remained on the wheel. But because he wore sunglasses, I had not noticed that he had fallen completely and utterly asleep.

Now, back in the road, he woke with a start. “Hey guys!” he said cheerfully. “Almost there.”

“Dude,” said Kevin again, sticking with his theme. “Did you just fall asleep?”

“Oh yeah,” replied Fahad, without batting a tired eye.

We all looked at each other, confused. Fahad had replied as though this was an entirely normal occurrence. I leaned in.

“Do you want me to drive the rest of the way?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. I’m really tired.”

Now you could hear the reality setting in to his voice. He pulled over into the breakdown lane, intentionally this time, and Fahad and I got out of the car to swap seats. It was totally surreal. As we resumed, with me at the wheel now, Fahad explained that he had worked the entire night at a deli. He was now covering an Uber shift for a friend, and he had planned for our group to be his last fare. That’s why he had responded with aversion when we told him we were going all the way to Bethpage. But Uber insists that drivers not turn down fares based on destination. He didn’t have a choice.

“I thought I could make it,” he apologized. “I’m just exhausted.”

For a moment, we sympathized with him. But then we remembered that, you know, he had fallen asleep at the wheel while driving 4 passengers on the highway. When I pulled us in to the Bethpage parking lot, I told him to recline his seat and nap for a bit before driving home, for the sake of others on the road. He promised he would.

We played our round and the memory of our harrowing journey was pushed aside as we tiptoed the tightrope fairways of the course.  No harm, no foul.

There are details in this story that probably paint me as a pretentious douche. But to that I would say, I was once an Uber driver. And I didn’t even get paid.