i never did do acid with swahilis or have threesomes with aussies. i didn't have sex with any australians, for that matter. instead, i started dating a girl who worked in our office which changed a lot of things.
this blog wound up being created not after the pot-smoking, but after a particularly horrible day. it may have been one of my first horrible days as a tour guide, and it was mostly on account of some very cheap italians who insisted on causing trouble without leaving a tip. this can lightly explain my very racist initial post here.
and once this blog began, i put away the reporter-moleskine and started typing here instead.
what i'd forgotten was sometime between the eight canadian potheads and before the rude italian toursts, i wrote about the first couple times i realized locals actually rode tour buses. that story had been hiding in the moleskine between pages of college-related notes and odd drawings of steve buscemi and bruce willis.
until yesterday.
i was looking for something-- i'm not sure what-- and i found the moleskine sort of hidden under a box of envelopes. i flipped through it and laughed at myself for some of the more emo notes i'd written to myself.
what's funny is that i've probably written that sentence every single year of my life, with an exception of the years i thought that sentence but didn't have any paper nearby. and no matter how lost i've felt, i've always wound up finding myself just in time to feel lost again. that particular time was because i was going through the end of a two-year relationship and living in one of my first non-dorm apartments.
anyway, the point of this post was not to get into all of that.
i thought it may be interesting to share a sort of "deleted scenes" tour guiding story. it was never intentionally deleted, but it was also never told-- so here it is:
i got a $20 check as a tip. the check was made by a woman who lived in the outer richmond just two blocks from me. the next day, four people boarded my bus and told me that the woman was a local and doing the tour with five other locals just for fun.
she told them to ride my bus.
this was the first time i realized locals ride our buses-- and definitely the least obvious of times.
today, a group of 35 drunken fake-mustache-wearing locals boarded our bus at 11am-- drunk at 11am! i'm a lush, but getting hammered before noon is a bit much. they got off the tour after just three stops and the four (sober) tourists on board were glad.
well, my last run of the day had only two passengers. it was about 4pm in north beach, the third from last stop of the tour, when the crowd of 35 drunken locals got back on! they had been bar-hopping since 11am and made it from the soma to north beach, more intoxicated than ever and a little too excited to see i was the same tour guide from earlier.
you should've seen the faces of the two tourists when they realized the 35 drunkards were not planning on being quiet or getting off till the tour was over.
it was someone's 40th birthday and this, apparently, was how they celebrated.
when i realized my tour was not going to happen as planned, and we were only three stops from done, i put the mic down and stopped trying. it was then that one of the locals (named charlie brown, believe it or not) slipped me a fifty dollar bill and asked me to let the birthday-boy give the rest of the tour.
i considered:
• this was my last tour
• there were only two tourists on board
• and there was no way i could give a successful tour with the 35 drunk fools and their 35 sloppy mustaches.
i handed him the mic.
they screamed, they smoked joints, they changed "YES WE CAN!" and they threw beer bottles overboard. the tourists clung to each other.
i made sure they were all seated and had returned the mic just before we reached the offices and final stop. they even chanted my name in the very end-- upon my request to look good in front of the bosses. after it all, we made $100 in tips and i managed to convince the two frightened tourists that getting to ride with locals is technically better than any tour i could've given anyway.
later on-- ten days later, actually-- i would come to realize that the best way to point out a local on a tour bus is that they were hammered. it was a semi-constant thing. some people say, "let's take a forty to the movie theatres" and others say, "let's get on a tour bus."
i'd be a liar to say i have not ridden that tour bus with a pint of whiskey in my jacket. and you know, it's surprisingly fun way to spend $20 if you get a good tour guide.
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