Ridin’ with the Wheeldude: Keep tabs on your kids

I drove my Yellow Cab on a very hectic St. Patrick’s Day one Thursday night last month. It’s always one of top three busiest shifts of the year, so early Friday morning, I was dead tired and ready to go home. Just before logging off though, at about 3:30 a.m., I got dispatched for a pickup in Scotts Valley, scheduled to go all the way to the Mountain Store in Boulder Creek.
Halfway down Highway 17, I called the customer from the cab’s data terminal, to make sure I wouldn’t have to schlep 10 miles for nothing. I spoke to a female, confirming that she still needed a cab. (It’s surprising how often people change their minds when there’s a $40 fare involved.)
While I drove on Mount Hermon Road, she called back and changed the house number in the pickup address. Obviously, she was going home after a visit in Scotts Valley.
I pulled up in front of a big, nice house in a rich neighborhood and was a bit shocked to see a little girl, maybe 12 or 13 years old, coming out the front door.
Well, I thought, at least she’s getting home safely. But it seemed weird that her parents would allow a youngster to stay out so late, especially on St. Patrick’s night. However, she seemed completely sober.
A quick side note: The main function of night-shift cabbies is to get safely home all the intoxicated, distressed, DUI-avoiding or otherwise endangered people that need transportation. We’re not there to question the purpose of alcohol, medical or illicit drug abuse, the morals of finding a quickie sex partner or blowing your paycheck buying drinks for the entire Red Room (as long as you’ve got enough left to pay cab fare).
The girl got out in Boulder Creek, and I went back to Yellow Cab’s Live Oak yard to finish my shift before going home for some sleep.
I was awakened at about noon by my cell phone ringing. It was little girl’s mother. She was upset that I didn’t report her daughter to the police. Apparently, the girl wasn’t going home to Boulder Creek; she was visiting her boyfriend. The woman threatened to report me to the police and my employer, and when I explained to her that it sure seemed as if the girl was going home, she said her daughter is an exceptional liar and my instincts should tell me something’s wrong.
I didn’t say it, but thought: “Where the heck were you and your instincts that night?”
I raised two teenagers (now in their 20s and 30s, thank goodness) and have an 11-year old from my second marriage. I know, as every parent should, that on St. Patrick’s Day, New Year Eve’s or whatever — your social life is irrelevant while raising your kids.
If you can’t afford a reliable and clever baby sitter (teenagers do occasionally escape on a rope through a balcony in the middle of the night), stay home for the night.
The pop music industry targets kids. Pimp lyrics address “baby girls,” “little girls,” “baby dolls” and whatever else the subconscious child molesters decide to put in their sicko, pornography-bordering lyrics. They pound the supreme importance of sex into little pre-teenage heads.
Do we as a society need that kind of crap? No. Kids are already handicapped by hormone overproduction and the body-over-mind struggle. We should try helping minds to win that struggle, unless the next step in evolution is named “Stupid.” Do hyperactive toddlers need to drink Red Bull? It’s like Camel cigarettes using a cartoon character to creep into children’s subconscious and make them become smokers.
Let me close with several comments about a 2006 study by Steven Martino studying the effect of degrading music lyrics:
“Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs. (…) Teens who said they listened to lots of music with degrading sexual messages were almost twice as likely to start having intercourse or other sexual activities within the following two years as were teens who listened to little or no sexually degrading music.”
Talk to your kids. Explain that the whorish, pimp, libido-driven dark-side imagery and the behavior of the profit-at-all-cost Billboard Top 100’s majority has nothing to do with achieving harmonious daily existence and the joy of living a full, multifaceted, enriched life.
Or, cop out and blame a cabbie.
Lucjan Szewczyk, the Press-Banner’s photographer, is a part-time cab driver who commutes to Scotts Valley from San Jose.