This one time when I was drunk...

I am a man of stories. Sadly, none of those stories has anything to do with me saving infants from a burning building or dedicating every waking minute of my free time to curing a disease. No, no, nothing of the sort. And with my college days not far behind me, I remember some of those stories quite well.

They usually started off with, "This one time, when I was drunk..."

So, this one time, when I was drunk, I was out with my roommate. We'll call him Dub. Dub and I spent the afternoon at the beach tossin' back a few [many] brewskies. It should also be known that at this time in my life I regularly partook in the activity known to many as "getting stoned." And given the fact (yes, it's science) that smoking pot is often considered a social activity, we were regularly in the company of bikini-clad passerby with just a whiff of that lofty aroma. Anyhow, we befriended two of these young dames and agreed to meet up with them later.

Went home, showered, then went back out.

We, Dub and I, had a couple drinks with dinner and met up with the girls. Turns out, one of them had just had a run-in with her pseudo-boyfriend, not a big deal. Then she told us he had broken into her car a couple days before and was at the bar looking for her...too much drama so we bounced. We unintentionally did a pub crawl and by midnight we were ready to go home. So we hailed a cab.

When we got in the cab, I saw a dark-skinned driver who uttered something with an accent. Being in southern California such as we were, I assumed him to be of Mexican descent.

I'll tell you right now, I am most certainly not fluent in Spanish.

But that didn't stop me. I, in terrible, slurred and broken high-school level Spanish, gave him directions to our house.

Izquierda! No, derecha! Derecha!

Some 20 minutes later we made it the two miles to our house. Dub ran inside to get some cash and I waited in the cab. And I waited. And I kept waiting. So I said, "Es--esppp--espera un minuto, poourrrfavoooor" and ran inside to see what happened. Dub was passed out on the couch, sitting Indian-style, a beer in one hand and a joint in the other. I took money from his shirt pocket, that had apparently been there all along, and ran it out to the cab.

"Lo, lo siiento seniouwwr," I tried to apologize. When I looked in the window to hand him the money, a startling revelation. I jumped back in defense. This was not a Mexican-blooded man. He looked at me and screamed, "I'm Chinese. No Mexican! Chinese!" He ripped the money out of my hand and layed rubber.

To this day I still feel bad. If you ever encounter this nationality-shifting cab driver, please extend to him my deepest apologies.