Calves comments: The best-of collection

We had 12,000 operating room nurses in town this week for a convention, so this has been the main pool that my passengers have been coming from over the last few days. One of them said to me, "Wow, you have beautiful soleus and gastrocnemius!" It wasn't hard to figure out what she was referring to, but I asked her to put it in writing so I could look it up when I got home.


Her remark got me thinking about some of the more interesting and outrageous comments that have been inspired by my soleus and gastrocnemius muscles since I've been pedicabbing. Here's a list, along with some comments of my own:


"Those are so gorgeous, I'd love to just take a bite out of them!"
I'm glad that this girl found them attractive -- and even gladder that she didn't give in to her impulse. Can you imagine how this list of comments might be different if she had? ("Eeww! How did you get that hideous gaping hole in the back of your leg? Was that from a cycling accident or a shark encounter?")

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Female passenger A: God, look at those calves!
Female passenger B: I know! Wouldn't he look good in heels!
I have a hard time conjuring up any image as repulsive as my hairy horse-cavles atop a pair of high heels.  On second thought, the image of my calves with a big bloody bite taken out of them (See above) might come  close.

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"I sure would hate for you to kick me!"
This is one that I've heard several times, mostly from guys. I suppose it's a safe way for a guy to compliment me on my calves without sounding gay.

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"I'm so jealous! I wish I had calves like that."
This is probably the most common comment, and it's always women who say this. A common variation (one I heard last night, actually) is: "I need this job so I can have legs like that!" Personally, I don't think calves like mine -- even clean shaven -- would be very attractive on a girl. But that's just me.

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"Can I touch them?"
Sometimes they don't even bother to ask; they just start grabbing.

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And my all-time favorite, which I already recorded in an earlier post, but I think it's worth telling again. 
Drunk Cajun A: Man, look at those calves!
Drunk Cajun B: Those aren't calves, no. Those are full grown cows!

Rickshawing in the rain

I recently got a shout out from the American Meteorological Society's blog in response to this post. (Executive summary: I jokingly speculated that the wisdom of pedicabbies may somehow factor into the algorithms that meteorologists use to predict the weather. The AMS blogger affirmed that meteorologists do in fact pay attention to the observations of pediabbies as part of their data collection process.) I guess this makes sense, right? If being out in the weather a lot qualifies you, then we pedicabbies should be experts.

Speaking of being out in the weather, this brings to mind a question that I get asked a lot: "What do you do when it rains?"

In these four months that I have been working outdoors full time, I have not missed a single day's work because of the weather. And don't forget, this is New Orleans we're talking about! There have been plenty of days when I didn't manage to get in a full eight hour shift, but I've always showed up for work. Even on the wettest of days there have always been enough breaks in the rain to give me brief windows in which to ride.

As long as I can keep luring people onto the trike, I try to keep moving. The week before Mardi Gras I took a couple on a 20-minute ride in a downpour so fierce if felt as if there were a big fire hydrant in the sky hovering over our heads.

We have two types of canopy available to cover the passenger seat. One is open at the front, and doesn't really offer much protection; the other is a zip-up cocoon kind of thing that is quite an ordeal for riders to get into and out of. With both types, the added wind resistance is like having another 200 pound passenger on board all the time. Naturally, it takes time and effort to mount the canopy and take it down. All that to say that I hardly ever bother to use a canopy anymore. After all, if I don't get any protection on the front seat, why should the guys on the back, right?

If the weather gets bad enough that I can't get anyone on board, then I take cover and wait it out. If I'm lucky enough to be in range, I try to make it to Riverfront Restaurant on Decatur, where they give me free coffee, and the waitresses spoil me. "What can I get you, sweetheart?" they say. "Would you like a refill on that coffee, darling?" (It's a New Orleans thing, I think.)

On rainy days I often struggle to remember why I like this job so much. Sometimes I barely make enough money to cover the cost of fuel for the commute back and forth across the lake. The worst part is the cold. You have no idea just how cold 50 degrees Fahrenheit -- or even 60  or 70 for that matter -- can be until you're out in it and soaked to the skin for hours at a time! As long as I stay dry, it's not hard to combat the cold; I just start pedaling furiously, and pretty soon I'm generating my own heat. But when I get drenched, the only thing that helps is to go home and take off my wet clothes and soak my already wrinkled skin in a steaming bath.

News flash: Idaho joins the Union!

I did it! I can now boast that I have transported passengers from all 50 states... Wait, that's not quite right, is it? I mean, I haven't actually transported anyone across any state lines. After all, hauling someone from Hawaii to New Orleans on a pedicab would be problematic, right? Anyway, I think that you get what I'm trying to say.

Yesterday, within a couple of hours of posting this entry, I picked up a pair of passengers from Idaho. I had been riding around looking for a fare, when I spotted a middle-aged couple poring over a map and looking a bit lost on the corner of Bourbon and Dumaine, so I stopped to ask them if they needed directions. (This is something that I make a practice of. It gets me rides sometimes, though not as often as you might think; but either way, I want my city's guests to have an impression of New Orleans as a friendly, helpful place. I know that sounds corny, but it's true.)

In this case the couple seemed happy for my help. They wanted to know if I could show them where they were on the map and where they might find a good seafood restaurant. This was right up my alley. "Sure!" I said. And just about that time I noticed that the man was wearing a Boise State baseball cap.

"Are you from Idaho?" I asked, barely able to contain my excitement.

"Yes, we are," they said.

"Then hop on," I ordered them, "because you're going to get a free ride anywhere you want to go!" Looking back, that was a bit rash. It's a good thing they didn't say, "OK then, take us back to Idaho!" As it turned out, I just took them a couple of blocks -- far enough for me to explain a bit breathlessly (Like I said, I was excited, not to mention the fact that they were as plump as a pair of Idaho potatoes, bless their hearts.) why I was so thrilled to have riders from Idaho.

When they got off, they asked how much, and I told them again that there was no charge. I didn't want them to think that the whole story was just a ploy to get them on board and get a fare. But they insisted on giving me a ten, which I finally (after a solid three or four seconds!) accepted.

And so -- barely four months into my pedicabbie career -- I have had the honor of transporting tourists who have come to the great city of New Orleans from every single state in the Union. I've also had riders from most of the provinces of Canada and from a number of other countries, including: Mexico, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Greece, India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Taiwan, and Japan. What a wonderful job I have!

I need an Idahoan

Anybody know anybody from Idaho headed to the Big Easy? If so, have 'em call me for a free ride. I've had passengers from 49 states, and I'd love to make it an even 50.

How much for a ride?

Here's an interesting (to me, at least) piece from The Pricing Journal on pedicab pricing of all things. After experimenting with a number of different approaches to setting fares, the one described in this article is precisely the one I've settled on -- at least when it comes to rides of 20 minutes or less, which is more than 90 percent of what I do. For longer rides, it's a dollar a minute.

I still improvise occasionally depending on the situation. Last night I had a pair of ladies who wanted a ride to their hotel, which I figured was just at the edge of the 20 minute boundary. It was past 2 AM, things were pretty busy, and I really didn't want to take a chance on going that far away from the action for a meager tip, so I quoted a price of $20. They said, "OK, no thanks then. That's a little high. We'll just take a taxi."

Usually in these situations, I don't mind losing the customer. If she's looking for the least expensive option, she's better off with a conventional taxi. Whenever someone says, "I can get a cab for cheaper," I usually say, "You sure can! Would you like me to hail one for you?" But for some reason, I decided on impulse to gamble this time. "I tell you what," I said. "I'll take you for a tip. You just pay me whatever you like, and that will be fine."

They hesitated briefly. "Whatever we want? Are you sure?" I told them yes, I was sure, and they got on board.

The ride turned out nice. It was a beautiful night with a gentle breeze, and the three of us had a pleasant conversation along the way. It was clear that they were thoroughly enjoying the experience. When we got to their destination, they gave me $30.

"Are you sure this is enough?" they asked, seemingly having forgotten that just 20 minutes earlier, $20 was more than they were willing to pay.

"Yes, that's great," I said. "Thank you!"

"Are you sure?" they asked again.

"Yes, yes I'm sure!"

This kind of thing is fairly common actually. People end up enjoying their pedicab experience so much that they're happy to pay substantially more at the end than they were prepared to pay at the beginning. That's one of the reasons that I'd prefer not to lock them on to a price before they get on board. It's also one of the reasons that I really love my job!

Another funny story featuring my freakish calves

Yesterday afternoon. I pull up and park beside a colleague for a minute to catch my breath and engage in the pedicabbie equivalent of water cooler conversation.

"Remember when I had that couple on my bike, and you rode past me over by the steamboat terminal?" he asks.

"Sure."

"Well they were admiring my muscular legs," says my colleague, an ex-Marine, who's pretty ripped all over by the way, "and right at that moment you go riding by. I told them, 'You think I've got strong legs, get a load of that guy!' Their reaction was like shock and awe. Honestly, Mark, I think they were so impressed that they actually gave me a better tip out of appreciation for pointing you out to them!"

Fast forward a couple of hours. The same colleague and I are back in the shop counting up our day's earnings. Turns out he made exactly three dollars more than me, which doesn't sound too bad -- till he reveals that he started the day two hours late. This just isn't fair! I worked till 3 a.m. the night before then slept in my car in the shop to get an early start on the day shift. And this guy shows up for work two hours late and finishes the day with three dollars more than me.

I haul off and whack him as hard as I can with a business card I happen to be holding at the moment. (In case you're wondering, I'm not resorting to literary license here; I actually did this. I actually hit the guy with an honest-to-goodness business card.) I would have used my fist, a bike wrench, or some other more formidable weapon were it not for two facts: 1) He's actually a really nice guy; and 2) as you may remember reading just a couple of paragraphs ago, he's a muscle-bound ex Marine. I figure he could probably snap my neck and the bike wrench with his bare hands. Simultaneously if necessary.

Anyway, the injustice of the whole thing really sunk in on the drive home: By his own admission that no-good scoundrel had gotten an extra tip by showing off my calves. By all rights those three dollars should have been mine! I have been exploited for profit. I'm thinking that I just might sue if I can find a lawyer who'll take the case for a dollar or less.

Harrah's parrots

There's a colony of parrots living in the palm trees around Harrah's Casino. Soon after starting my job I caught a glimpse of an emerald-green bird flitting amongst the top fronds of a palm tree, and I wondered if I was hallucinating. (My daughter Lydia is the ornithological expert In our family, but I knew enough to be pretty sure that there weren't any birds of that color native to New Orleans.)

I've seen them several times now, and my pedicabbie colleagues have confirmed that they have seen them as well. Lydia says that colonies of feral parrots are fairly common in the southern U.S.  There may still be plenty of valid reasons to question my sanity, but apparently sighting little green birds outside Harrah's isn't one of them.

I often hear them chattering away when I ride beneath the palm tees at night. Unlike their kin in cages, they apparently don't speak English, so I can't say for sure what they're going on about. But I strongly suspect that they're commenting on my calves.

Mardi Gras stories

I've been out riding the rickshaw so much lately that I haven't had much time for keeping up the blog. The good news is that with all those long hours out on the street I've been accumulating that many more stories, all of which are just waiting for me to find the time to tell them.

Doing a double 

Speaking of long hours, I worked a couple of double shifts in the days leading up to Mardi Gras. The money was good of course, but my main motivation was something else: I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. Making it through more than 16 straight hours (almost 18 in one case) pedaling God-only-knows-how-many pounds of passengers for God-only-knows-how-many miles was as exhilarating as it was exhausting. To grasp why I found this so thrilling, you probably need to understand that I've never been the athletic type. When I was a kid and it came time to pick teams for kickball or dodgeball or whatever, there were generally girls who went higher in the draft than me. So at this point in my life, just a couple weeks shy of my 46th birthday (a milestone I crossed last Monday, by the way), meeting the physical challenge of "doing a double" on the pedicab felt like scaling a mountain or running a marathon.

Easy money

Like I said, the money was good too. Sometimes, it felt almost as though it were falling out of the sky. Here are some examples (not in chronological order):

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On Mardi Gras Day itself I was flagged down by a guy who runs two restaurants, both of which are located right along the main parade route. They had been serving so many hungry revelers that they were running out of supplies. The restaurateur wanted me to take a few cartons of cream from Restaurant A to Restaurant B and bring a couple of boxes of lime juice and big sacks of sugar back from Restaurant B to Restaurant A. When he asked how much, I hesitated a moment, a little unsure. "Is twenty dollars OK?" I proposed. "How about sixty"? he countered. Yes, I told him, sixty would be fine.

__________

The weekend before Mardi Gras day I had a couple of pretty girls on the back of the bike, and we were stuck in traffic. Some young guys in a nearby car started flirting with the girls, who seemed to be enjoying the attention. One of the guys began begging me to pop a wheelie. After he had made this request for about the fifth time, I got down off my seat and, with my feet planted on terra firma, gently lifted the front tire about three inches off the ground. The guy jumped out of the car, ran over to me, and handed me a twenty dollar bill.

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I was hired for a big chunk of Mardi Gras morning by a middle-aged man. A long-time resident of the Garden District, he and his wife belong to a small circle of friends who choose a theme every year, dress in elaborate handmade costumes based on that theme, and march together along Saint Charles Avenue (the main parade route) during the brief interlude between the two big parades, Zulu and Rex. This man has a handicap, which makes it difficult for him to walk, so he hired me to haul him and his wife in the pedicab while their friends walked alongside us. We moved at a snail's pace, pausing every few seconds to allow the people lined up along the route to take pictures of our procession.

When we saw the Krewe of Rex parade coming toward us, we pulled off onto a side street to watch for a couple of hours. During this time I was on standby, free to watch the parade or just wander around until the gentleman and his wife got ready for me to take them home.

Back at their house, they urged me to come in and eat lunch with them and their friends. I was eager to get back out and make more money, so I stopped in just long enough for some chitchat and a Coke. All in all, the whole job took a little more than three hours, of which less than one hour was spent actually pedaling -- and that at a very easy pace. For this, I was paid the full hourly rate for four hours plus a generous tip.

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Late one evening the weekend before Mardi Gras, a tall black guy collapsed onto the seat of the rickshaw. He mumbled the name of a hotel as though the mere act of speaking was depleting the very last of his energy. I couldn't tell whether he was drunk or just totally exhausted. Almost the instant we started rolling, he fell asleep. I tried to go slowly and to avoid sudden stops because I was worried that he might fall out of the pedicab.

When we reached his hotel, I had to grab his shoulder and gently shake him to wake him up. Once he had gathered his wits, he told me that he needed to go up to his room to get some money and that I would have to wait for him to come back down and pay me.

A couple of ladies who were standing outside the hotel smoking cigarettes overheard this conversation and offered me a twenty dollar bill. They said that they doubted very much that I would see my passenger again, and they hated to see me get stiffed. I argued that we should at least give him a couple of minutes to see if he kept his word; and at any rate, it wasn't their bill to pay. But they kept insisting that they wanted to pay for the man's ride, so finally I took the twenty.

Just about that time, the guy came back (seemingly a whole lot more coherent and energetic than a few short minutes before) and also offered me a twenty -- which, by the way, was a fairly generous amount for a single passenger on a brief ride.

"These two ladies already paid me for your ride, so why don't you just give it to them," I suggested.

Looking a bit bewildered, he turned toward the women and held out the money to them, but they refused to take it, so he turned back to me, trying to press it into my hand. I declined again. "Your ride has been taken care of," I said. "If they don't want the money, you can just keep it."

He just stood there stubbornly holding the money out and insisting that I take it until finally, I did. I made one more attempt to hand it over to the ladies, but they continued to refuse, so in the end I stuck his twenty in my wallet alongside theirs.

"You're an angel!" one of the ladies said to me as she planted a kiss on my cheek. I was grateful for the kiss and the compliment, but it still strikes me as strange. If anybody was angelic in that situation, it had to be the ladies. I, on the other hand, made out like a bandit.

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An angel with wheels instead of wings

Actually, these weren't the only women to tell me that I was an angel during the Mardi Gras season. It became something of a recurring theme. The typical scenario was that I would happen along at the right time to offer a ride to a lady who was desperately trying to get somewhere on foot while, either: A) drunk; B) wearing high heels; or C) drunk and wearing high heels. And she would say, "Oh God, yes, I would LOVE a ride!" And the whole way she would tell me over and over again that I was her angel (sometimes interspersing compliments on my calves). I lost track of how many times this happened, but I can tell you that I never got tired of it.

What does it take to make the blog?

On Mardi Gras and the days leading up to it, I ended up working more in the Garden District than in the French Quarter. I found working uptown (the Garden District) to be a much more pleasant experience all the way around than working downtown (the French Quarter). Navigating traffic was much easier, and the parade watchers were much better behaved. Truth be told, Mardi Gras parades are wild and raunchy affairs anywhere in the city, but far less so uptown where the crowd is made up largely of families with children as opposed to college kids and of locals as opposed to tourists.

That's not to say that all of my passengers were perfectly orderly, law-abiding and sober though. For example, there was this one seemingly sweet, young couple. We were having a pleasant chat along the way, and I mentioned to them that I write a blog about my experiences as a pedicabbie.

"That's cool," the man said, "So are we going to be in your blog?"

"Probably not," I told him. "You haven't really done anything outrageous enough to bear mentioning."

"Really?" said his female companion. "We just smoked a joint back here!"

So, sweet young couple, if you happen to read this, let me say to you, "Congratulations! You made the blog after all."