A day in the life of a chauffeur

I was on call and hadn't worked at all that day. It was about 2 PM when my boss called me. "I have some clients at the hotel in Ontario you need to pick up right now, they're going to the Burbank airport." I tell my boss that I'm on it and I put on my suit, dust off my Lincoln town car and head to the hotel. There are two latina women around their late twenties or early thirties waiting out front. I help them put their luggage in the trunk and they hop into the car. "WE WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN KICKED OUT OF THE HOTEL IF YOU WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN MESSING AROUND WITH THAT GUY ON THE ROOFTOP" one of them says to the other. I remain passive, calm and pretend I'm not listening. I am merely their driver taking them to where they have to go, what they're talking about is none of my concern. "Yeah well you stole my my ID for some reason you trick!" The other one says back. It is clear that the older woman is the alpha and the younger one is the more submissive one. They continue to bicker and somewhere in between their bickering I realize that they are prostitutes, I drive on. We were on the 210 freeway driving through the city of Glendora when the older, alpha prostitute demands that I pull off of the next exit. I pull off of the exit and we enter a shopping center. She gets out of the car and screams at the younger woman "GET OUT OF THE CAR! NOW! ACCUSING ME OF STEALING YOUR ID, I HUSTLE MY ASS OFF SO THAT WE HAVE FOOD TO EAT, SHELTER OVER OUR BACKS, GET OUT!!!" The woman still in the car agrees that she'll calm down. The older one goes into the Ross at the shopping center we are at. Waiting outside of the car awkwardly with the younger prostitute still sitting in the car I light up a smoke and lean against the car. She hops out and bums a smoke off of me "yeah that bitch stole my ID, I don't know why but she is just bad news." I don't know what to say so I just nod and imply that I'm listening. Eventually the older prostitute emerges from ROSS with what I assumed to be a few items of stolen clothing. "GO GO, DRIVE AWAY" she says. I drive off and head back to the 210 freeway. "Yeah we aren't going to the Burbank airport" the older one says to me "just drive towards Hollywood please." I changed direction and we were nearing downtown LA when the older one asks me to slow down a bit because the younger prostitute was going to do a "napkin." I was clueless about what she was referring to but quickly find out she meant that her friend was about to shoot up. She eventually asks me to pull over somewhere and I do. While the younger woman is in the car shooting up, the older one hops out of the car and looks through the mailbox of the house we were pulled over in front of. There was nothing there however just as she's doing that a cop pulls up behind us. She swiftly but without drawing attention to herself tells me to drive off. I do and the cop tails us for about half a mile when he finally disappears. I get off on La Cienega and pull into an apartment complex not far from the 10 freeway and La Cienega. A man who looks like he might be their pimp crawls out of a hole in a garage, a few scraggly looking teenagers crawl out after him. The prostitutes chat with him and they tell me they need to be dropped off somewhere else. When I ask where they tell me to just drive through Hollywood. The sun was starting to set at this point, the younger woman was strung out and I had no idea where I was going. After a few phone calls the older prostitute asks me to drive them to the back of a tattoo shop off of Hollywood Boulevard. At last after several hours of aimless driving with these aggressive women I had a destination to drop them off at. I pull up, a tattoo artist emerges and hugs the prostitute and I help them unload all of their luggage from my car and onto the ground. I shake hands with the older tattoo artist and say goodbye to the younger one. They didn't seem to know how long they would stay there or where they would go afterwards. I couldn't help but feel sad for them but especially for the younger one who was obviously very influenced and bossed around by the older one. I drove back East towards Ontario, thinking about my boring and uneventful life and how I had just shared the day with a couple of women who had very different lives, lives full of turmoil, drug use and prostitution, but at least they were lives full of adventure.