It is now 2021, and although I haven’t written about my experiences driving rideshare with Uber in St Louis, stories of my riders which reshaped my image of St Louis during the last two years I lived there are still easy to remember.
A young woman entered my car in the Central West End neighborhood of St Louis. She was probably no more than a year or two out of high school, if that. Her clothing and her personal style were not very much influenced by pop culture, she seemed to be someone who had good judgement, not easily lead by group opinion into drugs and violence, but someone who made her own decisions, interested in quality of life.
She had lived in a rented apartment, and fallen behind on her rent by three months. By the time of the court date with the landlord, she had the rent money, so she paid the rent in cash as agreed according to court stipulation, and was able to stay in her apartment with the express condition that she had to keep up on her rent going forward.
My heart sank when she said she had paid the past due rent in cash, and I looked at her in my rear view mirror with alarm for what she might say next. When again she fell behind on rent, her landlord falsely claimed she had not paid the late rent from before and she had no proof of payment because she had paid cash. So she was evicted and the door locked, all of her possessions remaining in the apartment.
Not long after her eviction one of her neighbors noticed, one day, that the door had been left ajar. Wanting to collect her clothing and belongings, she entered the apartment.
One has to wonder whether the open door was watched by others, who perhaps had left the door open for a purpose. She was arrested for breaking and entering, and at the time she was riding with me, in the midst of the crisis, was facing prison time. This was her response when I had asked her, as I ask many of my riders, how is your (whatever week day) shaping up?
All of us make mistakes. Although there are those in St Louis who are her age and have a defiant attitude, for what ever their reason, she did not have an attitude of truancy. She was one of those people whom you cannot imagine seeing the inside of a jail cell, or prison. One of those people for whom we hope assistance is available from free legal services in St Louis, a service always over burdened.