ride-i-t-l-trip

Ride I T L is a privately-owned, government-funded van service for the transportation disadvantaged here in the greater Pensacola area.

The bus system as you know: leaves a bit to be desired? has some holes in the schedule and routes? How-and-whatever you wanna describe/call it. And Navy Federal isn’t one of the stops.

Being within a hundred twenty-five percent of the poverty line we qualify.

To get to NavyFed by seven-thirty in the morning the pickup window is between six-fifteen and seven-fifteen in t he morning, though they are have always been (for the last six weeks) here by six-forty-five. Haven’t been late once. The pickup window is four to five pm. There are a few of us new recruits without wheels. Four out of eleven in this training class. Nikkie sits out front with me and, not qualifying as poor enough, spends a third of her paycheck on Uber rides.

Almost all of the drivers have multiple jobs: Lawrence teaches elementary school in the morning; one dude drives Uber; Larinda has something else; one woman is a caregiver to a disabled person; John only works for Ride I T L, but drives as well as maintains the fleet of wheelchair vans, seven days a week from two ‘till ten in the morning, sometimes longer.

They’ll come door to door picking two or three people up and dropping us off per ride. Near our house is Miss Jackson who’s older than me and lives in one of about a dozen little cottages in a by-the-week motel on Mobile Highway by the Vietnamese stores. Her son, a fireman, died three or four years ago and she is on the cleaning crew at Navy Federal along with Annabelle who we sometimes pick up in the evenings at five or five-fifteen. She lives in the opposite direction from our house so on those evenings it’s often two hours or more before I get home, and it’s ten miles away.

Annabelle is a bug-out: she’s got tourettes (syndrome), “the clean kind”, she says. Her meds have shitty side effects, so she often opts for “glitching out”, which makes sense and I don’t mind. The glitches are kind of high volume, but not unpleasant. Glitch is a good word for it, out of her ebullient stream of loquatiosness there’ll be what you might describe as a cough followed by a vocalization that sounds like a stream of repeating whaddayas as she stares into the sky. She digs Jesus but not in a beautiful way, she’s all heart and we all adore her.

“Dollar” Bill just released a memoir called Jail Sales which chronicals his journey from grand theft auto to a career in sales of rent-to-own furniture subscriptions, radio dee-jaying and more. He drives while he emotes.

John and Lawrence are big dudes, they probably weigh six hundred pounds between them. John has his son and grandkids living with him in a trailer.

Along with jobs, they take a lot of people to dialysis and methodone clinics. There’s a woman not far from here who we pickup in a trailer off T Street and take, in her wheelchair to have her blood slowly flushed out in a refrigerated clinic off Airport Boulevard. She’s been doing this three days a week for like seven years. Big needles and it takes hours. Some people elect for the alternative which is an expiditious death.

Lawrence and I rode out to what used to be the Monsanto plant on Chemstrand the other evening and picked up a guy who recently became some kind of supervisor there after only six months of employment following a brief stint in federal prison for stealing government property: refurbishing and selling laptops they were going to throw away. He said that one of the men he’d become close with there over chess games disclosed before my fellow riders release that his sentence was for murder and cannibalism. The guy was apparently very cool and cordial in demeanor. What inspired him to kill and eat people? Apparently he’d explained he had anger issues.

So, thanks for helping me sleep. Good night.

–dRiLL

4/09/2026