Rush hour. A graveyard of cars on the LA-to-OC asphalt, engine heat shimmering, a thousand red taillights smearing the horizon. My Prius idled—a metal coffin in the procession.
He slid into the back seat wearing a suit that cost more than my transmission. Skin the color of a tanning bed bulb, hair like an oil spill. Expensive-cheesy. He never looked at me, never offered a grunt of greeting. Just opened his phone and launched into a loud, performative conference call—mergers, margins, *leveraging synergies*—with the unearned confidence of a man who’d never been told *no*, and certainly never to use his inside voice.
The radio was on low, but it couldn’t drown him out.
I wasn’t a driver anymore. I was a hornet trapped under a glass jar, buzzing with futile rage. He was free in the back seat—free to command, to perform, to exist. I was the automated stagehand, a ghost in the machine he didn’t even know was haunted.
An hour of my life, gone. The worst part wasn’t the traffic. It was the violence of being turned into furniture—no acknowledgment, no nod, no “thanks.” Just an object moving him from Point A to Point B.
When we finally reached his destination—a sleek office tower reflecting the hazy sun—I dropped him at the curb and felt a hollow relief. Beneath it, a small, childish rage.
So, I did the only thing the system afforded me: I gave him one star. A petty, digital spike of spite. It felt like justice—the only kind I could administer.
An hour later, my phone buzzed with a notification. He’d tipped me ten dollars.
All that anger, all that erasure, and he’d casually slipped me a bill—to absolve his conscience, or maybe just to close the loop in his mind. My one-star revenge sat there in the rating history, a confession of my pettiness he would never see.
I stared at the ten-dollar. The app owned the interaction, the payment, even my attempt at defiance. The machine was built for his comfort and my compliance.
My only choice was to log back in and drive.
***
Tom Young is a Philadelphia-born writer in Los Angeles. His essays chronicle the hustle to survive in LA’s performance economy, a struggle deepened by cancer and the long road back.
Rejection Letters 