Homobiles Magic Night One

In fifth grade I told my mom that I wanted to be a truck driver or a taxi driver and I don't remember how that was received but it probably was not her first choice.  Tonight I managed to live out my dream: I'm going to try my hand at being a cab driver for Homobiles.  More accurately I will be a volunteer driver for this non-profit which provides safe rides homes for the queer community and their allies. I will gladly accept donations for my work (which is how we pay for our own gas, car upkeep and it is where our take home pay comes from).

Tonight was my first full shift doing a ride-along with another driver.  She was an amazing trainer, having spent years as a yellow cab driver in her hometown of San Francisco before joining Homobiles shortly after they opened.  I'll write more about the history & premise of Homobiles another time (it's a good story) but want to thank my kind trainer for a night full of good conversation, driving all over the city teaching me connective tissue of roads and on-ramps while talking about the Bay, the queers, and all the other things.

The reason I'm staying up a few more minutes before crashing into bed is that pure magic happened at the end of the night. There has been this thing happening since the moment I moved here (and other people report similar phenomena) where I frequently, unexpectedly and delightedly bump into people I have known in all my past lives (well, most of them).  The dyke who I really connected with when we all got snowed in over President's Day weekend in DC after the True Spirit conference, long-lost friends from college, people I haven't seen in years have all surfaced in unexpected but understandable ways.  We've all rolled downhill towards the Bay, drawn by similar and diverse reasons to call this area home or to come for visits.

So when we pulled up outside our destination in the early-model Prius I was both astonished and not at all surprised to see him standing there.  I haven't seen Ghalib in 15 years - approaching 40 allows for sentence like this to start cropping up in alarming fashion.  He arrived at Hampshire College from Jordan, a Palestine 17 year old who rapidly emerged as a fierce queer artist and activist.  And I loved him like a brother.  And there he was in the late night and I could hug him and call him habibi.  It was instantly familiar in the cab, like it was last month that we'd last chatted.  Facebook keeps us up on each others lives, he lives in Hawaii but is here to watch his sister graduate.  And when we dropped him off I got out to hug him again and did not want to let him go.

We'll see each other soon and be able to talk more about what we meant to each other as young queer activists trying to make our way in a world neither of us knew. My heart is full and I teared up when we left - feeling like a benediction had been bestowed upon my shift, my new gig.  Driving home across the bridge to Oakland felt like wild freedom and the taste of something new in my mouth but grounded by these things, the queer community people I meet who instantly feel so familiar plus those long lost familiars coming back around. Pure magic.