February 13, 2008
In many respects, big city drunks have it easy over their blotto backwoods brethren. There’s no need to blow a sizable portion of your paycheck–the remainder of what’s been left in the jukebox of a local saloon–on a cab fare into the hinterlands, if cabs even service those back roads at all. At least you’re occasionally able to stumble home if you remember such details as your address (which you distinctly recall scribbling on a napkin and stuffing into a stranger’s purse) or that the shortest distance between two points is the straight line you cannot walk.
Sure you might wander into an alley inhabited by a tire iron-wielding maniac (who doesn’t look like they drive but who take out their bus-pass related frustrations on the noggins of unwitting passersby), but you’re at greater risk of having your reasonable facsimile of ‘home’ be a yellowing mattress hauled out on garbage day.
A Sydney man after a night on the town and eschewing public transit (a good move generally, as we’ve shown here) found out that navigating home in an urban milieu is fraught with peril even if you’re taking what should be the safest route. According to the Daily Telegraph, a cabbie was arrested after allegedly reversing over the man, who he thought was trying to abscond without paying the meter fare—cab drivers being second only to bartenders on the service industry’s ‘most often stiffed when it comes to paying the bill’ hierarchy.
The Aussie partier, whose drunkenness cannot be called into dispute as he would only give his name as ‘Columbus’, claimed he was ’smacked to the footpath’, by the cab driver, not once, but twice. In keeping with the ’seeing double’ sensory experiences often occurring in these situations, police investigators later confirmed that the cab had only reversed once.
According to reports, the cab driver had looked bewildered as he was lead away in handcuffs, asking why they had arrested him and not the man who’d recently painted the town fire engine red and didn’t have the good sense to get off the road. He was later released without charge.
It’s unknown how ‘Columbus’ fared the rest of his voyage.
