I remember one time when I was bar hopping in my thirties. I picked up an Uber ride when the company had just started. It had to be around 2010.

The driver was a short guy. His head was barely sticking over the steering wheel. He greeted me when I stepped in and asked where I was heading.

“To the Lava Lounge on La Brea,” I said.

“OK, I like that place,” he said. “A lot of famous people go there.”

I hadn’t gone enough to see anyone I would’ve recognized.

My friends had just moved out of town, so I was going to bars alone, which was a little sad, but I was fine with it. You get used to the solitude after a while. I thought, what a weird, ingenious idea was Uber, an alternative to a smelly taxicab. The drivers used their own cars and kept them fresh and clean.

The driver that night drove slowly through the Sunset Strip in Hollywood and stayed well within the parameters of the speed limit. And he was conversational, too, keeping me engaged while I was drunk. Except he was obsessed with celebrities. He must not have been from around there–maybe Glendale–because if you lived in Hollywood long enough, you got jaded. It was no big deal if I saw a famous person at a coffee shop or someplace else.

But anyway, we were halfway to the Lava Lounge when the driver told me, “You’ll never believe who I picked up yesterday.”

I was genuinely curious to hear exactly who. I said, “I don’t know. Who was it?”

“Charlie Brown,” he said.

I said, “Who?”

“Charlie Brown,” he repeated.

I had to wait a few seconds to the let the name register to know whom he was talking about, so I had to confirm with him. “You mean the Peanuts cartoon Charlie Brown?”

“Yep, that’s him,” he said in an impressed sort of way as if he was telling every passenger he picked up.

I didn’t know what to say to that. “OK? Was he nice?”

“Yeah, really nice.”

We were about a block or two away from my destination.

“What did you talk about with him?”

“We talked about stuff.”

He made it sound like it was just between him and Charlie.

I didn’t want to stir things up, so I left it at that.

The driver dropped me off in front of the Lava Lounge.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“So long, friend.”

I got out of the backseat. I think it was a black Nissan but not altogether sure.

All night, as I was drinking and getting more drunk in the bar, I tried to decrypt what he meant as if Charlie Brown held a hidden meaning. Who was he really talking about other than the cartoon character? Then I decided to let it be. OK. So he picked up Charlie Brown. I don’t know–and I’ll never know–where Charlie was going, certainly not to a bar because he was too young to go to one. Maybe to baseball practice with Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the gang. All I know is I tipped the driver ten dollars and gave him five stars.