It’s last call—time to kill any drinks within arm’s reach and make a crooked beeline to the door before being dragged out or yelled at by some scuzzy doorman. At 2 a.m., nothing seems more appealing than escaping the piss-soaked San Francisco streets and retreating to the comforts of home with a nightcap, a date or just passing out face first on the bed. At this point, every reveler has to decide how to get home, or whether to go home at all. While teleportation is not yet an option, there are a few travel options beyond waiting hours for the Night Owl bus or hunting down a vacant cab—though they would only be considered by the heavily intoxicated.

The haze of alcohol combined with the strange energy of the wee hours of the morning can make hazardous “alternative” travel decisions seem not only viable, but outright inspired.

Alejandra Salas stopped by a bar in the Mission after a miserable day at work. After an indefinite number of vodka cranberries she realized that closing time was coming up fast, and she needed to begin her journey home. Salas, twenty-two, was the only one among her friends who had to wake up early in the morning, so she left the bar alone with only her vodka-muddled judgment to guide her. Under the glow of streetlights, she saw two vehicles parked along the curb. Her eyes moved right past the empty yellow taxicab and settled on a fluorescent painted VW van.

An unassuming-looking guy sat in the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette. “The engine was running, and he was blasting the Rolling Stones,” Salas recalls. He stopped nodding his head to the music long enough to lean over and ask the bewildered Salas if she needed a ride home.

Now, Salas usually makes it a point to follow that old childhood adage. “[When] sober, I would never get into a stranger’s car,” she insists. But in this instance, she weighed her options in a fleeting moment without thinking about the possibilities of axe-murderers, sex offenders, or even waking up dead.

The cab that had been waiting beforehand had already taken off. “It was too cold to walk and I was tired, anyways, so I thought, ‘What the hell?”

Once Salas hopped into the van, the driver put it in reverse and gently backed into a trashcan on the curb. The collision didn’t seem to faze him and he lurched the van forward without looking back to assess the damage. Salas, however, turned to look over her shoulder—not to scope the scene of the crime, but because something in the back seat caught her eye. It was a pigeon, flapping its wings amid a pile of its own feathers and excrement. She then realized that the inside of the van was fully peppered with pigeon feathers.

“I asked him why he had a freaking pigeon in his car, and he just kind of shrugged and said it must have flown in earlier that day.”

She thanked him for the offer, and decided that, on second thought, she was going to walk home. Salas escaped the psychotic hippie in the VW Bus, but was certainly left shaken. Even the 38 Geary is usually less freaky than that, although also not completely excrement-free.

Colette Grant* sat at a bar near her apartment in the Sunset District, talking to a guy she met when she saw him eyeing her across the room an hour earlier. She felt a strong connection between them, although the connection had a lot to do with the fact that she had just knocked back a shot of Jameson and chased it with a Long Island Iced Tea. It was St. Patrick’s Day and she was determined to celebrate the occasion, whether she’s Irish or not (she’s not) and whether or not she had to work the next day (she did).

Her plans changed slightly when her new friend suddenly told her he needed to leave to take care of his roommate, who was very drunk, sitting on the sidewalk outside the bar. But instead of saying goodbye, calling it a night and heading home, she took him up on his offer to go swimming at his house in Belmont.
Moments later, Grant found herself cruising to the Peninsula with a stranger and his drunken roommate swaying in the back seat. “It was bizarre, but funny at the same time,” she says. “Well—funny until the roommate started projectile-vomiting all over my back.”

He gave no warning, so she was unable to avoid getting coated with everything he ate and drank that night. Swimming was starting to seem less like fun and more of a good way to get the barf off of her backside. “It was in my hair, the side of my face, and inside the hood of my sweater,” she exclaims. “I could feel it running down the top of my back, and—I swear to you—it was the hands-down most disgusting thing I have ever felt.”

As soon as the car stopped moving, Grant jumped out, peeled off her sweater, and threw it to the ground. She didn’t say a word to either of them, but she waved goodbye as she walked away, on her cell phone, calling a cab to give her a ride back into the Sunset.

Just when you think that your life is not complete because you have never ridden home tandem on a skateboard or hitched a ride in a limo or a fluorescent VW Bus, somebody pukes all over your back and introduces you to their pigeon-hostage-cum-pet, reminding you that taking a cab is enough of an adventure after all.