You could tell he wanted to. You could tell he had comments to add, things to say in our conversation that he was not a part of. He’d chuckle silently at a joke one of us made, his body quivering a little behind the wheel. Or he’d nod along at a point as he flicked on the turn signal or merged into traffic.

But he held out from the moment he picked us up at the 26th and California courthouse in Little Village up until the pre-rush hour glut by the Ogilvie train station when he just couldn’t take it any more.

“I’m one of them!” the Uber driver said after my friend made a comment about all the people in the world who paid tens of thousands for degrees they don’t use.

He was a mathematician.

Jaime was his name, the app told us when he rolled up to the decrepit courthouse to pick us up in a Mercedes. He had a slight accent — Argentinian, he later clarified. A child of immigrants. Immigrants who wanted a better life for him. Immigrants who pushed.

So college, which they paid for. Mathematics degree, which requires a level of brains I don’t quite comprehend. A career in forensic accounting, which required a level of dedication he didn’t quite comprehend.

Forensic accountants are the people who uncook the books. They’re the ones who go through the records of corporations or individuals to uncover every shady trick pulled. They find the forged entries. They find the off-shore accounts. They pull the laundered money out of the dryer and they find every tax nook and crook the rainy day funds get hidden.

It’s amazing work. And an amazing pain in the ass.

“It was hard, you know?” he said as he turned past a trendy bar in the former warehouse district. “The fourth time your friends call and it’s like, I’ve got to work.”

So he walked. Got his life back. Saw his friends. Breathed. We congratulated him.

“Yeah, my parents don’t feel the same way,” he said.

The family that paid for everything.

Here’s where the story gets unbelievable. Here’s where it goes from a moral victory to an out-and-out win.

The guy’s job is amazing. Not the Uber driving, which he just does in odd hours when he’s back in Chicago for a few days. He’s a photographer. And his specialty?

“So this guy sends us to photograph his resorts. I just got back from Bali, where he has like nine resorts. I’m off to the Philippines next week.”

The man gets paid to spend months at a time at beachfront resorts around the world, and apparently gets paid enough to Uber in a Mercedes. After ditching nights and weekends poring through reams of data and financial paperwork to catch tax cheats, his only complaint now is that he sometimes doesn’t know what to do with himself during all the downtime he has.

At the resorts.

In Bali and the Philippines.

This isn’t a call for the disaffected to quit their jobs — I can assure you this man is an outlier. And it’s not the moment where I announce that I’m quitting journalism to steal this man’s identity and show up in Bali with a fake Argentine accent and a camera — I can assure you though that I thought about it.

This is a bit of hope for the disaffected, just a nod that, yeah it’s not you but somebody made it.

And he’s sitting on a beach or picking up rides in Little Village. Either way, he’s out.

Read about another conversation with a driver

Read a sadder tale of the courthouse at 26th and Cal

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Read the original stories from the teaser:

Hunter of Magic

Goodnight Wicker Park

The Smell of Magic

Cockroach on the Factory Floor

A Blue (Line) Christmas

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks

The Evidence of Leather

She just walked wrong, herky-jerky like an inexpertly operated marionette. She clomped into Room 100 when it was still holding traffic court, sliding in the seat next to me and my friend.

“Have they called S_____ yet?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. We just got here,” I whispered back.

She slid up to the next row forward.

“Have they called S_____ yet?” she asked a young woman there.

The young woman shook her head and shrugged.

It was 40 minutes to bond court.

Bond court at the criminal courthouse at 26th and California, “26th and Cal” to those familiar, isn’t in what one thinks of as a courtroom. The courthouse has those, grand high-ceilinged rooms let rot with chipping plaster and wheezing ventilation, justice dished by judges and juries in decaying chambers that once impressed.

Bond court isn’t in one of those places. The room where bail is set looks like rundown office space for a company that doesn’t care much about its employees. Bright fluorescent lights and that awful off-white porous ceiling tile that you just want to whip pencils at to see if they’ll stick.

The pews tell that it’s not an office. Like castaways from a failed church, the pews were stained wood, heavy and stately and, for that, almost comical for being lodged in what should by rights be a telemarketing call center.

There was a break while the room flipped from traffic court to bond. My friend and I headed to the second-floor cafeteria, passing along the way a petting zoo for TV camera crews waiting to do their live remotes on the luxury trials of the day. Friday’s TV attractions were two pedophile cases, one involving a priest and the other a teen raped while locked up in adult corrections, a smiling newswoman in mortician wax makeup told us.

After our break, we returned. The woman with the taut ponytail and T-shirt hanging like a dress was still there, but most of the other audience had changed. Some milled about the comical pews gabbing while others, like the woman with the ponytail, simply sat, hand resting on chin or nails nervously nibbled or, like the woman with the ponytail, both.

Some reporters entered and left, sitting in their special, fenced-off set of pews. Bailiffs rolled in two, three rolling carts stacked with manila file folders. Bailiffs and clerks and shoddy-dressed lawyers bustled in and out of closed doors near the massive tiered bench for the judge and his helpers.

The pace quickened. The crowd strained necks to see what action would come. A dark-haired woman in a skirt suit walked in front of the audience, explaining the rules and what they meant. The judge sets bond. There are a few options, the most common that the person will have to pay 10 percent of the amount the judge names. If the suspect pays, he or she (mostly he) can go free until trial.

From there, the justice system will see.

All rise. The judge comes in. Be seated. A new door opened and the first suspect was guided out, hands held behind his back to mimic cuffs.

It started.

Armed robbery. Aggravated battery. DUI. Possession, so much possession. A man accused of owning child porn. A man who fought the Wrigley Field security guards for saying he was too drunk to enter. A shackled man in DOC reds who wouldn’t give the guards a shiv he stole while awaiting trial on murder charges.

The whine of a printer. The rumble of an impatient crowd. The creaks of seats as each suspect’s loved ones stood to show support when they entered. Reporters leaving and entering the room. The judge calling names and numbers as fresh-faced defenders rattled off mitigating factors.

He graduated high school, your honor. He’s in a GED program. He’s learning to operate a drill press. 25, lives with his mother. 43, lives with his sister. Same house he’s lived in for 10 years, 20 years. Lifelong Cook County resident. Lived in Chicago 23 of his 25 years. Two children. No children. Child on the way, your honor.

Then, the final word from the judge. I-bond. D-bond. Cash for some. Report in July. Report in August. Branch 44. Branch 50. Branch 38. Branch 42-5. $10,000. $30,000. $75,000, numbers meaningless because the real cost will be a tenth. On to the next suspect’s name before the current one has a chance to walk away. The suspect is rushed back through that same door, sometimes jostled into the next person coming out it for justice.

“It’s like a factory floor,” my friend whispered.

“I guess it has to be,” she later said.

It started at the front. Two women in heavy makeup and booty shorts recoiled at something on the ground, yanking their feet onto the pews. A large bailiff who had previously yelled “Be quiet!” to the yammering crowd slammed a foot down by it.

Whatever it was skittered off, its path only discernable by the recoiling audience members looking down in horror. The bailiff gave chase, slamming a foot down every few steps.

With a final slam by the end of the row, the bailiff smiled. He kicked it over to an open doorway where a conference table and a few chairs could be seen. It was a cockroach, now curled and dead. Nothing in the courtroom stopped during the chase. Factory floor justice continued. It had to, just to keep up.

The woman with the large men’s T-shirt and herky-jerky motion sat and watched it all. Squirming like a schoolchild, she tried to joke with a Hispanic woman in front of her.

They were sending them through the door now three at a time. The first would go to the bench, the second to a railing by the reporters’ enclosure, the third up against the wall by the door. Then wall to railing, railing to bench, bench back through that door.

A man came out, was put against the wall. The woman with the ponytail pulled back in her seat.

He was heavy and black. He was big, maybe the owner of the inside-out T-shirt that hung over the woman like a dress.

The woman moved up a row and stood next to the pew, holding onto it for balance.

She waved delicately at the man. He mouthed something at her. What he mouthed had three syllables. What he mouthed ended in “you.” She smiled.

Wall, railing, bench. Charges, mitigation, an acronymic bond name and a dollar amount named without eye contact. Back out the door, new guy coming in.

It took no longer than the others.

The woman clomped away from the pew, pausing for a moment by the door with the dead cockroach, a watery, scared look on her face. She straightened herself as much as her marionette posture could and clomped down the hallway, now truly alone.

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A story from a past trip to the courthouse

How did he get there? What happened? And how does tough does a man have to be in this neighborhood to go out at night in a wheelchair? That’s what scared me.

That and the fact the house they were hanging out in front of had no lights.

I kept driving.

I had checked out my car-sharing car to drive to Chinatown. Highway traffic pushed me onto surface streets. My sense of direction pushed me to Little Village, almost four miles to the east of the dim sum and illegal weapons I sought.

The cruise west on Cermak had been pleasant and uneventful. I passed some storefronts closed for the night, some closed forever. Botanicas, abogados, agencias de viajes, a Church’s Chicken.

A few stories beckoned, things I made mental notes to come back and write about when they were open (an old theater called Apollo’s 2000), when I could bring someone to translate (a place called Pizza Tango) or when I grew a foot taller, got some muscles and learned how to fight (a sketchy looking pool hall with a hand-painted sign).

Turning back north on Kedzie into North Lawndale was a bit harder a transition. The stores went away, replaced by homes punctuated with corner convenience liquor stores that all took LINK. Groups of young guys hanging out on corners in front of buildings with no lights, some in wheelchairs.

A firetruck stopped and started up along the road, apparently pulling over to check their directions.

But I was in a car.

A car is separate. A car is safe. It’s the urban battle tank, we convince ourselves. Nothing bad can happen in a car and if something looks like it needs some extra security, just roll up the windows and gape at the poverty, gape at the urban blight, gape at the people just trying to get through a day on cracked roads that lead everybody out but them.

The car turns us into a fool, a gawker and a tourist.

And on my gaping tourist drive, my coward’s run through a place I had no reason being, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror.

It was the one I saw there who scared me.

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