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Ahhhhghhhhh!
Crap if it isn't Sunday night already. I slept until about 6:30 pm. I got a money order from Gerbes and went downtown to pay my utilities bill. I grabbed a pie from Shakespeare's and rented The Brown Bunny from 9Th Street. Wow. That Chloe Sevigny is an actress, in spite of what that umlaut says. That must have been some direction on Gallo's part.
While at the grocery store I spied the newest addition of the Vox. On the cover (and in the link) is a story about a purported 'day in the life' of a Columbia A *1 taxi driver. The author apparently followed a driver for a day and tried to capture a glimpse of what its like in the cab. Read it for yourself. From the dates in the story, I guess it was written some 8 months ago. Who knew there was such a backlog on cover stories at the Vox?
The driver in the story still works for A*1, and dispatches part time. I also drew her name in the office Secret Santa pool ($10 limit), something I wish I had avoided. I had a momentary stirring of seasonal emotion. It has since passed.
I had been tipped off on the story by Mark, a night driver, last night. I thought I might learn something from reading it so that I could buy something slightly more personal than a $10 gift certificate. Maybe 3 packs of Marlboros?
If you read the story, it talks of the driver trying to finalize wedding arrangements. She's still engaged as of press time. Her beau is a guy named Derrick, who just came back to working at A*1 after a hiatus/tour of duty with John Luter Transportation.
Yeah, cab.
Friday night was busy enough. Last Tuesday and the food poisoning had pretty much crushed any resistance left in my spirit. Near full-fledged hatred for the job has set in. I had filed to work like a mindless complacent zombie. I was pleasantly surprised, a little, when things didn't completely suck ass and I had the tiniest glimmer and faint reflection of when I kind of enjoyed it.
I got to work at 3:40. I'm supposed to get there by 3:45. On any given day it's about 30 minutes before I get into a cab, some days its an hour and a half. I was surprised, then, when I had a car and a call as soon as I walked through the door. I was still a little groggy from sleep when I went out and jumped in #10.
#10 had apparently been sitting all day, and was completely cold. I fired it up and was surprised to hear the engine racing somewhere above 2000rpm. The call they gave me was a 3:45 time call. Thus, by the time I was in the car, adjusted, and rolling, I was already late. I got to the address at 3:55 or so. The car was running so fast it was hard to stop and sounded like it was going to explode when you had it in park or neutral. I was embarrassed to pull up late in such a shitty ride. It was a large black woman with an apron on, apparently headed to work. Her husband stood in disapproval at my tardiness. All in the glaring light of day.
She climbed in and I dropped the car in gear with a thud and a jerk. I apologized for running late. She asked what the time was and said we had 5 minutes to get to Ryan's steak house. I went to turn the meter on and it didn't work. I was embarrassed and pissed off times two. She used the cab a lot, though, and knew the fare. I got her to work on time. I figured the car should have been warm enough to turn on the heater by then, so I flipped on the blower. It didn't work. Pissed off times three.
Coming back from a $20 night when I quit early due to a flat tire, I was given a car that ran dangerously too fast, had no meter, and no heat. I radioed dispatch to complain. It was the owner. I predict it will not be long before our personalities clash. I was pretty pissed, and though I'd have liked nothing better than to have gone home, I needed to work to make some damn money. She told me some trick to the meter, and, to my surprise, it began working. Then she sent me to her son's house (the co-owner and half-assed mechanic who works on these pieces of shit) to have him check on the idle problem.
I knew the Lincoln's 5.0 motor well. I had swapped an identical unit in my old '75 Ford Bronco to update it to a fuel-injected, non-points distributor, serpentine belt-driven, roller-rocker motor. I knew I could fix it, but with the owner dispatching I knew I would get blamed for anything else that happened to the car, which is perpetually in a state of disintegration. It pained me to take it to someone else, especially someone several degrees below my own mechanical aptitude, to have it looked at. Plus, it was costing me my time, where I wouldn't be able to run any fares while I drove across town and waited on him to fiddle with it. But, I was bound by procedure and headed over there.
Again, to my amazement, he was able to fix it in a quick second. I watched him back out the throttle set screw by hand until the engine calmed down to a proper curb idle. I then asked him where the fuse was for the blower motor. I told him it wasn't working. He acted surprised and stuck his hand in the car and over a vent on the dash. Now it was working. I guess the Lincoln has some relay that won't turn on the blower until a certain temperature is reached. I had never got in one cold.
So, again, to my amazement, all three ailments were fixed in short order. I found it most odd.
My next call was a group home regular whom I had never dealt with before. He was a skin-and-bones black guy with a walker. He was wearing blue sweat pants, a puffy coat over a matching sweatshirt, and had a stocking cap on his head. The hat further exaggerated the disproportion of his atrophied body to his noggin. As did his gaped mouth and protruding teeth. The teeth were coated in a green film, maybe like the cosmoline GIs coated WWII Jeeps in to protect them from sea salt during shipment to the European fronts. He had a scruff of a goatee under his chin.
He didn't have much to say that I understood. He seemed happy, though, and it came out in a bit of a rush of glee, in the higher register of his vocal cords. I saw him home safely, out past the Lake of the Woods exit. His signature on the charge slip was one of the most rudimentary that I have received. He nearly missed the line entirely and only managed his first name.
I had been so surprised to be given a car and a call as soon as I got to work that I had forgotten to grab a street guide book. I had to rely on the dispatcher for directions near the Lake of the Woods, since it is an area I am not familiar with. When I had dropped off my fare I called 'clear' on the radio, as is procedure. The dispatcher didn't acknowledge me, but this is not an altogether rare occurrence. Some dispatchers never acknowledge your transmission, unless they have further instruction for you. Then, if you call back to make sure they got it they act annoyed. I rarely work when the owner is dispatching, so I'm not really accustomed to her habits. So, I headed back into town.
I figured we were slow, since I didn't get a call on the entire drive back into town. I decided to run by the office to get a street book before I got busy. I radioed to say I was coming in when I turned on the street in front of the dispatch. Only then did dispatch call back to see what I had said. I repeated myself, and she started bitching that I didn't call clear, and that she had had another call at Lake of the Woods coming back into to town, and that I had just cost the cab company a 1/4 tank of gas since another car would have to be sent out.
For starters, I did call clear. And, she knew I was about to clear, because she was giving me directions right up to the point I cleared. And, every other dispatcher is quick to tell you when you have another call in the vicinity, because it is fairly rare. And, I'd put the odds at about 100:1 that there would be a return fare from the Lake of the Woods at 4:45 on a Friday. She should have known I was about to clear and told me then, and surely should have said something in the 10 minutes or so I was driving back to Columbia. It was with this exchange that I had to get out and go in to get my street guide.
When I went to the file cabinet to get my book she said that they weren't there and that "from now on you have to check them out of the office and check them back in when you're done." I hate it when people try to create unnecessary procedure to appear professional to the other 5 people who work there. Like how the manager at Mr. Transmission would put notes on the refrigerator and sign them 'the Management,' as if the other 6 of us would be confounded as to where this strange mandate came from. Nurse Ratchet rationing cigarettes.
My next call was to the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Again, the owner was dispatching. She told me I would have to park and go inside to the McDonald's, where my fare would be waiting. I was looking for a woman with crutches, and I'd "probably have to help her."
I pulled up, stopped, and went inside. There's nothing like the crowd hanging out at the McDonald's inside a Wal-Mart near Christmas. It's like 5 layers of useless tacky shit for the price of one. There was no one anywhere who matched the description. I asked a couple of McDonald's employees who were apparently just off work, eating some of their product, if they had seen any such lady.
"Yeah, but that was like 2 hours ago since she was here."
Given the description I figured I was looking for a group home person who had a time call. I thought they must have had another ride and left early, which isn't overly rare. I double checked, saw no one, and went back outside and relayed the info to dispatch.
Dispatch said it had only been about 40 minutes since she called. She told me to go on if I couldn't find her, but tried to unload it on me like it was my judgment call and that I was making the wrong one. If you're my fucking boss tell me what the fuck you want me to do. I decided to check one last time, to pacify the bitch. As I was walking back to the door a car pulled away, revealing a cart positively overloaded with bags of food. I looked for its owner, who was a black woman with crutches sitting on a bench making a call on the pay phone.
Then I recognized the girl as a regular I pick up from Columbia College. The first night I carried her I asked her about her studies. She started going off about a paper she was writing comparing Hamlet, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings. It had become a routine for me to ask her one quick auspicious question about her paper and listen to her rant and bitch herself out of breath the entire way to her house. She would literally froth and become breathless, in part, no doubt, due to her particular physical malady. Once we got to her house she would catch herself, snap out of her spell, and apologize for ranting so much, telling me that she was sure I was sick of hearing about her problems, and find herself caught short on the subject of polite social discourse.
I caught her just before her call went through. I didn't recognize her immediately because she wasn't wearing her trademark backwards Looney Tunes hat and had her hair shorn close.
"Well, Hell, they should have just told me I was looking for you."
I loaded all of her packages, testing the Titanic proportions of the Lincoln's trunk. She had been waiting outside, she said, for an hour. She had waited outside because other drivers had told her they wouldn't come inside to look for anyone. Thanks, dispatch.
This time we reversed roles and I bitched for the duration of the trip, about the problems with the car, the Lake of the Woods fiasco, the book stuff. The Lincoln had resumed its high idle problem. It was only a $6.05 fare to her house. I carried all of her groceries inside for her. She had a poodle named Taffy on a lead. She would yell at Taffy to stay out of my way and gave me license to kick it if necessary. I felt better after all of the bitching, and she seemed giddy at the prospects of someone unloading themself on her.
I ran a few more fares. The Lincoln's idle continued to climb. I got out and raised the hood. The hood is equipped with gas struts which no longer hold it up. Holding the hood with one hand, I backed out the throttle set screw with the other. I then realized the problem. #10 had had a problem with dying at idle, when you put it into gear, which I knew could be remedied by bumping up the idle speed. After a couple of months, the cab company apparently figured it out. There's a spring which the adjusting bolt goes through which hold tension on it so that it will not turn out of adjustment. Apparently, the yahoos at the cab company removed the spring so they could turn the screw in further to get the desired higher idle speed. But, with the spring missing, the adjusting screw would turn itself inward due to the engine's vibrations while driving with the throttle open. Thus, when you let off of the gas it had turned the idle speed up unreasonably high on its own.
So, every time I drove across town, with my foot on the gas, the screw was constantly worming its way in. Therefore, the idle speed would increase to a dangerous level until I opened the hood and manually turned it down. To do so I had to stop, get out in the cold, hold the hood up with one hand, stick my free hand into the greasy confines of a racing, hot, running engine, find the screw in the dark, and back it out. I probably did this 10-12 times in between fares, which meant that I only had to deal with the outrageously high idle about half of the time. One more thing to worry about when its cold and you're in a hurry. I can barely find time to stop and piss for hours at a time when I'm busy, so this is one more distraction I don't need. Plus, there's something about a machine running needlessly that makes me very anxious. Some quirk to my personal psychology.
Anyhoo, back to the fares. I had a call to pick up at the Super 7. The Super 7 is reputed as a crack den and crackwhore dive, so you never know what you're going to get. I got a skinny old man with no teeth and Merlin the Magician white hair and beard. He was clad in a light blue denim jacket. His movements were deliberate and stilted and I half expected the wind to carry him away.
He got into the car and I asked where we were headed. He said he was going to a friend's house on Rangeline and something. His speech was slow and broken. I asked if it was towards downtown, and he said yes, and that he would recognize it when he saw it. I told him we had a $3 minimum fare, since we were on Rangeline and only a few blocks from downtown. He said he wasn't worried about money.
Well, Dave (as I found out his name was) didn't recognize any houses on Rangeline. I turned, at his direction, onto Worley. Dave didn't recognize any houses on Worley. I turned onto West Boulevard. Ash. Garth. Worley again. Ash again. When the fare hit $7 or $8 I began to worry if he had any money. I asked if he could call his friend to get the address. He said he had a cell phone but that we would find it. I told him I was confident we could but that I didn't want to spend all of his money trying. He again said he didn't care about the money.
Somewhere around $12 or $13 I smelled something akin to scorched food. Dave asked if I "cut the cheese." I told him I didn't. He started fumbling for a window switch. I rolled the window down a little. He laughed, slowly, and waived his hand in front of his face. I though his motions too slow to stir any air or waft away any stench.
On our third trip past Garth and Ash I stopped and asked Dave if he wanted to call his friend. He dug out a cell phone. He looked blankly in front of him "8-7-4...8-7-4...I'm drunk."
"Well, that does happen." I said something again about money. He reiterated that he didn't care "Well, I spend it like I don't care but sometimes it's hard for me to come by." Dave said he was retired military, and drew money for disability, for 30 years or so now.
Dave decided to abandon his plans and go to another friend's house, one to which he knew the address. I pulled up to the house, which was only a few blocks from the Super 7. The fare between the two should be about $4-5. In Dave's case, the meter ran $23.55. He produced $25 and required no change. Good guy, that Dave.
After the owner went home in the evening, Kelly, the dispatcher from the Vox article, came on. She is the least experienced dispatcher, and this is the first time she had ever worked a whole shift when I was driving. I think she could use some more practice.
I dropped a group of sorority girls off on the south side, off of Bearfield, near 1 am. Along the way they called me Edward, Darin, and Garner interchangeably, and, at times, all three. They told me I was the "most 'normal' cabbie" they had ever had. I was eager to race back downtown. The rush at bar closing from 1-2 is my bread and butter. After 2 or 2:30 calls slow down, and you pick up a lot of people from different subdivisions around town, who rode home with someone else or went to a party and need a ride to their houses. But, between 1 and 2 all the money is in getting people from downtown and racing back for more. Thus, I was a little miffed when dispatch sent me across town on the south side to pick someone up from a subdivision on the city limits. When you head back downtown you're guaranteed another fare. People have to get home and can't wait inside. They're cold and they'll literally jump in front of you to flag you down. Out in the sticks there's no guarantee they'll even still be there or awake when you show up.
So, here I am, heading away from all of the money, to a street I have never heard of. I had to stop and consult my book. Inside the city the book gives the locations of streets in reference to other streets. When you get to the edge of the city, though, instead of saying '3 streets west of Providence" it says ".5 miles West of the Providence." It is much easier to count three streets than to look down at an analog odometer and try to do the math while watching where you're going. I was looking for "Chris Street," which was supposed to be off of "Tony Street," which was .5 miles from Rout K-S. I went bombing down a narrow unlined country road. #10's high beams don't click on, and you have to hold the lever with one hand while driving with the other, all the while looking for streets and doing the math.
Well, I didn't find any Tony Street. When I was convinced I had gone much further than .5 miles I had to find a place to turn around. I wasted 5 or 6 miles of precious time on the round trip. I started again, and, again, no Tony. I turned on the only streets close, which were missing their signs. I drove on 4 or 5 winding aimless streets in a subdivision where all of the signs were missing. House numbers were nearly impossible to see and there were cars parked everywhere. I wasted several more minutes before I saw someone come out of a house on my 3rd or 4th pass.
It was now 1:18. A third of bar rush over. This was a young 'urban' black couple, not known for being great tippers. They were concerned with getting to the gas station by 1:30 so they could get booze before it closed, en route to a trailer park on the south side. I drove like a jackass. The road that was supposed to be Tony was marked "Mont" and was nowhere near .5 miles from Route K. I asked which gas station was closest. The woman said to turn right. I got in the right lane at the stop light. Then the guy said left. The right turn/straight lanes turned green. I went to drive through the intersection to u-turn and go right, back towards town.
The chick yelled, "No! Left!"
The guy yelled at her that I was right. I raced towards town, and got to the gas station at about 1:24. In the confusion I didn't get a chance to tell them that it was a dollar extra for the second passenger. I did tell him I charged wait time. He came back out and acted shocked that the meter had climbed to $7.30, from about $4.55 when he went in. Now the girl was defending me, reminding him I mentioned wait time. He had a 4 pack of 16oz Miller High Life cans.
They spent the rest of the ride chewing on the high cost of cabs. I got them to their trailer park. I got to keep the $.30 cents change for tip, after risking tickets to get them to the beer store on time. As the guy was climbing out I noticed he had a San Diego Padres jacket on. I asked him if they were going to show up this year. He didn't understand me, and was half defensive for a second.
"Your jacket. The Padres? You think they'll do any good this year?"
"Oh. Yeah, I don't know." I got the impression he wasn't much of a fan, and probably got it to represent some geographic locale, like in a bad-ass-rap video. He lightened a bit. "You take care now, baby boy."
Baby boy. Another first.
It was now after 1:30. Instead of ferrying a couple of groups of good-tipping drunks I had one $12 fare and $.30 tip. I later found out that the other drivers quit following her dispatch and were just picking up flags. They would say they had another flag when they had cleared, rather than getting sent out on some bull shit call like me. Thus, I was the clean up man, and got sent all over creation on shitty calls.
My next call was on East Walnut. I was looking for the number, which was one of those apartments you never knew existed until you went there, between two businesses. I had passed it, and was going to turn around so I would be coming back on the right side of the road. About 1/2 a block down I saw my friend Alex (a cab regular and my first ever fare). Alex ran across the street and flagged me down. He had also called, though he had given a different addy than the one I was looking for. I told him if he didn't mind doubling up it would save him a couple of bucks. He was cool with that, so we picked up at the other address.
It was two stooges, brothers, on the fast track to being Republican stalwarts. The younger was in from out of town to celebrate his 21st birthday. They were out to indulge in some bawdy rights of passage, though they seemed like poor imitators, like accountants ready to party hardy. I was under the hood of the Lincoln when they walked out, and there was a black guy in the front seat. They climbed in the back and were going to Club Vogue.
The younger wanted to get some booze. The other three of us told him that it was past 1:30 and they wouldn't sell him any. He was stubborn on this point, and insisted the whole ride that he could buy. It was tiresome. We pulled up in front of the Vogue and they continued to bicker as they tried to sort out the $5.05 fare and an appropriate tip.
Club Vogue is in the same weird strip as two other bars, the Thirsty Turtle and Hoot-N-Anny's. They are flooded with people after bars close. The parking lot was a zoo and cars were trying to squeeze through the alley. People leaving the two bars were milling about. While these guys bickered a Cadillac Escalade full of hood rats showing off started honking their horn behind me, rather than going around. A drunk white guy appeared in the passenger's window, wanting a ride. Alex told him we were occupied. He persisted, and tried to open the door. The exterior handle is broken. His hand slipped off and he tried again. And again. It was like a sedated bear at a drive-through zoo, lethargically trying to raid the car for Ho-Hos or Twinkies. The hood rats kept honking. The Lincoln's engine raced. The elder Republican brother was trying to conduct some complex math rather than just giving me a couple of dollars. All of the honking attracted some white hoochie's attention. The Escalade pulled up so they could rap. Alex told the guys he wouldn't go into the Vogue if the ladies looked like that inside. The brothers wanted a time call to pick them back up at 3 am. The guy finally gave me $10 and asked if that was good for Columbia, in part to impress me and here me gush about how generous he was. I thanked him and kicked him the fuck out.
I ran Alex home and thanked him. He got a good first hand example of how hectic the cab can get at times.
At about 2:30 I picked up a second 21st birthday boy. By contrast, he was pretty cool, and flying solo. He was waiting outside of Walgreens. We chatted about strippers all the way to his house. Dispatch told me to head back to the Vogue for my 3 am time call.
I pulled in a few minutes early. There was a #1 Reliable cab sitting in front of the door. I recognized the driver from an incident earlier in the week. I had been dispatched to pick up some regulars at the Vogue. They are 3 contractors in from Kentucky doing construction south of Columbia. They go to the strip club at least 5-6 times a week and spend a couple of hundred bucks each every night. They go to the Extended Stay America. When I pulled in the Reliable guy was there. I pulled in front of him and stepped out to find my guys. As I got out of my car the driver said "Excuse, me, Sir?"
Sir? I drive a cab and look 25. "Yeah?"
"I wouldn't park there, the officers will give you a ticket." The officers?
"Thanks for the heads up," I said, and went about my business, totally blowing him off.
I found two of the guys, and one of them came back to the cab while the other went to get the third from the bar next door.
The guy in the cab apologized for the delay. I told him it was no big deal, I just didn't want them to get in the wrong cab.
"What cab?"
"That yahoo back there in the maroon cab."
"Maroon cab?" The guy got out and went back to the Reliable driver. I watched in the mirror as he poked his head in the driver's window. The Reliable driver gave him a stack of business cards, per his request. As he walked back to my cab he ripped the stack in two, in full view of the driver, handing me the remnants as he got back in.
"I think you just made me a new friend."
This time the Reliable guy was blocking the door, so I had to pull in behind him. I wasn't going to let him scavenge my fare. He was staring at me in his driver's side mirror, giving me the stink-eye. I stopped the big Lincoln so the headlight was beaming right into his mirror and refracting right into his stupid face. Fucker.
I sat there like that for a few minutes, pretending not to notice how pissed off he was. I thought it particularly funny that he compounded his anger by refusing to look away from the source of it. I got out and went inside. I couldn't find my guys so I went back to the car. He was still staring. After a couple of minutes more I heard his door slam. I looked up to see him stalking back towards me. He's a useless fuck of about 45, fat, with a gay moustache and salt-and-pepper hair. I believe his jacket is reserved for Member's Only.
I was still pretending not to notice and trying not to laugh when he rapped twice, angrily, on my driver's window. I opened the door.
"You gonna get those damn lights outta my face?"
My head was tilted back with half a shit-eating grin. I paused to let him build a little. "Yeah," I said, aloofly, with a flick of the toggle switch powering the lights. He grumbled something or other I couldn't pick up, though I was sure it wasn't friendly. I had his attention. With my aloof, shit eating-grin intact I offered him a friendly warning, trying to goad him a bit:
"Easy, guy."
He stalked back to his cab and I was thoroughly amused.
While I was waiting a black guy with that Michael Jackson pigment disease came up to me. He had a $2 bill and was looking for quarters. A crazy lady had paid me a $4.55 fare in quarters earlier, so I traded him out.
My 3 am guys never came out so I headed downtown where I picked up two guys in front of Quiznos. There's an apartment above it where there are a lot of after-bar parties. They hadn't made their mind up on exactly where they were going when some 2-bit hustler came up to the door. He's a pain in the ass black guy who has the most tiresome lines and is a relentless beggar. I've known of him going back to my Mr. Transmission days when he would come in with some crappy far-fetched hard-luck story. He thinks he's an Oscar-caliber actor, but his schtick is paper thin. He had found his way into their party, perhaps as a novelty, from off of the street. He was wasted and was going to try to glom a free cab ride. I pulled off before he could figure out the broken door handle.
The two guys hadn't decided which party they were headed to, but they were both around the corner, off of College. As I neared College on Broadway I pulled to the side and stopped in the last parallel space before the intersection. "Oh, you don't have to stop."
"That's cool, just figure out where you want me to drop you." The guy was on his cell phone. Then there was an incredibly large, misplaced crash.
It sounded weird, and caught us all by surprise. Before the shock of the noise set in, we looked up to see that an '88 or '89 Lincoln, identical to ours, had magically appeared in the opposite lane of Broadway. The front end was gone, shoved up to the firewall, the driver's front tire tucked under where his feet would be. Steam was just starting to billow from under the hood. Pieces lay scattered all over the intersection. The roof was buckled. I looked to see if it was a cab. It wasn't. A small white car appeared right behind it. It was unscathed. A white woman jumped out of the car. She was already on her cell phone.
We were still trying to figure out what happened, when, to my amazement, the driver's door opened. Amazed, in part, that it would still function, since the car was buckled so bad. It took a couple of thrust to open completely, and a big black guy got out. He was apparently so wasted he didn't feel a thing. Or think to run. He stood there in the cold, his hands casually in his front pockets. I pulled around the corner, and dropped the two guys off, less than a block away, still in sight of the crash. The skid marks led right to the concrete base of the light pole in the middle of the intersection. He had gone full bore into the oncoming lanes of College Avenue, over a hundred feet before the intersection, on the wrong side of the divider. He had barreled the front of corner of his Lincoln into the concrete, which destroyed the car and sent it spinning around the pole and left onto Broadway. The skid marks started just past where I would have turned into the lane had I not stopped so the guys could confer. Ouch.
My last call that night was at about 3:20, and was to go to 'Fairway and Limeway,' according to dispatch. There was no Limeway in my book. I found my way over to Fairway and drove along its length. I found an intersection with a 'Vine Way,' but there was no indication of which house I was looking for. It was an odd intersection, with 4 or 5 houses spread way out in all directions. I asked dispatch to call and find out at least which street the house was on, and/or an address. After 10 minutes I was no better off. I was on the radio with the dispatcher who was on the phone with the fare. She was telling me to go left, around a corner, down a hill, etc. But every street was curvy and hilly, and I couldn't figure out how she could give me directions if she didn't see me, and if she saw, why the fuck didn't she just come out? I was getting pissed, and, after my 4th or 5th request I got an address. I pulled up to a small figure hurrying to the street in the dark, braced against the cold.
She got in the front seat. She was scrawny, maybe 20 years old, maybe 5'2", maybe 95lbs. She had straight hair yanked back into an unfashionable pony tail. This revealed more of her ordinary face and pallid complexion. She had tiny scabs all over her face, like zits she had compulsively picked at. She was tweaking pretty hardcore. Meth. No wonder we couldn't get an address out of her.
She spent the bulk of the ride to the Super 8 on her phone, talking with her lover about who all she "was messin' with." "I only fuck you and one other person. You know who he is. You work with him. He's married." She had apparently been at the hotel and left. She didn't want to go back, and was making whoever wanted her to come back pay for the fare. She was complaining to the person on the phone that they "better hurry and get there, or I'm just going to go to sleep. I'm already coming down right now."
She fidgeted quite a bit. I pulled up to the lobby, and she said we were waiting for 'her' to come out with the cab fare. She said she had money but was going to make 'her' pay for the ride. I was about to get off work and was pretty mellow. I watched the lobby for someone to come out. She was sitting in the seat, looking in her purse, facing towards me. A dude from the parking lot started walking up to her side of the cab. He was still a few steps away when I said "is the guy looking for you."
I said it in a normal tone, but she jumped like I just popped a balloon in her ear, and shrieked, startled. "Oh, don't do that to me." She turned around and opened the door for the guy.
He had a beer in one hand an a wallet in the other. He fumbled through some cards and began to check his pockets. It was some horrible acting. "Well. I just had it right here."
"How'd I know this was going to happen," she said, and paid me the $5.05. "I can't tip you 'cause I don't have the money."
Fair is fair.
I cleaned up the cab and headed in. The uniforms had come in. I looked through the rack and found mine. I had put off telling the owner what size I needed, thinking that would spare me a few weeks of wearing them. But, she guessed for me and ordered XL shirts. They are knit 'golf' shirts, heavy, gray, with A-1 Express badged on them. An XL would have been too big, even if they hadn't of ran about a size larger to begin with. There were no pants. I grabbed the shirts and the two black jackets with my name on them and took them home.
When I got to work Saturday a bunch of drivers were already there. Everyone was wearing their ridiculously big shirts. The tails on them are a mile long, and a few people hadn't tucked in. I didn't bother taking mine out of the car, and was wearing my normal attire. Phyllis asked me something about them. I said I had taken them home.
"Why aren't you wearing them, then?" I told her I had left them in my car and that they were too big. Then she scolded me for taking them off of the rack. What the fuck? She said she would reorder them in my size, and, that "from now on, it's no uniform, no car." I wanted to tell her not to bother and walk the fuck out.
We are not a good looking group. We could be wearing tuxedos and still look more or less like shit. You can't polish a turd. And a knit golf shirt isn't exactly way classier than what people already wore. I think its funny that you'd worry about putting on matching shirts when most drivers are creepy obese old men with disheveled hair and lackluster grooming habits. Especially when we're sitting in the front seat of a dark car where no one can see what shirts we are wearing anyway, like people riding in the cab would even care.
And, if you want to put forth a professional image for a cab company, start with the fucking cabs. If I looked nice I don't think it would overshadow the fact that my car is a complete pile of shit. Besides being 18 years old with a peeling vinyl roof and mismatched wheels, the seats are worn, there are no seat belts in the back, the ash tray lids are gone, the trim is fucked, the windows don't work, and half of the door handles are broken. And #16 has a cardboard window.
The cloth seats in the minivans are disgusting and full of cigarette burns. And none of the cars really match, if you're into branding. The two nice new cabs they bought aren't even on the road. Apparently only certain people are privileged enough to drive them, and the owners take them home at night. And, as shitty as the cars are, they could at least clean them. Other than vacuuming the carpet and hosing the exterior, no one ever cleans the dash or windows. When I first started I would clean the cigarette smoke and fingerprint haze off of the windows at night at the gas station. But not since it got to be 20 degrees outside. No one has cleaned a window there in the 7 weeks I've been employed.
This was the chief thing pissing me off when I got into #10 Saturday. And, even though I noted it on my sheet Friday, #10 was still fucked up and idling uncontrollably fast. I got in a car and Phyllis told me to go to the Greyhound bus station, next door, since a bus was coming in. Then she said to "get out and greet them, and see if you can get a flag."
"Gee, I wasn't planning on taking a taxi, but he did stand there like a tool and say 'hello.'"
Fuck all that. I was pissed off and pulled around to the bus station. Two other A*1 cabs were already there, and another followed, then two Reliable cabs. I figured my odds were just as good at the mall or downtown, but I had orders. Then the guy who works at Greyhound came out and told me that there wouldn't be a bus until 9 or 9:30. It was 4:30. Again, what the fuck?
I had brought the Furry Lewis CD from the library. That was the only thing I had going for me.
My first fare would be two women headed to the Heidelberg for a company Christmas party. Normally I turn the radio completely off when I have a fare, but, fuck it, people were going to get a dose of Furry and fucking like it. One of them asked what we were listening to.
"Furry Lewis." I said something about it not being for everyone. The older of the two said "oh, no she likes that sort of stuff, I just think it's crap."
"Well fuck you, too, bitch." It's been shown that you can call me a Fuck to my face and I'll laugh. But dismiss Furry Lewis because your mind operates in the narrow sphere of corporate music that demands complacency now and I'm ready to come to blows. But, I did let it go. I spent some more time pondering the distant relationship people have to music. Though they are surrounded by it and bombarded by it all day every day they have no more of a personal relationship to it than I do to 50 Cent.
A big part of my music aesthetic is recombining people to music. That it is a process as well as a product, a means for expression as well as communication. The crap most people listen to is meat grinder fodder stripped and removed from the 'artist' who creates it. It's a commodity manufactured in laboratory conditions by computers and piped to people by extremely efficient commercial conduits. Commercial music is to music as Twinkies are to food. No substance. Artificial.
And people don't care. It's like the two party system of American politics. By giving people the choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche they feel like they are steering their destiny, though they never consider that there may be better options for governance than the two presented to them by their ruling corporations.
So you like country. Or rap. Or rock. Same 3 stations owned by the same corporation with 14 songs in heavy rotation. Wear it out in 6 months and pipe in something new from the factory. You think by choosing between 3 variants of the same empty shit you are asserting your individuality.
And classic rock fucking kills me. I'm not saying you can't like the same song for 20 or 30 years. And I'm not saying that something ceases to be good because too many people like it. What I am saying, rather, is if that a song speaks to you so loudly at 18 maybe some other song should appeal to you at 30. Maybe somewhere along the way you should have grown or changed in a way that the same old song doesn't have the same meaning.
And I love guys that think they are untamed rocker dudes with a devil-may-care attitude listening to some bad ass Sammy Hagar or some such shit. If your dad rocked out to it at the factory 25 years ago maybe you should find some new anthem to speak to you. It may no longer be cutting edge.
And have you ever been to a concert in your life? Big 'N' Rich at the Mizzou arena does not count. That's like saying you met Mickey Mouse when you hugged some guy in a stinky rat suit in Orlando, Florida.
Wait, I'm going to stop that there. A bit too much of a tangent right now. Perhaps I'll refine and expound upon that at some time.
Yeah, so, anyway, I was listening to Furry Lewis. Calls were coming in about one an hour. I went home for a while. Since no one had bothered to fix #10 I took some LocTite out of my garage and put it on the adjuster screw. I turned it back in to the proper idle speed and it worked perfect all night. Fuckers.
After that I had to go pick up Miss Jane at McD's. I guess they sorted out the credit card fiasco. I didn't want to bring it up in case they wanted money for it. I heard some day drivers talking about her paying by check and her lawyer depositing more money into her trust account. We didn't chat about too much. Apparently the day drivers also take her to the grocery store every few days where she buys vodka by the half-gallon and multiple bottles of wine.
I had one call to pick up at Pepper's up north of town. It is a legitimate 'lounge' with karaoke and such nonsense. It is by reputation shitty, and owned by the same woman who owns Lynn's, the whore house. Apparently some of the ladies from Lynn's moonlight there off of the clock. I picked up a drunk guy there and took him to Cody's, the super big crappy western-themed bar. I underestimated how wasted he was. It was like 8:30 and he was in his 40s. About the only thing he would say was 'bet.'
"Doing any good tonight?"
"Bet."
"Not much going on at Pepper's?"
"Bet."
He acted shocked at the amount of the fare, but paid, and tipped. Then, it seemed too much effort for him to stand up out of the cab. He looked at Cody's and said "why did you bring me here?" I didn't quite know what to say. "Is this where I said I wanted to go?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. Bet." And he was off.
I had a call to go to a gas station to pick up an employee who was getting off of work. I watched through the window as he put on his jacket, grabbed a bag, and headed out. A Jeep Cherokee had pulled up behind me. He walked past the cab without looking at me, and went to the Jeep. I figured he had got another ride but it would have been nice if he could have said something. But, he did come to the cab, and got in. He told me the address but said he needed to make a quick stop at the De Ja Vu.
Along the way he started ranting excitedly about his girlfriend. Apparently she had gone to some 'sex party' with her girlfriends. The Tupperware kind of party where they talk about techniques and try to sell you products. He was upset that it had taken her so long and that she didn't answer her cell phone, though she did answer his text messages.
He said he had met her at a gas station he worked at in Seattle, Washington. She came in, they talked, he asked her to a movie. She said she lived in Missouri. He asked for her number and said "we could be pen pals or something." One week and four phone calls later she drove to Washington to pick him up. He drove most of the way back and spent $500 on the trip. This was 5 months ago.
"I mean, what kind of sex party lasts 4 hours? A Tupperware party should last maybe 1-3 hours, but not 4." He was convinced there was some pretext at work and that his girlfriend was cheating on him. He wanted to go to the Vu to check on her alibi, that she was going to the comedy show with girl friends. I told him it was $1 a minute wait time. And he had to pay the cover.
He asked if he could borrow my jacket. He was wearing a yellow jacket and convinced he would stick out. I told him it my be a little small, since he was quite a bit bigger than me. I gave him the black taxi jacket with my name on it. I hadn't even worn it yet. He looked ridiculous walking in. The jacket was too small and he had zipped it up at the bottom. It rode high over his big man-ass. Good luck not standing out.
He was in there over 20 minutes. He had given me $20 up front, and his jacket and bag were in the car. When he finally came out he told me he never even got upstairs. The comedy show had started and they were sold out. He sat downstairs and drank a beer, waiting in case she came down to use the bathroom.
We were going to her house. He had a key and was going to wait for her. He was pretty neurotic, but didn't seem like the kind who would cut a girl up in tiny pieces. I decided to let it work itself out. The fare came out to $32 or $33. I let him finish his cigarette in the car in her driveway before I kicked him out.
Later I picked up an older black gentleman from near downtown and took him to the Knights of Columbus Hall for a company Christmas party. He detailed cars for a living. Along the way he noticed the Furry Lewis and asked "what's that you're listening to, KOPN?" KOPN is the public radio station (I think).
"Actually, its a CD of mine. Furry Lewis."
We talked about music for a minute. "I know you got some of my boy Stevie Ray Vaughn." Not really.
He paid me the $14.55 in exact change. "You be good now, baby boy." Damn, that's twice now, in two nights. I thought it was a term of endearment the first time, and this confirmed it. I felt like it reflected some street cred I may have earned.
I had one of my crazier/edgier drunks Saturday night. I picked up a man and a woman from the Emory Sapp Christmas party at the Expo Center. Emory Sapp is a huge construction outfit. They do a lot of road and concrete work for Columbia subdivisions and highway projects. I had some trouble finding them. Dispatch had called and confirmed they were still there, but they had gone through to the main entrance of the adjoining hotel. I worried they'd be pissed when I found them but they were just drunk.
The guy got in the front, the lady in the back. She was probably about my age, only with some more living under her belt. He was about 40, with a good voice. He had a well groomed goatee and slick hair that belied a blue collar concrete laborer. He was howling and carrying on quite a bit. It was pretty distracting when I was trying to explain the details of our credit card policy and take directions.
He had an ornate patterned tattoo between the first and second knuckles of his right hand. It wrapped around his finger. It was blue and showed a little age. It was hard to get a look at due to the calamity and his rapid gestures. He was trying me, not sure yet if I was cool or not. He was the kind of loud, boisterous guy who tries to push you to the edge. If you lose it he loves to fight. If you keep your cool you 'earn his respect' and he likes you and relaxes.
He said "I used to be in this business. But I wasn't a cab, a cab uh, a cab..what you call yourself, a cab ____?
"Cab driver?"
"Yeah! A cab driver. I just drove whores."
"Well, I've had a few in here, myself."
"No, I just drove them. Took them, to you, know the hotel, wherever they had someone they had to..."
"Conduct business with?"
"Yeah," he laughed heartily. He was wound up the whole way. We stopped to use an ATM just off of Smiley. He had a bad habit of snapping into an abusive character towards his lady. He would be laughing and she would brush against him and he would snap "you get the fuck off of me you bitch." He swung back and forth. She was always nonplussed, like putting up with an annoying child. I imagine much of it was bravado, and almost entirely empty threats. What I couldn't figure out, though, was how much of it was a character and how much of it was unchecked aggression.
After he took his turn at the ATM she took hers. He was headed back to the car, trying to put his wallet back into his pocket, walking alongside the retaining wall next to the cab. He walked into it, backed up a step, walked back into it, backed up a step, and walked into it again. He finally managed to free himself and get in the car.
"I feel like one of those damn RC cars. I just kept hitting the wall, and backing up, and hitting the wall. I didn't think I was ever going to get off of the damn thing."
He acted shocked over the meter and the wait time. She reminded him that I had mentioned it and that he knew about it. We headed north again. They changed their plans and we were headed to a party. As we drove along the narrow, dark, hilly rural road and I tried to keep everything in check--the directions, his rant, the car, etc--I looked down and saw that wait time was running. Shit, I thought I turned it off. I figured it hadn't added much to the fare and reached up and turned it off.
As I kept driving I noticed again that wait time was on. When you're running the meter on a fare you're only running distance. The meter display reads "TIME OFF." People sometimes think that it runs on time, but that's only when we're stationary and I turn it on, like when someone goes in the grocery store in the middle of a ride. Wait time is $1 a minute, in 15 second $.25 intervals. In this case, the time would be more expensive than the distance, since we weren't going very fast. Some people will try to hit the button under the "TIME OFF," thinking it turns time off, and therefore, the meter. That's what this guy was doing, but it was only costing him more money.
I asked him if he hit the button and he did a fabulous job acting. The chick said that he did. I tried to explain it to him, but we were pretty much there. It was a tiny dirt lane that stretched for two trailers. They were going to the second. It was an older single wide, and the ground fell from under one end of it, so that it was fairly high off of the ground at the front door. There was a tiny deck almost as high as it was square. A few people were on the deck. Someone was walking across the chat driveway with some firewood. It took a while to run her credit card because dispatch was slow in getting back to me. She tipped me with some quarters and two Sacajawea dollars. I finally got out of there with no incident. They had mentioned maybe needing a ride home. I thought about telling dispatch to warn any driver they sent, because the guy was bound to be worse after more drinking. But I didn't. There was a shiny black Cadillac Escalade parked in the driveway.
Then I picked up some crackers at Columbia Regional ER. It was two women and a dude. When the first woman said something I thought she was yawning. But instead of resuming in a normal voice and saying excuse me she just had a speech impediment. So did the second girl. It turned out they were mother and daughter. The younger said something about taking the cab when she was staying at the Ronald McDonald House. Her baby had been born with neonatal hepatitis, jaundice, a bad liver, a heart murmur, and a hole in its heart. The white trash dude in the front said "and you never got anything for that, did you?" Entitlement. I dropped the mom off at Woodstock Trailer Court and the other two at Lenoir Trailer Court, just down the road.
I picked up a guy of about 23 or 24 at Cody's later that night. He was pretty drunk, but managing himself well. He wasn't the Cody's type, and had apparently been dragged there an hour or so earlier, and was trying to get home. He had the hiccups. They were pretty constant, and he would say "excuse me" after each one. Thus, his speech was comical and cumbersome. He was very gracious for the ride. When he was searching for his money he finally found it in his wallet, and said, upon its discovery, "yabba dabba."
I got hosed around bar closing again. I took a fare out south on Old 63. Rather than coming back downtown, I was dispatched north of town, off of Rangeline. It was two wasted young college girls. A guy came down and gave me directions before piling them in. I was taking the girls back to one of their houses, but the girl was too drunk to remember the name of her street. The guy remembered every other street name. They had been puking, but thought they were done. One had no shoes on. They were going to the Lake of the Woods area. Of course I missed the turn, looking for the wrong street name. They were passed out on top of each other in the back. One breathed shallow, rapid breaths, and I feared more puking. I finally got them home in time, with no incident.
My last call was at about 3 am. It was a couple, in their mid 30s, stylish. I picked them up in front of a salon near the banquet center in the Peach Tree Plaza. I think they owned it. The guy was tres stylish for a heterosexual, with shaggy, moussed hair, trendy glasses, a sport jacket, torn jeans, and an authentic western belt buckle. They had a bottle of wine that we each took turns holding while everyone got in and settled. They had tried to get one of their friends to wait for the cab but she insisted on driving and got a DWI. They had been drinking all night and were going to the Marriott. In telling the DWI story the woman said "while we were waiting on your dumb ass." I didn't think anything of it. After a couple of minutes she asked "wait--did I call you a dumbass?"
"Well, no. You said 'your dumb ass,' which, technically, is different than calling me a dumbass." She apologized and said she didn't mean it. They asked me what I did and we got into the law school conversation. The dude's interest was piqued and he insisted that I come up to the room and party. I told them I would be working for another hour. He still insisted. I told him he might change his mind when he got to his room and wanted to sleep. He said they had plenty of partying left to do.
"You're not some undercover drug enforcement agent, are you?"
"No, I assure you I'm not."
"Well, good. You get done with the cab and you come back at 4." I told him to give me his number and I would call them at 4.
"Are you ready for some wild partying?"
"Well, wild is a relative term. Remember, I'm going to be sober at 4 am."
"Oh, we're gonna do some wild partying alright."
I had one more call that was a no-show. I got a firm impression that they were going to be putting some Bolivian export up their noses at the Marriott. That wasn't my scene. I didn't know how many people would be there, and I didn't want to be the third element in some weird sex equation. Besides, even if it were guaranteed cool, I had just worked 12 hours and felt like total ass. I hated to be conventional and cop-out, but the only real draw was that this was the first time anyone was ever really adamant about inviting me back after work. I went to McDonald's instead and then home. It was one more story I just had to leave out there.
Well, we'll see how Monday goes. My roommate is out of town until the 24th. That means I can listen to the stereo while I blog. I have to work Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. My buddy Gene is going to try to get his taxi license this week and come to work for A*1. Apparently he's about the only person with a worse job situation than me. And he has a law degree. I just looked at the word verification to publish this post and it is "gSuxx."
Crap if it isn't Sunday night already. I slept until about 6:30 pm. I got a money order from Gerbes and went downtown to pay my utilities bill. I grabbed a pie from Shakespeare's and rented The Brown Bunny from 9Th Street. Wow. That Chloe Sevigny is an actress, in spite of what that umlaut says. That must have been some direction on Gallo's part.
While at the grocery store I spied the newest addition of the Vox. On the cover (and in the link) is a story about a purported 'day in the life' of a Columbia A *1 taxi driver. The author apparently followed a driver for a day and tried to capture a glimpse of what its like in the cab. Read it for yourself. From the dates in the story, I guess it was written some 8 months ago. Who knew there was such a backlog on cover stories at the Vox?
The driver in the story still works for A*1, and dispatches part time. I also drew her name in the office Secret Santa pool ($10 limit), something I wish I had avoided. I had a momentary stirring of seasonal emotion. It has since passed.
I had been tipped off on the story by Mark, a night driver, last night. I thought I might learn something from reading it so that I could buy something slightly more personal than a $10 gift certificate. Maybe 3 packs of Marlboros?
If you read the story, it talks of the driver trying to finalize wedding arrangements. She's still engaged as of press time. Her beau is a guy named Derrick, who just came back to working at A*1 after a hiatus/tour of duty with John Luter Transportation.
Yeah, cab.
Friday night was busy enough. Last Tuesday and the food poisoning had pretty much crushed any resistance left in my spirit. Near full-fledged hatred for the job has set in. I had filed to work like a mindless complacent zombie. I was pleasantly surprised, a little, when things didn't completely suck ass and I had the tiniest glimmer and faint reflection of when I kind of enjoyed it.
I got to work at 3:40. I'm supposed to get there by 3:45. On any given day it's about 30 minutes before I get into a cab, some days its an hour and a half. I was surprised, then, when I had a car and a call as soon as I walked through the door. I was still a little groggy from sleep when I went out and jumped in #10.
#10 had apparently been sitting all day, and was completely cold. I fired it up and was surprised to hear the engine racing somewhere above 2000rpm. The call they gave me was a 3:45 time call. Thus, by the time I was in the car, adjusted, and rolling, I was already late. I got to the address at 3:55 or so. The car was running so fast it was hard to stop and sounded like it was going to explode when you had it in park or neutral. I was embarrassed to pull up late in such a shitty ride. It was a large black woman with an apron on, apparently headed to work. Her husband stood in disapproval at my tardiness. All in the glaring light of day.
She climbed in and I dropped the car in gear with a thud and a jerk. I apologized for running late. She asked what the time was and said we had 5 minutes to get to Ryan's steak house. I went to turn the meter on and it didn't work. I was embarrassed and pissed off times two. She used the cab a lot, though, and knew the fare. I got her to work on time. I figured the car should have been warm enough to turn on the heater by then, so I flipped on the blower. It didn't work. Pissed off times three.
Coming back from a $20 night when I quit early due to a flat tire, I was given a car that ran dangerously too fast, had no meter, and no heat. I radioed dispatch to complain. It was the owner. I predict it will not be long before our personalities clash. I was pretty pissed, and though I'd have liked nothing better than to have gone home, I needed to work to make some damn money. She told me some trick to the meter, and, to my surprise, it began working. Then she sent me to her son's house (the co-owner and half-assed mechanic who works on these pieces of shit) to have him check on the idle problem.
I knew the Lincoln's 5.0 motor well. I had swapped an identical unit in my old '75 Ford Bronco to update it to a fuel-injected, non-points distributor, serpentine belt-driven, roller-rocker motor. I knew I could fix it, but with the owner dispatching I knew I would get blamed for anything else that happened to the car, which is perpetually in a state of disintegration. It pained me to take it to someone else, especially someone several degrees below my own mechanical aptitude, to have it looked at. Plus, it was costing me my time, where I wouldn't be able to run any fares while I drove across town and waited on him to fiddle with it. But, I was bound by procedure and headed over there.
Again, to my amazement, he was able to fix it in a quick second. I watched him back out the throttle set screw by hand until the engine calmed down to a proper curb idle. I then asked him where the fuse was for the blower motor. I told him it wasn't working. He acted surprised and stuck his hand in the car and over a vent on the dash. Now it was working. I guess the Lincoln has some relay that won't turn on the blower until a certain temperature is reached. I had never got in one cold.
So, again, to my amazement, all three ailments were fixed in short order. I found it most odd.
My next call was a group home regular whom I had never dealt with before. He was a skin-and-bones black guy with a walker. He was wearing blue sweat pants, a puffy coat over a matching sweatshirt, and had a stocking cap on his head. The hat further exaggerated the disproportion of his atrophied body to his noggin. As did his gaped mouth and protruding teeth. The teeth were coated in a green film, maybe like the cosmoline GIs coated WWII Jeeps in to protect them from sea salt during shipment to the European fronts. He had a scruff of a goatee under his chin.
He didn't have much to say that I understood. He seemed happy, though, and it came out in a bit of a rush of glee, in the higher register of his vocal cords. I saw him home safely, out past the Lake of the Woods exit. His signature on the charge slip was one of the most rudimentary that I have received. He nearly missed the line entirely and only managed his first name.
I had been so surprised to be given a car and a call as soon as I got to work that I had forgotten to grab a street guide book. I had to rely on the dispatcher for directions near the Lake of the Woods, since it is an area I am not familiar with. When I had dropped off my fare I called 'clear' on the radio, as is procedure. The dispatcher didn't acknowledge me, but this is not an altogether rare occurrence. Some dispatchers never acknowledge your transmission, unless they have further instruction for you. Then, if you call back to make sure they got it they act annoyed. I rarely work when the owner is dispatching, so I'm not really accustomed to her habits. So, I headed back into town.
I figured we were slow, since I didn't get a call on the entire drive back into town. I decided to run by the office to get a street book before I got busy. I radioed to say I was coming in when I turned on the street in front of the dispatch. Only then did dispatch call back to see what I had said. I repeated myself, and she started bitching that I didn't call clear, and that she had had another call at Lake of the Woods coming back into to town, and that I had just cost the cab company a 1/4 tank of gas since another car would have to be sent out.
For starters, I did call clear. And, she knew I was about to clear, because she was giving me directions right up to the point I cleared. And, every other dispatcher is quick to tell you when you have another call in the vicinity, because it is fairly rare. And, I'd put the odds at about 100:1 that there would be a return fare from the Lake of the Woods at 4:45 on a Friday. She should have known I was about to clear and told me then, and surely should have said something in the 10 minutes or so I was driving back to Columbia. It was with this exchange that I had to get out and go in to get my street guide.
When I went to the file cabinet to get my book she said that they weren't there and that "from now on you have to check them out of the office and check them back in when you're done." I hate it when people try to create unnecessary procedure to appear professional to the other 5 people who work there. Like how the manager at Mr. Transmission would put notes on the refrigerator and sign them 'the Management,' as if the other 6 of us would be confounded as to where this strange mandate came from. Nurse Ratchet rationing cigarettes.
My next call was to the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Again, the owner was dispatching. She told me I would have to park and go inside to the McDonald's, where my fare would be waiting. I was looking for a woman with crutches, and I'd "probably have to help her."
I pulled up, stopped, and went inside. There's nothing like the crowd hanging out at the McDonald's inside a Wal-Mart near Christmas. It's like 5 layers of useless tacky shit for the price of one. There was no one anywhere who matched the description. I asked a couple of McDonald's employees who were apparently just off work, eating some of their product, if they had seen any such lady.
"Yeah, but that was like 2 hours ago since she was here."
Given the description I figured I was looking for a group home person who had a time call. I thought they must have had another ride and left early, which isn't overly rare. I double checked, saw no one, and went back outside and relayed the info to dispatch.
Dispatch said it had only been about 40 minutes since she called. She told me to go on if I couldn't find her, but tried to unload it on me like it was my judgment call and that I was making the wrong one. If you're my fucking boss tell me what the fuck you want me to do. I decided to check one last time, to pacify the bitch. As I was walking back to the door a car pulled away, revealing a cart positively overloaded with bags of food. I looked for its owner, who was a black woman with crutches sitting on a bench making a call on the pay phone.
Then I recognized the girl as a regular I pick up from Columbia College. The first night I carried her I asked her about her studies. She started going off about a paper she was writing comparing Hamlet, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings. It had become a routine for me to ask her one quick auspicious question about her paper and listen to her rant and bitch herself out of breath the entire way to her house. She would literally froth and become breathless, in part, no doubt, due to her particular physical malady. Once we got to her house she would catch herself, snap out of her spell, and apologize for ranting so much, telling me that she was sure I was sick of hearing about her problems, and find herself caught short on the subject of polite social discourse.
I caught her just before her call went through. I didn't recognize her immediately because she wasn't wearing her trademark backwards Looney Tunes hat and had her hair shorn close.
"Well, Hell, they should have just told me I was looking for you."
I loaded all of her packages, testing the Titanic proportions of the Lincoln's trunk. She had been waiting outside, she said, for an hour. She had waited outside because other drivers had told her they wouldn't come inside to look for anyone. Thanks, dispatch.
This time we reversed roles and I bitched for the duration of the trip, about the problems with the car, the Lake of the Woods fiasco, the book stuff. The Lincoln had resumed its high idle problem. It was only a $6.05 fare to her house. I carried all of her groceries inside for her. She had a poodle named Taffy on a lead. She would yell at Taffy to stay out of my way and gave me license to kick it if necessary. I felt better after all of the bitching, and she seemed giddy at the prospects of someone unloading themself on her.
I ran a few more fares. The Lincoln's idle continued to climb. I got out and raised the hood. The hood is equipped with gas struts which no longer hold it up. Holding the hood with one hand, I backed out the throttle set screw with the other. I then realized the problem. #10 had had a problem with dying at idle, when you put it into gear, which I knew could be remedied by bumping up the idle speed. After a couple of months, the cab company apparently figured it out. There's a spring which the adjusting bolt goes through which hold tension on it so that it will not turn out of adjustment. Apparently, the yahoos at the cab company removed the spring so they could turn the screw in further to get the desired higher idle speed. But, with the spring missing, the adjusting screw would turn itself inward due to the engine's vibrations while driving with the throttle open. Thus, when you let off of the gas it had turned the idle speed up unreasonably high on its own.
So, every time I drove across town, with my foot on the gas, the screw was constantly worming its way in. Therefore, the idle speed would increase to a dangerous level until I opened the hood and manually turned it down. To do so I had to stop, get out in the cold, hold the hood up with one hand, stick my free hand into the greasy confines of a racing, hot, running engine, find the screw in the dark, and back it out. I probably did this 10-12 times in between fares, which meant that I only had to deal with the outrageously high idle about half of the time. One more thing to worry about when its cold and you're in a hurry. I can barely find time to stop and piss for hours at a time when I'm busy, so this is one more distraction I don't need. Plus, there's something about a machine running needlessly that makes me very anxious. Some quirk to my personal psychology.
Anyhoo, back to the fares. I had a call to pick up at the Super 7. The Super 7 is reputed as a crack den and crackwhore dive, so you never know what you're going to get. I got a skinny old man with no teeth and Merlin the Magician white hair and beard. He was clad in a light blue denim jacket. His movements were deliberate and stilted and I half expected the wind to carry him away.
He got into the car and I asked where we were headed. He said he was going to a friend's house on Rangeline and something. His speech was slow and broken. I asked if it was towards downtown, and he said yes, and that he would recognize it when he saw it. I told him we had a $3 minimum fare, since we were on Rangeline and only a few blocks from downtown. He said he wasn't worried about money.
Well, Dave (as I found out his name was) didn't recognize any houses on Rangeline. I turned, at his direction, onto Worley. Dave didn't recognize any houses on Worley. I turned onto West Boulevard. Ash. Garth. Worley again. Ash again. When the fare hit $7 or $8 I began to worry if he had any money. I asked if he could call his friend to get the address. He said he had a cell phone but that we would find it. I told him I was confident we could but that I didn't want to spend all of his money trying. He again said he didn't care about the money.
Somewhere around $12 or $13 I smelled something akin to scorched food. Dave asked if I "cut the cheese." I told him I didn't. He started fumbling for a window switch. I rolled the window down a little. He laughed, slowly, and waived his hand in front of his face. I though his motions too slow to stir any air or waft away any stench.
On our third trip past Garth and Ash I stopped and asked Dave if he wanted to call his friend. He dug out a cell phone. He looked blankly in front of him "8-7-4...8-7-4...I'm drunk."
"Well, that does happen." I said something again about money. He reiterated that he didn't care "Well, I spend it like I don't care but sometimes it's hard for me to come by." Dave said he was retired military, and drew money for disability, for 30 years or so now.
Dave decided to abandon his plans and go to another friend's house, one to which he knew the address. I pulled up to the house, which was only a few blocks from the Super 7. The fare between the two should be about $4-5. In Dave's case, the meter ran $23.55. He produced $25 and required no change. Good guy, that Dave.
After the owner went home in the evening, Kelly, the dispatcher from the Vox article, came on. She is the least experienced dispatcher, and this is the first time she had ever worked a whole shift when I was driving. I think she could use some more practice.
I dropped a group of sorority girls off on the south side, off of Bearfield, near 1 am. Along the way they called me Edward, Darin, and Garner interchangeably, and, at times, all three. They told me I was the "most 'normal' cabbie" they had ever had. I was eager to race back downtown. The rush at bar closing from 1-2 is my bread and butter. After 2 or 2:30 calls slow down, and you pick up a lot of people from different subdivisions around town, who rode home with someone else or went to a party and need a ride to their houses. But, between 1 and 2 all the money is in getting people from downtown and racing back for more. Thus, I was a little miffed when dispatch sent me across town on the south side to pick someone up from a subdivision on the city limits. When you head back downtown you're guaranteed another fare. People have to get home and can't wait inside. They're cold and they'll literally jump in front of you to flag you down. Out in the sticks there's no guarantee they'll even still be there or awake when you show up.
So, here I am, heading away from all of the money, to a street I have never heard of. I had to stop and consult my book. Inside the city the book gives the locations of streets in reference to other streets. When you get to the edge of the city, though, instead of saying '3 streets west of Providence" it says ".5 miles West of the Providence." It is much easier to count three streets than to look down at an analog odometer and try to do the math while watching where you're going. I was looking for "Chris Street," which was supposed to be off of "Tony Street," which was .5 miles from Rout K-S. I went bombing down a narrow unlined country road. #10's high beams don't click on, and you have to hold the lever with one hand while driving with the other, all the while looking for streets and doing the math.
Well, I didn't find any Tony Street. When I was convinced I had gone much further than .5 miles I had to find a place to turn around. I wasted 5 or 6 miles of precious time on the round trip. I started again, and, again, no Tony. I turned on the only streets close, which were missing their signs. I drove on 4 or 5 winding aimless streets in a subdivision where all of the signs were missing. House numbers were nearly impossible to see and there were cars parked everywhere. I wasted several more minutes before I saw someone come out of a house on my 3rd or 4th pass.
It was now 1:18. A third of bar rush over. This was a young 'urban' black couple, not known for being great tippers. They were concerned with getting to the gas station by 1:30 so they could get booze before it closed, en route to a trailer park on the south side. I drove like a jackass. The road that was supposed to be Tony was marked "Mont" and was nowhere near .5 miles from Route K. I asked which gas station was closest. The woman said to turn right. I got in the right lane at the stop light. Then the guy said left. The right turn/straight lanes turned green. I went to drive through the intersection to u-turn and go right, back towards town.
The chick yelled, "No! Left!"
The guy yelled at her that I was right. I raced towards town, and got to the gas station at about 1:24. In the confusion I didn't get a chance to tell them that it was a dollar extra for the second passenger. I did tell him I charged wait time. He came back out and acted shocked that the meter had climbed to $7.30, from about $4.55 when he went in. Now the girl was defending me, reminding him I mentioned wait time. He had a 4 pack of 16oz Miller High Life cans.
They spent the rest of the ride chewing on the high cost of cabs. I got them to their trailer park. I got to keep the $.30 cents change for tip, after risking tickets to get them to the beer store on time. As the guy was climbing out I noticed he had a San Diego Padres jacket on. I asked him if they were going to show up this year. He didn't understand me, and was half defensive for a second.
"Your jacket. The Padres? You think they'll do any good this year?"
"Oh. Yeah, I don't know." I got the impression he wasn't much of a fan, and probably got it to represent some geographic locale, like in a bad-ass-rap video. He lightened a bit. "You take care now, baby boy."
Baby boy. Another first.
It was now after 1:30. Instead of ferrying a couple of groups of good-tipping drunks I had one $12 fare and $.30 tip. I later found out that the other drivers quit following her dispatch and were just picking up flags. They would say they had another flag when they had cleared, rather than getting sent out on some bull shit call like me. Thus, I was the clean up man, and got sent all over creation on shitty calls.
My next call was on East Walnut. I was looking for the number, which was one of those apartments you never knew existed until you went there, between two businesses. I had passed it, and was going to turn around so I would be coming back on the right side of the road. About 1/2 a block down I saw my friend Alex (a cab regular and my first ever fare). Alex ran across the street and flagged me down. He had also called, though he had given a different addy than the one I was looking for. I told him if he didn't mind doubling up it would save him a couple of bucks. He was cool with that, so we picked up at the other address.
It was two stooges, brothers, on the fast track to being Republican stalwarts. The younger was in from out of town to celebrate his 21st birthday. They were out to indulge in some bawdy rights of passage, though they seemed like poor imitators, like accountants ready to party hardy. I was under the hood of the Lincoln when they walked out, and there was a black guy in the front seat. They climbed in the back and were going to Club Vogue.
The younger wanted to get some booze. The other three of us told him that it was past 1:30 and they wouldn't sell him any. He was stubborn on this point, and insisted the whole ride that he could buy. It was tiresome. We pulled up in front of the Vogue and they continued to bicker as they tried to sort out the $5.05 fare and an appropriate tip.
Club Vogue is in the same weird strip as two other bars, the Thirsty Turtle and Hoot-N-Anny's. They are flooded with people after bars close. The parking lot was a zoo and cars were trying to squeeze through the alley. People leaving the two bars were milling about. While these guys bickered a Cadillac Escalade full of hood rats showing off started honking their horn behind me, rather than going around. A drunk white guy appeared in the passenger's window, wanting a ride. Alex told him we were occupied. He persisted, and tried to open the door. The exterior handle is broken. His hand slipped off and he tried again. And again. It was like a sedated bear at a drive-through zoo, lethargically trying to raid the car for Ho-Hos or Twinkies. The hood rats kept honking. The Lincoln's engine raced. The elder Republican brother was trying to conduct some complex math rather than just giving me a couple of dollars. All of the honking attracted some white hoochie's attention. The Escalade pulled up so they could rap. Alex told the guys he wouldn't go into the Vogue if the ladies looked like that inside. The brothers wanted a time call to pick them back up at 3 am. The guy finally gave me $10 and asked if that was good for Columbia, in part to impress me and here me gush about how generous he was. I thanked him and kicked him the fuck out.
I ran Alex home and thanked him. He got a good first hand example of how hectic the cab can get at times.
At about 2:30 I picked up a second 21st birthday boy. By contrast, he was pretty cool, and flying solo. He was waiting outside of Walgreens. We chatted about strippers all the way to his house. Dispatch told me to head back to the Vogue for my 3 am time call.
I pulled in a few minutes early. There was a #1 Reliable cab sitting in front of the door. I recognized the driver from an incident earlier in the week. I had been dispatched to pick up some regulars at the Vogue. They are 3 contractors in from Kentucky doing construction south of Columbia. They go to the strip club at least 5-6 times a week and spend a couple of hundred bucks each every night. They go to the Extended Stay America. When I pulled in the Reliable guy was there. I pulled in front of him and stepped out to find my guys. As I got out of my car the driver said "Excuse, me, Sir?"
Sir? I drive a cab and look 25. "Yeah?"
"I wouldn't park there, the officers will give you a ticket." The officers?
"Thanks for the heads up," I said, and went about my business, totally blowing him off.
I found two of the guys, and one of them came back to the cab while the other went to get the third from the bar next door.
The guy in the cab apologized for the delay. I told him it was no big deal, I just didn't want them to get in the wrong cab.
"What cab?"
"That yahoo back there in the maroon cab."
"Maroon cab?" The guy got out and went back to the Reliable driver. I watched in the mirror as he poked his head in the driver's window. The Reliable driver gave him a stack of business cards, per his request. As he walked back to my cab he ripped the stack in two, in full view of the driver, handing me the remnants as he got back in.
"I think you just made me a new friend."
This time the Reliable guy was blocking the door, so I had to pull in behind him. I wasn't going to let him scavenge my fare. He was staring at me in his driver's side mirror, giving me the stink-eye. I stopped the big Lincoln so the headlight was beaming right into his mirror and refracting right into his stupid face. Fucker.
I sat there like that for a few minutes, pretending not to notice how pissed off he was. I thought it particularly funny that he compounded his anger by refusing to look away from the source of it. I got out and went inside. I couldn't find my guys so I went back to the car. He was still staring. After a couple of minutes more I heard his door slam. I looked up to see him stalking back towards me. He's a useless fuck of about 45, fat, with a gay moustache and salt-and-pepper hair. I believe his jacket is reserved for Member's Only.
I was still pretending not to notice and trying not to laugh when he rapped twice, angrily, on my driver's window. I opened the door.
"You gonna get those damn lights outta my face?"
My head was tilted back with half a shit-eating grin. I paused to let him build a little. "Yeah," I said, aloofly, with a flick of the toggle switch powering the lights. He grumbled something or other I couldn't pick up, though I was sure it wasn't friendly. I had his attention. With my aloof, shit eating-grin intact I offered him a friendly warning, trying to goad him a bit:
"Easy, guy."
He stalked back to his cab and I was thoroughly amused.
While I was waiting a black guy with that Michael Jackson pigment disease came up to me. He had a $2 bill and was looking for quarters. A crazy lady had paid me a $4.55 fare in quarters earlier, so I traded him out.
My 3 am guys never came out so I headed downtown where I picked up two guys in front of Quiznos. There's an apartment above it where there are a lot of after-bar parties. They hadn't made their mind up on exactly where they were going when some 2-bit hustler came up to the door. He's a pain in the ass black guy who has the most tiresome lines and is a relentless beggar. I've known of him going back to my Mr. Transmission days when he would come in with some crappy far-fetched hard-luck story. He thinks he's an Oscar-caliber actor, but his schtick is paper thin. He had found his way into their party, perhaps as a novelty, from off of the street. He was wasted and was going to try to glom a free cab ride. I pulled off before he could figure out the broken door handle.
The two guys hadn't decided which party they were headed to, but they were both around the corner, off of College. As I neared College on Broadway I pulled to the side and stopped in the last parallel space before the intersection. "Oh, you don't have to stop."
"That's cool, just figure out where you want me to drop you." The guy was on his cell phone. Then there was an incredibly large, misplaced crash.
It sounded weird, and caught us all by surprise. Before the shock of the noise set in, we looked up to see that an '88 or '89 Lincoln, identical to ours, had magically appeared in the opposite lane of Broadway. The front end was gone, shoved up to the firewall, the driver's front tire tucked under where his feet would be. Steam was just starting to billow from under the hood. Pieces lay scattered all over the intersection. The roof was buckled. I looked to see if it was a cab. It wasn't. A small white car appeared right behind it. It was unscathed. A white woman jumped out of the car. She was already on her cell phone.
We were still trying to figure out what happened, when, to my amazement, the driver's door opened. Amazed, in part, that it would still function, since the car was buckled so bad. It took a couple of thrust to open completely, and a big black guy got out. He was apparently so wasted he didn't feel a thing. Or think to run. He stood there in the cold, his hands casually in his front pockets. I pulled around the corner, and dropped the two guys off, less than a block away, still in sight of the crash. The skid marks led right to the concrete base of the light pole in the middle of the intersection. He had gone full bore into the oncoming lanes of College Avenue, over a hundred feet before the intersection, on the wrong side of the divider. He had barreled the front of corner of his Lincoln into the concrete, which destroyed the car and sent it spinning around the pole and left onto Broadway. The skid marks started just past where I would have turned into the lane had I not stopped so the guys could confer. Ouch.
My last call that night was at about 3:20, and was to go to 'Fairway and Limeway,' according to dispatch. There was no Limeway in my book. I found my way over to Fairway and drove along its length. I found an intersection with a 'Vine Way,' but there was no indication of which house I was looking for. It was an odd intersection, with 4 or 5 houses spread way out in all directions. I asked dispatch to call and find out at least which street the house was on, and/or an address. After 10 minutes I was no better off. I was on the radio with the dispatcher who was on the phone with the fare. She was telling me to go left, around a corner, down a hill, etc. But every street was curvy and hilly, and I couldn't figure out how she could give me directions if she didn't see me, and if she saw, why the fuck didn't she just come out? I was getting pissed, and, after my 4th or 5th request I got an address. I pulled up to a small figure hurrying to the street in the dark, braced against the cold.
She got in the front seat. She was scrawny, maybe 20 years old, maybe 5'2", maybe 95lbs. She had straight hair yanked back into an unfashionable pony tail. This revealed more of her ordinary face and pallid complexion. She had tiny scabs all over her face, like zits she had compulsively picked at. She was tweaking pretty hardcore. Meth. No wonder we couldn't get an address out of her.
She spent the bulk of the ride to the Super 8 on her phone, talking with her lover about who all she "was messin' with." "I only fuck you and one other person. You know who he is. You work with him. He's married." She had apparently been at the hotel and left. She didn't want to go back, and was making whoever wanted her to come back pay for the fare. She was complaining to the person on the phone that they "better hurry and get there, or I'm just going to go to sleep. I'm already coming down right now."
She fidgeted quite a bit. I pulled up to the lobby, and she said we were waiting for 'her' to come out with the cab fare. She said she had money but was going to make 'her' pay for the ride. I was about to get off work and was pretty mellow. I watched the lobby for someone to come out. She was sitting in the seat, looking in her purse, facing towards me. A dude from the parking lot started walking up to her side of the cab. He was still a few steps away when I said "is the guy looking for you."
I said it in a normal tone, but she jumped like I just popped a balloon in her ear, and shrieked, startled. "Oh, don't do that to me." She turned around and opened the door for the guy.
He had a beer in one hand an a wallet in the other. He fumbled through some cards and began to check his pockets. It was some horrible acting. "Well. I just had it right here."
"How'd I know this was going to happen," she said, and paid me the $5.05. "I can't tip you 'cause I don't have the money."
Fair is fair.
I cleaned up the cab and headed in. The uniforms had come in. I looked through the rack and found mine. I had put off telling the owner what size I needed, thinking that would spare me a few weeks of wearing them. But, she guessed for me and ordered XL shirts. They are knit 'golf' shirts, heavy, gray, with A-1 Express badged on them. An XL would have been too big, even if they hadn't of ran about a size larger to begin with. There were no pants. I grabbed the shirts and the two black jackets with my name on them and took them home.
When I got to work Saturday a bunch of drivers were already there. Everyone was wearing their ridiculously big shirts. The tails on them are a mile long, and a few people hadn't tucked in. I didn't bother taking mine out of the car, and was wearing my normal attire. Phyllis asked me something about them. I said I had taken them home.
"Why aren't you wearing them, then?" I told her I had left them in my car and that they were too big. Then she scolded me for taking them off of the rack. What the fuck? She said she would reorder them in my size, and, that "from now on, it's no uniform, no car." I wanted to tell her not to bother and walk the fuck out.
We are not a good looking group. We could be wearing tuxedos and still look more or less like shit. You can't polish a turd. And a knit golf shirt isn't exactly way classier than what people already wore. I think its funny that you'd worry about putting on matching shirts when most drivers are creepy obese old men with disheveled hair and lackluster grooming habits. Especially when we're sitting in the front seat of a dark car where no one can see what shirts we are wearing anyway, like people riding in the cab would even care.
And, if you want to put forth a professional image for a cab company, start with the fucking cabs. If I looked nice I don't think it would overshadow the fact that my car is a complete pile of shit. Besides being 18 years old with a peeling vinyl roof and mismatched wheels, the seats are worn, there are no seat belts in the back, the ash tray lids are gone, the trim is fucked, the windows don't work, and half of the door handles are broken. And #16 has a cardboard window.
The cloth seats in the minivans are disgusting and full of cigarette burns. And none of the cars really match, if you're into branding. The two nice new cabs they bought aren't even on the road. Apparently only certain people are privileged enough to drive them, and the owners take them home at night. And, as shitty as the cars are, they could at least clean them. Other than vacuuming the carpet and hosing the exterior, no one ever cleans the dash or windows. When I first started I would clean the cigarette smoke and fingerprint haze off of the windows at night at the gas station. But not since it got to be 20 degrees outside. No one has cleaned a window there in the 7 weeks I've been employed.
This was the chief thing pissing me off when I got into #10 Saturday. And, even though I noted it on my sheet Friday, #10 was still fucked up and idling uncontrollably fast. I got in a car and Phyllis told me to go to the Greyhound bus station, next door, since a bus was coming in. Then she said to "get out and greet them, and see if you can get a flag."
"Gee, I wasn't planning on taking a taxi, but he did stand there like a tool and say 'hello.'"
Fuck all that. I was pissed off and pulled around to the bus station. Two other A*1 cabs were already there, and another followed, then two Reliable cabs. I figured my odds were just as good at the mall or downtown, but I had orders. Then the guy who works at Greyhound came out and told me that there wouldn't be a bus until 9 or 9:30. It was 4:30. Again, what the fuck?
I had brought the Furry Lewis CD from the library. That was the only thing I had going for me.
My first fare would be two women headed to the Heidelberg for a company Christmas party. Normally I turn the radio completely off when I have a fare, but, fuck it, people were going to get a dose of Furry and fucking like it. One of them asked what we were listening to.
"Furry Lewis." I said something about it not being for everyone. The older of the two said "oh, no she likes that sort of stuff, I just think it's crap."
"Well fuck you, too, bitch." It's been shown that you can call me a Fuck to my face and I'll laugh. But dismiss Furry Lewis because your mind operates in the narrow sphere of corporate music that demands complacency now and I'm ready to come to blows. But, I did let it go. I spent some more time pondering the distant relationship people have to music. Though they are surrounded by it and bombarded by it all day every day they have no more of a personal relationship to it than I do to 50 Cent.
A big part of my music aesthetic is recombining people to music. That it is a process as well as a product, a means for expression as well as communication. The crap most people listen to is meat grinder fodder stripped and removed from the 'artist' who creates it. It's a commodity manufactured in laboratory conditions by computers and piped to people by extremely efficient commercial conduits. Commercial music is to music as Twinkies are to food. No substance. Artificial.
And people don't care. It's like the two party system of American politics. By giving people the choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche they feel like they are steering their destiny, though they never consider that there may be better options for governance than the two presented to them by their ruling corporations.
So you like country. Or rap. Or rock. Same 3 stations owned by the same corporation with 14 songs in heavy rotation. Wear it out in 6 months and pipe in something new from the factory. You think by choosing between 3 variants of the same empty shit you are asserting your individuality.
And classic rock fucking kills me. I'm not saying you can't like the same song for 20 or 30 years. And I'm not saying that something ceases to be good because too many people like it. What I am saying, rather, is if that a song speaks to you so loudly at 18 maybe some other song should appeal to you at 30. Maybe somewhere along the way you should have grown or changed in a way that the same old song doesn't have the same meaning.
And I love guys that think they are untamed rocker dudes with a devil-may-care attitude listening to some bad ass Sammy Hagar or some such shit. If your dad rocked out to it at the factory 25 years ago maybe you should find some new anthem to speak to you. It may no longer be cutting edge.
And have you ever been to a concert in your life? Big 'N' Rich at the Mizzou arena does not count. That's like saying you met Mickey Mouse when you hugged some guy in a stinky rat suit in Orlando, Florida.
Wait, I'm going to stop that there. A bit too much of a tangent right now. Perhaps I'll refine and expound upon that at some time.
Yeah, so, anyway, I was listening to Furry Lewis. Calls were coming in about one an hour. I went home for a while. Since no one had bothered to fix #10 I took some LocTite out of my garage and put it on the adjuster screw. I turned it back in to the proper idle speed and it worked perfect all night. Fuckers.
After that I had to go pick up Miss Jane at McD's. I guess they sorted out the credit card fiasco. I didn't want to bring it up in case they wanted money for it. I heard some day drivers talking about her paying by check and her lawyer depositing more money into her trust account. We didn't chat about too much. Apparently the day drivers also take her to the grocery store every few days where she buys vodka by the half-gallon and multiple bottles of wine.
I had one call to pick up at Pepper's up north of town. It is a legitimate 'lounge' with karaoke and such nonsense. It is by reputation shitty, and owned by the same woman who owns Lynn's, the whore house. Apparently some of the ladies from Lynn's moonlight there off of the clock. I picked up a drunk guy there and took him to Cody's, the super big crappy western-themed bar. I underestimated how wasted he was. It was like 8:30 and he was in his 40s. About the only thing he would say was 'bet.'
"Doing any good tonight?"
"Bet."
"Not much going on at Pepper's?"
"Bet."
He acted shocked at the amount of the fare, but paid, and tipped. Then, it seemed too much effort for him to stand up out of the cab. He looked at Cody's and said "why did you bring me here?" I didn't quite know what to say. "Is this where I said I wanted to go?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. Bet." And he was off.
I had a call to go to a gas station to pick up an employee who was getting off of work. I watched through the window as he put on his jacket, grabbed a bag, and headed out. A Jeep Cherokee had pulled up behind me. He walked past the cab without looking at me, and went to the Jeep. I figured he had got another ride but it would have been nice if he could have said something. But, he did come to the cab, and got in. He told me the address but said he needed to make a quick stop at the De Ja Vu.
Along the way he started ranting excitedly about his girlfriend. Apparently she had gone to some 'sex party' with her girlfriends. The Tupperware kind of party where they talk about techniques and try to sell you products. He was upset that it had taken her so long and that she didn't answer her cell phone, though she did answer his text messages.
He said he had met her at a gas station he worked at in Seattle, Washington. She came in, they talked, he asked her to a movie. She said she lived in Missouri. He asked for her number and said "we could be pen pals or something." One week and four phone calls later she drove to Washington to pick him up. He drove most of the way back and spent $500 on the trip. This was 5 months ago.
"I mean, what kind of sex party lasts 4 hours? A Tupperware party should last maybe 1-3 hours, but not 4." He was convinced there was some pretext at work and that his girlfriend was cheating on him. He wanted to go to the Vu to check on her alibi, that she was going to the comedy show with girl friends. I told him it was $1 a minute wait time. And he had to pay the cover.
He asked if he could borrow my jacket. He was wearing a yellow jacket and convinced he would stick out. I told him it my be a little small, since he was quite a bit bigger than me. I gave him the black taxi jacket with my name on it. I hadn't even worn it yet. He looked ridiculous walking in. The jacket was too small and he had zipped it up at the bottom. It rode high over his big man-ass. Good luck not standing out.
He was in there over 20 minutes. He had given me $20 up front, and his jacket and bag were in the car. When he finally came out he told me he never even got upstairs. The comedy show had started and they were sold out. He sat downstairs and drank a beer, waiting in case she came down to use the bathroom.
We were going to her house. He had a key and was going to wait for her. He was pretty neurotic, but didn't seem like the kind who would cut a girl up in tiny pieces. I decided to let it work itself out. The fare came out to $32 or $33. I let him finish his cigarette in the car in her driveway before I kicked him out.
Later I picked up an older black gentleman from near downtown and took him to the Knights of Columbus Hall for a company Christmas party. He detailed cars for a living. Along the way he noticed the Furry Lewis and asked "what's that you're listening to, KOPN?" KOPN is the public radio station (I think).
"Actually, its a CD of mine. Furry Lewis."
We talked about music for a minute. "I know you got some of my boy Stevie Ray Vaughn." Not really.
He paid me the $14.55 in exact change. "You be good now, baby boy." Damn, that's twice now, in two nights. I thought it was a term of endearment the first time, and this confirmed it. I felt like it reflected some street cred I may have earned.
I had one of my crazier/edgier drunks Saturday night. I picked up a man and a woman from the Emory Sapp Christmas party at the Expo Center. Emory Sapp is a huge construction outfit. They do a lot of road and concrete work for Columbia subdivisions and highway projects. I had some trouble finding them. Dispatch had called and confirmed they were still there, but they had gone through to the main entrance of the adjoining hotel. I worried they'd be pissed when I found them but they were just drunk.
The guy got in the front, the lady in the back. She was probably about my age, only with some more living under her belt. He was about 40, with a good voice. He had a well groomed goatee and slick hair that belied a blue collar concrete laborer. He was howling and carrying on quite a bit. It was pretty distracting when I was trying to explain the details of our credit card policy and take directions.
He had an ornate patterned tattoo between the first and second knuckles of his right hand. It wrapped around his finger. It was blue and showed a little age. It was hard to get a look at due to the calamity and his rapid gestures. He was trying me, not sure yet if I was cool or not. He was the kind of loud, boisterous guy who tries to push you to the edge. If you lose it he loves to fight. If you keep your cool you 'earn his respect' and he likes you and relaxes.
He said "I used to be in this business. But I wasn't a cab, a cab uh, a cab..what you call yourself, a cab ____?
"Cab driver?"
"Yeah! A cab driver. I just drove whores."
"Well, I've had a few in here, myself."
"No, I just drove them. Took them, to you, know the hotel, wherever they had someone they had to..."
"Conduct business with?"
"Yeah," he laughed heartily. He was wound up the whole way. We stopped to use an ATM just off of Smiley. He had a bad habit of snapping into an abusive character towards his lady. He would be laughing and she would brush against him and he would snap "you get the fuck off of me you bitch." He swung back and forth. She was always nonplussed, like putting up with an annoying child. I imagine much of it was bravado, and almost entirely empty threats. What I couldn't figure out, though, was how much of it was a character and how much of it was unchecked aggression.
After he took his turn at the ATM she took hers. He was headed back to the car, trying to put his wallet back into his pocket, walking alongside the retaining wall next to the cab. He walked into it, backed up a step, walked back into it, backed up a step, and walked into it again. He finally managed to free himself and get in the car.
"I feel like one of those damn RC cars. I just kept hitting the wall, and backing up, and hitting the wall. I didn't think I was ever going to get off of the damn thing."
He acted shocked over the meter and the wait time. She reminded him that I had mentioned it and that he knew about it. We headed north again. They changed their plans and we were headed to a party. As we drove along the narrow, dark, hilly rural road and I tried to keep everything in check--the directions, his rant, the car, etc--I looked down and saw that wait time was running. Shit, I thought I turned it off. I figured it hadn't added much to the fare and reached up and turned it off.
As I kept driving I noticed again that wait time was on. When you're running the meter on a fare you're only running distance. The meter display reads "TIME OFF." People sometimes think that it runs on time, but that's only when we're stationary and I turn it on, like when someone goes in the grocery store in the middle of a ride. Wait time is $1 a minute, in 15 second $.25 intervals. In this case, the time would be more expensive than the distance, since we weren't going very fast. Some people will try to hit the button under the "TIME OFF," thinking it turns time off, and therefore, the meter. That's what this guy was doing, but it was only costing him more money.
I asked him if he hit the button and he did a fabulous job acting. The chick said that he did. I tried to explain it to him, but we were pretty much there. It was a tiny dirt lane that stretched for two trailers. They were going to the second. It was an older single wide, and the ground fell from under one end of it, so that it was fairly high off of the ground at the front door. There was a tiny deck almost as high as it was square. A few people were on the deck. Someone was walking across the chat driveway with some firewood. It took a while to run her credit card because dispatch was slow in getting back to me. She tipped me with some quarters and two Sacajawea dollars. I finally got out of there with no incident. They had mentioned maybe needing a ride home. I thought about telling dispatch to warn any driver they sent, because the guy was bound to be worse after more drinking. But I didn't. There was a shiny black Cadillac Escalade parked in the driveway.
Then I picked up some crackers at Columbia Regional ER. It was two women and a dude. When the first woman said something I thought she was yawning. But instead of resuming in a normal voice and saying excuse me she just had a speech impediment. So did the second girl. It turned out they were mother and daughter. The younger said something about taking the cab when she was staying at the Ronald McDonald House. Her baby had been born with neonatal hepatitis, jaundice, a bad liver, a heart murmur, and a hole in its heart. The white trash dude in the front said "and you never got anything for that, did you?" Entitlement. I dropped the mom off at Woodstock Trailer Court and the other two at Lenoir Trailer Court, just down the road.
I picked up a guy of about 23 or 24 at Cody's later that night. He was pretty drunk, but managing himself well. He wasn't the Cody's type, and had apparently been dragged there an hour or so earlier, and was trying to get home. He had the hiccups. They were pretty constant, and he would say "excuse me" after each one. Thus, his speech was comical and cumbersome. He was very gracious for the ride. When he was searching for his money he finally found it in his wallet, and said, upon its discovery, "yabba dabba."
I got hosed around bar closing again. I took a fare out south on Old 63. Rather than coming back downtown, I was dispatched north of town, off of Rangeline. It was two wasted young college girls. A guy came down and gave me directions before piling them in. I was taking the girls back to one of their houses, but the girl was too drunk to remember the name of her street. The guy remembered every other street name. They had been puking, but thought they were done. One had no shoes on. They were going to the Lake of the Woods area. Of course I missed the turn, looking for the wrong street name. They were passed out on top of each other in the back. One breathed shallow, rapid breaths, and I feared more puking. I finally got them home in time, with no incident.
My last call was at about 3 am. It was a couple, in their mid 30s, stylish. I picked them up in front of a salon near the banquet center in the Peach Tree Plaza. I think they owned it. The guy was tres stylish for a heterosexual, with shaggy, moussed hair, trendy glasses, a sport jacket, torn jeans, and an authentic western belt buckle. They had a bottle of wine that we each took turns holding while everyone got in and settled. They had tried to get one of their friends to wait for the cab but she insisted on driving and got a DWI. They had been drinking all night and were going to the Marriott. In telling the DWI story the woman said "while we were waiting on your dumb ass." I didn't think anything of it. After a couple of minutes she asked "wait--did I call you a dumbass?"
"Well, no. You said 'your dumb ass,' which, technically, is different than calling me a dumbass." She apologized and said she didn't mean it. They asked me what I did and we got into the law school conversation. The dude's interest was piqued and he insisted that I come up to the room and party. I told them I would be working for another hour. He still insisted. I told him he might change his mind when he got to his room and wanted to sleep. He said they had plenty of partying left to do.
"You're not some undercover drug enforcement agent, are you?"
"No, I assure you I'm not."
"Well, good. You get done with the cab and you come back at 4." I told him to give me his number and I would call them at 4.
"Are you ready for some wild partying?"
"Well, wild is a relative term. Remember, I'm going to be sober at 4 am."
"Oh, we're gonna do some wild partying alright."
I had one more call that was a no-show. I got a firm impression that they were going to be putting some Bolivian export up their noses at the Marriott. That wasn't my scene. I didn't know how many people would be there, and I didn't want to be the third element in some weird sex equation. Besides, even if it were guaranteed cool, I had just worked 12 hours and felt like total ass. I hated to be conventional and cop-out, but the only real draw was that this was the first time anyone was ever really adamant about inviting me back after work. I went to McDonald's instead and then home. It was one more story I just had to leave out there.
Well, we'll see how Monday goes. My roommate is out of town until the 24th. That means I can listen to the stereo while I blog. I have to work Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. My buddy Gene is going to try to get his taxi license this week and come to work for A*1. Apparently he's about the only person with a worse job situation than me. And he has a law degree. I just looked at the word verification to publish this post and it is "gSuxx."
posted by Garner at 10:07 PM
2 Comments:
" He walked into it, backed up a step, walked back into it, backed up a step, and walked into it again. He finally managed to free himself and get in the car."
OMG. I spewed coffee out my nose.
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