Somewhere in my misspent youth, I picked up the idea that
there are several crucial building blocks to becoming an infamous writer. For
Bukowski it was a diet of booze, women, and dead end jobs. I figured that if I
drank heavily and drove a cab, at least I would have two out of three essentials
covered.
Bukowski steps into Taxi Driver to shake hands with Travis
Bickle.
After a year of living in a remote cabin in the deep woods of Chauncey, Ohio. Carla and I were ready to get back to civilization. We had
moved there immediately after getting married, both of us enrolling in classes
at Ohio University. I was just spinning my wheels in grad school though; mostly
I studied Carla and the THC levels of the local sinsimilla crops.
Migrating back to Northern Virginia, and much to the disgust
of my father, a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa who only spoke to me when my grades were
good, so we never spoke, I launched my career as a cab driver. Even though I
had recently turned 30, my emotional age was around 17. Anything that would
help me put off adult employment and responsibilities for as long as possible,
would be perfect. Plus, it was writer training, right?
I threaded long chains of pop tops from beer cans and strung
them around our little apartment like garlands of Walmart Christmas lights,
smoking a mountain of ganja while doing it. I was making all the right moves, well on my way to becoming a name writer.
A beat up black Chevy four door was my office, one of the
septuplets owned by a fledgling cab company operating out of Herndon, Va. Dulles
Airport to National and back were the money runs. Businessmen rushed back and forth as well as diplomats who came in from overseas. They flew into Dulles Airport
with their dance cards booked, filled with dates to meet partners who played
the shell game on Capitol Hill. The Washington Waltz. All those suits and ties, seemingly gleaned
from the same closet, an inbred stock of family members hanging out
there with near identical profiles, all in muted colors and fabrics. Nothing
too wild. Save that for after hours when the hookers and blow were flowing
freely.
Those tight collar uniforms, I’ve never understood them, nor the
obligatory ties that also ran a very limited gamut of colors and patterns. It
was as if they thought the more boring and bland the suit and tie, the more
trustworthy they appeared. Those people made for interesting passengers though
and loved a good story.
So I lied. Any outrageous story I thought would entertain could work.
After all, I probably would never see them again.
They loved hearing about the jail time I did as a result of the
bad decisions made in my early teens. The suits were crazy about a rehab story. Or any
brush with fame. My cousin, Steve McQueen was a crowd pleaser, and yes, Ali was
every bit as hot in person. She even hit on me once when she and Steve were on
the outs. She was drunk, but I didn’t press my luck. Stevie could fly into a
jealous rage and go ballistic in a heartbeat, waving that pistol of his around like an out-of-control fire hose.
“For two years, I lived with my twin brother, Glenn Frey, in
Topanga Canyon. You know, The Eagles? We used to party with Jackson Browne and
Linda Ronstadt. Those were some seriously crazy days. He doesn’t like me to
talk about it now that he’s trying to be all respectable and act like none of that stuff Rolling Stone wrote about really happened, but I was there, so you can ask me anything.”
The tips were great and correlated directly to how much my
passengers believed my stories. I perfected lying as an art form.
That was the high-end of cab driving. Clean, educated,
antiseptic, homogenized and morally bankrupt.
The truly fun stuff came at the end of the month when the welfare
checks and food stamps arrived. Everybody who didn’t own a car needed to go to
the grocery store. Those people didn’t tip but were a lot more honest than the
suits. They never pretended to be anything other than what they were.
There was the lady with five kids under the age of six. All had bad colds, 24-7. Mucus factories who had never been introduced to a tissue. Their
hands and sleeves were fine for that. Crusty, but fine. Thick greenish snot crept down
their upper lips until their tongues could cut the flow like a red slug windshield
wiper.
I kept a beach towel and some spray cleaner in the trunk,
just for them.
One sunny morning I got a dispatch to pick up at a local
lounge. Must have been an all-nighter for the woman who staggered out and got
into the back. Squeezed into a stained cocktail dress, a terrible looking mess in an outfit that was two sizes too small and older than the
bar she came out of, blind drunk. My immediate goal as I took two cardboard
pine-scented Christmas trees out of the glove compartment and draped them over
my rear-view mirror, was to get her out of my car. She lived in apartments that
were only a few blocks away, so it was a short ride, but things went from bad
to worse when we got to her place. After I pulled into the parking lot and told
her the fare, she leaned forward in her seat, 50-year-old breasts straining at
the skimpy restraints of her dirty purple outfit, stinking of booze,
cigarettes, and vomit, she croaked at me in a guttural rasp: “Would you take these in
payment?” That’s when she pulled down her top, letting those heavy
old mammaries drop to the floor, flaccid balloons that hung like used condoms stuffed with lumpy chicken fat, scarred by stretch marks that pulled all the way to
the baseboard.
Then she promptly passed out.
She exited my cab the same way, unconscious. With my hands firmly
clamped around each of her ankles, I pulled her out and up. Out of my cab and
up a short flight of stairs. Dress twisted around her waist, a torn black lace
rag between her legs, head banging with each step, dumped unceremoniously, blocking the main door to her apartments.
One of the regulars. I knew that I would see her again in a
few days and get the fare she owed me.
After literally dropping her off, I was in dire need of immediate writer training and decided to
drink and drive for the remainder of my shift.
Bukowski would have been proud.
Most of the food stamp & welfare crowd consisted of
single mothers with too many children. Overweight breeding factories, an
obvious history of poor dental care, the occasional black eye. They stocked
up on groceries at the end of the month. Shopping carts piled high with processed
foods got thrown unceremoniously into the trunk.
Huge bags of Cheetos and potato chips, cases of soda and gallons of
sugar water swirling with red dye No 5, 24 pack boxes of snack cakes, cheap
bakery items, candy of all shapes and sizes…all of it squashed together in
grocery bags designed for lighter use.
Beer and cigarettes were top priority supplies and necessitated their own stop on the way back.
Sad, angry people living dead end lives, fueled on a diet of Cheez Whiz squirted on the top of a cracker of desperation.
Perfect fodder for an aspiring writer living in a dead end
job.
All of the cabbies shared a radio frequency, our dispatcher calling out unit numbers and pick-up destinations. Jimmy, the heavy African American
driver who was unfailingly happy all the time, would bubble over the open air at the end of his
shift each night that he was going home “to gets me a piece of pussy!” He was so
delighted with himself and never considered the fact that other drivers may
have passengers listening to his declarations.
I kept my own radio turned down
low.
Our English driver, fresh from one of those huge British
cabs in Manchester, announced over the radio one afternoon that his passenger
had been explosively incontinent in his back seat. After a few moments of uncertainty,
a fellow driver explained to Jimmy what that meant “Someone shit all over
Burt’s cab!” The rest of us were thankful that it had been Burt’s passenger,
not ours. We were helpful like that. Burt had no choice but to bring the cab
back into base and hose down the entire back seat. Apparently Burt immediately found other
work, as that was the last time any of us saw him. He couldn’t take it. I guess the Manchester passengers were never incontinent in the English cabs.
At night, drunks, whores, drug addicts, and fares who would
ride and then quickly run off into the dark when we got to their destinations,
all balanced out the prim and proper suits who shuttled between airports by day.
Ultimately, the suits were more larcenous but their wrapping was their
camouflage that helped to open doors.
My most memorable passenger, hands down, was a woman named Lilly.
A regular end-of-the monther, we all knew where Lilly lived and hoped the
dispatcher would send someone else to go get her. She wore the same faded Moo Moo every time, floral patterned, a fitting garment that didn’t fit at all. Lilly
herself was rather bovine in structure and conversational ability. Constantly
chewing her cud, she never spoke. Neither she, nor the stained, flowered tent
she wore, had aged well. Although the
dispatcher told us where to take her, we already knew. Grocery shopping at the Safeway
store on Broad Street.
The first time I was dispatched to pick-up Lilly, I was advised to bring along a roll of paper towels. It turned out that Lilly didn’t speak
for a reason. She must have been taught that a lady doesn’t speak when her mouth
is full. Although it was obvious, as Jimmy put it “She ain’t got no teef” the
paper towels were necessary but had nothing to do with toothlessness. It
was her cud that was the problem.
Lilly kept her change in her mouth.
Expert at spitting out exact change, Lilly was able to
distinguish between quarters, dimes, and nickels. Bald gums and her wet tongue
kept order in that rancid coin bank of hers. As we pulled up to her apartment, I would wad
up five or six paper towels and hand them back to her over my right shoulder,
looking straight ahead as I did so. After that first time, I couldn’t stand to
watch Lilly make change again, dribbling out slime coated coins into a nest of paper
towels. She would sit the damp wad on the back of my bench seat as I used more towels
to grab that heavy clump and throw it into the open glove compartment. There it
sat until the end of my shift, an unwrapped present for the dispatcher, with
love from Lilly.
It wasn’t even the Lilly’s of the world that finally got me
out of that cab though, I loved it. No, it was my dear wife who shamed and
belittled me into taking a shower, putting on clean clothes, sobering up and going out and
getting a real job.
She didn’t realize that she was cutting short my dead-end, down
and out writer training. The fact that I don’t have books on best-seller lists today, is clearly her fault.
I do miss those easy days though. I even miss Lilly.
So now I’ve started keeping my change in a big wad of paper towels stashed away
in the glove compartment of my car.
It’s my homage to Lilly, and what was on track to be a brilliant writing
career, truncated too soon by real life and a wife who apparently just didn’t
understand.
