Read Spitting Off Tall Buildings Online

Authors: Dan Fante

Tags: #Fiction

Spitting Off Tall Buildings (9 page)

BOOK: Spitting Off Tall Buildings
6.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Chapter Seventeen

A COUPLE OF days later, after the diner deal, I’d knocked off early and pulled into the mechanics section of the Rodney garage to have Hot Rod work on my front brakes. Another driver, a night-shift guy everybody knew, Al Bridhoff, was there too having some tranny work done. Al had once gone to law school upstate. Albany or somewhere. He was now the garage shylock. Because he had power and controlled money, many of the Rodney cabbies went to him for advice.

We were talking and drinking vending-machine coffee when I decided to mention the telephone incident and Betty at the diner and some of the stuff my mind had been saying to me.

But right away I regretted bringing it up.

Bridhoff was a pipe smoker. I began telling him what had happened and he began trying to light his fucking pipe. I’d say something, then he’d start to reply but stop in the middle, attempt to relight the pipe twenty-eight more fucking times, then nod that we could go on. I felt like the chump, the mooch, groveling for this asshole’s magical syllables of insight. In less than five minutes I hated him and hated myself for initiating the conversation.

When I’d said what I had to say, Bridhoff sat down. He could see that I was annoyed at having to watch him with his moron pipe. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully and attempted to give the appearance of contemplation. ‘Well, sport,’ he said finally, playing with the lid on his Zippo lighter, clicking the
top up and down, ‘it sounds like you’ve been overdoing it just a bit.’

I didn’t answer. A dented cab fender had more intelligence than this shylock imbecile fuck.

Disgusted, I threw my half-full coffee cup in the garbage, and began walking away. Bridhoff stopped me, putting his hand up like a crossing guard. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘tell me what you did with all the telephone parts, the receivers and cords? Still have that stuff?’

‘No. It was broken junk. I threw it away.’

‘Evidence, huh?’

‘No. Junk. Not evidence of any kind. Useless fucking junk.’

‘Yeah, well, that wasn’t very good thinking, was it? Telephone equipment has value. I might’ve been able to help you there.’

‘There’s a dumpster in the alley behind my rooming house. The valuable telephone shit you’re looking for is under a cat carcass and six feet of garbage. Help yourself, sport.’

A day or two later something else happened. More insanity.

I was hacking. On Madison Avenue in the Eighties about to pull over and pick up a guy hailing me, when another hack in a Checker cab cut me off to get to a fare. I had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting his taxi.

The fare got in the other guy’s Checker.

I pulled up next to the cabbie and yelled something and he mouthed ‘Fuck you’ and gave me the finger.

No big deal. Normally I’d just let it go. It can happen a couple of times a week when you’re hacking but, for some reason, I flipped out and lost control.

I followed the other taxi, yelling shit, tailgating, screaming out my window.

After a few blocks he swerved between cars and I was forced to stop for a light. Seeing that I’d caught the signal, he went ahead to his destination, assuming that because he’d gotten away the incident was over. But I kept my eyes on his taillights. Saw him turn. I caught up.

He had pulled to the curb after making his drop on Sixty-first Street, around the corner from the Pierre Hotel.

That’s when we settled up.

A lot of cab drivers I knew carried weapons; guns or mace or pepper spray. I didn’t. I carried a baseball bat under my front seat. A Louisville Slugger.

I walked up quickly. The other guy was looking down, still filling out his trip record. I attacked his window. Slam! Slam! Slam! putting a million spiderweb cracks in the windshield’s safety glass. Then I did the back and the side glass.

There would have been no witnesses too because the prick couldn’t see me through the opaque glass, and he was too shocked and scared to do anything about it but, as I was getting back into my cab, looking around, I recognized one of the drivers from my garage waiting alone in his cab at the hack stand in front of the Pierre. He saw me too, then he looked away.

A couple of nights later I was checking out with Shorty Smith, leaving the dispatch window, counting my tips, when Al Bridhoff patted me on the back. ‘Hey, “Batman,”’ he said. ‘Take it slow out there tonight.’

There were a dozen guys standing around the shape-up room. They all laughed. From then on I had a new name at the Rodney garage.

Chapter Eighteen

THE GOOD PART was that hacking kept me constantly busy. I was making money. I’d acquired a new electric typewriter to work on my play, a color TV.

Then something happened that triggered something else that put me over the edge: Shorty Smith had graduated me to what in the taxi business they call a ‘single’ - one long twelve- to fourteen-hour shift. No night guy. Just me. I was allowed to choose my own time slot; 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week. Sundays off.

It was early June, 8:30 a.m., drizzling a smelly rain in stop-and-go traffic. I was maneuvering my cab back up Eighth Avenue in the Thirties after a drop at Penn Station, staying to the east side of the street, barely making the staggered lights, preparing to avoid the stampede of commuters who would be flagging me down as I approached the Port Authority Bus Terminal at Thirty-ninth Street.

The cab was sweltering. A morning summer rain had made the humidity worse. The Dodge’s temperature gauge showed three-quarters to the bright orange/red ‘
HOT
’ area. Already the back of my shirt was wet with sweat, stuck to the seat.

My plan at that time of the morning was to make my way empty uptown into the Seventies on Central Park West, get my next fare, drop them in midtown or downtown, then repeat the process. Uptown downtown, uptown downtown, until the end of rush hour.

After I passed Forty-first Street, traffic opened up. Rolling by the commuter hotels more frantic hands waved at me; a whistle blew from a red-faced doorman. I slowed but when I saw garment bags and suitcases stacked next to the guy on the curb, I punched the gas pedal again. No airport runs. Not at rush hour. It would mean a dead hit all the way back from Kennedy.

Crossing Forty-fifth and Eighth, a black guy stepped out from between parked cars, hailing me. I let up on the gas to check him out. A second guy, behind guy number one, was on the curb carrying an A & P shopping bag filled with groceries. The two looked like working men. Hotel employees. The night shift. I guessed their destination as Harlem or Washington Heights. It could be a parlay. Perfect. I’d drop them uptown then catch a long hit back down into midtown. So, flicking my ‘
OFF DUTY
’ light off, I pulled over.

But they’d been in the taxi for under a minute when I knew; the first guy did the talking, flat, inflectionless: ‘One-eighteenth and Manhattan Avenue.’

I threw the meter flag and twisted my way back into traffic, but I knew. Cab drivers know. My groin and stomach suddenly felt like they’d been punctured by the dirty blade of a pocket knife. This was a hold-up. These guys were going to do me.

My brain clicked to the word ‘fuck’ and screamed it at me over and over.

Guy number one, the talking guy, was sitting directly in back of me. He leaned forward against the plastic partition to give more instructions. ‘Into the park,’ he said. ‘Go in at Fifty-ninth Street. Come out uptown. Hundred and tenth street. Lenox Avenue…understand?’

I saw his eyes locked on me in the rear-view mirror. Dead eyes. Dead face. The gray lips moved but beyond that movement there was nothing alive. Guy number two
stayed silent, staring at the back of the front seat. I knew it. I was fucked.

The route that number one had told me to take was circuitous, the long way. It was the way I would choose if me and another robber scumbag had decided we were going to take off a cabbie. By going his way there would be no interference. The uptown Central Park roadway was abandoned in morning rush hour. The fear that had jabbed my guts now worked its way up into my chest and down my arms.

‘That’s the wrong way,’ I mouthed. ‘Eighth Avenue and up Central Park West is the best way. Faster.’

Again Dead Face leaned up against the open partition window; a pull-cord zombie doll. ‘Yo,’ he hissed, ‘jus take the fucking park. Jus do what I say…take the park.’

Two blocks later we reached the turn-off entrance to the park at Fifty-ninth Street. I knew that if I entered the northbound drive there would be no chance for me at all. I chose not to turn, instead steering around the monument at Columbus Circle and heading north on Central Park West.

‘Man,’ came the voice from behind me, ‘what’s your fucking problem?’

‘I told you,’ I came back, ‘the park is the wrong way.’

‘Pull-the-fuck over, man. Do it…Stop here!’

We were between Sixtieth and Sixty-first streets on Central Park West. I rolled up beside a line of parked cars while my two passengers exchanged whispers.

What they did after that seemed choreographed. They both got out at the same time. The one on my side, Dead Face, took up a position by my driver’s window while the other dude moved to the front passenger door and began miming for me to roll the glass down further.

Dead Face talked across the roof of the cab to number two,
sneering; ‘Pay this motherfucker, man. Let’s get us another cab.’ Their A & P groceries bag was still on my back seat.

Then I had the thought that I might be wrong, that guy number two at the passenger window was standing there intending to pay me, dealing straight. I saw his hand go into his pants pocket as if to get his money and an automatic reaction made me glance at my meter then call out the fare: ‘Two fifty.’

Later on, as I went over and over the incident in my brain, I realized that that was the moment the fuckers had me. It was a move, a feint, all part of the score. I’d been distracted. The idea was for me to take my eyes away from Dead Face.

A second later his knife was at my throat, his body leaning in through the window blocking the view of pedestrians, people in other cars.

His sweet breath was on my cheek and forehead. ‘My man,’ he whispered, ‘make one fucking sound and you die!…Anything stupid and you die.’

I didn’t move. I didn’t talk.

My paper money was kept in a cigar box on the seat, my coins in my steel change-maker attached to the car’s dashboard.

Then I saw the second guy’s weapon. A gun. Short. A small-caliber automatic.

The whole deal lasted a few seconds. The blade of the shank stayed pressed tightly against my neck while number two crawled across the seat, shifted the cab’s transmission up into ‘park’, turned the engine off, removed the car keys, and threw them out the door. Then number two scooped out my cash from the cigar box on the seat and unfastened the change-maker.

Dead Face took my wristwatch. A cheap watch. That done, he reached down and worked my wallet up and out from my rear pants pocket.

Then he traded weapons with the other guy and pressed the muzzle of the little pistol hard to the side of my head. ‘Face down on the seat, motherfucker. One word and you die.’

I hesitated for a second because I knew that if they had made plans to kill me it would happen while I was in that position. The feeling of the pressure of the gun’s muzzle digging into my temple took a week to go away.

They exchanged whispers and then I felt something else, a pressure, like being poked, but no pain.

Then they were gone. Down a subway entrance or over the wall into Central Park.

That’s when I saw the blood. Soaking my sleeve and the right side of my shirt. On the seat. Two separate fat red streams coursing around the sides of the empty cigar box then pooling where the front seat cushions come together.

I didn’t feel hurt. I felt nothing, only electricity in my arms and the hammering of my heart in my chest.

In the rear-view mirror I located my cheek and neck, then reached back to the source of the injury; a two inch gash, high on my neck behind my right ear. Not a big cut. It didn’t seem that deep either. But the blood flowed freely, quickly covering my palm and fingers.

I held the hand out to study it. The red stream looked as thick as motor oil. Fat drops fell on the vinyl seat below.

I was sitting on the curb near the open rear door of my cab, smoking, talking to the police, holding a thick wad of gauze up to my head to soak up the blood while I waited for the ambulance. One of the cops noticed the sack of A & P groceries still on the back seat. ‘Theirs?’ he asked.

I nodded.

The other cop pulled the bag out of the car. When he saw how light it was, he cackled. The three of us looked
inside. On top, sticking out above the rim of the bag, were a milk carton, an egg box, a cornflakes box, and a cardboard orange-juice container. All empty, either taped closed or upside down. Beneath the upper layer of decoys was twelve inches of wadded up newspaper.

The one cop sneered. ‘Pretty slick.’

‘Yeah,’ said the other cop, ‘slicker than shit.’

Chapter Nineteen

IT TOOK TWELVE stitches to sew my head up. After the Emergency Room I was prescribed Fiorinal with codeine for pain, Valium to calm me down. I asked for refills so they gave me one each.

The hold-up changed me. I trembled involuntarily several times a day but I knew I’d get over that. The big change was that I had completely stopped giving a shit. I now drank without any moderation whatever.

The union rep from the Rodney garage came by my rooming house with medical forms. It was nine o’clock in the morning. I was blasted and stayed blasted. The next day someone else from the taxi company delivered a payroll check to my room. Two weeks of union-approved medical leave. $515.

Black sludge began seeping into every part of my brain. I stayed as drunk as possible and ate the Valium and Fiorinal.

The garage union guy came back with more forms. I knew he was there. Outside my door. Knocking. Calling my name. I didn’t answer. He left more envelopes and papers with Bert, the rooming-house manager.

I was filling a deep hole. Every day a fifth by lunchtime, from the bottle, like medicine. My goal was ‘numb.’ The whiskey worked good.

A week went by. Then two.

My shaking was gone but I knew there was no way I would ever drive a cab again. I was done.

On Seventh Avenue in Times Square there was an Oriental Massage that employed all Korean girls - thirty bucks for the hour. The secret to Korean masseuse hookers is the tip; the more you tip the girl the more she does. I always gave a twenty-dollar bill as soon as I got in.

I’d come in drunk but not too drunk. My girl called herself Sandy. A wonderful slut. Sandy’s American was lousy but she liked drinking with me, loved sweet wine. That and the twenty-dollar tip and she would do anything, lick me wherever I wanted. Anything. As much as I wanted.

Her shift began at one in the afternoon every day so that’s the time I would show up. Being first was important to me. I always wanted to be her first.

Even that stopped working.

BOOK: Spitting Off Tall Buildings
6.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer
ROMANCE: Lust by Appointment by Brittanee Farrow
Endless, Forever by E.M. Lindsey
The Good Girl by Fiona Neill
Can't Let Go by Jessica Lemmon
The Sportin' Life by Frederick, Nancy
If Only by Lisa M. Owens
Sword for His Lady by Mary Wine
Cascade by Claudia Hall Christian