Taxi Driver (2 page)

This all started happening to me seems to me musta been a long time ago, in the winter, my first in New York City, maybe two years ago. More. There was still a war.

It was cold and snowy. Filth everywhere. Just like now. I didn’t have any love in my life. To speak of. No love at all, and nobody to care for. Just very little self-respect.

Whatsoever.

Worse than my Christmas year before with the dog. When Junior and I didn’t have any place to stay.

I was standing in front of the Avon Cinema to see
Angel Pussy
(for the fifth, or possibly sixth, time) when this person with big yellow cole slaws on his lips starts telling me things.

Seems he only goes to see these type pictures because he’s presently
at liberty.
Which is a word, or phrase, I don’t know. He is a musician, plays the slide trombone. Weddings and dances, that sort of thing. It so happens his arms are very short, extremely, and his hand can’t always move the slide back and forth on certain days when his elbows are stiff from an old wound. To change notes he must depend upon his lips. But now that he has all these cole slaws he can’t work, you see, and his wife is afraid to kiss him. He’s
at liberty.
The Workmen’s Compensation don’t give a shit for cole slaws.

There are certain New York mornings when just about everybody wakes up crazy. Even the natives. You can see it on their faces. Such misery and unhappyness. Well so this other person was hanging around, too, on his lunch hour, and he seemed very extremely unhappy. Said the blond woman in the box office knew him. She recognized him, and that made him feel so resentful. Said his name was Ashley. He’s from South Carolina, but he’s been working in New York ten years and right now he has to go back to work, or he will be out on the streets for good. He’s plainly worried about himself a lot. Said he didn’t like being recognized and stared at because this was his free lunch hour to do with as he damn well pleased.

“It’s a free country you bitch,” he screamed at the woman in the box office. “Stop looking. Do you hear?”

Well it was such a cold windy howler of a day anyway. I was thinking your free time is not always such a great thing as it is sometimes cracked up to be, Travis old dog, and, if you love life you will get busy. Work is a kinda love. You give it to people. Yourself. The world. Things like that. Stuff of that sort to that effect.

Also I’d been thinking that spending all of my all-too-free time at the porn was basically a step in the wrong direction. For staying up all those nights with insomnia I suspected I should be paid.

Right away I went down to the hack bureau to apply for a license. I still had some service pay left, but I knew where I would be after that.

A few mornings later on this cold filthy mother of a day I went up to Manhattan Cab Garage, job-hunting.

Unreal. Drunks, dinge, skunk pussy everywhere just don’t go to make up a city in my book, but there you are; that’s basically your New York City early in the morning. Well thank God I’d seen worse.

In my head I was making all these notes: real
cuzzy
of a day; dirty snow piled high in banks. Like back home only much worse. There you don’t expeck much.

Well that day, too, I began to keep this journal. As a keepsake. Something to keep me from going completely bananas. Keep me busy. Things like fresh snow falls are peppered with city soot as on my mashed potatoes.

Also guys without fingers washing cab windows with a big yellow sponge

Sorta like that

Manhattan Cab Garage is Amoco Penzoil Fresca and a small faded blue on white telephone bell meaning pay phone somewhere inside nailed to one greasy black window.

Puddles of big yellow suds everywhere. Place smells of Simonize and beer. Piss, gasoline.

Caution signs. Check-in logs tacked to the walls. The motor pool all over again at Banh Me Thut, all sorts of cabs and companies: Yellow, Blue, Green&White; Mavis, Acme, Dependable.

My diary says I saw this person at the entrance way next to Warrenty body&fender repairs

He stopped me.

Am I interested in getting help with the hack bureau? The police? Work at Skull Co?

This little man with a reddish bruiselike mark all over his right cheek says connections are certainly important in a city such as New York.

Would I care to purchase a second-hand cholestoil and calory counter?

“You’re always sitting down on the job,” he explains, “and that means weight gain.”

I’m shown a shiney brass thing with a little brass pull-out ruler. You snap a button. A lotta numbers, a spirit level.

He has a suitcase and I’m shown a six-digit pocket calculator which adds and subtracts orange numbers. A steel change maker. A lotta different soft hats.

“I’m coughing up a lot of flames,” he says, pounding his chest, “if you know what I mean, it’s my chest . . .”

When I tell him fuck off I’m in such a big rush he says only the sheenies are getting rich now a days in New York.

A glance at my personal appearance afterwards in dusty plate glass like a certain piece in
Lady Adrian’s Afternoons.

Well Travis you dirty son of a bitch you are some beauty as usual in your jeans and Frye boots and army shade 44 green fatigue jacket you could be an educated man but frankly I doubt it

More than likely just anybody the shit off the streets maybe

That personnel office was also unreal. An A&W root beer stand in bullet proofed glass with a fat man and a slim older woman chatting at separate dull green desks.

I took my chances on the man with a white spot in his right eye. He was sort of skinny at one end and sacklike on the bottom. Not very pretty to look at, but he had nice hands. Really fine and slim. The woman she wore a lotta big rings

Once he sees my King Kong Co patches he wants to know if I was ever in the Nam? Did I get an honerbull discharge?

“May 1971 . . .”

Old gray crocus bag. Weary, probly bored, too, “What’s that?”

I say “That’s my approximate date of discharge Mr.,” emphasizing a lot so he would see I had respect for him, meant no harm. Well I really wanted work, but I also mean business

“Seen combat?”

He seems to have all sorts of different things on his mind except my getting work. Probly scared he’ll lose his own job.

“Abe,” says the woman, “my mood ring has just turned brown.”

“So what?”

“So what?”

She shows us what her daughter who is in cosmetics gave her for Christmas, a real mood ring that changes colors of the stone on your hand and is now almost real nut brown

Well I don’t mean to seem rude. “I came here to see about getting a cab to drive, I think.”

“O,” says the guy. “I bet you’re from out of town. You think getting work here in New York City is a great big cinch.”

“I’m willing to work . . . is all . . .”

“Any troubles with the hack bureau?”

“No sir.”

“Got your license?”

“Yes.”

So just then there was a lot of commocean, guys screaming, car exhausts. Somebody has slammed into one of the new cabs. The old man flinches. The woman says I’ll get that, goes off with her mood ring turning yellow.

The old man squints at me very hard and over all the noises I can hardly hear him when he asks, “Been getting much here in the Apple?”

Well it’s cold and wet in that place like you’ve fallen into some mud, and the noises are very big and get lost everywhere overhead.

Well I don’t happen to think that’s any of his business, anyhow. Though I am not ashamed.

“So,” he asks me, “why do you want to drive a cab?” I tell him very straight: I can’t sleep nights.

Well he says there’s porno theaters for that and the park in summer. Am I gay?

Me, disregarding his insult: “I know. I tried all that”

He still won’t let me be, won’t let up. “So whatja do now?”

“I ride around nights mostly subways, buses. See things. Figure I might as well get paid for it.”

“We don’t need any misfits around here, son.”

“Who else would hack through South Bronx or Harlem at night?” (Well I can feel myself smiling. I’ve been speaking to him like my mind don’t know what my mouth is saying and now I’m getting angry. Riled.)

“You got others to take the heat off you at the Human Relations people it’s okay with me.”

The guy brightens.

Says, brightening, “You’re willing to work uptown nights.”

“Uptown or downtown doesn’t make any difference. What have I got to lose? I’ll work anywhere anytime. I can’t be choosey.”

Then he wants to know if I have an arrest record and when I tell him I’m clean, real clean, “as clean as my conscious,” he says, “listen sonny if you’re gonna get smart you can leave right now.”

I apologize. I don’t mean to seem so smart. So the guy asks can I pass a physical, how old am I, if I am moonlightening. Stuff like that. Words to that effect. He seems to like it that I’ll work long shifts.

“Hell,” he says, finally, “we just ain’t fussy around here. There’s always openings on one fleet or another.”

He asks me to fill out a bunch of pink yellow white forms, leave them with the girl at the front desk behind the little window five feet up in the air. They would call, if I had a phone.

I told him no I don’t.
No I never.

“Okay but we’ll get in touch somehow, or call us in a coupla of days.”

Good to break the ice anyway. On the way out saw myself in plate glass again: This thin dark shadow.

Read my army patch backwards: ynapmoC gnoK gniK.

Then I ducked, the God damn New York police sirens are like mad babies crying

Travis Working

By March I was working and it had been raining days ever since I started, well, practically. Lousy wet syrupy weather. Like the beginnings of a miserable spring. Well at least we got to pick up who we chose to in that weather. Go wherever we liked. “When it rains the boss of the city is the cab driver,” all the guys at the garage say.

I started out working the theater district but that got to be too much for me. Too many out-of-towners and the higher-class people can be harder on your nerves than some junkies, or hookers. Temperamental. Except when it comes to tipping. A lotta East Side people were into saving money. The people from Kenosha expected you to know all sorts of very strange things.

Maxey from the Bronx, a driver thirty years, maybe he knows how to bullshit the people with advice of all sorts and what-nots, stories about his grandchildren, the great people he’s picked up who are famous, to that effect, but when I’m cruising downtown on Fifth Avenue in heavy fog with a half-chewed burger on the seat next to me well like I have no time for giving weather reports, flight information, theater & dining tips, just no inclinations.

“Listen,” says this guy in a business suit one day, “isn’t that the needle of the Empire State Building I saw? You can’t see it for the fog, driver, but that must mean Kennedy Airport is closed, am I right?”

“That’s a good guess,” I tell him. “Kennedy grounded . . .”

Man says, “You know that for a certainty?”

“The Empire State Building in fog does mean something, don’t it?” he demands, moments later. “Do you know, or don’t you?”

My hamburger tastes like solid brown fog in a bun. Through a mouthful I ask if he has tried telephoning the airport.

“In other words, you don’t know?” This guy is getting me crazy.

“Well,” he snarls, “you should. Should know, dammit, or who would know?” Stuff of that sort. A lotta blah blah. Says, “Pull over here driver.” He’s pointing out the window like a schoolteacher. Says, “Why don’t you stick your head out of the goddamn window and find out about the goddamn fog!”

I hadda laugh. He only gave me a dollar, tip included.

A Sweetheart.

There was also a woman in Tudor City I kept picking up all of the time and she always asked if I knew her son Bud in Vietnam. Was he my CO?

She had gray hair. Doused herself a lot with lily-of-the-valley water.

She said Bud was her oldest, such a good boy, had I ever known him?

I musta picked her up three or four times and she asked the same questions and I never even asked what happened to Bud.

Never.

One night in the Village picked up this guy in full dress. He was going to a fashion show at the Pierre. The President’s wife and daughters would be models. I didn’t want to go uptown but he said he would report me to the Company. If I didn’t. Seems he had a riding date in West Virginia the next day with this beautiful girl who was also one of the models and she’d just broke a date with her boyfriend Norman. Well you know what it’s like with some people. Animals.

The guy leaves me and I get picked up by a very pretty young woman says she wants to go up near Columbia University. “Through the park, driver.”

Well were going along by the reservoir when I look into my rear view mirror and I see she has her feet up inside the stirrups with her legs spread and she is sticking herself with this long glass tube in the hot spot.

I asked what’s going on and she explains, “No trouble, driver. No problems.”

She told me she was extracting her blood. Seems she did this every month so she wouldn’t have to have her period. Her boyfriend liked her better that way and she said she had more control over her body.

Well she said she was going up to see her boyfriend tonight and was staying over and she’d almost forgotten. She wanted to surprise him that way again. As usual.

Well we got up to an address on Morningside Drive and she wanted me to come upstairs with her. Said her boyfriend wouldn’t be home for quite a while yet. Would I not come up? She would show me how it worked.

So foward. Just like animals. All too many of them. I suppose I would have said yes maybe so if not for that boyfriend. Also I liked to think they would come to my place, and my place was a mess. Really pretty awful.

Well I had this room and a half on the West Side, a ratty old mattress on the floor, a chair, a table, an old TV on a crate, and on the walls that red silk VC flag I traded with Lee Lucas.

I almost never got calls at my place so the phone was disconnected; a little black pig tail dangling out of one wall. There were also some porn photos, I’d collected too, and a kitchen full of grease and roaches, a stopped sink.