Taxi Driver (4 page)

The primary was July 20. A long way off. People seemed pretty excited already.

Palantine had something. He was no middle-class bullshit artist. He looked like he could be your friend for Life, or your friend’s friend. A happy man. Lotsa positive vibes. Had one of those nice clean honest faces. Middle-aged, smiling with thin lips, wiry gray hair. Used to wear seersucker suits and pink shirts. Nice ties. I thought I would vote for him, though that was not why I was hanging out.

A certain woman worked there, I didn’t even know her name, but she was beautiful, tall and blond and clean and cool. I liked keeping an eye on her, watching her with the other workers. There was a guy she talked to a lot. A
chub,
cute, with a big
shock
of curly brown hair and glasses, I guess. Sort of a kid brother type. He reminded me of my second lieutenant. Well I don’t think she liked him that much, but he liked her.

Me, I had eyes for her, too, liked to watch her a lot, all the time, she was one of America’s “chosen youths,” I sometimes think, so beautiful and fortunate. When she walked out on the street to get coffee, she always seemed to float above any of the others, suspended. She was certainly better than your run of the mill.

I didn’t know what she did, we never spoke. Once in a while our eyes touched through the glass, and then she had to look away, or I would get a stare.

I thought if it was ever going to happen this was it. I could only stand so much. Like being inside a tin can, holes for peering out. I had the cab fitted out with a rubber portable fan and a little transistor radio, but it was still not all the comforts of home: And I would always park across the street and stare at her typing, or talking on the phone, such a beauty.

Well, one day she pointed me out to her friend and he was coming at me through the door so I just put the cab in gear and drove away, fast.

I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get involved. What did I know about politics anyway? A loner wolf like me. They’re all no good, I thought. But she was so very beautiful.

I thought she was my dream woman. She always wore this nice long yellow dress, or a Palantine T-shirt, jeans. Built nice. She spent so much time on the phone, too, talking and looking happy and she typed with only two fingers. So stylish, slender, a little pug nose, blond hair, a yellow dress that clung to her body, among the masses on the street, untouched by the crowd.

Well she was like an angel out of this open sewer, out of this filthy mass. Alone; they couldn’t touch her. I would call her—what’s wrong with just
her?
Names wouldn’t change a thing about the way I felt for her. I’d call her
Her
. . .

But, that day when her boyfriend started out the door, I got so very frightened and angry and started to drive away because I could see her pointing me out to him.

I don’t think he meant to chase me away. He was just being protective of her. Is all . . .

Further Thoughts

By April 14, I had given
her
a birthday, April 14th, the anniversary of our eyes first meeting a week ago on Fifty-eighth and Broadway: I still didn’t know a thing about
her
except that I was madly in love with this person, if she was who I thought she was, my woman I could respond to

I tried writing notes to leave for
her:
“I am a working person vitally concerned about the welfare of our country. I want to help Mr. Palantine. Can we talk? I want to meet.”

“I think you are a lovely clean young woman . . . Could we be friends?”

There was also a sort of poem I scribbled to myself, though I would never send her that:

I bring you my lonely death
with open arms to love you
Like a flower that smells sweetest
whenever you are bending over it

Well, I never finished that one because it seemed she would not understand. All that week, my favorite song was, “Killing me Softly With His Song,” and also “Lean On Me” though not with Bill Withers.

I wondered what
her
favorite song was. Probly something by Stevie Wonder or the Stones maybe.

Deep in my own thoughts. A dreaming time. I’d have to buy
her
an album with my letter of introduction and poem when we got acquainted. One thing was certain, she was very well brought up. You could tell.

Small Talk in a Greasy Spoon

Well people do such things when they are about to have a relationship and I was talking to a lot of people about a lot of things lately. In my cab, a woman says to me, “New York is always cold when it’s hot and hot when it’s cold, ever wonder about that?”

At the Belmore at 3:30 one morning, I’m with Wizard, Dough Boy, Charley T., who, as I say, is black, and we’re comparing fares. The usual shit: How everybody
squeezes
the cabbie if he can. How they talk at you. How lonely it is. How they don’t even care sometimes if you’re listening. And chicks, they like to chisel you.

I had just gotten bucket loaded by a chick with a ride to Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, so I figured the night was
fucked
and came there, but then Dough Boy told me he would “bust any bastard who pulled that shit this time of night.”

Wizard says, “Dough Boy likes the dollars too. He’d chase a buck straight into Jersey.”

“Look who’s jabbering,” says Dough Boy. “Who else would come here to squeeze an extra ten bucks out of the rush hour?”

The place was so full of junkies, and black pimps. Repulsive. All that greasy plastic everywhere. Plastic
eggs.

One old coot hung onto his coffee cup at the front of the line as if for dear life when we came through.

The ticket bell bonged and Charley T. ordered cold scrambled eggs and studied the racing form.

Well the colored don’t know how to hang onto their money.

There were some street people there too, a girl and a boy at the next table, all lovey-dovey. She was kinda pretty, I guess. Lanky. I don’t really know what she saw in him. He wore an Indian head band.

Wizard says to me, “If I was you, Travis, I’d have copped me a feel. I ain’t too old for that you know, Travis.”

I had nothing to say. She wasn’t my type. I thought of
Her.
So slender and clean. Not like that slutty-looking hippie girl at the next table.

Dough Boy asked, “You run all over town, don’t ya, Travis?”

“A ladies’ man,” Wizard said.

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking how clean her body must be, and what she looked like without clothes, next to me, if I ever

Hell, shit, I have a right to my own thoughts, but I was interrupted by that Goddamned Dough Boy who was a needler and a nosy-body. He said he understood I handled all the rough traffic, and did I carry a gun?

Naw

Well did I need one?

Pondered that a second before saying, Naw, I suppose not.

Well Dough Boy said that if I ever needed one, he knows a guy who could get me a real nice deal. “Lots of that shit around,” he said.

Wizard says, “The cops and company raise hell they find out.”

I dropped two Alka-Seltzers, and then another red. Maybe we can change the subject.

Dough Boy he says, then, “Truck drivers bring up Harlem Specials that blow up in your hand, but this guy don’t deal no shit. Just quality. If you ever need anything, I could put you in touch.”

Wizard puts in “For a fee.”

“For a fee,” says Dough Boy.

Wizard says, “It’s a good thing to have around the house. Thanks be praised, but I never used mine.”

We started breaking up. Then Dough Boy says, “If there’s this many hackies inside, there must be lots of fares outside.”

Well, he has a wife and kid, a mortgage somewhere in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Charley T. had nodded off. Dough Boy makes a crack: “Say hello to Malcolm X, Charley.”

And then it was just Wizard and me and we don’t have very much to say to each other. Ever.

I stayed awhile and then I made my excuses, got up, went to the cashier, paid the bill. Got a fare right outside on Park Avenue to Little Italy and on the way back uptown to the garage, another, a fat guy with a sob story about his divorce, a lawyer with a thing for his client’s wife who he is suing for divorce on the grounds of adultery on behalf of his client to get custody of her child.

The guy was bad drunk and he said he felt all mixed up, ethically and professionally.

Words to that effect.

Said the woman and he were having this affair years and years and there was a child involved and she didn’t want her
ex,
his client, to see the kid and it was just very hard on him as a lawyer because he usually did only Workmen’s Compensation, stuff like that. But because she was such a beautiful woman, when she told him he was the best ever, he felt he couldn’t say anything to his client.

So who, he asked, was he responsible to?
The client? The woman?

Well I don’t know. In my journal, I write, Fat men with briefcases carry their lives in a big bulge.

He leaves me on Seventy-second Street near Central Park West, says he thinks of giving it all up sometime and moving into one of the Caribbean Islands, St, Loosha.

When people tell you these things, they don’t really want you to hear really. They just need to have you there to bounce it off. Once I picked up Joanie James. Remember her? She’s not what she used to be.

Well, I suppose that happens to everybody after a while. Even
Her
. My girl. God, is she beautiful . . .

Betsy Meet Travis Bickle

On April 14th, I wrote the following in my journal:

“Dear Diary—this really happened. I got up the nerve and went into Palantine headquarters today to see
her
and talk to
her.”

No kidding. I got all dressed up: Tie, pressed my army jacket and slacks, shined my shoes, shaved, walked right through that door on my own two feet.

Had the cab parked a block away.

Entered the place quickly, at a quick step march, headed right for
her
desk. That guy she sees with the curly hair trotted over, too, though I ignored him.

Me: “I want to volunteer.”

I was feeling a little panicky but O.K., I guess, except for wear and tear from lack of sleep.

So he comes over to her right then, too, and interrupts: “If you’ll come this way.” Didn’t even call me
sir
like they usually do.

Well, I give him the elbow. I’m not budging. I didn’t have enough time to notice what’s going on with
her.

I just plant myself there and say, “No, I want to volunteer to
you.”

He sort of warns
her,
in an undertone, “Bets.” Now I know for certain that’s her name. But she waves him away. Everything is going to be O.K. She is looking at me real warmly, I think. Then he goes about his business, and she says to me, “Why? Why is that?”

Me: “Because you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

She seems to like that, in a mild way. She knows I’m coming on, gets startled, though not angry. Those lovely greenish-blue eyes are watching me close.

She: Smiling all the while, “Is that so? But what do you think of Charles Palantine?”

“Who, ma’am?”

“Charles Palantine, the man you want to volunteer to help elect President.”

“Oh, I think he’s wonderful, a wonderful man. Make a great, great President.”

“Do you want to canvass?”

(I’m trembling. Were sort of playing around, I think.)

“Yes, ma’am.”

(She’s grinning a bit now.)

“What do you think of Palantine’s stand on welfare?”

(She’s a real teaser, no doubt about it.)

Me: I’m feeling as though I can finally speak my mind to a friend.

That guy is shuffling his papers a few desks away.

There’s a clatter of typewriters.

“Welfare, ma’am,” I asked very respectful, at first, and polite. Well, even though politics is not my bread and butter, I have my views. “Welfare. Well, I’d say he wants to get all them lazy people off welfare, all them old coots. Make ’em work for a change.”

She gives me a funny look again and then another, unreal, a little more interested.

“Well, that’s not
exactly
what the Senator has proposed. You might not want to canvass, but there is plenty of other work we need done: office work, hanging pictures.”

Me: “I’m a good worker, ma’am, a real good worker.”

She says, with her cool little smile, “Call me Betsy, that’s my name. If you talk to Tom over there, he’ll assign you to something.”

“If you don’t mind, Betsy, ma’am, I’d rather work for you.”

“Well, we’re
all
working tonight.”

When I tell her I drive a taxi at night, she lifts her eyebrows at this, asks, “Well, then, what is it you
exactly
want to do?”

“If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’d be mighty pleased if you’d go out and have some coffee and a piece of pie with me.”

Well so did she. Seem pleased. Real pleased, even smiled, openly. “All right.” Then she seems to be thinking again. “All right. I see you’re not just another pretty face. Well, I’m taking a break at four o’clock and if you’re here we’ll go to the coffee shop at the corner and have some coffee and pie.”

Tom over there didn’t seem too pleased, but I was. “Oh, I appreciate that, Betsy, ma’am. I’ll be here at four o’clock. Exactly.”

“Betsy,” I went on.

“Yes?” She was delighted with me.

“My name is Travis.”

“Well, thank you, Travis.”

And, after 4:00
P.M.
, I added the following little note in the same book:

“B even nicer than I thought and very well brought up, too. Her father is some sort of big shot diplomat. Lives a broad. B wouldn’t tell me much. Said her parents had been very cruel to her when she was little. Well, I don’t see how, the way she looks. They must have loved her a lot, though she wouldn’t tell me more. Said it was time she grew up.”

Coffee Shop Rendezvous

Which all goes to prove I took Betsy to the Mayfair Coffee Shop on Broadway and had only just returned when I started writing in my book again.