Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Good morning,

Nearly seven years ago you were one of twenty-some people who subscribed to my online cab driving diary: “Brad Newsham’s 2010 Free Ride Journal.”

You may remember that I swore I was not writing a book — I was just trying to have some writing and story-telling fun — and I meant that when I said it.

But… I am a writer.

And in the fall of 2011, that diary crooked its little finger and summoned me back.

I have spent the past several years working those original posts into a polished manuscript: replacing less-interesting stories with favorites from other years; buffing up the prose; adding 115 color photographs (most of which I took during 2011 and 2012); and weaving in a personal tale which many readers say is their favorite element of the book. The result is similar to but, I believe, much different than the original diary. The word count has grown by roughly fifty percent — to 145,000. With the photos, the book comes in at 450 oversized pages (7” x 10”) and weighs two pounds, six ounces. It makes a pretty good doorstop.

(Important: Please pause here and take two minutes to expand and read the text on the attached photos of the cover.)

Knowing that you were reading my 2010 output meant the world to me. You helped give me enough of an audience to allow myself to keep trying to have some writing fun. Thank you.

Yesterday my “second printing” — 100 new copies — arrived on my doorstep. I wish I could afford to give them all away and order more. I cannot. But the next time your “reading queue” allows you to take on a fairly sizable read, if you are in the USA (foreign shipping is beyond my budget) I would love to send you a loaner copy – I will be thrilled and proud to know you have read it. And should a mainstream publisher ever publish Free Ride, I intend that each of you original subscribers receive your own copy of that future version.

Again, thank you for your support and partnership during 2010. Those meant more to me than I know how to convey.

If you would like a loaner copy (or if you want to say anything else to me), please contact me directly. 

Again, thanks for 2010.

All the very best,

Brad
newsham@mac.com

415-305-8294






Tuesday, November 6, 2012

AND I WANT TO DANCE FOR YOU!

Shift #88

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12 -- Seventh/Mission to Turk/Parker -- $15.25


I HAVE ZERO CREDENTIALS AS AN ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC
, but being a cab driver entitles me to -- in fact it often requires me to -- have an opinion on just about everything. And I think the new Federal Building in San Francisco at Seventh and Mission is just plain off-putting.

When the Transamerica Pyramid was being constructed, many people (including many blowhard cab drivers, I’m sure) decried its weirdness, opined that it was an abomination that would never fit in. But the populace quickly embraced its up-pointing, optimistic design, and within a few months of its 1972 opening, the Pyramid had become a celebrated San Francisco icon. I don’t think the Federal Building is going to be so lucky. It’s a visual head-scratcher with odd, dull coloring and an asymmetrical roof line, and after studying it for the past two years, I hereby pronounce its overall effect jangling. I can’t be the only one wondering, “What were they thinking?”


TOWARD MIDDAY, on the Mission Street side of the Federal Building, I see three young women eyeballing my cab. They are sauntering along all helter-skelter: only one of them is actually up on the sidewalk; a second is walking in the bus zone, a good five feet out onto the Mission Street asphalt; and the third is carefully tiptoeing her way along the edge of the curb as though it were a tightrope.

Their flagging style is as foreign as their pedestrian style -- in fact it takes me a moment to notice that I’m being flagged at all. Each of them is holding one hand down by her thigh and almost imperceptibly wiggling her open palm toward me -- trying to be…discreet, perhaps?

All three of them have the same olive skin and the same jet-black hair, and each of them, I notice, is clutching a phone in her non-flagging hand. All are dressed neck-to-toe in cascading layers of clothing, all of which is either black or white, but the overall effect is black-black-black. Two of them are strikingly short, almost tiny -- at first glance I think they might be identical twins. All are quite noticeably cute.

The taller one sits up front with me, the almost-tiny ones climb into the back.

In clear, lightly-accented English, the one seated in the right rear (I will soon come to think of her the group’s leader) tells me, “We need to go to 388 Beale Street.”

It’s a twenty-story condominium building, almost directly beneath the Bay Bridge, one block from the water. I say, “I know the spot.”

Leader again: “But first we need to go to an ATM.”

While I drive toward the nearby Wells Fargo, they talk excitedly in…Arabic? I stop at the curb at Market and Eighth and activate my emergency flashers. Leader trots over to the ATM.

I ask Upfront, “Is that Arabic you’re speaking?”

Upfront: “Yes -- we’re from Saudi Arabia.” The three of them are on a ten-day visit to America -- today is day four. They are visiting a Saudi friend who attends the University of San Francisco. In three days they’ll fly to LA, and three days later “back to Saudi.”

Me: “Is this is your first trip to America?”

Upfront: “Yes.”

Me: “Have you traveled away from Saudi before?”

Upfront: “Europe -- England, France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands…”

The girl behind me speaks up: “Turkey and Egypt, too.”

Upfront looks over at me -- my questions seem to have worn her out: “Can we put on some music?” There is no please, I notice.

I say: “Do you have a favorite station here?”

Upfront: “Ninety-four-point-nine”

It’s a hip-hop station, but the song that’s playing has a tolerable melody. I set the volume toward the low side of middle. Behindme suddenly uncorks an anguished squeal and then a frantic burst of Arabic.

Me: “What’s the matter?”

Upfront says, “She lost her iphone.” Upfront pokes a button on her own iPhone. A ring tone peeps in the backseat. Behindme mutters in Arabic -- Thank friggin’ Allah, I presume.

Upfront and Behindme confer briefly, and then Behindme exits through the right rear door, walks over, and joins Leader at the ATM.

Upfront notices that Behindme has left the rear door wide open, and now she extends her right hand out through the passenger side window to try to swing it closed. Not quite able to reach it, she torques her spine and reaches her right arm back as far as she can. Still, she’s coming up just short...

Given that she and I are almost shoulder-to-shoulder in this little drama, it’s impossible for me to not notice that Upfront’s over-garment -- a thin, black, button-up sweater -- has fallen open. Underneath that, she’s wearing a skimpy top. I catch flashes of orange and green and blue and red and white -- a bright floral design. It might be a halter top, or some item of lingerie, or it could be part of some longer, more complicated ensemble, but whatever its category, this undergarment covers only the lower third or so (my peek is fleeting) of Upfront’s plump young breasts.

I have zero credentials in fashion design, and my anatomy lessons have been strictly amateur, but it seems unquestionable to me that with even the slightest further shifting around -- an inch, inch and a half max -- a nipple’s gonna have to pop loose somewhere.

I say: “It’s okay -- really, it’s okay…” The open rear door is not actually creating a problem.

Upfront glances over at me -- her sweater falls closed again -- and then relaxes back into a forward-facing position.

Every night driver has an extensive backlog of titillating stories, but a low-cut top at Eighth and Market Streets in the full light of day is about as racy as day shift ever gets.

(Okay, okay… Off the top of my head… One night, I heard a customer [it’s quite possible that she was mentally unhinged] call to me, “Look at these, driver!” -- and when I turned around I saw that she had peeled her shirt and bra down around her waist and was lost in admiration of her own, rather amazing, Wonder Woman chest… Another night, a tall and beautiful youngster -- she looked like a track star, a champion high-hurdler perhaps -- stepped from my cab, handed the exact fare through the passenger side window, announced, “And here’s your tip, mister,” yanked her shirt up to her collarbone, gave her bare torso a spirited shimmy, and trotted away into her housing project… And on the night of the Exotic-Erotic Ball, a woman wearing nothing but a sheer, electric-blue, full-body stocking climbed into my front seat… Well, I actually think I’d get back to business now…)

I tell Upfront, “I’m fifty-nine years old. May I ask how old you are?”

“Eighteen.” She tips her head toward the ATM. “My cousins are both sixteen.”

“Are they twins?”

Upfront: “They just look it, but they’re not even sisters. We’re all cousins.”

Leader and Behindme return, and as we head down Folsom toward Beale, the chatter slips between English and Arabic. I hear one say, “Yamma yamma yamma four hundred dollars for three days yamma yamma yamma…”

Another counters, “No, three hundred for four days yamma yamma yamma…”

Behindme places a call to her bank, and I overhear a male customer service rep say, “Because you withdrew $500 last evening…”

Behindme says, “I forgot that one.”

Another ring tone sounds, and Leader swiftly greets the caller: “Ali Baba!” For the next sixty seconds, two loud phone conversations compete for backseat airspace. Upfront’s head is wagging along with a new number on 94.9, a male rapper working a taunt that I can’t fully comprehend: it includes either the word direction or the word erection and the rapper is making what sounds, to me, like a dead-serious vow to “get me some.” Seconds after Behindme hangs up with her bank, Leader dismisses Ali Baba with an arresting lyric of her own -- original? borrowed? -- which she cries out in shockingly clear English: “I love you and I want to dance for you!”

At 388 Beale, I make exact change for Upfront’s hundred-dollar-bill. Foreigners and teenagers are notoriously negligent tippers, and earlier in the ride ($10.75) I’d noted my double jeopardy, and now, when no tip is forthcoming, I roll right on through it.

No one is making a move to leave. Arabic swirls through the cab. Leader makes a phone call: “We’re out front...” And then Upfront tells me, “We’re picking up something here, but then we have to go to USF. Can you wait and take us, or should we get another cab?”

Regulations dictate that a cab driver must wait whenever asked, but most cabdrivers, including me, want no part of waiting. A driver can at least wallow in the illusion of being in control while his/her cab is in motion, but not while waiting for someone else’s dry cleaning, or for their burrito to be wrapped or their potstickers to finish steaming. “Wait-a-bit” rides -- somehow, one way or another -- always wind up being pure aggravation.

I tell the girls, “No problem. Take all the time you need.”

Several minutes pass. On the radio, a girl singer repeatedly proposes, “Let’s go aaall the way to-night.” Leader and Upfront and Behindme occasionally break away from their Arabic chit-chat to sing along, with feeling: “skin tight jeans…a teenage dream…aaall the way tonight…”

As I’m musing on the sexual undercurrents; on the odds of me ever traveling to Saudi Arabia; on these kids’ easy mobility in this vast world; on their proficiency in English, their scrubbed accents, the elite schools they must attend; and on how oily rich their parents must be, a young Asian man walks out the front door of 388 Beale. He is wearing blue jeans and a crisp white tee-shirt. Leader joins him on the sidewalk -- he’s not tall, but he towers over her -- and I catch snatches of their conversation: One hundred and ten dollars… We do not have a printer…

Leader pokes her head back into the cab to consult in Arabic with Upfront and Behindme, then informs the young man, We want actual tickets…

He disappears back into the building. Leader slips back into her seat and tells me, “A few more minutes.” When the Arabic starts up again, I step out for some air.

We’ve had a ten-day run of warm, clear, intoxicating days -- in November! -- a spectacular global warming dividend. The cold, foggy crud we suffered during June, July, and August is forgotten, forgiven. Today, the downtown skyscrapers are gleaming in full sunshine, with an unblemished, polished-looking blue sky behind and above it all.

I rotate my trunk fifty times and listen to my spine crackle. I windmill my arms around for a while, touch my toes, stretch out my hamstrings. Life is good. In another nine days, my driving year will be finished. I can go to yoga classes every day, I can spend all of December reading the books that have stacked up.

I leave an I-love-you-and-I-want-to-dance-with-you message on my wife’s office line, do some more stretching, and ponder the future of the world. Next year, I’ll turn sixty. By the time the harem in my cab has reached my age, I’ll be long gone. What sort of world will have emerged? What unimaginable things will these kids, and my own daughter, be dealing with?

I’ve been outside the cab for at least fifteen minutes when the rear door opens and Behindme says, “Can we ask you some questions?”

I sit behind the wheel and twist around. The inside of a Prius is a small space; no more than three feet separates any of our four faces. The two in the back -- Leader and Behindme -- are virtually indistinguishable, and they could both be movie stars. They’re each wearing expensive-looking sunglasses with big, round, chocolate-colored lenses; Behindme’s cover her eyes, Leader’s are cocked up on her head. The task of parting their identical heads of hair precisely down the middle looks as though it’s been performed by a laser tool. And the way it’s been pulled tightly back gives them each a pleasantly fierce look.

Leader lays out the deal: They found the Asian guy on craigslist. He’s got tickets to tonight’s Usher concert at the Oakland Coliseum for $110 each. (I nod, pretending I know who Usher is, pretending that I have even the dimmest awareness that the hottest act in hip-hop is planning, to-night, to come tear up/tear down the town where I live.) The Asian guy wanted to email bar coded tickets to Leader. Leader told him to print them out for her. “You saw him,” Leader tells me. “Do you trust him? Do you think he might just give us copies, and sell the real tickets to someone else?”

They are leaning forward, eyeballing me, almost panting for my wisdom. My god, they’re young! Their dark black pupils are flinting sparks. My god, they’re good-looking! As I eyeball them back, the word spitfires comes to me.

I say, Yeah, I’d trust him -- he looked okay -- and this is how we do it here now -- I’ve bought lots of email tickets and never got burned. “Did you given him any money?”

Leader: “No!”

Behindme: “But he is taking too long.”

Me: “Call him -- tell him the cab driver is wondering what’s going on.”

Leader: “Brilliant!” She touches a button: “Our driver is getting nervous -- he wonders why this is taking so long… Good…good… Okay.”

Then, to me again: “I blamed it all on you!”

We’re all pals now. I ask, “In Saudi do you have to cover up to go out in public?”

All three speak out once: “A scarf… Over the shoulders only… No robes… No burqa… Scarf only… Not over the head… The head is optional…”

Upfront makes a point of catching my eye: “I don’t wear the headscarf” -- she shudders her head from side to side -- “I don’t. I don’t.”

The two in back: “No-no! We don’t either. We don’t either.”

I have been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir, Infidel, a blistering account of growing up female and Muslim in the Middle East: perpetual inferior status to males, hot robes even in the sweltering summertime, lack of freedom to come and go, and -- my friggin’ Allah! -- genital mutilation. I know I’m not going to bring up the latter, but I do ask, “At home, if you go out, do you have to be accompanied by a male?”

Them: “That is up to the family -- some yes, some no.”

Me: “What about your families?”

A chorus: “Usually no…” And then Behindme delivers a trump card so perfect that it breaks down all four of us: “We came to America...by ourselves!” She is sixteen years old, shrieking hysterically in the back seat of a taxicab five thousand miles from her parents’ home. It’s crazy-sick.

We’re still recovering when the Asian man returns with the printouts -- and the deal goes down.

After at least a half-hour of down time, I reach up, restart the meter -- “Music too, please,” says Leader, and I do like hearing the please -- and head of toward USF.

A throaty-voiced female is going on and on and on: Like a G-six.. G-six… Like a G-six… G-six… I listen closely but can perceive no guidance as to what a G-six might be. The tone, however, promises a full serving of hotandnasty.

My buds provide lusty backup: “Like a G-six… G-six… Like a G-six…

I ask, “How do you know all these songs?”

“We hear everything in Saudi.”

I imagine them gyrating in an dark underground grotto, shafts of colored light swirling down on them, ecstatic looks on their faces, bodies obedient to a pounding bass beat. I ask: “Do you go to clubs in Saudi?”

“No.”

Me: “Do you have clubs in Saudi?”

Them, laughing: “No!

“Then how do you hear the music?”

“Internet… iPod… MP3…!” Doo-oood, you are so lame!

Me: “What kind of work do your parents do?”

Leader: “My father is in the government, and my mother is a policewoman.”

Me: “A policewoman…?”

Hysteria: “Not a police-woman -- a business-woman! We don’t have policewomen!”

Me: “Do women drive?”

“We are not allowed.”

Me: “I thought I read about some women driving now?”

“That is Kuwait. In Kuwait, since the Gulf War, some women can drive now, they can even run for Parliament. Even in Afghanistan women run for parliament, but not in Saudi…”

We’re driving slowly up Turk Street, past Max’s Opera Café. I lift my hands off the wheel and glance back: “Any of you want to drive?”

They shriek -- they love it, but they know I’m joking. Still, I wonder: What if one of them said yes? I do know a couple of big empty parking lots…

On 94.9 a gangsta has gotten hisself some weed and now he and his posse, “We be smokin…

Me: “Do people in Saudi ever smoke marijuana or hashish?”

Them, subdued: “No.”

Me: “Do any of you?”

Upfront and Behindme scream: “No!” But Leader comes in loud over top of them: “We are too young!”

I suggest: “But you’ve got plans?”

Hard, affirmative laughter -- that subject just may have been discussed a time or two.

Me: “Is Islam a big thing in all of your lives?”

All three, “Oh, yes!” They bleat this with a vehemence I hadn’t expected -- G-six, skin tight jeans, reefer dreams... On jetliners approaching Middle Eastern airspace, chic fashionistas returning from sojourns in Europe -- during which they have lain on beaches half-naked, strutted through shopping malls on high heels, legs showing, shoulders uncovered, and heads bare -- suddenly disappear under long black robes. I have read widely about this phenomenon, and also about the Sufi and the Wahabi sects of Islam, but this ride is my first personal brush with the Hottie branch.

Me: “Do you pray…?”

They sure do: “Five times a day!”

A perhaps-true story comes to mind: Centuries ago, somewhere in India, a powerful mogul was approached by several nervous advisors: “Your Majesty, an army of 20,000 Muslims approaches from the west.” The mogul replied, “Pfft! We have 100,000 soldiers, the finest army in all the world.” The advisers advise, “But you see, Your Majesty, these soldiers all pray together at the same time, five times every day.” The mogul considered this, but not for long, and then said, “We’re doomed…”


THE HIGHEST POINT on the USF campus yields one of the best views in the San Francisco. As we pull to a stop, I see the Richmond and Sunset neighborhoods; the long green stripe of Golden Gate Park, a third-of-a-mile wide, flowing like a river toward the sprawling blue Pacific; the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking over the eucalyptus and pine forests of the Presidio. I zap the meter and inform my fares that I won’t be taking any more of their money. I expect them to fight like little desert dervishes, and they do, but I win them over with a line I improvised during a similar tangle with Manu from India back in August. “If you pay me,” I tell the girls, “none of us will ever remember this ride. I want to remember it.”

When they assure me that, yes, they do read books in English, I pull a copy of Take Me With You from my trunk and hand it to Leader. Upfront and Behindme lean in from either side of her, and the three of them study the cover. Leader murmurs, “I have never met a real writer.” She looks up at me with -- may I say it? -- awe.

“I swear to you,” she says, “we will always remember this ride!”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

OVERVIEW: “And WHY is he doing this?”

JANUARY 1, 2010


THANK YOU FOR FINDING YOUR WAY HERE. -- Brad

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage -- as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance. --Thomas Cahill



I STARTED DRIVING A SAN FRANCISCO TAXICAB ON JUNE 8, 1985. Twenty-five years ago. I enjoyed it from the start, but right away discovered that -- for me, at least -- the worst part of the job was driving around empty. After just ten empty minutes I would start scolding myself for all of my poor life choices, would start questioning my worth as a person, my reason for living, etc. But find my next passenger and, ah, well, suddenly everything was just fine.

After considerable stewing, I eventually stumbled upon the thought, “Next time I’m in one of those demoralizing empty periods, I should just pull into a bus zone and offer someone a free ride. At least I won’t be empty.”

And at some point, empty and frustrated, I impulsively swept into a bus zone and offered a free ride to whoever was standing there (the exact memory escapes me). Before long I began to do this semi-regularly, and doing so almost always broke whatever bad mood I’d talked myself into. With a passenger in the backseat, any mini-depression would invariably vanish. Here we were, a couple of human beings, talking -- what could be better than that? Almost always, my day became more fun. Better. It was like magic. And the key was always at my fingertips.

Over the years, things evolved, and for at least fifteen years now (it might actually be closer to twenty) I have consciously given away (at least) one free ride per shift. I don’t tally them, but I’m sure I’ve given away more than a thousand so far.

For the past decade or so, I’ve celebrated my final shift of each year by giving away EVERY ride for free -- and this has become my favorite day of the year. After ten or twelve rides, after just two or three hours of basking in the surprise and delight and the smiles of all my free-ride passengers, I feel like I’ve been injected with a drug more powerful than anything I’ve ever known. Just imagine driving around San Francisco, sharing happiness with everyone you encounter! Think about it... Please.


EVERY CAB DRIVER I KNOW gives away an occasional free ride (I don’t know any others who do it as a practice), but I haven’t heard any of them spell out their criteria. Nor do I have any particular criteria. I’ve given free rides to people who’ve made me laugh, to newlyweds, honeymooners, people who’ve told me it was their birthday, or people who have somehow made me feel good about life. Also to people who tell me about a bad turn their day has taken, or who simply look like they could use a break. To people whose life stories make me feel sorry for them, or who are obviously underprivileged or underfunded. People on crutches, people with limbs embedded in casts, people in wheelchairs.

I’ve given free rides to people who have just arrived in San Francisco and are enduring the frustration of trying to find an apartment. To people I spot wandering the street with heavy backpacks and lost looks on their faces. To people who prattle on and on about how much better taxi service is in New York or Chicago (or wherever) than in San Franicsco -- and I love hearing these people say, if they do, “Well, this certainly never happened to me at home!”

I’ve given free rides to members of the military, to people who can barely speak English, to people who have suffered through one of my many long stories or who have laughed at one of my attempts at humor. And sometimes, when I find myself revolted by someone, when I catch myself despising him or her, I decide to blow my own mind by making their ride free -- and I almost always learn something surprising about them, or about myself, this way.

Sometimes I give my ride to the first person who gets into my cab, just to get things rolling. Sometimes, late in my shift, if I remember that I haven’t yet given away my ride, I give it to the next person to climb in. And if it’s getting way late, there’s always the stranger in the bus zone, minding his or her own business. In November 2008, during the two weeks immediately following Barack Obama’s election, I pulled to the curb each time I spotted an opportunity to offer a free ride to a black person -- and was that ever fun!


I’VE ALWAYS ENJOYED CAB DRIVING, but this daily, free-ride practice has made it even more enjoyable, made it a bit of a game, added an element of play. And sometimes I suspect that it has transformed my whole relationship with Money Itself (but that’s another story).

For years, this practice was not something I talked about very much. It was my own little secret. But lately I’ve been talking about it more. And in late 2009 I decided that during the year 2010 I would keep a journal of each day’s free ride. My intention is to keep it up all year long, but we’ll see...

My sense is that cab stories are a bit like potato chips -- tasty at first, but they can become less-interesting if you eat (read) too many. I would recommend reading a few at a time, maybe a month’s worth. I intend to post them as soon as possible after each shift, but you might be better off coming back here about once a month. Or maybe not.

However you approach these stories, thanks for reading even this far. And for those of you who have been encouraging my writing for years -- and for some of you it’s been decades now -- thank you doubly. Triply. Freely.

AND to the first person who mentions this journal to me from the back seat of my cab (I drive Green Cab #914, roughly 4 AM to 4 PM on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays), well, YOUR ride is definitely free!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, November 1, 2010

WORLD CHAMPS

Shift #86

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – Bernard/Jones to Market/Sanchez -- $11.20


LATE LAST MONTH
-- way back during that distant, almost-forgotten, long-ago era before the San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers four-games-to-one in the World Series and became the world champions of baseball! -- I gave a free ride to a fresh young Asian woman who called from a house on a narrow two-block alley on Russian Hill. And now, just ten days later, I’m back, summoned by a radio order from that very same address.

It’s a small, two-story, hundred-year old house squeezed into a wall-to-wall row of others much like it. This one was long ago divided into two rental units, each with its own separate buzzer. I press the appropriate buzzer and wait in the doorway, thinking: Will she even remember the free ride…? Will she expect another…?

But when the door opens, instead of the fresh young Asian woman I’m anticipating, a fresh young blond woman emerges. She’s heading to the Castro District, and tells me, “I usually take the bus, but this morning I chose to sleep in. Today is my birthday.”

I coo and wish her a wonderful day, and think, Birthday... Probably a free ride after all…

She runs a reading program at a public elementary school, coordinating sixty “community volunteers” who once a week read aloud, one-on-one, to fifty-five students who struggle with reading. Each session lasts approximately forty-five minutes. “It’s an AmeriCorps program,” she says. “There are similar programs in about forty schools around the Bay Area.”

I tell her that on the bulletin board in front of the public school down the street from my house in Oakland, I have noticed just such a program advertised, and in the back of my mind for quite a while now I’ve been telling myself that this would be a sensible place for me to volunteer. My fare encourages me wholeheartedly.

Me: “What did you study in school?”

She laughs. “Human biology -- and then I started focusing on the brain.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Stanford.”

Me: “Well, that is one high-powered address back there -- your roommate went to Northwestern, right?”

She, briefly puzzled, but deciphering quickly: “Oh no -- the two girls downstairs went to Northwestern. My own buzzer doesn’t always work, but theirs always does, and I can easily hear it up in my apartment. So this morning, since I’d already heard them both leave for work, I gave their address to the dispatcher. It’s more reliable this way.” The sort of very clear answer -- and the sort of creative solution -- we’d expect from a Stanford grad.

Me: “Where did you grow up?”

“Austin, Texas.”

Me: “So who did you root for in the World Series?”

“Oh the Giants, of course! And wasn’t that fun?”


THE GIANTS HAVE BEEN WORLD CHAMPS FOR ALL OF THREE AND A HALF DAYS NOW. Cleanup crews have barely had time to sweep up the tons of confetti that fluttered down onto Montgomery Street during Wednesday’s victory parade, which was attended by hundreds of thousands of people -- some reports say a million!

(My personal mental image of the months of September and October shows me in a crowd of thousands and thousands of people, screaming as loudly as any of them and waving something orange over my head. My wife and daughter and I watched the final pitch in our living room on Monday night, and then I drove alone in to San Francisco and joined tens of thousands of high-fiving, beach-ball punching, electric-smiling fans outside the ballpark. But on Wednesday I just didn't have anything left. I skipped the parade and instead drove to Point Reyes (photo, right), hiked out to Arch Rock [below], and took a short cold swim in the Pacific.)

The entire region is still stunned, still pinching itself. I sense that we’re only now -- and perhaps just this morning -- starting to catch our breath, preparing to think about moving on. But a thrill as electric as this thrill -- the almost-complete surprise of seeing “a bunch of castoffs, misfits, and mercenaries” win a World Series, the Giants’ first World Series victory since the team moved to San Francisco fifty-two years ago -- does not pass through the collective psyche of a populace overnight. I believe that the feeling in the streets, on the airwaves, and in my backseat so far this morning must be the feeling that swept this same city during the now-fabled Sixties. I suspect that this stunned, warm, borderline-psychotropic feeling will last a while -- it will morph and twist and will seem to disappear and then it will flare back up again and again, and this will continue to some degree for the next couple of years. It’s going to take a while for us to get over, to get used to, this one…

Birthday girl asks: “Where are you from?”

Me: “I grew up near Washington, D.C. -- Alexandria, Virginia.”

My Stanford fare is still with me: “How did you wind up in San Francisco?”


IN 1974 I SPENT TWO MONTHS traveling from Athens to Afghanistan and back with an elite basketball player friend of mine, Bird Nietmann. Bird was one of just sixty-four players invited to try out for the 1972 US Olympic basketball team, and in 1974 we had to time our Afghanistan venture to take place during the off season of the French professional leagues, where Bird was being paid a (to me) fabulous amount of money to score a (to anyone) fabulous number of points.

Along our journey -- on trains, on buses, in cheap hotels -- we found ourselves in conversations with hundreds of other travelers. Our compatriots painted exquisitely detailed portraits of their hometowns, their schools, their parents and siblings and grandparents, their pets, boyfriends and girlfriends, their health, and the jobs they’d worked (or the trust funds they’d tapped into) to pay for their travels. But as I recall, only once did anyone ask the basic questions that would provoke Bird into telling his unusual story. (And I don’t remember anyone ever soliciting the details of my ordinary life.) What this says about human nature, I’m not quite sure, but I do find it at least…well, fascinating.

By my own rough estimate, somewhere between half and two-thirds of my cab fares never ask a single question about my life. This doesn’t much bother me (it’s my cab and I still get to talk plenty -- if you’ve ever caught me right after my morning or afternoon coffee, you’ve probably regretted it), but I do find this lack of curiosity puzzling. In general, people seem flattered, even sort of thrilled, when I pepper them with my questions. Most often they will, with enthusiasm, sketch out their entire life histories, and some will share shockingly intimate details of their lives. But many of these very same people express no interest in hearing anything whatsoever about me.

I notice that among the people I’m most comfortable with -- my friends -- it seems that there is always a rough parity in the amounts of time we each spend talking to and listening to the other. It doesn’t have to be an exact fifty-fifty split (and there are certainly times when something dramatic will require one or the other of us to do ninety-five percent of the talking during a particular get-together), but my experience is that if the airtime ratio regularly drifts beyond, say, sixty-forty, the friendship will not survive.

If, over lunch or dinner or out on a hike, I find myself talking too much, I believe I’m quick to create a conversational opening for my companion(s). I’m hardly unique -- many people are the same way. Often, while I’m watching the face of a friend who is sharing a story, I will see something uncomfortable flash across his or her face, and will know that they will soon be soliciting something -- almost anything -- from me.


“HOW DID YOU WIND UP IN SAN FRANCISCO?” the Stanford-grad with the birthday has asked me. I meet a fair number of Stanford students (and alums and faculty) in my cab and I am always impressed. Many college graduates will look back on their school years as perhaps the best years of their lives. And often they will do this with a wistful sense: Too bad I didn’t realize at the time just how good I had it. But anyone currently attending Stanford seems to already appreciate their good fortune, seems to understand that he or she is currently in the midst of a peak experience. They’re not going to have to let several years pass so that they can look back, rosily, on their college days. They’re into it all right Now. In my next life I plan to go to Stanford. Had I applied during this lifetime, I would most definitely have not been accepted. Next lifetime, I’m be ready.

I tell my fare about having visited all fifty of the States, about having circled the world with my backpack four times, etc.

She: “What were your favorite places?”

Me: “Whenever I get that question, I always start with India…”

She: “India-- I was just there last summer!” She tells me she worked in an orphanage in Chennai for six weeks, during which she simultaneously contracted both dengue fever and some other grizzly-sounding disease of which I have never heard and of which I want no part. My fare looks and sounds and claims to be fully recovered, and maintains that even the illnesses didn’t ruin her experience. “I loved India,” she says. “It is so different...”

No one ever forgets their time in India, where today eight hundred million people are living on less than two dollars a day and doing whatever they can to get by. I say, “Imagine the things we’d be seeing out the window right now if this taxi were in India…”

For the duration of the ride, we share India stories, pretty much fifty-fifty. At the end she briefly protests my free ride offer, but I don’t take it seriously. I’ve noticed that people’s resistance to my free rides -- and to Life itself -- is always lower on their birthdays.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eight Hundred Hours

Shift # 87

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7 -- Post/Powell to Broadway/Gough -- $8.50


TAXI INDUSTRY REGULATIONS
specify that in order for me to keep my permit -- the infamous “medallion” that gives me (or any other permit holder) the right to put one cab on the streets -- I must personally operate my cab for at least eight hundred hours each year.

This works out to roughly two ten-hour shifts per week, which I do not consider to be an onerous requirement. During the first few months of each year I usually work three shifts-per-week, then at the beginning of the summer I drop back to two shifts-per-week. Sometime around Thanksgiving I knock off for the year, and then I start back up again in early January. When I’m not behind the wheel, Green Cab rents out “my cab” (Green Cab #914) to drivers who are not medallion holders (every medallion holder has roughy this same arrangement with the cab company of his or her choice). For the use of my permit, Green Cab pays me about $2,000 per month, twelve months a year.

I hear you thinking: Pretty sweet deal! And I reply, “You too can have this very same deal -- all you have to do is spend approximately fifteen years (or maybe, as in my case, twenty years) in a job that pays about $15/hour and has precisely zero benefits -- no vacation, no sick pay, no 401-K, nothing -- and then if you’re lucky, you might wind up with a medallion...” (But that’s another story.)

In late October, just as the Giants were going gonzo, I surpassed the eight hundred-hour mark for this year. Each year, just to be on the safe side with the regulators, I usually work about eight hundred and fifty or nine hundred hours, and now the end of my 2010 driving year is looming. Whenever I see it coming at me, I always get a little melancholy. On a day like today -- a Sunday that has been hopping from the very first moments -- there are, honest to god, few things I’d rather do than drive a cab around San Francisco and meet strangers.

For years I’ve believed that I could craft an entire book around any single shift (and perhaps around any single ride), and sometimes I find myself doing darned near exactly that, and all the typing involved has been taking a repetitive-stress toll on my body. My mind is not yet ready to call it quits on this year, but my shoulders-arms-hands are ready for a break. Today’s entry is going to be a short, first-draft deal.


IF THE CONVERSATIONS I’M HEARING ARE REPRESENTATIVE, the city is full of several thousand audio engineers who have taken over Moscone Center to celebrate the return of vinyl records to the music industry. The city’s residents are still agog over the Giants’ astounding run-the-table postseason. The hills around the Bay are nicely greened-up from a right-on-schedule, first-of-November drenching earlier this week. This annual greening, which seems to happen virtually overnight, always seems like a trick, a marvel -- and today’s sky is bright and filled with fluffy, snow-white clumps of cartoon clouds.

With about an hour to go in my shift I pull to the curb in Pacific Heights to deposit two middle-aged folks and their adult daughter. For decades they lived right here in San Francisco, but seven or eight years ago they “moved back” to the town in Italy from which one set of grandparents had emigrated. During the whole ride we’ve been yacking away, with them listing all the things they miss about the City and singing about how wonderful it is to be back, and isn’t it great that the Giants -- finally! -- won the whole darned thing?

As I’m pulling to the curb I find myself hating to see this ride, like this year, come to an end, and as I pause the meter I suddenly remember... And then, while quickly informing my fares about my free ride tradition, I keep on punching buttons until the numbers clear from the screen.

The man is protesting but his wife is telling him to “Hush up, just say thank you, and get out of the cab, dammit,” but he keeps on protesting until I reach back and yank the handle and swing the door open and say “I ain’t taking your money -- geddouddamycab!” and the next thing I know I’m glancing back in the rearview -- they’re standing on the sidewalk, watching me drive away, all three of them looking at each other and flapping their hands and shaking their heads and laughing laughing laughing. As I roll down Gough Street, straight out ahead and down below me I can see a couple dozen boats with full white sails scooting across the bay in full glorious California sunshine.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* * AND I WANT TO DANCE FOR YOU! * *

Shift #88

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12 -- Seventh/Mission to Turk/Parker -- $15.25


TOWARD MIDDAY
, on the Mission Street side of the new Federal Building, three young women flag me. All three of them have the same olive skin and the same jet-black hair. All three are dressed neck-to-toe in cascading layers of clothing, all of which is either black or white. And each of them, I notice, has a cell phone in her hand.

The tallest one sits up front with me, and the other two climb in back.

In clear, lightly-accented English, the one seated in the right rear (I will soon come to think of her as the group’s leader) tells me, “We need to go to 388 Beale Street, but first we need to go to an ATM.”

While I head for a nearby Chase branch, the three of them chatter in Arabic which occasionally morphs seamlessly into English and then back to Arabic. The girl right behind me says, “Yamma yamma yamma three hundred dollars for four days yamma yamma yamma…”

The one up front counters, “No, four hundred for three days yamma yamma yamma…”

I stop at the curb on Market at Eighth and pop my emergency flashers. Leader and Behindme trot over to the ATM.

When I ask, Upfront tells me, “We’re from Saudi Arabia.” The three of them are on a ten-day visit to America. Today is day four. They are visiting a Saudi friend, a student at the University of San Francisco. After three more days they’ll fly to LA, and after three more, “back to Saudi.”

“Is this is your first trip to America?”

Upfront: “Yes.”

“Have you traveled away from Saudi before?”

“Europe -- England, France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands… Turkey and Egypt, too.” She looks over at me -- my questions seem to have worn her out. “Can we put on some music?” she asks. There is no please, I notice.

Me: “Do you have a favorite station here?”

“Ninety-four-point-nine.”

It’s a hip-hop station, but the song playing has a tolerable melody and nobody’s spewing curse words. I set the volume toward the low side of middle.

Upfront suddenly notices that Leader and Behindme have left the rear door wide open, and now she extends her right hand out through her open window to try to swing it closed. She torques her spine and reaches her right arm back as far as she can, but can’t quite reach that back door...

She and I are almost shoulder-to-shoulder in the front seat of my narrow Prius. Her head is turned away from me, and now it is impossible for me not to notice that her over-garment -- a thin, black, button-up sweater -- has fallen open. Underneath, she’s wearing something with a floral motif -- I catch a flash of orange-green-blue-red-white. This undergarment might be a halter top or an item of lingerie or it might be part of some larger fashion ensemble, but whatever its classification, it only covers, and just barely, the approximate lower third of Upfront’s plump young breasts. Any more stretching, any more shifting around, and I’m afraid we’re about to see wardrobe failure…

I say: “It’s okay -- really, it’s okay…” The open rear door is not actually creating a problem.

Upfront turns back around and glances at me -- her sweater falls closed again -- and then she relaxes down into her seat again.

I recall reading about a phenomenon that occurs as jetliners from Europe begin their descents toward airports in the Muslim Middle East. Chic fashionistas who have just spent days or weeks lying half-naked on beaches, or strutting through shopping malls on high heels -- legs showing, shoulders uncovered, heads bare -- suddenly begin to disappear under long black robes… Wahabi, Sufi, Sunni... Hottie?

I tell Upfront, “I’m fifty-nine years old. May I ask how old you are?”

“Eighteen.” She tips her head toward the ATM. “My cousins are both sixteen.”

“Are they twins?”

Upfront: “They look like twins, but they’re not even sisters. We’re all three cousins.”

When the other two return, we head down Folsom toward Beale, and suddenly Behindme uncorks an anguished squeal and then a frantic burst of Arabic.

Me: “What’s the matter?”

Upfront says, “Lost her iphone,” and then she pokes at her own phone. A ring tone peeps in the backseat. Behindme mutters in Arabic. Thank friggin’ Allah, I presume.

Apparently the stop at the ATM didn’t go so smoothly for Behindme. She calls her bank, and through the phone I can easily hear a male customer service rep say, “Because you withdrew $500 last evening…”

Behindme says, “I forgot that one.”

A different ring tone sounds, and Leader swiftly greets the caller: “Ali Baba!” For the next sixty seconds, two loud phone conversations compete for backseat airspace. Next to me, Upfront’s head is wagging along to another hip-hop number, a male rapper working a taunt that I can’t fully comprehend: it includes either the word direction or the word erection and the rapper is making a dead-serious vow to “get me some.”

Seconds after Behindme hangs up with her bank, Leader dismisses Ali Baba with an arresting lyric of her own -- original? borrowed? -- which she cries out in shockingly clear English: “I love you and I want to dance for you!”

In front of 388 Beale, Leader makes a phone call: “We’re out front...”

Upfront tells me, “We’re picking up something here -- just a few minutes -- and then we have to go to USF.”

Arabic swirls through the cab’s interior. On the radio, a girl singer proposes, “Let’s go aaall the way to-night.” Leader and Upfront and Behindme occasionally break away from their Arabic chit-chat to sing along, with feeling: “skin tight jeans…a teenage dream…aaall the way to-night…”

As I’m musing on the sexual undercurrents; on the odds of me ever traveling to Saudi Arabia; on these kids’ easy mobility in this vast world; their proficiency in English; their scrubbed accents; the elite schools they must attend; and on how oily rich their parents must be, a young Asian man walks out the front door of 388 Beale. He is wearing blue jeans and a crisp white tee-shirt. Leader joins him on the sidewalk -- he’s not tall, but he towers over her. He is just out of my earshot, but I can still catch snatches of Leader’s side of the conversation: One hundred and ten dollars… We do not have a printer… We want actual tickets…

The Asian man disappears back inside the building. Leader slips back into her seat and tells me, “A few more minutes.” When the Arabic starts up again, I step out for some air.

We’ve had a ten-day run of clear, intoxicating, seventy-degree days -- in November! -- a spectacular global warming dividend. The cold, foggy crud we suffered during June, July, and August is forgiven, forgotten. Today, the downtown skyscrapers are gleaming in full sunshine under a dome of unblemished blue.

I rotate my trunk fifty times and listen to my spine crackle. Life is good. In another nine days, my cab driving year will be finished. I can go to yoga classes every day. I can spend all of December reading the books that have stacked up.

I leave an I-want-to-dance-with-you message on my wife’s office line, do some more stretching, and ponder the future of the world. Next year, I’ll turn sixty. By the time this harem in my cab has reached my age, I’ll be long gone. What sort of world will have emerged? What unimaginable things will these kids, and my own daughter, be dealing with?

The cab’s rear door opens. Behindme smiles and says, “We would like to ask you some questions…”

I slide behind the wheel and twist around. The interior of a Prius is a cozy space; no more than three feet separates any of our four faces. At this distance, the two girls in back -- Leader and Behindme -- are virtually indistinguishable, and they could both be movie stars. They’re each wearing expensive-looking sunglasses with big, round, chocolate-colored lenses; Leader’s shades are cocked up on her head, Behindme’s hide her eyes. The black hairs on their nearly-identical heads look like they’ve been parted precisely down the middle with some sort of tonsorial laser tool -- and the way that hair has been pulled tightly back gives them each an alluring, semi-fierce look.

Leader lays out the deal: The Asian guy has tickets to tonight’s Usher concert at the Oakland Coliseum. He wants $110 each. (I nod, pretending I know who Usher is, pretending that I have even the dimmest awareness that the hottest act in hip-hop is planning -- to-night -- to come tear up/tear down the town where I live.) The Asian guy wanted to email bar coded tickets to Leader. Leader told him to print them out for her. “You saw him,” Leader tells me. “Do you trust him? Do you think he might just give us copies, and sell the real tickets to someone else?”

They are leaning forward, eyeballing me, almost panting for my wisdom. My god, they’re young! Their dark black pupils are flinting sparks. My god, they’re good-looking! As I eyeball them back, the word spitfires occurs to me.

I say, Yeah, I’d trust him. He looked okay to me. This is how we do it here now -- I’ve bought lots of email tickets and never got burned. “Did you given him any money?”

Leader: “No!”

Behindme: “But he is taking too long.”

Me: “Call him -- tell him the cab driver is wondering what’s going on.”

Leader: “Brilliant!” She touches her phone: “Our driver is getting nervous -- he wonders why this is taking so long… Good…good… Okay.”

Then, to me again: “I blamed it all on you!

All four of us laugh.

I ask, “In Saudi, do you have to cover up to go out in public?”

All three speak at once: “A scarf… Over the shoulders only… No robes… No burqa… Scarf only… Not over the head… The head is optional…”

Upfront makes a point of catching my eye: “I don’t wear the headscarf” -- she shudders her head from side to side -- “I don’t. I don’t.”

The two in back: “No-no! We don’t either. We don’t either.”

I have been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir, Infidel, a blistering account of growing up female and Muslim in the Middle East: perpetual inferior status to males; hot robes even in the sweltering summertime; lack of freedom to come and go; and -- my friggin’ Allah! -- genital mutilation.

I ask, “At home, if you go out, do you have to be accompanied by a male?”

Them: “That is up to the family -- some yes, some no.”

Me: “What about your families?”

A chorus: “Usually no…” And then Behindme delivers a trump card so perfect that it breaks down all four of us: “We came to America…by our-selves!” She is sixteen years old, shrieking hysterically in the back seat of a taxicab five thousand miles from her parents’ home. It’s crazy-sick.

We’re still recovering when the Asian man returns with the printouts. The deal goes down.

As we head off toward USF, Leader says, “Can we hear the music again, please.”

On the radio, a throaty-voiced female is going on and on and on: Like a G-six…G-six… Like a G-six…G-six… I listen closely but perceive no guidance as to what a G-six might be. The tone, however, promises a full serving of nasty.

My new pals provide lusty backup: “Like a G-six…G-six… Like a G-six…

I ask, “How do you know all these songs?”

“We hear everything in Saudi.”

I imagine them gyrating beneath swirling shafts of colored light in an dark underground grotto, ecstatic looks on their faces, bodies obedient to a pounding bass beat. I ask: “Do you go to clubs in Saudi?”

“No.”

Me: “Do you have clubs in Saudi?”

Them, laughing: “No!”

“Then how do you hear the music?”

“Internet… iPod… MP3…!” Doo-oood, you are so lame!

Me: “What kind of work do your parents do?”

Leader: “My father is in the government, and my mother is a policewoman.”

Me: “A policewoman…?”

Hysteria: “Not a police-woman -- a business-woman! We don’t have policewomen!”

Me: “Do women drive?”

“We are not allowed.”

Me: “I thought I read about some women driving now?”

“That is Kuwait. In Kuwait, since the Gulf War, some women can drive, they can even run for Parliament. Even in Afghanistan women run for parliament, but not in Saudi…”

We’re driving slowly up Turk Street, past Max’s Opera Café. I lift my hands off the wheel and glance back: “Any of you want to drive?”

They shriek -- they know I’m teasing, but they love it. And I wonder: What if one of them said yes? I do know a couple of big empty parking lots…

A gangsta on 94.9 has gotten hisself some weed and now he and his posse, We be smokin…

Me: “Do people in Saudi ever smoke marijuana or hashish?”

Them, subdued: “No.”

Me: “Do any of you?”

Upfront and Behindme scream: “No!” But Leader comes in loud over top of them: “We are too young!”

I suggest: “But you’ve got plans?”

Hard, affirmative laughter -- this very subject just may have already been thoroughly discussed a time or two.

Me: “Is Islam a big thing in all of your lives?”

All three, “Oh, yes!” They bleat this with a vehemence I hadn’t expected -- G-six, skin tight jeans, reefer dreams...

Me: “Do you pray…?”

They sure do: “Five times a day!”

A perhaps-true story comes to mind: Centuries ago, somewhere in India, a powerful mogul was approached by several nervous advisors: “An army of 20,000 Muslims approaches from the west, Your Majesty.” The mogul replied, “Pfft! We have 100,000 soldiers, the finest army in all the world.” The advisers countered, “But you see, Your Majesty, these people all pray together at the same time, five times every day.” The mogul considered this, but not for long, and then said, “We’re doomed…”


THE HIGHEST POINT on the USF campus yields one of the best views in San Francisco. As we pull to a stop, I see the Richmond and Sunset neighborhoods; the long green stripe of Golden Gate Park flowing like a river toward the sprawling blue Pacific; the burnt-orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge poking above the eucalyptus and pine forests of the Presidio. I zap the meter and inform my fares that I won’t be taking their money.

I expect them to fight like little desert dervishes, and they do, but I break down their resistance with this line: “If you pay me, none of us will ever remember this ride. I want to remember it.”

“But I swear to you,” Leader says, “we will always remember this ride!”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One hundred and eleven words

Shift #89

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14 -- California/Davis to California/Mason -- $5.35


A MARRIED COUPLE FROM MODESTO.
A weekend getaway in San Francisco. Headed to the Top of the Mark for an afternoon drink. In the Mark’s driveway, I think: “I’ve learned almost nothing about them. There’s no story to tell. Perfect!” I wrote 4,500 words about Friday’s shift, and after twenty drafts got it whittled down to 2,500. Today my arms feel like they’ve been strung with barbed wire. Coming up next is All-rides-free Day, and who knows how many words and how many drafts that’ll take! I turn to my passengers: “Free ride!” But it’s really a gift to my aching arms. One draft. Bam! Let’s count: One hundred and...eleven words.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------