Brad Newsham's 2010 Free Ride Journal

OVERVIEW: “And WHY is he doing this?”

2010-12-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

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!

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WORLD CHAMPS

2010-11-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

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.

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Eight Hundred Hours

2010-11-01T00:04:00.004-07:00

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.

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

2010-11-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

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!”

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One hundred and eleven words

2010-11-01T00:02:00.001-07:00

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.

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* * ALL-RIDES-FREE DAY * *

2010-11-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Shift #90

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2010

(NOTE: I don’t know how to add a caption, but that is NOT my cab in the photo.)

NOT EVERY DAY do I see people waiting in the casual carpool line at 5:45 AM. But this morning, as I’m driving my personal car in to work, I notice the silhouettes of two men who are standing in the shadowy darkness under the designated oak tree a mile from my home. As we cross the Bay Bridge, I tell them about today being All-rides-free Day in my taxi.

One of the men chuckles: “And to think that I was just about to offer you a dollar toward the bridge toll…”

By 6:30, I’m cruising up Van Ness Avenue. It’s drizzling, still dark, and the shiny black streets have a moody, romantic feel. The radio is quiet, and no one is flagging me. I see people huddled around bus shelters, but crowds are always tricky. If just one person is waiting for a bus, that’s easy, but to single out one or two people (maximum four) from a cluster is awkward. It’s easier to just keep rolling…

Fare #1 -- 6:46 AM -- Finally, a radio call in Pacific Heights, a young man going in early to his job at an internet company on the edge of the Financial District. He’s been assigned to manage the re-positioning of the workstations -- all the desks and computers and phone lines -- of the company’s fifty employees, and the task is supposed to be completed before he goes home tonight. He’s a big baseball fan, but says, “During October I had to work until midnight so often that I feel like I kind of missed the playoffs.”

I’m never actually convinced that All-rides-free Day is truly happening until I get the first one under my belt. Until I utter the words and declare it, it’s not actually real. No higher authority is demanding this of me. No one is watching to make sure I follow through on my good intention. If I get cold feet, I can just simply remain silent, crawl back into my little shell, and Earth will no doubt keep on spinning…

But at ride’s end, Body swivels toward the backseat (it seems there may be a higher authority after all) and says, “Today is my last shift of the year, and for several years now I’ve made it a tradition to give all my rides for free on this shift. So -- this is a free ride. Have fun moving everyone’s desks around. I’ll see you next year.”

My fare is extending a bill in my direction, and studying me with an uncertain expression. Is this guy for real? And then he smiles. “Well, thank you.”

Fare #2 -- 7:23 AM -- I’ve grabbed coffee and a bagel at Noah’s and have worked my way through the cab line in front of the Hyatt-Embarcadero. A woman who has just ridden BART in from Concord needs a ride to her job at the Hilton-Fisherman’s Wharf. She tells me that yesterday she braved the DMV: “I’d scheduled my appointment a full month ahead, but I still had to wait forty-five minutes before my name was called. And then the woman behind the counter gave me a form to fill out, and when I asked for a pen, she said, ‘Do you mean to tell me you came to the DMV and didn’t bring a pen!’”

But that was yesterday. When she hears that today is All-rides-free Day she brightens right up: “Well let me a least give you a tip.” I say, “If you must.” She places three one-dollar bills on the console between my front seats. I tell her, “At Christmas, I put my free-ride tips into an envelope and give it to my thirteen-year-old daughter. So, she and I thank you very much.” (Generosity inspires generosity -- by day’s end, fifteen of my twenty-two fares will have given me a total of $78 in tips.)

Fare #3 -- 7:32 AM -- A young guy from Iowa is standing in front of the Hyatt-Fisherman’s Wharf. He’s married, has four- and two-year-old kids, and works for a two-hundred person company that originally manufactured concrete watering troughs for Midwest farmers. Now they sell concrete benches and drinking fountains to municipalities all over the world. Today he’s calling on the San Francisco Parks and Recreation Department. This is his first visit to “god’s favorite city,” and even with today’s rain and clouds he finds the Bay and the bridges and all the bungalow-covered hills “stunning.” He asks, “How did you wind up here?”

Me: “I visited all fifty States, circled the world four times with my backpack, and then chose the place that most appealed to me.”

He: “All fifty! I’ve always dreamed about that! How’d you do it?”

Me: “In college, two friends and I challenged each other: ‘Who can get to all fifty first?’ By the time we were about thirty years old, we each had about forty-five -- I had forty-seven -- and then one guy went off on a hitchhiking blitz and got his last few and called and told the other two of us that we were playing for second place. In the end, I did manage to come in second.”

Fare #4 --7:47 AM -- A short ride in the Tenderloin District -- a young guy who is planning to spend all day helping a friend move from one apartment to another.

Fare #5 -- 8:00 AM -- At the Hilton on O’Farrell Street, a man from Chicago, an employee of Thomson-Reuters, needs to get downtown to visit a few accounts. “We sell business news and information to financial institutions,” he tells me. I think: Has any large business ever taken a day and given away its products for free? Now THAT would be a business story! I don’t mention this to my fare, but I do tell him about my special day, and he tips five dollars for the $4.90 free ride.

Fare #6 -- 8:24 AM -- Radio call, a young physician, a general practitioner, who one year ago moved from Phoenix to San Francisco. He’s traveling from his Marina District apartment over to his office at the base of Telegraph Hill, where he works six days a week: “Too much!” he says. He remembers having all the time in the world when he spent eight months backpacking around Australia and Southeast Asia in between college and medical school. I say, “Isn’t travel the very best thing?” He says, “My three passions are: the work I do, cooking, and travel. There is no number one. They’re all in first place.”

I stop at the Hotel W to use the bathroom, and when I return to the cab line I’m second-up. I open The Power of Now and before Fare #7 arrives I have just enough time to read this snatch: “There is a novel by Aldous Huxley called Island, the story of a man shipwrecked on a remote island. The first thing that the man notices are the colorful parrots perched in the trees, constantly croaking the words ‘Attention. Here and Now. Attention. Here and Now.’ We later learn that the islanders taught them these words in order to be reminded continuously to stay present.”

Fare #7 -- 8:49 AM -- A young woman from New Orleans tells me, “We’re coming around. A year ago I thought we had hit a plateau, but now we have a mayor and a city council who actually seem to like each other, and things are getting better.” She’s in town for a convention of cognitive behavioral therapists. Over the past few years, she and her colleagues have developed a twelve-to-sixteen-week program that has been successful in treating post traumatic stress syndrome -- a lot of my fare’s work involves veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Once-a-week therapy appointments (combined with certain drugs) have produced positive results for fifty-five percent of the participants. At the end of the ride I thank her for doing the important work she does. She assures me that, “It is my honor.”

Fare #8 -- 9:09 AM -- A paralegal who lives in Burlingame has dropped her car at the Mercedes dealership at Eighth and Bryant and now needs a ride to her job downtown. She can’t believe how much a routine annual maintenance appointment costs: $400. I enjoy telling her, and I think she enjoys hearing: “This’ll bring it down closer to $390.”

Fare #9 -- 9:29 AM -- I stop at the Noah’s Bagels on Battery Street for a second cup of coffee, and then pop next door to Happy Donuts to indulge my weakness for big fat cinnamon rolls, and one block later I’m flagged by a man with a suitcase on rollers. This is the one day all year when I am not thrilled to see an airport fare, but it all works out. The man says, “I’m sorry. I’m only going four blocks, and worse, I’m going to have to pay with a credit card -- I don’t even have five dollars cash with me.” When I explain why none of this will be any sort of problem today, he protests: “Oh, I can’t do that!” I say, “My first eight fares managed.” I hold up my clipboard and point to him the notation following each ride. “Free-Free-Free-Free-Free...,” I say. He slumps into the seat back and surrenders with a simple, “Wow!”

Driving away, I note that eliminating the payment ritual also eliminates much bothersome paper-shuffling -- the time-honored Thank You / You’re Welcomed ritual is so much more streamlined. What percentage of our precious lives do we squander by exchanging currency or credit/debit cards, making change, collecting receipts, and recording and accounting for all of it? During a seventy-year lifetime, how much time do we waste on this? An entire month? An entire year?

I further note how this free-rides business is all starting to seem so normal to me. My recollection is that in past years my free-ride days have seemed surreal, quasi-psychedelic. But today doesn’t seem surreal at all -- it feels absolutely unremarkable, run-of-the-mill even. Perhaps this is a function of my having kept this journal all year, and thereby forcing the practice up toward the surface of my daily consciousness.

Fare #10 -- 9:50 AM -- Downtown. A business consultant who looks like he’s from India tells me, “I grew up in LA, but now I live in San Francisco -- but only on weekends, really. Most weeks I’m on the road Monday through Friday.” Does he see glimmers of hope for the economy? He says: “In the Bay Area, yes. But nationally… That’s going to take a long time.”

Fare #11 -- 9:58 AM -- As fare #10 exits out the right side of my cab, a man and woman enter through the left side. They’re headed out toward their new home near the University of San Francisco. Just two months ago they moved here from Philadelphia when the man’s employer, an accounting firm, sent him to work on the firm’s Genentech account in South San Francisco. My fares have two adult children living in San Francisco, and this has helped make the move virtually painless. The man says, “We even rooted for the Giants in the playoffs -- they were a much more likable team than the Phillies.” The woman says, “We have liked everything about San Francisco except the bad drivers. But they’re not fast bad drivers like in New York. At least they’re slow bad drivers.’”

Fare #12 -- 10:30 AM -- A hairdresser from the Haight, going to work in the Financial District, says, “I’ve been a hairdresser for, let me count, eight years now -- and I love it! I feel like I spend all day hanging out with friends.” I tell her: “That’s exactly how I feel about cab driving…” Usually I wait until ride’s end to tell a fare about my free rides, but I know this woman’s going to appreciate the concept, and several blocks before her destination I spill the beans. “What a great idea,” she says. “Maybe I should do that…”

Fare #13 -- 10:48 AM -- Two guys who sell bus tours of San Francisco (their biggest bus has forty seats) are heading over toward Pier 33 for a meeting with the folks who run the Alcatraz tours. When I ask how this year has been for their business, one of them says, “It’s been okay” -- his inflection is hey-not-bad okay as opposed to just-so-so okay. The other one tells me, “You look familiar -- I must have ridden with you before…” Back during the spring, my Green Cab and I were the stars of a Toyota commercial that bombarded northern California television viewers for three straight weeks. It disappeared for several months, then unexpectedly returned just two weeks ago, and customers have again been commenting on it. But I’m not exactly sure what to make of this fellow’s comment. “This is a small town,” I tell him. “I do get a lot of repeat business…” And we leave it at that.

Fare #14 -- 11:39 AM -- A fifty-seven-year-old woman from Bakersfield, in town to visit one of her three adult daughters, says, “Tomorrow, rain or shine, we’re going to ride bicycles across the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond. And this winter we’re going to Peru to hike the Inca Trail.” I ask if she likes to read travel books, and when she says yes, very much so, I dig a gift copy of my first book out of my trunk and wish her happy travels.

Fare #15 -- 11:48 AM -- A woman taking a short ride from the Parc 55 to Bush and Stockton, tells me, “Don’t go up Powell Street. Something bad happened there. Did you hear all those sirens?” I had noticed distant sirens, but I’d dismissed them.

Moments after I drop her, I check in for a downtown radio order. Today’s dispatcher -- T.O. -- says, “Brad, if you’re empty, can you go over to Sutter and Powell? A Green Cab driver was in an accident there and he’s gone to the hospital in an ambulance. I need someone to get his things out of the cab.”

A police van is parked across the cable car tracks, blocking Powell Street at Post. I park illegally in a red zone right on the edge of Union Square, one short block downhill from the accident. I scrawl an explanatory note for the parking control police, slip it under the cab’s windshield, and walk up the cable car tracks.

The event has reached its chaotic conclusion directly in front of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. The entire site is marked off by yellow crime-scene tape behind which at least one hundred onlookers -- hotel guests and others -- are gathered. Two badly banged up cars are splayed out in the middle of the intersection with their hoods popped straight up in the air. Over by the curb, our Green Cab looks like an accordion that’s been tossed from a speeding train. A fourth car has also been damaged, and to me all of them look like total losses. Fifteen police officers are searching through the vehicles, kicking debris out of the way. A boxy red ambulance is just pulling away and a tow truck is maneuvering backwards down Powell Street. As I duck under the tape, I’m thinking: “Attention. Here and Now. Attention. Here and Now.” And: “Nothing run-of-the-mill about this free-rides day!”

I show the badge hanging from my neck to the officer in charge, and tell him I’m with Green Cab. He says, “Your driver looked like he was basically okay. With all this stuff lying around, you’d think maybe fifteen people got killed here, but all the airbags went off, and really, I don’t think anyone was seriously hurt.”

I find our driver’s briefcase and red lunchbox (hummus and pita bread, untouched) in the cab’s back seat, and lots of broken glass everywhere. Another officer tells me, “The guy in the white car said he lost his brakes coming down Powell. Witnesses saw him catch air two blocks back up the hill. By the time he hit this intersection he was really flying. He smashed into that other car and then he hit the cab. Your guy was stopped at the curb -- he’d just picked up a passenger -- nothing he could have done.”

I click a few pictures with my cell phone. I call T.O. and tell him everything’s okay. I call Green Cab’s general manager, Athan, and tell him it wasn’t our fault. I thank the police, and I have just started walking back downhill toward my cab when one of the officers calls, “Hey, just a minute -- aren’t you the guy in the commercial?”

One of his partners says, “Yeah -- it’s you!” And he pulls out his camera and records the scene: me and his partner standing on the cable car tracks, smiling at each other, with four smashed up vehicles and a tow truck in the background. Behind us I hear one of the onlookers telling someone else, “The Green Cab guy from t.v. -- I knew it was him!”

Fare #16 -- 1:06 PM -- A full hour and fifteen minutes have passed between rides. (Another big cup of coffee and a Subway sandwich have helped me reflect on chaos theory, airbags, and my own mortality). On Langton Alley I pick up one of our regular radio callers who usually goes to her job at Momo’s Restaurant, directly across the street from the Giants’ ballpark, but today she’s going to Seventeenth and Church for a haircut. She says she loved the whole World Series buzz, but she’s also glad to see things quiet down just a bit.

Fare #17 -- 1:19 PM -- One block later I’m flagged by an architect headed back downtown. A couple of days ago a friend sent me a link to buildingwhat.org, an organization in New York that is trying to get that city’s officials to open an investigation into how Building Seven of the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11. Twelve hundred architects and engineers have joined the effort. The truth is that I have no idea what happened that day, but every time I watch a video of Building Seven collapsing I’m dumbfounded. Even though I know I’m going to sound like an off-the-rack, crackpot-conspiracy-theorist-cabdriver, I mention buildingwhat.org to the architect in my backseat. He takes it well -- he’s one of the few people I’ve met who even remember that a third skyscraper, the 47-story Building Seven, fell out of the sky that day -- and he seems to have an open mind about it. But I know I’ve talked too much and too excitedly (I blame all the coffee), and I’m relieved to not be taking his money for this ride.

Fare #18 -- 1:29 PM -- She’s waiting eagerly as I drop Fare #17 at Market and New Montgomery. Just moments ago she finished a pharmacology exam and now she’s in a hurry to meet a friend who is driving her to the airport. She’s flying home to Minneapolis for Thanksgiving. She looks like a poor student, but insists on leaving a $10 tip for a $6.25 free ride.

Fare #19 -- 1:37 PM -- California and Polk. My only bus zone rider of the day seems delighted by my offer. She’s majoring in business at San Francisco State, and right now she’s headed to her job at a tanning salon at Union and Fillmore, and this ride will get her to work early.

Fare #20 -- 2:22 PM -- It’s raining steadily now, and I see her sauntering through the crosswalk at 10th and Mission, umbrella-less, smiling my way and nodding as though she’s been expecting me. When I ask how she’s doing today, she says, “Honestly? I’m a bit hung over, I’m feeling guilty for drinking too much wine last night, and I had a bit of an argument with my boyfriend.” I assure her that we’re all human and that these things do happen. She needs to stop by her apartment in the Panhandle to change shoes -- she’s been wearing sandals and now her toes are cold and wet -- and then I drop her near City Hall. We’ve had an easy and fun sixteen minutes together, and when I tell her about today’s deal she dissolves into I-can’t-believe-it laughter which I can still hear even when she’s three car lengths down the sidewalk from my cab, even though my windows are rolled up tight, and even though noisy traffic is zipping down Gough Street.

Fare #21 -- 2:50 PM -- A flag at 12th and Folsom. A moment after he has settled into the back seat, he says, “I saw your ad on TV…” I spend the entire eight-minute ride giving long-version answers to the two short questions he, and most ad-viewers, ask: 1) “How’d you get the gig?” (Short answer: Last winter, when Toyota started getting all its bad publicity, I sent their ad agency a two-minute, homemade video of five Green Cab Priuses rolling single-file down the crooked portion of Lombard Street, and one thing led to another…) and 2) “Did you get paid?” (Answer: $3,000)

[Years ago, two high school classmates of mine (Karen and Larry, still married even today) sent a note to the organizers of our 20th class reunion, and the organizers included it in our class newsletter. Karen wrote: “We’re not going to be there. Larry says that at this stage of the game all anyone really wants to see of you is a naked picture and a financial statement.”]

Fare #22 -- 3:08 PM -- My cab is due in at 4 p.m., and now, with time for one last ride, I spot a shrunken elderly woman standing in the late-afternoon drizzle in front of the Market Street Safeway, waving a cane over her head. I load her five bags of groceries into my trunk and head up toward Twin Peaks. “I’ve been waiting for a cab for over an hour,” she tells me. I pass her a card with Green Cab’s phone number (415-626-4733) and tell her, “You won’t wait an hour any more.” At the end of the ride she says she will pay extra if I will please carry her groceries to the top of her steps. I tell her that won’t be necessary, in fact nothing will be necessary, as all my rides are free today.

Like all of us, this woman has heard a lot of bullshit during her lifetime. She studies my face with the same dubious look Fare #1 gave me back during the dimness of early morning. And then a smile spreads slowly across her own face. “My goodness,” she says. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

“Well,” I say, opening my door and getting ready to step around back to get her groceries, “now you have.”

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* * The Thanksgiving Project * *

2010-11-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2010

TOYOTA AND I NEVER TALKED MONEY, not a word, not a peep, until “my commercial” had already been bombarding northern California television viewers for a while. Ten days into it, a woman from the ad agency telephoned. We should have discussed this with you earlier, she told me, but, well, here we are... We sent you some standard forms to sign, and as soon as you send them back we’ll send you some money.

I told her that I didn’t imagine that a big pile of money was involved, and if we were just talking a couple hundred dollars, I’d actually prefer to not be paid -- I was happy to say all those nice things about my Prius for free, because they were all true.

From the other end of the phone, I heard an audible intake of air -- a small gasp. “Oh, but we have to pay you!” she said. “Legally, we actually…have to…pay you.”

I said, “Well, how much money are we talking about?”

She: “Screen Actors Guild regulations say that we owe you five hundred (and some) dollars for the day of the shoot, another five hundred for (something else), five hundred for (something else), five hundred for…”

I said, “I’ll sign…”

In the end, I received about $3,000 -- after taxes, $2,250.

GREEN CAB was founded in 2007 by eight hard-working visionaries (I was not one of them), and now nearly one hundred of us drivers have helped the company grow and prosper. Shortly after Toyota’s check arrived, it hit me that it would be ridiculous for one guy (me, not even a founder) to be getting so much attention -- plus all the money!

It took me a while to figure out just how to share it, but after consulting a few others at Green, in early November I wrote Green a check and sent every driver in the company a letter saying that on Thanksgiving, at Green Cab, all gates and gas would be paid by the money from the ad.

A couple of days later, two Green drivers told me that at the airport cab lot they’d wound up in a long argument with a driver from another company. It wasn’t possible, the other driver said. He’d been driving forever, and he’d never heard of such a thing: Free gates! Free gas! Hah!

And he was right. I’ve never heard of, and no one I know in the industry has ever heard of, any such thing before.

I INVITED ALL GREEN DRIVERS to play along -- to give away a free ride of their own if they felt like it. And, if they agreed, I would mention those rides here on this blog. The stories have been trickling in, and I’ll continue to post them as they arrive. But so far, here’s how I might summarize the feedback I’ve received:

1) Everyone at Green Cab was absolutely thrilled at the prospect of free gates and gas. Once the news got around, the looks I saw on the faces at the Green cab lot were exactly the same sort of looks I’ve grown accustomed to seeing in my backseat during the last however-many-years-it’s-been. People appreciate something different. And something free.

2) Many drivers reported that giving away a free ride was often awkward. I rarely register any personal awkwardness around my free rides these days, but the feedback makes me recall the “early days.” We’re all conditioned to having almost every human interaction include a financial component, and, well, Who in the world are we if money is subtracted from the equation?

3) Several drivers mentioned that they hope to see the Thanksgiving Project become a Green Cab tradition -- as do I, of course.

Drivers Reports:

-- The first report I heard came from our general manager, Athan, who told me that one of our drivers, Jennifer, gave away free rides during her entire shift, accepted the many tips that people pressed upon her, and donated them all to North Beach Citizens, a non-profit that is working to address the issue of homelessness in North Beach “one citizen at a time.” Later Jenny showed me the thank-you letter she received.

-- Carol Osorio, laughing her wonderful laugh, told me that she’d pulled into several bus zones, but wasn’t able to talk anyone into accepting a free ride: “I couldn’t give ‘em away!”

-- Boz Zafeur told me that he, too, hadn’t managed to give away a ride -- but he’d enjoyed hearing his driver friends from other companies say they were “jealous.”

-- At Geary and Scott, Beyen Feraje picked up a student running late for school one morning. The kid was thrilled when Beyen told her that today she wouldn’t be delayed by having to pay him -- she could keep her credit card in her pocket.

-- Michael Pegues picked up three young women at Haight and Shrader at 3:30 one morning. As Michael drove them out into the Avenues, and as the women talked amongst themselves about how broke they each were, he found himself grinning inside, anticipating… Later, as Michael told me about the small, grateful pandemonium that broke out at ride’s end, he was grinning ear-to-ear. “Great, great fun!” he said.

Amen!

THE END -- I will keep adding to the above list as appropriate, but I think that, otherwise, this is pretty much “it” for this blog.

Thank you, dear readers, so very, very much for being along for the ride.

Brad Newsham

Green Cab #914
newsham@mac.com
415-305-8294

Rabbit, Rabbit

2010-10-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

Shift #79

FRIDAY, OCT 1 – Third/Mission to Third/Howard -- $5.80

AT SIX-FORTY A.M., I’m sitting in front of the Westin-Market Street, hoping, of course, for an airport fare. The first sunrise of October is still a short ways off. A woman with no luggage walks down the sidewalk toward my cab. She seems be be a bit uncertain. She stops at my window and I roll it down.

She: “Can you take me to the convention center?”

“Moscone?”

She: “That’s it -- Moscone!”

“Sure, but first I think I should point out that it’s only a block and a half back that way.”

She: “I know it’s right around here somewhere, but I’ve been walking around for about fifteen minutes now…”

“Hop on in!”

She: “I’m sorry…”

“Oh, no… this is what cabs are for.”

As we loop around several blocks of Financial District one-way streets, I promise her that this is not the “scenic route” -- the traffic patterns give me no other choice.

“Not to worry,” she says. “I’m just glad to be in your cab. It’s been years and years since I’ve been to San Francisco, and everything seems out of place to me.” She’s a pediatrician, from Manhattan, here with thousands of other pediatricians here to attend a national convention, starting today.

Me: “I’m not sure I knew what the word pediatrician meant until I became a father thirteen years ago.”

She laughs. “Parents find that we come in pretty handy sometimes. Like cab drivers.”

We talk childcare for a bit, and then, approaching Moscone, I ask her, “Do any of your patients play the 'Rabbit, Rabbit' game?”

She: “No. What’s that?”

Me: “I learned this little bit of nonsense from my ex-wife about thirty-five years ago, and now I’ve passed it along to my daughter: If when you wake up on the first day of the month you say the words 'Rabbit, Rabbit' before you say anything else, you will have a good month!”

She, a little dubious, but chuckling: “That’s news to me.”

Me: “Well, my daughter and I try to say it every month. So far we haven’t missed one all this year. I said it before I left the house this morning, but she was still asleep. When I drop you off I’ll have to give her a call and see…”

She: “Sounds sweet.”

In front of Moscone, I hit the meter, and tell a little, white, resistance-forestalling lie: “I also have another little tradition -- my first ride of every month is free, and this is my first ride of October. I absolutely can not accept money for this ride.”

She, with no resistance at all: “I am not lost any more. I must certainly be in San Francisco.”

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THEY DRILL US AND DRILL US AT THE ACADEMY

2010-10-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

Shift #80

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 -- Union/Buchanan to California/Front -- $9.85

STREET-WISE CUSTOMERS who wave me down while they are in possession of a suitcase will often issue a hurried, introductory apology: “I’m sorry I’m not going to the airport...”

Over the years, I have customized a response: Oh, don’t worry -- at the Academy, they drill us and drill us and drill us on not getting overly-excited whenever we see luggage…

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to use my (always well-received) line, but when I see a young woman standing on the curb near the Cow Hollow Starbucks, a suitcase-on-wheels at her feet and her hand in the air, I get ready to blow the dust off of it just in case.

She doesn’t apologize (nor do I think she should), just tells me she’s going downtown (to her job at a real estate firm). She remarks enthusiastically on the absolutely wonderful fall day that has presented itself to us, and for a minute or two I play along, but then I get right down to business: “Are you a baseball fan?”

She: “Oh yes I am -- and I was at the game last night!”

Me: “So was I!”

And we’re off and running…

Last night, in his very first postseason game, the Giants’ freaky young pitcher, Tim Lincecum (he’s 26), struck out 14 Atlanta Braves. The game’s only run was scored by the Giants’ kid catcher with the Hollywood name, Buster Posey (he’s 23), and now the Giants have a 1-0 lead in the opening round of the playoffs. At the other (imaginery) academy -- the All Sports Fools Academy -- they drill and they drill and they drill us sports idiots about not getting overly-excited about the unlikely possibility of our favorite teams winning the World Series, but no matter. All this week the city’s populace has been swaggering around in Giants orange-and-black. At night, City Hall and Coit Tower have been bathed in orange lighting. And the playoffs have brushed aside the weather as the number one topic of conversation. If our Giants win just ten more games, they’ll be world champs!

“The park is always great,” my fare tells me. “But last night -- all that energy was just phenomenal…”

Nearly 44,000 of us packed into our little jewel of a ballpark-by-the-Bay (the Giants’ stadium is the only major league sports stadium in the country built without taxpayer money -- the Giants raised $300 million and built it themselves), and all night long, strikeout after strikeout, we waved our silly orange rally rags and screamed our sports fool heads off.

In advanced coursework at the Taxicab Academy, we drivers are further trained to have an opinion on everything sports- or politics-related, and at least on this topic -- the San Francisco Giants’ chances of winning their first World Series championship -- I in fact do have a strong opinion, and whether my fare wants it or not, I give it to her:

“I think it would take some sort of miracle. I really like this team, but it just doesn’t ‘feel’ like a World Series winner to me. The World Series always seems to go to one powerhouse team who just blows everyone else away, or sometimes there are two pretty strong teams who fight it out. But then, every once in a while, some unlikely bunch of overachievers will catch a rogue wave and ride it all the way to shore -- and I’m going to leave the door wide open for the Giants to be that bunch this year. There does seem to be something really good and pure about this group -- maybe it just seems that way because prickly old Barry Bonds and his big old bag of steroids are all gone, but whatever, it’s been a fun year.…”

I’m on my sports fool roll: “Still, for the Giants to win it all, they’re going to have to forget everything they think they know and surrender themselves to the baseball gods, allow themselves to be infused with that special… I hate to use the word magic...”

My fare: “Hey -- there’s nothing wrong with magic. I’ve never seen a World Series game. I’m ready. I’m willing. I’ll take magic any day…”

In our short ride, my fare and I have unmistakably created a feeling, and baby, you know what that means: Free Ride!

She squeals: “Oh, you have made my day -- you’ve made my whole weekend!”

Play ball!

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No-hitter?

2010-10-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

SHIFT #81

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 -- Mission/Cortland to Twenty-Second/Valencia -- Ice Cream

MY VERY BUSY SHIFT IS ALMOST OVER. I’m returning empty from the airport, headed toward the gas station and then back to the cab lot. The annual eardrum-crushing performance of the jet fighters of the Blue Angels is terrorizing the skies above me, distracting me from the Giants-Braves playoffs on the radio. The series is tied one game apiece, and right now, in the sixth inning of Game 3, the Giants are ahead 1-0 -- and get this, Jonathan Sanchez is working on a no-hitter...

Suddenly, as I’m cruising past Candlestick Park, where the 49ers will be taking on the Philadelphia Eagles in a 6 pm football game, I remember: I haven’t given one away yet! I veer off onto 280, take the Alemany exit and then slip over to Mission Street via my secret Genebern Way shortcut. A few blocks later I spot a young, pretty woman sitting on a bus stop bench in the late afternoon fall sunshine; scooched up on either side of her are two picture-perfect, three-year old twins, a boy and a girl.

When I pull to a stop in front of them, the mom smiles at me, but shakes her head: No thanks. But when I roll down my window and call over May I offer you a free ride? her smile loses its formality. “Really?” she says.

As they’re climbing in, the boy pauses. He stands on the floor of the cab, steadying himself with one hand on the backseat, takes a moment to make sure that I’m looking him right in his big brown eyes, gulps a deep breath and then, in an exceedingly serious tone of voice and with an exceedingly confidential facial expression, he confides: “My daddy just loves taxis.”

Within the past hour, the mom and the dad (I imagine him at home, watching the game) have returned from a two-day trip to Florida to attend a wedding. Mom and kids are very, very happy to see each other again. “It’s such a beautiful afternoon,” she tells me, “and we’re going out for a special treat. I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M.”

Me, wide-eyed, turning around: “You’re going out for broccoli!”

The kids don’t laugh, but mom does. “Steamed broccoli,” she says.

The girl (soon I’ll learn that her name is pronounced Ee-Lisa and her brother’s name is Cass) says her first words of our ride, exceedingly dry and serious words : “Ice cream...”

They’re headed to Yotopia on 22nd Street, an eight or ten block ride, and just one block off my route back to the cab lot.

“This is so perfect,” the mom tells me in front of Yotopia. “We all love riding in taxis.” She gives Elisa a couple of dollars to hand to me as a tip, but I fight them off. Elisa doesn't mind: “I’ll put them in my piggy-bank,” she assures me.

I’m three blocks from the lot when Jonathan Sanchez gives up his first hit, a clean single to right. But still, as I pull through the gate the Giants are clinging to their 1-0 lead. No matter that Air Force jets are shrieking above me -- as I drive down South Van Ness toward Sixteenth Street, hope is definitely still alive...

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* * THEY BLINKED! * *

2010-10-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

Shift #82

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2010 -- Folsom/Main to Battery/Vallejo -- $8.05

THE WHOLE OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA is reeling this morning, trying to recover from having its collective breath sucked right out of its sprawling body -- temporarily, I predict -- by last night’s 4-2 Philadelphia Phillies victory over our 2010 San Francisco Giants.

The forty-four thousand of us packed into the stadium, plus millions watching on t.v., were prepared for a wild celebration, were prepared to see the Giants make it three straight wins in three straight nights against the Phillies -- and bring a World Series to San Francisco next week. But during the third inning our guys played sloppy baseball for about a minute and a half -- they blinked -- and the Phillies put up three cheap runs -- gifts! -- against Tim Lincecum. The series still stands at three games-to-two, Giants’ favor, and we go back to Philadelphia to play one more. Or possibly two...

ONLY ABOUT ELEVEN HOURS HAVE PASSED since my wife and daughter and I shuffled out of the ballpark with thousands of other dejected, deflated fans and made our way back home to Oakland. Now I’m in front of the Courtyard Hotel, first-up in the cab line. From here I can see the brick façade and the light towers of the stadium, a five-block shot down Second Street.

I’m up on the sidewalk next to my cab, with my right foot propped on the trunk to stretch out my hamstring. Over near the hotel entrance I notice two middle-aged guys wearing Giants gear and smoking cigarettes.

I call over, “Sad night at the ballpark…”

One of them calls back, “We’ll get ‘em tomorrow.”

And then, behind the smokers, I see a striking couple wheeling suitcases through the hotel’s front door. They’re both young enough to be my offspring, and they look so handsome and so well put together that they could be clipped from a magazine ad. The man has short, sandy blond hair and a short, short beard. The woman is tall and has long, straight brown hair. The man catches my eye and nods. I’m thinking: Airport.

Before the Courtyard’s distracted doorman can spot them and steer them into one of the nearby pirate limos, I jump behind the wheel and pull my cab into the covered driveway -- it’s drizzling this morning, and the portico will keep them dry. I am (or at least I once was) six-feet-two, and as I’m relieving the man of his suitcase I note that he’s taller than I am. When we’re settled in, the first thing that happens is that he quickly places a twenty-dollar-bill on the console between the two front seats, and says, “The ballpark, please.”

Earlier today I heard on the radio that the Giants are meeting at the stadium this morning to catch a bus to the airport. “You’re a ballplayer?” I tuck the bill under my clipboard on the passenger seat.

“Yes,” he says.

Me: “Oh, great -- what’s your name?”

“Chris Ray.”

Me: “Well, you’ve had a great year!”

Chris Ray: “Thanks.”

I’d not heard of Chris Ray until July 1, when the Giants acquired him in a trade and then, two days later, went off on a 22-6 roll. I recall hearing Giants announcer Mike Krukow pinpoint Chris Ray as a huge factor in that equation and speculate that Ray was throwing the ball as well as any reliever in the National League. In August Ray strained a rib muscle and had to go onto the disabled list. He rejoined the team in September and finished strong.

Me: “You came in with a bang. All of a sudden everyone was saying, ‘Well, who’s this guy?’”

He chuckles.

Me: “How was the mood in the locker room after last night’s game?”

He, sober, confident: “Fine.” No problems here. “If it wasn’t tough, it wouldn’t be any fun.” He says this not with a macho, but a philosophical tone.

As we’re talking, it occurs to me that I haven’t noticed Chris Ray’s name mentioned in the papers or on the radio for a while, and I wonder if the Giants found that they didn’t have room for him on the playoff roster -- but I keep this thought to myself.

I ask: “Where were you playing last year?”

“Baltimore. In the off season I was traded to Texas, and then in July I was traded to the Giants.”

Me: “Oh, you were part of the Bengie trade?”

He: “Yes.”

On July 1, the Giants traded popular-but-slumping veteran catcher Bengie Molina to the Rangers in exchange for Ray, plus a minor league pitcher and some cash. The Giants turned their catcher’s job over to twenty-three-year-old phenom Buster Posey, and now, as we’re riding to the park this morning, both Buster’s and Bengie’s teams (the Giants and the Texas Rangers) are one win away from a matchup in the World Series.

I tell Chris Ray and his quieter companion that my thirteen-year-old daughter and I have been to a dozen or maybe fifteen games together this year, which makes the season a total win for me no matter what happens from here on out.

“That’s great,” he says, and he seems genuinely pleased to hear this.

I catch the woman’s eye in the rearview. “What do you do to stay calm through it all?”

She, too, seems nice. She smiles at me and says, “I think I’m pretty used to it by now…”

And then we’re pulling through the players’ gate, out behind the left field wall, the bleachers section, the giant Coke bottle, and the giant baseball mitt. I stop the cab next to two large coach buses parked there and turn to face the back seat. “Every day for the last fifteen or twenty years I’ve given away one free ride…” -- I extend Chris Ray's twenty-dollar-bill back toward him -- “and I would really, really like it if you’ll let this be my free ride for today…”

One of the Giants’ logistics folks has opened the rear passenger door: “Chris Ray…! How you doing, Chris?”

But Chris Ray is momentarily preoccupied with the adoring-fan-cab-driver situation. He’s looking directly at me, he’s smiling -- he gets it. “Oh, thank you,” he says, “but I want you to have that. Really. But thanks…”

A second Giants employee, happy, smiling, is at Chris’s door now: “Chris Ray… Great to see you, Chris…” And the moment passes.

The woman and I both step out on the left side of the cab at the same time. I think: Is she taller than me, too? I unload their suitcases, both of them thank me and say good-bye, and then they’re swept into the warm arms of the Giants family, off to Philadelphia…

SEVEN BLOCKS LATER I’m flagged by a woman who moved to San Francisco from Seattle thirteen years ago and has had her own architectural/graphic design firm for the last “eleven or twelve” years. Yes, she says, she certainly is a Giants fan. No, she wasn’t at the game last night, but she watched the whole thing on t.v. “What a heartbreaker!”

Me: “I’ve been to all the playoff games so far, and last night’s was by far the toughest to take. I’ve been telling myself that this team’s already gone farther than I ever thought it would, but now… Now I’ve got my hopes up, and last night hurt…”

She: “Around the office we’ve all been asking, ‘Who in the world has tickets?’ You’re the first person I’ve met, or even heard of, who actually has any -- how’d you get them?”

Me: “I got lucky. Back in March I pulled out my credit card and bought season tickets, and now I have tickets to all the playoff games and, if we get there, to the World Series. But I have to admit, I’m relieved there’s no game today -- I’m exhausted! It’s a lot of work being a baseball fan!”

At the end of the ride, I tell her, “The last person to sit in your seat was Giants relief pitcher Chris Ray.”

She: “No way!”

Me: “Yep. And I told him that every day for fifteen or twenty years I’ve given away one free ride -- and I tried to give today’s ride to him, but he insisted on paying me -- he probably makes five million dollars a year. So, if you’ll allow it, I’d like this to be my free ride today...”

“Oh, I would be so happy to allow that -- are you kidding! Thank you so much!” She’s got a major league smile. “You know,” she adds, “I don’t make five million a year...”

(NOTE: After work I do an online search: Chris Ray is six-three, weighs two hundred and ten pounds, played baseball at the College of William and Mary, was drafted in 2003, has been in the big leagues since 2005, had Tommy John surgery in 2007, is 28 years old, and in 2010 earned a salary of $975,000. Not five million, but still... I am, however, saddened to see that Ray has in fact not been included on the Giants postseason roster, but I think it’s a wonderful thing, and right in line with the current ownership’s class-act reputation, that Ray and his pal are nonetheless going to Philadelphia with the team.)

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Called Strike Three!

2010-10-01T17:04:00.000-07:00

Shift #83

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24 – Jones/Leavenworth to Bush/Powell -- $6.25

LAST NIGHT I sat on the sofa between my wife and daughter, all of us holding hands during the last two innings until Brian Wilson, finally, on a three-and-two pitch, corkscrewed a game-ending knee-level backdoor slider that froze Philadelphia slugger Ryan Howard -- called strike three! -- and transformed a tense Bay Area Saturday night into a maelstrom of astonished shrieks from homes and bars, with a background melody line of happy car horns.

One of my favorite books -- maybe top ten, but top twenty without a doubt -- is Goodnight, Nebraska. The elastic, cantankerous characters hatched by author Tom McNeal (an alum of Stanford University’s writing program) are specific to a tiny, dying, fictional town in the American Midwest, but the themes McNeal explores are universal.

In the final moments of a gladiatorial Friday night high school football game, during which Goodnight’s perennially weak team has somehow managed to hang with a strong and fearsome rival, the opposing quarterback launches a long perfect spiral toward a wide-open receiver down near the Goodnight goal line. As the ball rockets through the air, certain to once again crush the locals’ ill-advised hopes, McNeal describes the mood of the Goodnight townfolk. But I think he might also be describing you and, absolutely for sure, me:

“They (were) mesmerized… They knew what it meant. They could already sense the unfair diminishment in self-respect that was on its way. In their farmers’ bones, in their shopkeepers’ bones, they had expected it. It was what living on small farms and in a small town taught them to expect. They would lose. They would walk away, muttering or maybe working up a joke, beginning to pretend it didn’t matter. But it did. Not in any way they could adequately define or defend, but still it did. It mattered.”

“CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!” Just about every fare who climbs into my cab this morning has the same greeting. Many of them are reacting to my orange cap, black-and-orange scarf, and orange tee-shirt. Many of them are wearing Giants gear of their own. All of them are grinning from ear to ear -- even the three separate fares from Texas, whose Rangers will be facing the Giants in Game One of the World Series on Wednesday evening, weather permitting.

Throughout the entire region, where suddenly everyone is a Giants fan, this most unexpected development is widely regarded as a miracle -- at the beginning of this season no one was counting on a trip to the World Series. Nope -- we all were pretty darned sure we’d wake up on the first day of the playoffs to realize, once again, that we were still solid, hangdog citizens of the greater Goodnight metropolitan area.

Instead, my morning-after shift quickly takes on the feel of an All-Rides-Free day -- great rollicking ribaldry -- and I do give away more than one ride: there’s the woman from Scott Street going to work at Betelnut who high-fives me across the backseat; and the man from Fell Street who is hungry for Series tickets and who, due to a rainy day dispatching snafu, arrives at Shanghai Kelly’s saloon an hour later than he’d intended; but the one I’m choosing to write about wouldn’t know Buster Posey from Bengie Molina:

She’s a young Asian woman who at first blink strikes me as demure, but shortly after we’ve pulled away from her Vallejo Street apartment shows a playful side. “Are you excited about last night's game?” she asks, a twinkle in her voice.

I tip my baseball cab an inch off my head: “A little.” We both laugh, and I ask: “Did you watch it?”

“No. I’m really not a sports fan, but I heard all the shouting at the end.”

I find other people’s sports fanaticism off-putting, ridiculous, often obnoxious, and I do my best to keep mine from spilling onto the un-infected. “What’s your work?” I ask her.

She: “I work at Genentech .”

“What’s your function?”

She: “I do research.”

“Have you been there a while?”

She: “Just since May. I graduated in May.”

“Congratulations on winding up with such a crackerjack company.”

She: “Thank you.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

She: “Northwestern.” A top-notch school in Chicago.

“So…where were you the night Obama was elected?”

There is a long pause. Then, playful again, self-deprecating: “I was in the LI-brary… study-ing...”

I think: My god! She and I are two completely different beasts. I say, “Was it noisy in there?”

“No, I pretty much had the place to myself. Everyone else was in Grant Park.” She laughs again -- at herself: “I felt funny about it -- but I did great on that mid-term I was studying for!”

Me: “And all those people who went off to Grant Park are probably still looking for jobs.”

She: “Could be!”

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NO GLOATING!

2010-10-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

Shift #84

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29 -- Oh my goodness!

ON JANUARY 9, 1982, after several increasingly-seductive, exploratory visits, I arrived in San Francisco and started calling it my home. I spent my first few nights with my friends Nancy and Bob whose Cow Hollow flat had a wide-angle view out over the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

I was not a football fan when I arrived, but on the day after my arrival I sat on the living room sofa with Bob and Nancy and several of their friends and watched a San Francisco 49ers football game. The 49ers were having a completely unexpected run: two seasons prior, the team had won just two games and lost fourteen and had watched the playoffs from the comfort of their own sofas. But this year they had reached the second-to-last round of the playoffs. In the final moments of this, my first 49ers game, an incredibly tense game against the feared and loathed Dallas Cowboys, 49ers’ quarterback Joe Montana floated a high pass toward the back of the end zone. Lanky 49ers receiver Dwight Clark leapt for it and latched onto the ball with all ten of his fingers -- this play is immortalized as “The Catch” -- and when Clark’s feet touched down onto the grass of the end zone, just in bounds, the City and the entire Bay Area region erupted in a wave of all-hands-on-deck euphoria, the likes of which would not be seen for another twenty-six years…

IF YOU DROVE AROUND SAN FRANCISCO on the night of November 4, 2008, the night Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, you saw smiling lunatics jumping up and down on every corner, in every neighborhood. Four years earlier, almost no one in the country had ever heard of Obama -- he was a newcomer to politics, a member of the Illinois state legislature, but then he’d given a rockin’ speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, and suddenly everyone knew him. In November 2004, he was elected to the US Senate. In February 2007 he announced his candidacy for President, and in 2008, well, you know...

In San Francisco, Obama-mania burned intensely for about two weeks, flared again during the period surrounding his inauguration (and the departure of the -- boo-hiss -- George W. Bush administration), and then started to fade as it came to be understood that Obama (oh my god!) was actually a human being. (In contrast, “Catch” euphoria lasted about a decade, during which four Super Bowl trophies were delivered to San Francisco, where Joe Montana and Dwight Clark are still considered immortals). San Franciscans began looking for some other odds-defying development to blow us away, and hoping that its arrival wouldn’t require another twenty-six year wait…

IT DIDN’T... Last night, not even two years since the night of Obama’s election, and twenty-eight years after The Catch, the San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers 9-0. The Giants now lead the best-of-seven World Series two-games-to-none, having beaten the Texas Rangers 11-7 in Game One, and again in last night’s Game Two shocker. Nine-zip! (To see a Game One closeup of my daughter and I sitting in “our skybox” -- also known as “the last two seats in the stadium,” click here, and then zoom in to the top two seats in the upper left part of the ballpark. You’ll see the two of us wearing orange, right in front of the Fox cameraman and a photographer from Major League Baseball.)

THIS MORNING the whole town is floating, doing our damnedest not to gloat. We’re two wins away from the first-ever World Series championship in San Francisco history, and we’re nearly out of our collective skin. By 1 P.M. I’ve given away four free rides.

My very first fare is a fellow from Argentina who knows absolutely nothing about baseball: What the heck -- Free ride! A couple from Anaheim is celebrating their fifth anniversary with a weekend in San Francisco: Free ride! Another fare, who has just arrived from New York with an overstuffed suitcase, goes from one Union Square Hotel to another just a few blocks away (one of my cab driver brethren had dropped him at the wrong hotel): Hey, free ride! Another man is going from Second and Market to an office across the street from the ballpark to deliver a bottle of whiskey to a client who had secured World Series tickets for him: Free ride...!

Almost everyone is euphoric, some are talking sweep, but I’m not buying it. The Rangers could so easily win four straight. I’m glad for the season we’ve had. I’m hoping for more. Still, I’m taking nothing for granted. Sure, I’m sky-high along with the rest of this city, which I long ago began calling “God’s favorite city.” I hope that’s not too much gloating -- I hope I don’t jinx anything.

Go Giants!

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Bad omen / good omen

2010-10-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

Shift #85

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 31 -- Halloween Day -- Union/Van Ness to Union/Fillmore

MY VERY FIRST THOUGHT upon waking is, “Why in the world didn’t (Giants manager Bruce) Bochy put Eli Whiteside at catcher last night, with Buster Posey at first base, Aubrey Huff at DH, Travis Ishikawa in right, and Cody Ross in left? Pat Burrell was a ghost last night -- he should get at least one night off, and my god, shouldn’t we send Pablo Sandoval home for the winter and let him get his head straight…?”

I look over at the alarm clock: 3:45 A.M.

SHORTLY AFTER 8 AM I’m rolling north on Van Ness, empty -- nobody’s up yet. I’m thinking I might get lucky and find a flag over in Cow Hollow, or maybe over in the Marina I’ll catch another airport off the radio. I’ve already caught one there earlier today.

I swing left onto Union Street and immediately spot a woman standing in the bus zone at Union and Van Ness. She’s dressed mostly in black, but I see a smudge of orange on the bill of her baseball cap and my cab swoops right in on her -- all by itself, it seems. Even before I can get my window rolled down she breaks into a great big smile and starts stomping her right foot up and down on the sidewalk -- she’s seen all my orange Giants gear and the pennant flying from the cab’s roof. My free ride pitch is not even half-finished when she shrieks, “I love it! Yes-yes, I love it!”

She’s only going seven blocks, so we have to talk fast. She’s about my own age and has been to twenty-six Giants games this year, but no playoff games (I’ve been to the ballpark maybe twenty times, including five times during the playoffs). One of her friends serves as a sort of extra-ticket clearinghouse for several Giants season ticket holders, so my fare often winds up with cheap tickets as a result. This morning she’s on fire. She wants to see the Giants win a World Series as much as I do, which is as much as any fan in the Bay Area does. She’ll accept last night’s loss (so will I), but we can NOT allow another one tonight.

She: “Texas is too good for us to let up -- we have to go all out tonight. Lots of idiots are saying, ‘Oh, I hope the Giants lose two in Texas so we can win it in San Francisco...' but that’s sheer stupidity. We need to win tonight, and we need to win tomorrow night... But tonight, especially, is a must-win.

I share with her the fully formed thought-chain that woke me up this morning.

She: “Oh, absolutely! Bochy can NOT let Pablo DH again tonight!”

At the end of the ride we sit in my cab for three or four or five minutes, talking about the unbelievable parts of the Series -- Timmy Lincecum’s heart-stopping “brain fart” in Game One; the ball that bounced off the top of the center field fence -- bounced backwards! -- and wound up in Andres Torres’ glove, a mere double for Texas instead of a game-changing homer; and simply everything about Juan OOO-ree-bay... And we agree that even if she and I had all day to talk to each other, we couldn’t even scratch the surface of Brian Wilson!

In Games One and Two, it seemed that every break went the Giants’ way, but Game Three started with a scary, even sickening, omen. In Row One, right behind the catcher, best seat in the Rangers’ house, there was the surly, bantam rooster face of George W. Bush, oozing a self-righteous surliness into just about every camera shot...

Me: “We Giants fans think we know something about torture -- but Bush knows more about torture than we’ll ever know -- and, for me, seeing him there all night -- that was pure torture!”

My fare laughs. “If that man had a speck of decency he’d stay out of sight forever. Just seeing him probably threw Jonathan Sanchez off his game.”

Me: “And didn’t Nolan Ryan (two seats to the right of Bush) start to look more and more like Dick Cheney the longer the game went on?”

She: “Oh, you said it! We just have to win tonight!”

As she’s walking away from my cab, I roll down my window again and call over: “Don’t worry -- I think I saw a good omen about an hour and a half ago. I was on my way to the airport just before dawn, the sky was still black and filled with clouds, but there was one crack down near the horizon, and you know what color was coming through?”

She: “Yes -- I love it -- Giants orange!”

Me: “Bingo! Giants orange.”

She: “I love it! Yes…!”

During the entire rest of my shift, I don’t meet a single person who isn’t planning to be in front of a t.v. by first pitch -- at 5:20 pm.

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* * DRUNK DRIVER * *

2010-09-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

Shift #71

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 -- Turk/Leavenworth to Haight/Belvedere -- $11.20

HER BLACK, SPAGHETTI-STRAPPED PARTY DRESS looks a little out of place at 7:30 on a Friday morning, even here in the Tenderloin. She gives a quick hug-and-kiss to a young man who’s been waiting with her at the curb, and then she climbs into my cab.

“I’m going over to Haight Street, just one or two blocks past Divisadero -- I think... I parked my car somewhere over near there last night... I did the responsible thing.”

Me: “Oh, good for you!” One of the vital functions of the cab industry is to provide a handy transportation option to people who’ve been drinking.

“I live in South San Francisco, and I really think I could have driven without any problem, but I just didn’t want to make some huge mistake.”

Me: “You did the right thing -- it’s just not worth it.” To me, she seems pretty happy and not visibly hung over. “What did you drink last night?”

She: “Just beer -- I don’t really drink hard liquor. But, you know, I didn’t want to do something I’d regret for the rest of my life. It’s going to cost me a few extra dollars, and now I have to hurry so I won’t be late to work, but in the end I think I’m a lot better off…”

Me: “A while ago I picked up a forklift driver at a lumber yard over near Potrero Hill. He was about my age, actually a little older, maybe 65, and we got to talking, and he said that during Vietnam he’d been a welder in the Army. He’d almost completed twenty years and was just a little bit shy of getting his retirement, and then on the way home from work on a Friday night he stopped and had two beers with some friends. He told me that he even left a little bit…” -- I show her my thumb and forefinger, spread about an inch apart -- “in the bottom of each glass…”

She: “Um-huh...”

Me: “He was driving home on a two-lane highway in the countryside in Texas. He said he didn’t feel impaired in the slightest. There was a tow truck driving in front of him and he couldn’t see around it, and suddenly, without any warning, not even a brake light or anything, the tow truck driver veered off onto the right shoulder, and there, right in front of my guy, a red Volkswagen bug was stopped in the road. He hit the brakes but couldn’t stop in time and he ran right into it. The Volkswagen exploded into flames and the driver was killed.”

She: “Oh no…!”

Me: “Yep. He told me that at his trial, the Texas Ranger who handled the case testified that excessive speed had definitely not been involved -- he actually specified ‘lack of speed’ as a factor. The blood alcohol level for drunk driving had just been lowered from point-one (0.1%) to point-oh-eight (0.08%), and this guy was point-oh-nine (0.09%). He said the judge, and the whole system, were looking to make an example out of someone to publicize the rule change. The judge could have been more lenient -- he had less severe options -- but he said, ‘You’re a soldier, you should have known better,’ and he gave the guy six years in prison. He spent three years in prison and three on parole, and he never got his retirement.”

She: “That’s a horrible story.”

Me: “It’s a horrible story, it's a great story.”

She: “That’s right…”

“I asked the guy if he came away with any wisdom from the whole experience, and he said the one thing he came away with was that, ‘You can kill someone real, real easy, and not even mean it.’”

My fare graduated from UC-Santa Cruz six years ago with a degree in biology. She works for (and owns a tiny piece of) a bio-tech firm down the Peninsula. They’ve got a cancer drug in the final stages of trials, and she’s hoping it’s a winner. At the end of the ride she tells me she is very glad for our exchange. And she seems to take it as a sign -- a good sign, a welcomed sign, and validation of her decision last night -- when I tell her that we need not exchange any money today.

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Robbed, Shot, Killed...

2010-09-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

Shift #72

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 -- 16th/Bryant to 25th/Connecticut -- $7.15

THE DISPATCHER SENDS ME TO LOOK FOR A WOMAN NAMED JEAN I should find waiting in front of the Potrero Center Safeway store -- and there she is. She’s young (under twenty-five, I would guess) and pretty, but -- standing beside a loaded grocery cart in the hot afternoon sun with two young boys (four and three years old, I would guess) swirling around her knees -- she also looks beleaguered, even overwhelmed.

When we’re loaded up and rolling, she tells me she’s going to 950 Connecticut, which I recognize immediately as being dead-center in the Potrero Hill Projects, the hardcore, rundown, gangsta-ridden neighborhood where O.J. Simpson grew up and acquired his family values. I’m no stranger to the place; I was robbed there twenty-two years ago, and I’ve been back many times since. I know what I’m going to see upon arrival: rows of barracks-like buildings painted several years ago in bright happy colors, now faded. There will be windows boarded up with plywood, trash everywhere. The grass in the common areas will be trampled dead. Young men sitting on doorway steps will be pumping out clouds of smoke -- only some of it tobacco smoke.

One of the kids repeats the address for me, loudly, all serious and sober like his mother: “Nine-fifty Connecticut.”

And then the other, serious, sober, louder: “Nine-fifty Connecticut!”

“Hush,” says the mom. “We don’t all have to tell the man!”

The boy directly behind me says, loudly, “I got Ghostbusters!”

I ask the mom, “Is there a particular route you prefer?” On trips that present multiple possible routes, I’ve learned to take whichever one the customer likes.

“Whatever’s fastest,” she says.

“I got Ghostbusters!”

I realize the boy is saying this for my benefit. “That’s great,” I say.

“I’m gonna get gooped,” he says. “Lotsa goop!”

“I got flowers,” says his brother, and a bouquet of orange flowers rises up and fills my rearview mirror.

Me: “Those are beautiful!”

“I got Ghostbusters!”

“I got flowers.”

The woman: “Hush up!”

We’ve been underway barely sixty seconds and already I know: Free ride. It’s not so much that I feel sorry for her, for them -- we all get our lives, we all do our best -- but it’s undeniable that we’re all dealt hands that are tremendously uneven, and I feel better about myself whenever I try to even things out a bit. I was dealt an entirely different hand than these folks and their neighbors in the Potrero Hill nightmare -- I know that only a few will get themselves out, and I know that many more will never leave. I often marvel that anyone survives cards dealt from the bottom of Life’s deck, and I tip my hat to anyone who manages to navigate from hardscrabble beginnings to a more comfortable existence.

I reflect daily -- I swear it: daily -- on the gift my grandparents gave me by walking away from a tiny village in Slovakia one hundred years ago. Too poor to afford transport or lodging, they spent five weeks walking clear across Poland to Gdansk, where they caught a three-week ride on a ship to America, looking for bigger-better lives for themselves and their unborn progeny -- people like me!

“Lots of goo!”

“I got flowers…”

A gust of strong marijuana smoke pours through my open window as I pull up the hill, stop in front of the correct barracks, and set my parking brake. I don’t make eye contact with the six-man crew sitting on the steps. From the backseat, the mom is holding a twenty-dollar bill toward me. I turn around. Up close, she’s strikingly pretty: Amber eyes. Cornrow hair. Milk chocolate skin. Strong young body. Obvious intelligence. If she’d grown up next door to me in the suburbs of Washington D.C., there’s not a chance in hell she would today be living at 950 Connecticut.

When I tell her it’s a free ride, her amber eyes blink once. Her head drops forward, her shoulders follow, and her entire body deflates -- just for an instant. She recovers quickly, looks me in the eye -- really looks -- and gives the slightest nod -- all of this takes no more than three seconds. She withdraws her twenty and reinflates herself. “Come on, boys -- thank the man!”

“I got Ghostbusters!”

“Flowers…”

Twenty-five years ago, I routinely carried groceries from my cab into the units of my projects-dwelling fares. Then one night, in another equally-grisly housing project on the south side of the city, a fellow cab driver was robbed, shot, and killed while hauling groceries for a customer -- neither the customer or anyone else in the project saw anything happen -- the crime was never addressed. And not long afterward, in broad daylight on this very same hillside, just a few steps from where we’re now parked, I too was robbed.

As I unload her groceries and set them on the sidewalk, the woman again instructs her sons: “Thank the man!”

They both look up at me: the one raises his flowers, the other his Ghostbusters video. Flowers says, “Thank you, mister.” Ghostbusters says it, too, louder, and now a bidding war erupts. “Thank you...!” “Thank you...!” Who can say it more deafeningly?

From the nearby doorway, I feel the eyes of the smoker crew: watching me, watching her, watching another sunny Sunday afternoon drift past and drain away down the side of a steep hill in a part of San Francisco that tourists never see.

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SMALL WORLD

2010-09-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

Shift #73

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 -- SFO to Menlo Park -- Peace of mind

LAST NIGHT AN ENORMOUS EXPLOSION cold-cocked the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno, which flows along the flat areas and then climbs up into the hills west of SFO. Around 6 P.M., near a ridgetop two crow-miles from the airport, something inside an underground, high-pressure, thirty-inch, natural gas pipeline went horribly wrong.

Investigators speculate about a weakened pipe joint, a leak that may have lasted hours, or even weeks, and then a spark… An instantaneous fireball left a fifty-foot crater where a couple of houses had just been. The explosion was heard for miles (although not inside my windows-closed kitchen in Oakland, about ten crow-miles distant).

“Nuclear bomb was the first thing I thought,” one survivor told a reporter. Residents of nearby neighborhoods thought, “Earthquake.” For nearly two hours, flames shot out of the ground and hundreds of feet into the air, sounding like “thirty high-speed freight trains having a race.” Before emergency crews could shut the gas off, fifty-three houses were destroyed… This morning a door-to-door search of the area is being conducted -- the death count currently stands at four or six depending on which radio station I’m listening to…

The longer one lives in the Bay Area, the more it shrinks. A few months ago, a different media drama unfolded when a crumbling cliff forced the evacuation of an oceanside apartment building in the town of Pacifica; days later I learned that a friend I’d met through the Beach Impeach events lived in that building. But I don’t think I know anyone living in San Bruno. One afternoon about three weeks ago, I dropped a former Jesuit priest at his home in the very area being discussed on this morning’s news. He told me he was planning to grab a drink, sit on his deck -- “Spectacular view of SFO,” he said -- and spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing by watching planes take off and land. But that’s as close as I come to this pipeline drama...

AFTER AN EMPTY HOUR, my first fare goes to SFO. The freeway passes two miles from the devastated neighborhood, and my fare and I both scan for some sign of the incident, but…nothing. No hovering helicopters, no blackened areas, just rows of streets and houses basking on the hillsides under a perfect blue September sky.

From the airport I pick up the CEO of a software company (“This is my fourth or fifth start-up,” he tells me). He’s returning from a three-day trip to Japan and after I fill him in on the explosion in San Bruno our talk goes to the weather. “I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, so I’m accustomed to lousy weather,” he tells me, “but this summer, this bogus summer in San Francisco... This one just about did me in.”

September and October are big convention months in the City, and today twelve thousand people are arriving for a dental industry get-together. After I drop the software CEO, I drive right back to the airport, take my spot at the end of the cab line, and head over to use the bathroom.

Several years ago, two picnic tables and a large-screen tv were installed adjacent to the cab lot’s food truck so that waiting cab drivers can watch sports or Chinese-language soap operas or whatever strikes the fancy of the truck’s operators. Returning to my cab, I see Barack Obama on the screen -- he’s called a press conference to discuss the economy and the November elections and, among many other things, the idiot fundamentalist Christian minister in Georgia who’s promising to burn a pile of Korans tomorrow, September 11.

Gathered around the television with me are a dozen other men. One is a black man with a shoulder patch identifying him as part of the SFO maintenance staff, but the rest of us are all cab drivers. At my right elbow is a Sikh with an orange turban and a gray beard; beyond him, another grizzled white guy like me; to my left, one driver from Yemen and one from Jordan, both Muslims; seated side by side at a picnic table, two Asian men are eating vegetables and rice; I nod hello to Afran, a Filipino friend of mine, who is wearing his beloved red 49ers jacket.

There are times when I’m frustrated with Obama. I wish he actually were a socialist. I fear that if he doesn’t stop trying to talk sense into those mean old, stone-headed, tax-the-poor, Republican bullies, he is going to be a one-term president. Why can’t he just go ahead and stop this crazy nine-year-old war in Afghanistan and transform our military-industrial complex into a renewable-energy/feed-the-people complex? But when I see and hear him -- this intelligent, earnest, reasonable-sounding, most powerful man in the world -- I can’t help but root for him. And I feel that the men around me are all pulling for him, too. No one is applauding, and no one is hissing; we’re all just attentively watching. And I sense -- or I imagine that I sense -- an atmosphere of respect and approval.

The dispatcher’s buzzer summons me to move my cab forward. To reach it, I have to walk down a long row of other cabs, a walk that will usually bring to my ear a smattering of different sounds: Lebanese hip-hop; Sufi dance tunes; sports talk radio. But this morning, emanating from each cab I pass, I hear only one voice: Obama’s.

MY NEXT CUSTOMER is headed twenty miles south to the town of Menlo Park. When I ask What’s your work? he says, “Software.” He chuckles for me when I deploy one of my newer bon mots: “I think I might just start asking people, ‘So, what branch of the software industry employs you?’”

He is the CEO of a one hundred-person software company, and is just now returning from a three-week trip to Russia. He finds the workforce in Russia poorly motivated: “My biggest problem over there is getting anyone to work,” he says. He laughs hard when I tell him about the ditty I heard when I visited the old United Soviet Socialist Republic, back during the pre-capitalist 1980s: “As long as they pree-tend to pay oss, we will pree-tend to work.” He asks me to repeat it -- he wants to remember this one.

It’s 2:10 P.M. when I roll up the driveway and across the bridge over the creek that passes through the front yard of my fare’s house -- his mini-estate. I haven’t given a way a ride yet today, and I’m beginning to suspect this might turn out to be one of those no-free-ride days that just winds up happening once every year or so. The prospect of giving away a big fare like this one, to a guy as well off as this guy, who lives in a house as magnificent as that big old thing, does not thrill me -- but I am willing. I check in with Body.

Body, quickly: No friggin’ way, dude! You nuts?

By the time I collect my fare’s eighty bucks, drive back to the airport, and again pull up to the end of the airport cab line, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be giving away a free ride today. Already it’s 2:39, and I may or may not even be able to get a ride out of the airport. The cab line can be slow here, and if it doesn’t move along fast enough I’ll have to give up and drive back to the city empty. The night driver, Fred, is due the cab at 4 P.M. I owe him one dollar for each minute I’m later. But I’ll at least stop here a few minutes, use the bathroom, look for something sweet on the food truck, and ask some of the other drivers how the line’s moving...

I put the cab into Park, open my door and swing my feet out onto the asphalt... And that’s when, from the corner of my left eye, I spy something that’s not right: an iphone sitting on my backseat...

Last month, after one of my shifts, I accidentally left my laptop in the Green Cab office -- I went four straight days with no laptop, missed it badly, and the memory is still very fresh...

I pull my legs up off the asphalt, swivel back inside the cab, and drive back to Menlo Park. By the time I again reach my fare’s house, a bit more than an hour has passed since I dropped him off. I can detect no signs of life from the palace, and it is absolutely silent. I imagine my fare several layers down into his post-trip sleep. I tuck his iphone into a corner of the porch with a note attached.

The fastest route back to the Green Cab lot is up Highway 280, which passes within half a crow-mile of the site of yesterday’s explosion. Flying along at sixty-seven miles an hour (cruise control), I again scan the hills, and again I see nothing. But I have my window down this time, and for thirty seconds my nostrils are filled with a strong, rancid, scorched smell -- like an electrical cord overheating and about to ignite. Perspective, my mind tells me. A little perspective.

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

(NOTE: Fred doesn’t come in to work on this day. I don’t see him again until Sunday. How are you, Fred? “Brad, I am a mess. I live in San Bruno. Eight blocks from the explosion. My son is at the library that afternoon. He is with a girl he’s known since they are in kindergarten. They’re both nineteen now. The girl finishes her work, says good-bye to my son, and goes home. Ten minutes later, boom! The girl and her mother, both are killed. Brad, I am a mess.”)

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The Spiritual Center of the Earth

2010-09-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

Shift #74

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 -- Seventh/Mission to California/Laurel -- $10.30

HER ORDER COMES TO ME via cabulous.com, and less than three minutes later she’s in my backseat, singing the praises of cabulous.com:

“Just now I decided I needed a cab, I looked on the cabulous map and saw you three blocks away… I touched my finger to the little icon for your cab… Fifteen seconds later my phone rings and I’m talking to you… On my screen I followed you coming down Mission Street… Three blocks away…two blocks away…and here you are -- it’s brilliant...! This is just my second time using it. The first time was last night -- Saturday night. We were in the Castro, calling and calling (another cab company) because they have so many cabs, but for the longest time they wouldn’t even pick up the phone. And finally, when they did answer, they never came -- they said they’d come but they never came. So we started looking around online and we discovered cabulous, and ten minutes later we were in a cab. It really is brilliant!”

She’s about twenty years old and has lived in San Francisco for a year, studying at the Art Institute: “I’m hoping to become a designer.” I would guess that the Art Institute is not her first expensive school. She has maybe the slightest trace of a foreign accent, but my sense is that she has been speaking English forever. When I ask Where did you grow up? I’m not terribly surprised to hear, “I’m from Dubai.”

Me: “You moved from permanent summer to permanent winter.”

She laughs: “I’ve loved everything about San Francisco but the weather. New York is too big for me -- for me, I think San Francisco is the perfect fit. I don’t know anywhere like it.”

Right ahead of us is a city bus with a billboard showing a young man wearing a goofy smile, a skirt and, on his head, what looks like a birthday cake with lit candles. I point to it and read aloud the caption: “San Francisco is full of characters…”

My fare laughs: “I love that spirit here. People seem so creative.”

Me: “Years ago, I met a man in India who told me that the spiritual center of the earth shifts from time to time. He said it used to be India, and it’s been some other places too, but now it’s San Francisco. I asked him, ‘And what exactly IS the spiritual center of the earth?’ and he said, ‘Oh, that’s easy -- it’s simply the place on earth where new ideas meet the least amount of resistance.’”

She: “Oh, please, would you say that again!"

I say it again -- The place on earth where new ideas meet the least amount of resistance -- she murmurs it twice to herself, and then I toss in some bonus commentary: “If you can’t be who you want to be in San Francisco, you really don’t have a chance anywhere else.”

We’re two blocks from the end of the ride now.

I ask: “Are you Muslim?”

I hear a quick inhalation from the backseat. And indeed, even to me, the question does seem to come out of nowhere: she wears no headscarf, I have detected no over-pious sensibility. Still, I hadn’t pondered or rehearsed my question -- her Dubai must have mingled in my mind with all the recent reflections in the media (yesterday was September 11) and, with the ride’s end approaching, it has just popped out. Are you Muslim?

She, after her audible inhale: “I am.”

“How has it been for you lately?”

She: “Interesting. And a little weird.”

“Has anyone been mean to you?”

Quickly: “No.”

Me: “I’m glad.”

“I keep my distance from all that. I just keep my distance. In no way does it dominate my life. I just keep it all at a distance.”

We’re at her café now -- for me, too soon. I anticipate that my free ride announcement will meet some resistance, and it does: “But it’s too much money,” she says. $10.30. Still, her face and her widened eyes tell me she likes the idea.

“Please,” I say. “Every shift for the last fifteen or twenty years I have given away one free ride. Please give me the gift of allowing me to give you this ride for free.”

She accepts with a gracious smile, a thank you, an extended hand, and: “My name is Zina -- what’s yours?”

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GRINDING IT OUT

2010-09-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

If films show violence in its wider context, show what it does to the victim as well as the perpetrator…then those films can fulfill a vital function in the awakening of humanity… That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the rising awareness, is the end of insanity.

-- Eckhard Tolle, A New Earth

Shift #75

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 -- Ellis/North Fifth St. to Columbus/Green -- $7.60

ON A CRACKLING-COLD WINTER NIGHT IN 1993, I went with my then-girlfriend, Rhonda (she’s now my wife), to the Kabuki Theater on Post Street to see “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s soul-ripping, Oscar-grabbing movie about the Holocaust.

As the final credits rolled I slumped in my seat feeling like a gutted fish, feeling as though someone had taken a sharp knife and slit me open from my pubic bone right up to tip of my chin. How-could-human-beings-treat-each-other-this way? I sat there feeling unable to move, until Rhonda and the folks with the brooms moved me along.

Out front of the theater, we were greeted by an unusual sort of “receiving line” -- a row of about a dozen seasoned, bundled-up panhandlers, each savvy about the effect that a movie like “Schindler’s List” can have on unsuspecting viewers. I knew that these street veterans were just doing their jobs -- grinding it out, working a crowd -- but I also instinctively knew that if I were to stiff them (Sorry…no…not tonight…sorry…no, no…sorry…), if I were to pass up even one of these, my fellow species-mates, I would have to first shut down some vital part of my own humanity.

It is no easy thing to access, even briefly, one’s own humanity, and now I felt -- desperately -- that I did not want to lose this raw, exposed, intensely alive feeling in which I was newly awash. I walked down that row of ragged figures and passed out coins and then dollar bills until I had given something to each of them. At that time in my life, the eternal money-scuffle seemed particularly acute, and ten-odd bucks did seem significant -- but a little money was, I knew, absolutely inconsequential when compared to the cost of casually denying my connection, or anyone else’s connection, to the whole human race. Tears had been welling at the edges of my eyes inside the theater, and by the time I reached the end of the line and had seen smiles creep across each of those humble, weather-beaten, dentistry-starved faces, my cheeks were wet.

During the several days that followed, the whole experience resonated quite satisfactorily with me, and, while reflecting on it, I noticed that even after I’d handed money to each beggar I still had enough left over to afford a post-movie sandwich-and-bowl-of-soup with Rhonda, still had enough to ransom our car from the parking garage, and could still pay my share of that month’s rent.

I began to wonder, “What if I just gave money to EVERYONE who asked for it?” Would it kill me? Would I actually go flat broke? Would I wind up on the street, too? Or are these just bullshit fears?

And so it began. Within a few days I was automatically giving money to every panhandler who approached me; to every friend who asked for a loan; to every one of the clipboard canvassers I encountered on street corners; to anyone who asked... I didn’t always give the full amount requested, but I made it a point, whenever someone physically presented themselves in front of me and requested money, to always give something, to always say Yes.

Prior to any city stroll, I made sure to load my pocket with quarters -- I didn’t want to ever be forced to say No. And before every cab shift, I positioned a plastic yogurt cup full of coins beside me on the front seat, just in case a cardboard-sign-wielder approached me at a stop light. (Full disclosure: I did not actually give money to absolutely everyone who asked -- I especially remember occasionally stiffing one particularly aggressive and obnoxious panhandler in my own neighborhood -- but my estimate is that over the course of the next fifteen years or so, I gave it up roughly ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of the time.)

As the years unfolded, I observed that habitually saying Yes didn’t really seem to impact my overall finances at all. I still experienced the upswings and downswings typical of economic life, but giving away little bits of money (my self-imposed minimum was fifty cents) didn’t seem to deprive me in any noticeable way. Never once did I find myself thinking, “Gee, if I hadn’t given anything away this month, I could have done X or bought Y or taken a trip to Z…”

But I also could not help noticing that a few nice surprises started showing up on the plus side of the theoretical ledger. For one, the clamoring mobs that I feared might descend on me, never did. Sometimes I would walk through my own neighborhood, or through unfamiliar neighborhoods, and for days at a time not a single person would hit me up. And even when I was hit up a lot, the total never amounted to more than a few dollars on any given day. The idea that saying Yes would bankrupt and ruin me was a lion of a fear but a mouse of a reality.

Also, I found that I no longer feared Other People or even Life Itself quite as much -- and what price can we assign to that? I won’t pretend that saying Yes turned my life into some magical dream -- none of the lottery tickets I bought during that (or any other) period of my life ever won me anything more than ten bucks -- but there certainly were some memorable moments, some inexplicable shimmering moments...

I could have a much longer conversation, I could write a book, about those years, but for now I’ll just say that the whole experiment often seemed to be changing something fundamental deep inside me, seemed to be altering, perhaps, my very DNA. Once in a while I found myself fancying that all this saying of Yes was somehow making me…I don’t know…making me bigger?…making me better?

But there were also many times when there seemed to be no magic in it at all, times when I felt like I was just grinding it out, times when I found myself pulling money from my pocket and giving it to the very same panhandler for what seemed like (and with several of them it might actually have been) the five hundredth time. But mostly my experience was completely positive, even sheer fun. Saying an automatic yes made me feel like a more empowered human being. Every time I gave money away I knew I was avoiding, or at least deflating, an almost-guaranteed downer -- and often I was transforming it into the opposite. My days seemed filled by notably happier people. I grew to look forward to giving my money away, and I came to count the practice as one of my favorite things about myself. For years and years and years I gave money to damn near every single person who asked for it. Kind of remarkable, no?

BUT IT DOES SEEM to be a hard and fast rule that whenever we make a hard and fast rule out of something, we eventually squeeze the life out of it. And sometime during the years 2007-2008 I began to notice that this practice of giving away money was no longer so much fun for me anymore. Sometimes it felt like a chore, an assignment, and sometimes I found myself outright resenting it.

After months of consideration, on January 1, 2009, I went cold turkey. To break my ingrained habit, I went ninety straight days without giving a penny to anyone. (I was amazed at how quickly a few of the panhandlers I had come to imagine as friends turned vicious.) After those ninety days passed, I began to consider requests for money on a case-by-case basis, which has been my practice during the eighteen months since. And, for now, that feels just right.

HOWEVER, I never did suspend my practice of giving away a free ride during each taxicab shift. That practice originated a good while before -- and, to me, never seemed directly connected to -- my Schindler’s List Declaration. Nonetheless, during the process of reevaluation, I did question it. I told myself that if Body suggested I give it up, I would at least listen. But I never did receive any such guidance -- all along, Body has seemed to love the free ride.

Still, while Body and I were conferring, I did a little bargaining. “If I have to give this up, I will,” I said, “but first I think I should at least write about it for a while…”

No problem, said Body.

And as the year 2009 unfolded, the idea of a one-year Free Rides Journal began to germinate… And that’s how we came to be here today, Friday, September 19, 2010…

IT’S MID-AFTERNOON, AND I’VE BEEN HUNGRY FOR THE PAST TWO HOURS. As I’m maneuvering my cab into a parking spot right in front of the Subway sandwich store on Ellis Street, just half a block from the Powell St. cable car line, a handsome, successful-looking couple, somewhere around forty-five or fifty years old, walks up to my back door. The man leans down and peers inside. I’m sure they could easily flag another cab, but I hate to turn people away. The energy involved with saying No is just too grating -- and I hate the feeling I have when I see my rejection register on people’s expectant faces. I wave this couple in. Lunch can wait.

The man has a German accent: “Ve vant to go to Ee-tah-lee.” I understand that he’s just trying to have a little fun with me. Guidebooks refer to the North Beach neighborhood as “Little Italy” (locals rarely call it that), and the man has intentionally dropped the “Little”: We want to go to Italy. Beside him, the woman snickers softly.

Me: “Oh-kaay... Italy.”

He, playfully: “Yes, Italy.”

Me: “I did have a fare to New York City once. But Italy… This will be my longest ride ever!”

The woman, also with a German accent, also having some fun: “How long did that take you? Two days or three days?”

Me, pulling away from the curb, heading away from New York, away from Italy, and over toward North Beach: “Sixteen days.”

If they want to continue down this path, I in fact can tell a much longer story, but Sixteen days seems to have bumped them off balance. A short silence ensues. I fill it with, “You are from…Germany?”

The woman: “Nederlands.”

The man: “We live only 20 miles from the German border, so it is hard to tell.”

The woman: “Have you ever been to Nederlands?”

Me: “I spent twelve hours in Amsterdam once, twenty-five years ago. But I also once spent several months driving around Europe in a Volkswagen bus that I bought from a Dutch man. It still had one of those NL country decals on the back, and at least once a day someone would come up and start speaking to me in Dutch -- so I feel like I’ve spent much more than twelve hours in Nederlands.”

They tell me they have visited America’s East Coast before, but this is their first time Out West. Eight days ago they flew from Amsterdam direct to San Francisco, and, with the exception of a visit to Muir Woods, they have spent their entire time poking around inside the city limits. They have loved San Francisco -- great food, friendly people, and the scenery, goodness! “This place is just absolutely beautiful,” says the man. They are scheduled to fly back to Amsterdam at 6 P.M. this evening -- “After we have a cup of coffee in Italy,” the woman reminds me -- but they definitely want to come back and take in the whole region. “Yesterday we tried to rent a car so we could drive out into the countryside,” says the man, “but there was not one rental car to be found in all of San Francisco. Even being a Hertz Gold Club member was not enough -- not one car available in the whole city.”

There has been nothing particularly special about this ride -- any veteran cab driver has had thousands quite like it. But this is my free ride for today. It’s late, I’m tired, I want to go have some lunch, and I haven’t given away a ride yet -- sometimes I am (sometimes we all are) just grinding it out.

My Dutch friends don’t seem to be grinding at all. They seem quite tickled about the free ride. In a few hours they’ll be airborne, headed back home, satisfied by the discovery of a delightful new place -- but right now, stepping out of Green Cab #914 in front of Caffé Roma in the heart of “Italy” -- with the jutting Pyramid Building off to their left, with Telegraph Hill rising up behind them, and with amused smiles on their faces -- they look to me like they’re having just about all the fun they can stand.

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Shades of Lovely

2010-09-01T00:10:00.001-07:00

Shift #76

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – McCoppin/Valencia to Fifth/Market -- $6.25

AFTER A FARE-LESS FIRST HOUR I do what I often do on dead Sunday mornings -- I drive to the Golden Gate Bridge, park my cab, and walk on the pedestrian sidewalk out to mid-span. I stop and lean my forearms against the iron railing, which supports my weight without even noticing.

My skin feels clammy on this muggy morning. Muggy? I’m wearing just a tee-shirt and a light pullover top, and I feel like yanking off the pullover. The chill and fog of mid-summer weren’t fatal after all. It’s good to have my preferred San Francisco back.

I’m about two hundred and twenty feet above the water. My hands are folded together out in front of me, and I’m looking past them, above them, toward the East Bay hills, where a new dawn is slowly unfolding. The sun is just now beginning to peek over the ridge tops above Oakland, and, like an artist experimenting with pigments, is dabbing various shades of lovely onto the world famous vista of which I am the merest speck. Should the water be a steely blue this morning? No, let’s go with more of a royal blue! Should those storybook white cottages on Telegraph Hill be eggshell or should they tend toward this quasi-metallic pearl, reflecting the early rays? Should the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts be marmalade, or perhaps gold, like those little nuggets which in 1849 almost instantaneously exploded a sleepy little harbor town of “five hundred and forty-nine souls” into a beehive of twenty-five thousand glaze-eyed fortune seekers?

Roughly one hundred and sixty years later, roughly one hundred thousand vehicles per day cross the Golden Gate Bridge. But early on this Sunday morning there is hardly any traffic at all. Every twenty or thirty seconds, a lone car swishes past me, and every few minutes a pod of bicyclists ticks along by, but now -- What’s this? -- another pedestrian, a woman humping a thirty-pound backpack, comes trucking down the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Mind if I ask what sort of trip you’re on?”

She stops. “Not at all -- I’m headed to Point Reyes Station.”

“Really!” I’m impressed. In 1995 I walked from the Haight-Ashbury District to Point Reyes -- forty-five miles -- but although I’ve since bragged to hundreds of people about that adventure I’ve never met anyone else who’s undertaken it.

She: “I’m hoping to do it in two days.”

Me: “Fifteen years ago I walked up to Point Reyes. I spent five days doing it, and that felt like absolute top speed. I can’t imagine sprinting through this gorgeous scenery…” -- I spread my hands like a preacher and slowly swivel around -- “in two days. You sure you want to go that fast?”

“I’m meeting someone in Point Reyes tomorrow night,” she says, and marches onward.

People spend thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to glimpse this very panorama, and it strikes me as wrong, or at least unfortunate, that someone would just rush through it. Still, no one appreciates blunt, unsolicited advice. I resume my position at the railing and scold myself for letting such pop out. Ah, well... Next time I’ll be more careful.

My eyes sweep from the Marin headlands, to Angel Island, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, past all the old bungalows and new highrises, past all the Victorians and apartment buildings, up to Twin Peaks. I find myself wondering whether there is some other city in the world where I might have found happiness, or even an acceptable level of satisfaction, while driving a taxi for twenty-five years. Honolulu and Miami have exotic appeal which I imagine quickly wearing off -- Miami’s within a month, max, I suppose, but Honolulu’s (or Kauai’s or Maui’s) might maintain theirs...two years maybe? New York City is without a doubt the big leagues of cab driving -- of so many other artistic endeavors, too -- and I would definitely like to spend a couple of weeks behind the wheel of a Manhattan taxicab just to be able to say I’d done it. But I’m sure that over the long run (and more likely, in the very short run) New York would chew me up and spit me out like a tiny little apple seed.

I ask my mind to suggest other cities I might find palatable, but a quick scan -- Seattle, Salt Lake, Denver, Dallas, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston... -- returns zero hits. I can’t imagine what sort of treachery my mind would throw at me on a slow Sunday morning in one of those other, lesser places. But if I semi-regularly found myself driving around empty in one of them, I suspect that I would before long encounter, and succumb to, some desperate moment, would suddenly find myself speeding for the nearest freeway onramp, seeking open highway and new landscapes, and aiming, like so many dreamers before me, toward California. And if I’d never seen it before -- or even if I had -- my specific destination would almost certainly be this very Golden Gate Bridge…

BACK IN THE CAB, I keep my ear on the radio and cruise through the Presidio, through the tony Seacliff neighborhood and past Robin Williams’ old pink house. (Williams had sweeping views of the Bridge and the ocean and the coastline until he recently moved to I-know-not-where -- nor why). I tell myself that someone out in the Richmond District or the Sunset will need to go to the airport, will need to go somewhere this morning, and will wind up in my backseat, but the radio stays dead. I cruise past the Palace of the Legion of Honor, past the Cliff House, and down to Ocean Beach.

I park in the exact same spot where I parked my tool-laden personal car on the morning of the first Beach Impeach event. I walk across the sand down to the surf and dip my finger into the foam at water’s edge. As I’m straightening back up I see a huge ocean animal break the surface about seventy-five yards offshore -- it’s a good twelve-to-fifteen feet long, jet black, and is moving right to left across my field of view (from Seattle down toward San Diego). It briefly shows its whole black, shiny-wet self, rotating up out of the water, counter-clockwise, as smoothly as I might twist a radio dial. And then it is gone, back beneath the blue again.

“Dolphin!” Just a few feet away from me are a couple about my age, and the woman has shrieked an ID.

“Not a shark?” I say. “Not a whale?”

“Dolphin,” she says with a confidence I don’t question.

We stand beside the fizzy surf for a while, searching the vast ocean, trading stories (they’re visiting from Holland, she’s a marine biologist), and hoping for another sighting, but there isn’t one.

AS I HEAD BACK DOWNTOWN, I promise myself that my last shift of the year -- my All-Rides-Are-Free shift -- will not be a Sunday. I want that last shift to be jumping from start to finish. We’re coming down the home stretch of the year now, and I can feel The Day coming, and I don’t want it to be one of these funereal Sunday mornings.

Three full hours after the start of my shift, I finally hit upon a string of fares. A woman flags me from the bus zone at 25th and Fulton -- she’s running late to her two-decades-and-counting gig in the choir at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church at Bush and Stiener. A Latino man is headed to work at a restaurant in the Marina -- he blasts music through his earbuds during the entire ride and doesn’t respond when I float a How are you today? toward him. A sommelier on his way to work at the Hotel Vitale agrees with my contention that Charles Shaw Merlot ($1.99 a bottle at Trader Joe’s) is as good as any just about any under-$20 bottle of red wine out there. A therapist in her fifties tells me that she’s devastated over a recent DUI that may wind up costing her her livelihood -- I’m thinking she will be my free ride today, but Body says No, which I find a bit odd.

A twenty-two-year-old, UC-Berkeley student, about to complete his degree in “social welfare,” is heading over to Noe Valley to drop in on his parents this morning.

Me: “Do they live in the house where you grew up?”

“Yes.”

Me: “I’m fifty-nine, and I’ve been driving a cab since a few years before you were born. That means you were one of those little kids I used to notice running around the Castro...” During the eighties and early nineties, I also saw gaunt, sore-ridden men walking the Castro’s streets, but they’ve long ago disappeared. “I always wondered about you kids.”

“It’s ironic,” he says. “I received my early education in human sexuality on my way to school every morning, and it was quite an education. Now I have a part-time job teaching sex-ed to grade schoolers. It doesn’t pay much, but it is interesting.”

Me: “In 1980, before I moved to San Francisco, I went to a six-day seminar up in the Sierras. There were a lot of people from San Francisco there, including many gays. I’d had no real experience with gay people before, knew nothing about them, and was kind of afraid of them. But during one of the meals, I found myself sitting next to a gay man -- very nice, very open... The seminar had a phenomenal way of getting people to open up with each other, and I took a chance and told him, ‘The things I imagine that you guys do with each other… Just thinking about that makes my stomach turn.’ We were sitting side by side, elbow to elbow, and he looked at me and said, ‘I get it.’ He didn’t try to ‘defend’ himself, didn’t try to explain anything, didn’t tell me a story. I kept expecting something more, but that was it. I get it. And it seemed like about the biggest gift I’d ever been given. In that moment, about ninety percent of the charge I had about gay people just disappeared. It totally changed, on some fundamental level, forever, how I looked at gays. What did it matter what I thought about whatever they wanted to do?”

My fare: “I have this friend who moved here from Chicago, and he was the same way. When he moved here he always felt threatened by gay men -- felt the same way you did. It took him about six years, but one day he told me, ‘I haven’t changed the way I feel -- the thought of gay sex still disgusts me -- but what I can’t imagine is why I ever cared, why I had so much energy on it. What a waste of my time!’ He couldn’t even explain where all his animosity had come from -- or why. But you grow up in the Castro, you don’t grow up with any of that.”

I’m so caught up in the conversation that Free Ride? doesn’t even occur to me until he’s already paid me and split, and I decide, in advance, to give it to the next fare, no matter who...

It’s a young couple from England on day eight of a three-week driving tour through the West. At their starting point, in Phoenix, they rented a Ford Mustang convertible and now they’ve driven it to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and along the coast highway up to Big Sur. “It was foggy some, but it was sunny a lot, too,” the woman tells me, “and we had the top down most of the way.”

This morning they’re going to catch a cable car over to Fisherman’s Wharf. Tomorrow they’ll be driving north across the Golden Gate Bridge, on their way up to Canada. They haven’t yet set eyes on The Bridge, but, says the man, “Ever since we started planning this trip I’ve been envisioning us driving across the Golden Gate with the top down and the wind blowing through our hair.”

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PENNANT FEVER

2010-09-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

Shift #77

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 -- Leavenworth/California to Baker/Geary -- $8.05

SHE OPENS THE DOOR to her apartment building just as I’m ringing the buzzer. She has short curly red hair, still glistening from her recent shower. She smiles as we exchange good mornings, and I notice that she has crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes, as do I. (Later, when we get to talking baseball, I will learn that we’re about the same age -- she’s fifty-six, and I turned fifty-nine just last week -- and she’s one of those rare passengers, someone born-and-raised in San Francisco.)

“What a beautiful morning,” she says. “Is it supposed to get hot, do you know?”

Me: “Mid-eighties, I heard.” The nine o’clock sky is an empty blue mirror -- I’ve been driving around since seven with my windows down, sweet air tickling the hair on my left forearm.

She: “It was cold for so long.”

Me: “Are you a baseball fan?”

“Not so much anymore, but I was when I was younger... Back in the days of Willie McCovey and Willie Mays.”

Me: “The Giants have been like this summer's weather -- cold and hot and cold and hot again. For the last couple of weeks they’ve been trading first place with the San Diego Padres. Last night they beat the Cubs thirteen-to-nothing and slipped back into first place by half a game.”

She: “I had no idea -- that’s ex-citing! The season must be just about over?”

Me: “Nine games left -- pennant fever time. The last three games are against San Diego, here, next weekend. I have a 13-year-old daughter, and we’re going to one of those games. Have you been to the new stadium?”

“Yes. What a beautiful place. But I haven’t been there in years. My dad took my older brother to Candlestick a lot, but he hardly ever took me or my sister. I didn’t really start going until I was about twenty.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

She: “Yes -- and then to rub salt, my brother kidnapped the baseball card collection my sister and I kept -- and we had some really good ones!”

Me: “Really! I have two younger brothers, and one of them kidnapped my baseball card collection -- I’m not even sure which one of them has it. Actually, ownership is a little murky -- my brothers collected, too, but I started before they did. Over the years, our mother threw out most of them, but we managed to keep a stack of the best ones. I think we have a Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris card in there. Did your brother have any sort of reasonable claim…?”

She: “No! They’re ours! He’s just throwing his big brother weight around. They’re ours!”

Me: “Aghh! Big brothers... What can you do?”

When we stop on Baker Street, I turn around: “Everyday I give away one free ride. Today, this is my free ride.”

She: “No…”

But I know exactly how to end this conversation: “This is for all those games you didn’t get to go to -- and for the baseball cards.”

She smiles at me so widely that she looks like a little kid -- maybe thirteen years old. “Oh, thank you,” she says. And then she steps out into the shade of a healthy green oak tree on Baker Street, on a bright beautiful day in San Francisco, in the heart and the heat of pennant season.

Go Giants!

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* * Hey Jack, Ker-o-ack! * *

2010-09-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

Shift #78

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 -- Desolation Peak -- What’s it matter?

ACHING SHOULDERS and tingly arms-forearms-hands wake me up. Digital red alarm clock numbers say 4:32 and I lie there for a while thinking how all the typing I’ve done over the years is catching up to me and My god will I ever be able to write again without it hurting me? If not, wouldn’t that be the shits! Already it’s the shits, something you love actually bringing you physical pain... It’s been heading this way for years and years, and I’ve been trying to figure out some way to dodge it, but here it is, waking me up in the night hurting so much. And if I can’t write, how will I find out Who am I? I think thoughts like this until about five and then I’m up feeding the dog Maggie and checking what the sportswriters are saying about my Giants’ ugly stumble in Colorado last night that knocks us back out of first place, half a game behind those damn Padres. Bottom of the ninth big Troy Tulowitzki double off the wall against our All-Star closer Brian Wilson. I put on baggy shorts, my first “shorts day” of the year, supposed to be a hot one. Thank God we’ve finally got summer arriving here finally for what seems like for real finally on September 26. I drive across the Bay Bridge in the dark, moon just two days past full, thinking about my arms and how I definitely should do more exercises and isn’t it too ironic that for nearly three decades I used to do yoga and stretching every day and now that I probably need all that good flexibility stuff more than ever I just can’t hardly make myself do it but about one day a week and only if it hurts real bad that day. At the cab lot there’s another Green Cab driver, Austin, who travels to Asia and Mexico all the time and lately he’s been reading my first book and now he tells me he wants “a case of them” to give as gifts to people he knows. I say Oh my that’s a lot of books, I’ll see what I can do because it’s out of print. And then I’m in my cab and there’s a radio order at Castro and Army a guy standing in the dark on the street in front of his house says he saw my headlights coming over the hill from Market Street, watched me the last ten-twelve blocks, says I had my high beams on the whole way but I don’t think I did. They’re not on now. I don’t ever mention my own writing to him, but it turns out he himself has written a book about the markings on coins and on bars of precious metals or something, it’s kind of a specialty book, he’s got some followers in the world of precious metals who think his book is pretty essential, costs $8.05 I think he said, odd number, and I can find it if I google hallmark research institute. I say that ten years ago the word google didn’t even mean anything to anyone and isn’t it amazing how fast we’re flying along through the twenty-first century 2010 already, which pretty much derails the conversation but we’re already there at the Alemany Street flea market where my fare likes to poke around on Sunday mornings -- $8.05 on the meter, how about that. The flea market’s already messy with people stumbling around in the still-dark 6:15 morning, but now I’m speeding down the freeway after a radio call for a woman named Marianna -- Mah-ree-AH-nah says the dispatcher -- waiting at the Glen Park BART station. She’s going to her clerk job at some store at the Potrero Center at Sixteenth and Bryant and since she doesn’t usually work on Sundays she didn't know BART doesn’t run early today so now I’m driving her. We’re quiet, I don’t know what she’s thinking but it’s probably about money, she’s very young and small and Latina and she works as a clerk and probably doesn’t make much money so she’s probably thinking about how much this is going to cost her all because of BART, and me I’m quiet too only thinking about how my arms ache all the time every day now dammit and How in the world am I going to get through this pain crisis like I got through my two-three years of screaming banshee back pain twenty years ago and who the hell will I be if I can’t write anymore? And wouldn’t my friends who are sick from cancer or Parkinson’s or mysteriously losing their voices and can’t speak but a whisper or the one who are in wheelchairs and nursing homes -- my own age! -- wouldn’t they just snort if they heard me griping about a little problem with my arms and some bogus hollow existential dramas? But there ain’t no problems like your own problems, and no matter how much I try to feel bad for those other people I feel worse for myself and now I laugh because for sure we’re all going to die anyway and I think we’re all probably I hope going to have a good laugh after we do, and when we get to the end of the ride I tell MaryAhnah that it’s a free ride and she scoots forward up to the edge of the back seat and sits up real straight like she’s in full lotus position and she says soft and sweet, “Really?” I can tell this is wonderful news to her and when I say Yes, Really she says Thank You and just then I hear a radio call back over at Seventeenth and Shotwell and I do a U-turn so that I pass right by MaryAhnah as she’s walking off to her store and she waves to me and smiles real big and sweet and I beep and speed off before anyone else can beat me to the order. But nobody does and there he is a thirty-two-year-old white guy with glasses and some sort of soft cap on his head who for the last six years has been a “surgical tech” at a hospital up in Napa and yesterday he drove down for Oktoberfest with some friends who are all still asleep and last night he left his car over by the ballpark and now he needs to go get it and when I ask him about his hospital work, has he already seen everything there is to see? He says Yep pretty much he has seen it all but just last week they had to amputate somebody’s toe and, strange, that sure made his stomach squirm. I tell him I once asked the same sort of question to a head-neck surgeon who told me he remembered being in med school and one day he and forty-nine other head-neck surgeon wannabes were all led into a refrigerated lab where there were fifty severed human heads sitting up on fifty tables waiting for all of them to practice on, staring ’em down, and he’s never going to forget that sight. Down by the ballpark we can see that the sun is just starting to twirl an orange flamenco skirt above the East Bay hills, the bay water is flat no-wind and the air is already a little toasty and you know it’s going to be hot and I’m glad I wore my shorts today. I drive through downtown, through the financial district where all the cab stands at all the hotels are all full barely even seven o’clock and I drive up Pine Street to the shi-shi Upper Fillmore part of Pacific Heights where there is still a light mist in the air and even though down by the ballpark it might have felt the way it feels at the beginning of a summer scorcher in Tucson or Dallas or Tulsa up here in Pacific Heights it’s cooler and pleasant like you want San Francisco to be and I can see that out toward Ocean Beach there’s just a little scrap of fog still. I park and go into Peet’s and buy a five-buck latte with a half pump of hazelnut and half pump vanilla and then walk across the street (newsrack headline says Legal Marijuana Looking Good in Polls) to Noah’s Bagels and buy a four-buck whole wheat sesame toasted with cream cheese and tomatoes and heated-up mushrooms and spinach please and go sit behind the wheel of Green Cab #914 listening to the dispatcher who isn’t saying much of anything today and my cabulous phone is dead quiet too and I eat and I sip my latte and I read the last ten pages of Dharma Bums which I’ve never read before. I’ve read Kerouac before, On The Road, but that was decades back and now I’m wondering just like I did decades ago How did this guy get published? He’s such a careless haphazard writer, no craft at all just a stream of any old thing he might be thinking, any old thing he wants to say like he was getting paid by the word or the random thought, no editing grammar punctuation like he just tipped his rucksack upside down and shook it and then popped all the drugs that tumbled out and now he’s remembering places he hitchhiked and mountains he sat on top of and parties he and a bunch of his friends had with jugs of wine where most everybody was naked. And I’m thinking, How hard is that? because I’ve been to my share of places and I’ve hitchhiked way more than my share of miles and I’ve sat on much higher mountaintops and I’ve danced at parties with my friends naked and big old jugs of wine -- I mean this Kerouac stuff, it’s like he’s stealing, it’s too easy -- like photography click-click where’s my money? But reading all his lame stories and all his lame musings on Enlightenment is mostly just embarrassing because he was writing all these things when I was five years old when every father in my neighborhood had a crewcut and went off to work for the government every morning and had two or maybe three weeks off every year and spent the other forty-nine or fifty weeks dreaming about climbing mountains and dreaming about seeing more than one woman naked at a time and lying in a meadow with a jug of wine on a bright afternoon and thinking any old damn thing he pleases instead of How’m I gonna get all four of these damn kids through college? It’s almost like Kerouac saw this crazy space and opened it up just a crack and a few years later all these hippie kids just like me, all these sons and daughters of straitjacket 1950s adults just like my parents, we hippie kids suddenly poured through that crack into that crazy space and attacked the world with our drug-filled backpacks and our crazy hair thinking we were doing something new and daring that had never been done before, but Kerouac had already done it all and had already gone ahead and written about all of it. Most all the places he’s writing about I realize are places I’ve been to now, like hiking in Marin or living in Oakland or watching the rocks at Rioanji Temple in Kyoto or hitchhiking all over this-land-is-your-land or going to Mexico -- hell, I went to San Miguel de Allende to write a book but Kerouac was already there thirty-five years before me. I moved to the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest and chopped down trees and built a log cabin but two decades before I even thought about doing that Kerouac spent a summer in a lookout tower on Desolation Peak in Washington state and if he had real good Forest Service binoculars he might’ve probably looked over into Idaho down at the meadow (both photos at right) where I built my cabin twenty years before I built it. Right now it’s too early to call my friend Blake in Corvallis or I would call him because just a couple of weeks ago in Yosemite Blake and I were sitting naked in the sun next to an icy snowmelt river we’d both just climbed out of and he pointed up to a far-off mountain and said, “That’s the mountain Kerouac and Gary Snyder climbed in Dharma Bums -- you should read it -- you might like it.” So as much as I fancy I’m not as lazy a writer as Kerouac and as much as I envy his fame and success mostly what I feel on this too-early-to-call-Blake-morning is just embarrassment. Every thought I ever thought, every place I’ve ever been, every thing I’ve ever done it’s all a repeat. And now outfront of Noah’s Bagels on Fillmore Street I read Kerouac’s last ten pages and think What a fraud I am! It’s clear like a prison searchlight pointing right in my eyes every thought I’ve ever thought has already been thought by at least a billion people, every place I’ve ever been has already been trampled over by at least a billion billion more and then written about by at least half a billion billion of them. Every hope and dream I’ve ever hoped and dreamed has already been endlessly hoped and endlessly dreamed, and every ache and pain I’ve ever ached and pained has already been ached and pained by a zillion zillion others. How did I ever delude myself that it was possible I might ever do something original? Save the world? Make some difference? Write a book that’ll always be remembered? All I’m going to do on this plane of existence is breathe some as-yet-uncertain number of breaths and then move on maybe to some other plane or to nowhere and nothing at all. I think again about calling Blake, but it’s too early, he’s got his family house full of kids and who really wants a call from some cab driver in San Francisco talking this kind of crap at 7:30 on any morning? But it’s definitely embarrassing reading all these stories about hitchhiking and traveling and Kerouac’s sophomoric enlightenment musings, just like mine, but maybe better. I’m so upset, really, that I switch on my gas-electric-hybrid engine and glide Green Cab #914 up Fillmore Street thinking I might just swing down through the Marina, maybe catch an airport fare off the radio, and if I don’t catch an airport fare I might just head on out to the Golden Gate Bridge and if I feel like it I might just keep on driving across and go on up to Desolation Peak or over to Idaho to visit my old cabin (right), but if I don’t feel like it I might just park on this side of the bridge and either get out and walk to the middle the way I sometimes do on slow Sunday mornings or else I’ll just sit there and look up at the bridge and dictate some of these Jack Kerouac thoughts of mine to my laptop. But when I hit the crest of Pacific Heights and I’m looking out between the Broadway mansions and down the ski jump steep part of Fillmore Street I see that even though the mist and fog have burned off from the whole city now, the Bridge itself is still smothered by a big tube of fog that’s pouring right through the Golden Gate and screaming across the Bay like one of those freight trains Kerouac hopped and which I never did, it’s big and fat and white and up above there’s nothing but more big and fat and blue and underneath there’s a bright stripe of the Marina green but all I can see of the bridge is the very tops of the two red towers sticking up out of Kerouac’s creamy freight train. If I park by the bridge I’ll just be sitting in fog. I look up the hill at Nancy Pelosi’s house which sometimes I drive past to count how many newspapers are scattered on her front sidewalk when she’s in DC or to look and see if the Secret Service is sitting out front inside one of their tinted black SUVs. But my heart’s not in any of that and I turn back toward downtown and drive through the Tenderloin until I’m flagged by a woman on Taylor at Geary right beside the Hilton Towers and first blink I think prostitute. She’s wearing a catchy little black and white schoolgirl thing that also kind of looks like a sailor’s outfit and she’s got a tough little face but she’s not wearing any makeup like most hookers I see so maybe she isn’t one after all. She says she needs to go to Seventh and Howard and when I start with my questions she tells me she was “born right up there at UCSF and raised right here in San Francisco” and the farthest away she has ever traveled is Arizona. She asks me how long I’ve been driving a cab and I give her my line about “I just started…twenty-five years ago” and she laughs and asks don’t I ever get tired of all the drunks and I say no not really. I don’t say Are you drunk and I don’t say Are you a prostitute and I don’t tell her that I’m so fucking sick-tired of my goddam arms hurting that I could cry and then we’re on Sixth Street, the old skid row Kerouac wrote about in Dharma Bums, I think he bought donuts there sometime when he was drunk one night, and suddenly I hear my little tough-faced schoolgirl’s voice coming from way down low like she’s maybe on the floor of my cab “I didn’t know you were going to go down Sixth Street!” I turn around and look and see that she has slid down as far as she can, she’s flat on her back on the backseat looking up at me with her no-makeup face like she’s laying down in some pine needle soft clearing in the woods or something but the important thing is that her head is not sticking up above the window frame any more so no one on Sixth Street can see her going past in a cab so now I know she really is a hooker and she’s hiding from her hooker friends or her pimp or whoever but she doesn’t want me to know so she tells me a different story. She says, “I don’t like Sixth Street” and I say “Oh really” and she says “Some of the people here are crazy -- some girl tried to jump me here last night for no reason at all” and I say “Oh really” and she says, “No reason at all -- women in San Francisco are unpredictable and scandalous.” And I say, “Oh, say that again. Please.” And she says it again, “Women in San Francisco are unpredictable and scandalous.” We only have another two blocks to Seventh and Howard and the whole time I’m repeating it to myself, and I’m thinking Jesus Christ my arms ache and at the same time I’m telling myself don’t forget her words unpredictable and scandalous, those are original words, I’ve been alive for fifty-nine years and eleven days and my arms have been aching for seven or eight years already, and in all that time I’ve never heard those same words put together in that particular order.

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Secret Beach

2010-08-01T00:06:00.001-07:00

Shift #64

SUNDAY, AUGUST 1 -- Bay/Laguna to Moscone Center -- $10.30

FOR WEEKS NOW the number one topic of conversation in my cab (also in my neighborhood, and in the rest of my personal life, and inside my head) has been this summer’s freaking foggy weather. It’s a landslide -- the Giants posted the best record in the major leagues during July (during one stretch they won twenty out of twenty-five games), and although they’ve been the talk of the baseball world, they are not even close to pushing aside the weather.

People, including me for sure, seem to regard the fog as a personal insult. There is a collective consensus that some sort of “breach of contract” has been committed by someone, somewhere, and that some sort of class action lawsuit is undoubtedly called for. But no one really, after all, wants to get into a legal wrangling with God, and the more reasonable among us have been cautioning that we should just wait and see -- July often is a little iffy, perhaps August will be different. Yes, August should be different…

But here it is, August 1, the very time of year when blue skies are virtually guaranteed in San Francisco. But no -- overhead this morning we’ve got the same dirty gray blanket that’s been slung over the City for the past month. Plus, it seems as though an unseen hand has laid a heavy comforter on top of the whole mess -- maybe two comforters. Life here is starting to feel like the movie “Groundhog Day” -- the same dreary scenario repeating itself over and over and over...

FOR NEARLY AN HOUR AND A HALF I drive around empty, but seconds after I turn toward Noah’s Bagels on Chestnut Street to grab a second cup (a sheer boredom cup) of coffee, I am flagged by two early-thirties blond women who are here to attend the big annual Gift Show at Moscone. They met in college, at the University of Virginia, and a few years ago decided to open their own jewelry business. I eavesdrop halfheartedly while they discuss their competition, the level of foot traffic at the show (slower than they had imagined), and their strategy for ramping up sales, but when they start griping about the fog my ears prick up. And then one of them makes the mistake of asking me if it’s always like this during August.

Me: “This is my twenty-ninth summer in the Bay Area, and I promise you I have never seen any summer even remotely like this one. I live across the Bay, over in Oakland, and in Oakland we have always counted on having mostly clear blue skies from morning until night from April right on into November. From Oakland we often look smugly across the Bay at the fog hanging over San Francisco, but not this big fat heavy fog, and not every darned day. For the past month I’ve been stepping out the front door of my house about five-thirty in the morning and I have to strain to see the top of the palm tree at the end of my street. And forget about blue skies -- sometimes the fog doesn't burn off all day long. For days in a row!”

One of the women: “It’s been so hot and humid back East this summer. If I had to pick one or the other, I guess I’d pick the cool."

Me: “I probably would, too… But we’re all ready for some sun around here!”

The other woman: “I guess I’d rather be here than down in Louisiana skimming oil off the beach…”

And that shuts me up -- temporarily.

One woman starts talking about a warm, sunny trip to Hawaii that she and her surfer-husband took not so long ago. At the mention of Kauai, an involuntary whimper escapes me, and in a moment I’m telling one of my stories:

“There is a beach on the north side of Kauai -- it’s called Secret Beach, even though it’s not really a secret. About twenty years ago someone told my wife and me about it, and now I’ve been back a few times. You have to hike down a hundred-foot cliff to reach it, and that keeps a lot of people away. It’s about half a mile long, and the beach -- perfect white sand -- extends out from the base of the cliff for about a hundred yards. You’ve both been to Hawaii…? Then you know the colors and the light and the air and how intoxicating it all can be… When you’re sitting on Secret Beach watching people body surf, you see these huge waves sweep in and lift them up ten feet in the air, and the water’s so clear that you see right through the wave -- all you see is the shape of the surfer. Plus there are dolphins that swim into the bay every few days to play with people. They don’t come right up to everyone -- I swam out, but they never did come up to me -- but they’d swim right up to some of the people who’d been coming there a long time...

“At the base of that big cliff there’s a spot where water comes pouring out of the rock -- it’s rain water that’s filtered down from the mountains at the top of the island, through the layers of rock, and by the time it gets to you it’s pure, perfectly drinkable, and it comes out of the cliff at about shower-nozzle-height, at about shower-nozzle-speed. You can drink it, you can shower in it -- you almost never see anyone wearing clothes on Secret Beach. (Note: That’s me in the above photo, taken by my wife on Secret Beach sometime in the early 1990s.)

“If you climb back up the cliff, there’s a little market about a mile inland -- so you can live pretty simply there for a long time, for not very much money at all. Once I spent three weeks camping there, and I met people who’d been living in little shelters in the nearby jungle for two years… six months… eight years -- Europeans backpackers, dropouts from the States, or three-week guys like me. Even a few single women. One guy I met had been a high school teacher somewhere back East and when he found this beach, six years earlier, he just never went home...”

As we pull up in front of Moscone, under our dirty gray blanket and our pile of heavy comforters, I apologize for having gone off.

Both women: “Oh no, that was great…”

One of them: “I’d rather be there today than here…”

The other: “I wanna go, too…”

Nonetheless, I’d talked too much: Free Ride.

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

* * MANU IN AMERICA! * *

2010-08-01T00:05:00.001-07:00

Shift #65

Friday, August 6 -- SFO to the city of Belmont -- $29.85

FARES LIKE THIS ONE come along only once or twice a year -- or, during many years, not at all.

He strolls confidently out of the International Terminal, wheeling a small suitcase behind him and with a bag slung over one shoulder. He’s in his mid-twenties, handsome, with skin the color of cinnamon, and thick black hair newly brushcut to about an inch and a half in length. He’s wearing a fresh cardinal-red polo shirt and designer blue jeans -- he’s the whole package, meticulously assembled.

Me: “Good afternoon.”

He: “Yes, good afternoon.” He has an Indian accent. “Do you know the Summerfield Suites in the city of Belmont?”

Me: “Right across from the Oracle campus?”

He: “Yes -- that’s it. And may I pay with an American Express Card?”

Me: “Absolutely.” (Most San Francisco taxi drivers, including me, now accept most credit cards.)

He settles into the backseat and, slowly, tentatively, breathes, “Toy-o-tah Pree-uss -- yes?”

The way he draws it out, I think maybe he’s recalling Toyota’s bad publicity from earlier this year. I say: “Yes. It’s a great car. I love it.”

He: “Is it electric?”

Me: “It’s a gas-electric hybrid.”

He: “I wrote a paper on the Toyota Prius... In 2004.” Long before the scandal.

I ask: “Have you ridden in a Prius before?”

He: “No. This is my first time. Actually, this is my first time ever to see one.”

Until now he has seemed so self-assured and worldly that I’ve assumed he’s one of the many Indian immigrants who’ve entrenched themselves in the Silicon Valley computer industry over the past couple of decades.

Me: “You are from India?”

He: “Yes. India.”

Me: “Are you coming from India just now?”

He: “Yes.”

Me: “Is this your first time to San Francisco?”

He: “Yes.”

Me: “First time to America?”

He: “Yes.”

I absolutely love being the first American a foreigner meets post-Customs. Cab drivers are frequently referred to as “The Ambassadors of the City,” but we also often function as ambassadors for the entire country -- I’ve had maybe fifty “newcomer” fares over the years. I turn, look back, extend my hand over the backseat. “Welcome to America!”

Our newest arrival shakes my hand and allows himself a slight smile: “Thank you. What is your good name?”

“Brad. And yours?”

“Brad…” He rolls my name around in his mouth. “Brad... Mine is Manu.”

Manu says he is a software engineer, employed by Oracle in New Delhi for four years now. He’s come to the States for some specialized training, will stay at the Summerfield Suites for five weeks, and then return home. This is the first time any member of Manu’s family has ever set foot outside of India. He has a younger brother and sister. His father works as a “civil servant.” When I ask about his mother, Manu says, “I lost my mother… Twenty years ago… She got sick and died… Yes, thank you.”

Had Manu been nervous about coming to America?

“Not at all,” he says. “Is there something I should be nervous about?”

Me: “No -- just the ‘normal’ nervousness about leaving everything familiar behind. I was twenty-two when I first left America. I was very nervous -- but I had no job and no money, and you don’t have to worry about those things.”

Manu: “No.”

Me: “I imagine that your family might be a little worried? The oldest son, the big brother... He’s gone off to America!”

Manu, soberly: “Yes. They will be worried.”

Me: “I have visited India twice, and I was nervous before I went -- especially the first time.”

Manu: “When was this?”

Me: “In 1982 and 1988 -- a long time ago.”

Manu: “What parts did you see?”

Me: “Delhi, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Goa… Oh, and Varanasi -- my favorite.”

Manu: “There have been so many changes. Things are better now.””

Me: “People often tell me that, but I’m not sure what they mean. Better in what way? Newer?”

Manu: “Yes, newer. Buildings, cars... There are many more cars all the time now.”

I do not believe that more cars will possibly be a good thing for India, or for any place. I say: “I would like to go back and see for myself. If I do, will I still see cows in the streets and millions of poor people everywhere?”

Manu: “Oh, yes. We still have those…”

Me: “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

“No.”

Me: “It’s right over those hills.” I point to our right.

“Really?” Manu studies the green coastal range for a few moments. Today’s sky is the famous California blue, but a low, almost unnoticeable, stripe of bright white fog hovers at the ridgetop. I wonder if Manu’s ever seen fog before, but I find myself hoping he doesn’t ask me about it. How do you explain fog?

Manu: “I may need a taxi later in my stay. Might you be available?”

I tell him that I’m only licensed to pick up passengers at the airport or in the city of San Francisco, which is about 20 miles back up the freeway now, but I’m sure that one of the taxi drivers from Belmont will be happy to help him. Does he drive a car?

Manu: “Yes, but everything is on the other side. I think I will probably not try it very soon here.”

Me: “I’m fifty-eight. May I ask how old you are?”

Manu: “Less than half. Twenty-seven.” Hahff.

A couple of blocks from the Summerfield we stop behind a gleaming, silver gasoline tanker whose entire backside is an enormous oval mirror, convex, so that our reflection is enlarged as in a fun house mirror. As I make a slow turn to the left, I see the image of our green-and-white-checked Toyota Prius, a long, distorted side view, from the front of the snub-nosed hood all the way down the tapered back. The cab looks huge, as though it’s been blown up and we’re now seeing ourselves on a big, garish roadside billboard. The front seat area is obscured in shadowy darkness -- I can’t see myself -- but at the right rear window it’s easy to see Manu, life-sized plus a bit, in full color, and smiling broadly.

Me: “Look -- there’s Manu in America!”

It cannot be denied. He laughs: “Aghh -- yes!”

IN FRONT OF THE SUMMERFIELD, as Manu is sliding his American Express card from his wallet, I place his luggage at his feet.

Manu: “How much…?”

But I cut him off: “Welcome to America, Manu -- this is a free ride.”

I reach my hand out toward him -- he takes it, and we shake again, but I know he is not yet understanding -- of course not. He’s looking at my face, expectant, awaiting my pronouncement of the total.

Me: “This is a free ride, Manu. Welcome to America -- it has been my pleasure to meet you. I don’t want any money. ”

As this sinks in, a shot of panic shows on Manu’s face. “No, please…” He had imagined his journey correctly up to this point: the long flight, the customs agents, the cab to the hotel -- but not this free ride business. “No please,” he says, holding out his credit card. This wasn’t in the script. “Please. Take the money…”

I step back. “Many people in India were very kind to me, Manu. This is my way of saying thank you.”

The panic recedes from his face, but it’s not okay yet. “You should have the money… Please.”

“It’s more fun this way,” I tell him, smiling. “And no one will ever believe it…”

His eyebrows lift. His mouth falls open and freezes that way. He sees the truth in my words -- no one ever will believe this -- back home it will sound like he has gone off to America and learned the telling of tall tales, and maybe this worries him a bit. He wants to say something to me, but he doesn’t know what. He’s out of his element. New Delhi is far, far away.

Me: “...but you and I will know it's true.”

I wish for a camera. The photo would show Manu standing in his red polo shirt in bright sunshine at the entrance to the Summerfield Suites lobby. His hands are extended out to his sides, palms up -- in one hand is his credit card, in the other his wallet. His knees are slightly bent and his feet seem to be groping the ground in search of something solid. There is no danger that he’s going to buckle, but he does look dumbstruck. His mouth is still open, although no noise is coming out -- yet. And now he’s smiling.

Me: “If you were to pay me for this ride, Manu, I would never remember it, and you probably wouldn’t either. But this way, I think we’ll both remember it forever.”

He straightens. He nods. His arms drop toward the ground, and now he starts to laugh. His head tips back so that he’s looking up at the California sky, then it rocks forward so that he’s looking down at the Belmont asphalt. His laugh is all the payment I could ever hope for, and now he pays me over and over again and tips me handsomely on top of it. I can’t restrain myself either -- and why would I? -- and now we’re both roaring at each other, just like when former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was in my cab. There is something universal, something compelling and very touching about the free ride.

I leave Manu standing there in the Summerfield’s driveway, his bags at his feet, a huge holy-shit smile on his face. Through my open window I call out once more, “Welcome to America, Manu!”

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

La Migra!

2010-08-01T00:04:00.001-07:00

Shift #66

SUNDAY, AUGUST 8 -- Sixteenth/Mission to Twenty-Fourth/Noe

MY FIRST EIGHT PASSENGERS ARE CITIZENS OF: Morocco, Israel, Ukraine, Noe Valley, Tunisia, Canada, Ecuador, and Mexico. Five of the eight complain with great gusto about the weather:

-- The man from Morocco says the fog has ruined his two-week vacation. Where is California’s famous sunshine? its surfers? its bikinis? He wishes he could apply for a refund, but where?

-- The woman from Israel says she could have gone to a resort on the Red Sea -- would have saved a lot of money, too.

-- The man from Tunisia is wearing a brand new heavy sweatshirt with San Francisco emblazoned across the chest. He speculates that our number one local summertime industry has got to be the sweatshirt industry.

-- The woman from Noe Valley says that she recently relocated from the Marina District because she had heard, and had even experienced, that Noe Valley was consistently the sunniest, warmest neighborhood in San Francisco. But not this summer -- there’s been nothing remotely warm and nothing vaguely sunny about this summer -- not even in Noe Valley!

-- The woman from Ukraine hasn’t seen the sun since she arrived a week ago. She drove up the coast from Los Angeles expecting that throughout the fabled Big Sur region she would be inspired by vistas of steep green oak-studded hillsides dropping with great drama down to an endless blue ocean. She imagined herself passing occasionally through stretches of gigantic, soaring redwoods spiked with arrows of golden light. Instead she only remembers being focused, for one-hundred miles, on the center-line of a twisting, two-lane, RV-choked highway. Instead of the great feelings of expansiveness she had anticipated feeling in California, she had experienced troubling hallucinations in which she had been shrunken down to a tiny size, and had been trapped in an air bubble inside a batch of suds. “Like in washing machine!” And whenever she did encounter a forest, she saw only the trunks of trees; “Never tree topes! Tree topes are always heed-en up een-side fog...” (I commiserate by telling her, exaggerating only slightly, that my wife and daughter and I went camping near Half Moon Bay earlier this week and nearly froze to death -- and we never saw the sun either!)

On the other hand:

-- The Ecuadorian man moved to San Francisco six months ago, swears he loves every last little thing about the place, and says, “Hell will freeze over before I complain about a little fog.”

-- The man from Canada says, “You want to see some really crappy weather? You come visit Nova Scotia.”

-- And the man from Mexico never mentions the weather at all: He tells me he arrived in San Francisco three years ago from the state of Quintana Roo, looking for work. He quickly found a job busing tables at a restaurant in the Financial District, a job he is hanging onto for dear life and for as long as he can…

At least I think that’s what he’s saying. Soon after he gets in, we switch to Spanish, which seems to go smoother. He asks where I learned my Spanish, and I tell him high school and college, and then later, in Switzerland, where I spent two months washing dishes at a train station restaurant where all my co-workers were guest workers from Spain. Also, I’d spent the year 1990 living in the little town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. But, I tell him, my Spanish has grown very rusty, so I really appreciate being able to practice with people in my cab.

He says I don’t need any practice, but I assure him that if I listen to two native speakers yakking away, or if I listen to a Spanish radio station, I catch only about one word out of twenty. If my Spanish sounds half-decent, it’s only because, in my cab, I’ve said all these very same things I’m saying right now about a thousand times already. I can get you where you’re going, I can sometimes keep up my end of a very simple conversation, but only when people speak very slowly.

Apparently he doesn’t understand or doesn’t believe me, as he begins speaking in a rapid-fire staccato which quickly gathers speed. The gist:

He says that San Francisco is a good place, because people without papers (“personas sin papeles”) are treated pretty well here. In San Francisco personas sin papeles do not worry so much about the Immigration and Naturalization Service (“La Migra”) knocking on their doors. But my fare has amigos who’ve been to other American cities, like Albuquerque and Phoenix, and they report that La Migra is a constant worry. It used to be that if La Migra sent you back home, it wasn’t too big a deal (no importa nada). But now my fare won’t even consider attempting a visit to his wife and kids (esposa y ninos) because getting back to San Francisco is much more difficult and much more dangerous (peligroso) than it used to be, and much more expensive (muy muy cara) -- these days los coyotes are charging five thousand dollares to sneak one person across the border. O possible mas! My fare has a friend who paid five thousand dollares to one of those damned coyotes and then La Migra got him anyway -- two days after the friend arrived in Tucson, La Migra sent him not just back across the border, but all the way back to Ciudad Mexico (Mexico City)!

When I tell my fare that I give (yo doy) one free ride every day (un viaje gratis cada dia), his smile (sonrisa) is so sweet (dulce) that no translation is needed.

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

* * How To Pick Up Women * *

2010-08-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Shift #67

FRIDAY, AUGUST 13 – California/Hyde to California/Drumm -- $5.80

COMING OF AGE, I had no small talk. Even around my boy pals I could barely croak out a word, much less float an opinion or spin a joke or a tale. I was particularly flustered around girls, and girls, most sensibly, created a fairly impenetrable no-fly zone around me. I never read one of those “How To Pick Up Women” books, but I used to puzzle over the advertisements for them and wonder…

I loosened up as I got older, of course, but I never exactly became easy around women until I started driving a cab. Cab driving quickly got me to believing I could talk with just about anyone about just about anything. And certainly one of the great, overlooked, undervalued, but very real perks of my job is that it allows me (in truth, it almost forces me) to hang out with pretty young women in whose company I would never otherwise find myself. How to pick up women? I could write a book…

SHE IS STANDING at the corner of California and Leavenworth, waiting for a cab to take her to her office twelve blocks down California Street. She could easily have jumped onto a cable car -- the California Line runs the whole length of her commute -- but the old trolleys rumble along slowly, stop at nearly every corner, and would add ten full minutes to her trip. A few bucks for a cab is, as the kids say, a no-brainer.

She’s young (twenty-three I will learn), blond, pretty without seeming to be aware of or concerned about that, and I immediately sense a warmth from her. She isn’t displaying the early-morning grumpies, she’s not punching at an iphone, she doesn’t stiffarm my complaints about the weather.For the past few weeks, whenever I step from my cab I have the irrational sense that if I stand fully upright I might bump my head on the psychological low ceiling. As we reach the crest of Nob Hill, I point out how the top three-quarters of Grace Cathedral are lost, smothered in fog -- only the base is visible. My fare allows that all the cloudiness has bothered her too, but she doesn’t seem so annoyed by it as I am. She misses the sunshine, but it’ll be back, she says. It’ll all work out…

As we glide past the cluster of Nob Hill icons -- The Huntington Hotel, the Pacific Union Club, the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins hotels -- we can barely glimpse the Bay Bridge. It’s straight ahead of us and usually presents a dramatic view, but today we have to strain our eyes to make out cars and trucks creeping along the upper and lower decks -- the bridge’s towers are invisible, swathed in cotton candy.

We drop steeply down California Street for six blocks, through Chinatown, past the red bricks of old St. Mary’s Church, past the fifty-story Bank of America tower, and roll onto the flat, six-block run through the Financial District. My fare says that for nearly two years she has been working in the Latin America and Caribbean division of workforce-dot-com. No, she hasn’t visited those parts of the world yet, but she certainly wants to -- as soon as she can find the time… Every day she is thankful for having been able to find a job right out of college, and for not having been laid off, as has happened to several of her friends.

The warmth I felt earlier has infused my whole gut. It’s more than my free ride feeling, but not exactly a sexual feeling -- I don’t think. It’s just a fifty-eight-year old man’s gratitude for being allowed to bask for a few minutes in the effortless glow of youth. Then again, how does one distinguish between the various warmths one feels? I’ve come to regard my own warmths as awarenesses of various possibilities. My free ride feeling is, in essence, an awareness of the possibility of a world where money isn’t such a tyrannical bully. And tinglings of attraction -- aren’t those just awareness of the possible lives that might result from our acting on our physical impulses?

In front of 101 California, I pull into an open parking spot, turn around, and inform my fare that her ride is free today. She gives me a pleasant, easy smile. She thanks me and offers her name, asks mine, extends her hand, and again thanks me with a warmth that seems genuine, heartfelt.

I drive off examining that word heartfelt. I spot heart and felt rather quickly, and then I spot he trying to hide in plain sight. And finally I spot art, thrown in as a kind of bonus.

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* * MY FIRST STRIPPER (in a long while) * *

2010-08-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

Shift #68

SUNDAY, AUGUST 22 – Colombus/Kearny to Sutter/Leavenworth -- $6.70

WHEN I WAS IN SIXTH GRADE, my younger brother Scott came home from school one landmark afternoon with the thrilling news that the father of one his classmates was employed at a strip club in Washington, D.C., where his duties consisted entirely of “raking up clothes for strippers.” Our jubilation died when, several days later, Mr. Mills was “outed” as a medical doctor. Nonetheless, the world of the stripper has remained, for me, as it for our whole global culture, a subject of endless fascination.

I’ve never actually visited a strip club. (Thirty-five years ago, during an innocent little educational junket in Las Vegas, I was flummoxed to note -- during a quick, informal estimate I conducted personally -- that the body of the cocktail server breathing Can I get you anything? into my ear, was ninety-eight percent naked.) But during my eighteen years as a night driver, I routinely transported strippers (they often prefer the term “dancers”) home from their shifts in the clubs around North Beach and along Market Street or over at the infamous Mitchell Brothers’ Theatre on O’Farrell Street. But for several years now, I’ve driven day shift, where conversations with stripper/dancers are much more rare.

IN THE PREDAWN MISTS SWIRLING THROUGH NORTH BEACH, I spot my first dancer in a long while, standing in front of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club on Kearny Street.

The stereotypical stripper is a tough, fleshy old broad with a gravelly, smoke-ravaged voice, but I have chatted with at least a hundred strippers and have yet to encounter the stereotype. From a distance, this one is a sleek, curvy silhouette barely visible in the fog, head turned my way, slender arm held in the air, still, her hand raised, open. As she approaches my door, I see that she is blond, young, on the short side, and on the lovely side, too. “I need to go to Sutter and Leavenworth, please,” she says in the soft, high-pitched voice of a schoolgirl who prefers to sit in the front row, homework complete, prepared and eager to answer every question.

We ride in silence for several blocks, my mind sorting and pondering, and then I just start talking. I tell my dancer fare that she is my first ride of the morning, and also my first fare of any kind in the past nine days. Just last evening my wife and daughter and I returned from a week spent in a tent cabin near Pinecrest Lake up in the Sierras where for seven glorious days we hiked and read and lounged around camp and went swimming and kayaking in the royal blue waters of the lake. I tell her that my overriding memory from the week is of miles and miles of soaring Douglas Fir trees with branches full of dark green needles continually groping for the diamond-bright, shockingly clear sky overhead. Temperatures in the eighties every day. Short pants, T-shirts. Almost heaven... During the entire week, we saw hardly a cloud, and not a single wisp of fog.

And I tell her this: “I had no idea how much this summer’s fog was affecting me, until the afternoon we got up there and I found myself choked up, on the verge of tears. Really, I had to fight to not burst out crying -- it just felt so good to see the sun!”

She: “Sometimes, if you’re in the City too long, it can be really hard to remember that Nature even exists. Unless you go the the park or hiking out in Marin or somewhere. I try to do that as often as I can.”

My idea of what goes on in a place like the Hustler Club derives mostly from movies. Also from an excellent book -- Some of My Best Friends Are Naked -- which consists of long, detailed, individual interviews with seven impressive North Beach dancers. The interviews were conducted (and the book edited) by my cab driver friend, Tim Keefe, who used to manage the Lusty Lady club. And now, even though I try, it’s hard for me to imagine this thoughtful young woman with the soft voice taking off her clothes to pole dance while a group of horny, half-drunk men (and sometimes their dates) watch through a window.

Me: “Did you have an interesting night?”

She: “It was long. I’m pretty tired. We had our anniversary party tonight, and it just went on and on.” It’s the Hustler Club’s eighth anniversary, and my fare has worked there for three years so far. “Too long,” she says, not with disgust but with the bored tone of so many who have spent their entire work lives in a job not their calling.

Just for confirmation I want to ask, “Are you a stripper?” But it seems too abrupt -- at about this time yesterday I was drinking coffee in the woods in front of my tent cabin two hundred miles away and inhaling the thinned out air at 5,000 feet. Next week I might feel comfortable popping “Are you a stripper?” (more likely I would phrase it, “What’s your function at the club?”), but I’m not really all the way back here yet.

Me: “Where did you grow up?”

She: “I was born in southern California, but when I was eight we moved to the Midwest…” Images of her body, naked under her clothing just three feet behind me, make it difficult for me to focus on her story: “When I was twelve, my father brought us on a trip to San Francisco, and I was immediately charmed… I graduated from high school in Iowa three years ago, packed my bags right away, and moved here."

“Was it hard to find work?”

She: “That didn’t take very long at all.”

“Overall, are you satisfied with your move?”

“Ecstatic.”

When we stop in front of her apartment building, a fashionable place I couldn’t have dreamed of affording at her age, I tell her it’s a free ride. She accepts, with delight, but absolutely insists on tipping me.

For years, whenever people would do this, I would try to wave them off. “It’s more fun for me this way,” I would tell them, and that would usually work, as the truth most often does. But after my daughter was born, whenever my free-riders were adamant about tipping me I began to thank them and tell them I would add their money to the “free ride tips” fund I’d started for her. And now I tell this to my dancer fare.

“Oh, that’s great,” she says, and passes me several folded ones (six of them, I discover later). She sounds enthused, interested. “How old is your daughter?”

“Thirteen.”

She: “I’ll bet she’s a great saver!” Goodness, what a sweet voice!

Me: “I’ve been buying stocks for her with the money. The first one was Google, two shares, back when it was $290 a share.”

She: “It’s over $500 now!”

Me: “Lately I’ve told her to keep an eye out for other companies whose products she likes, and then we research them, and sometimes we buy them. She’s got about four thousand dollars worth of stocks now.”

She: “My dad made me save all my money when I was a kid -- and I’m a great saver now. I never spend money unless it’s on something important.”

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Plan C

2010-08-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Shift #69

FRIDAY, AUGUST 27 – 4th Ave/Irving to Steuart/Mission -- $15.25

EARLIER THIS WEEK, after a sobering and seemingly endless stretch of cold and fog, an incredible and most-welcomed “three-day summer” passed through the Bay Area. On Monday, the first day in recent memory that the populace has awakened to blue skies, the temperature in San Francisco soared to 86 degrees. On Tuesday we hit an even 100, and on Wednesday we were again in the comfortable 80s.

This miracle-seeming stretch could not have been more perfectly timed for me and my daughter. These were her last few days before the start of school, and together we tried to “do it all” -- a Santa Cruz beach/boardwalk excursion, a trip to Pier 39, a Giants baseball game…

By yesterday -- Thursday, my daughter’s first day back in school --it was all over. The high was a chilly 63 degrees (a two-day drop of nearly 40 degrees!), and the fog had snuck back in -- not quite as thick as a week ago, but thicker then we want it to be. Hey, this is August! “Breach of contract!”

THE “EXPECTED HIGH” for today -- Friday -- is 59 degrees. My first fare takes me out “into the Avenues,” out toward fog-saturated Ocean Beach. After I drop and begin heading back downtown, empty, I theorize that if I follow the N-Judah trolley route, the appearance of my cab might challenge the fiscal resolve of some poor shivering commuter. And, at Fourth Avenue and Irving, Bingo!

“I’ve been waiting out there for twenty minutes, and I’m absolutely freezing!” she tells me. “I’m so glad it’s warm in here.”

For the past nine years my fare has worked for an agency that supports Jewish philanthropies, and that’s long enough to have earned her a one-month “sabbatical.” She is taking the entire month of September off, with pay, and without being charged for any vacation days: “I’m going to a music festival in Austin, and then to a friend’s wedding on Maui.”

Me: “A sabbatical? Sounds like a pretty good place to work.”

She: “It’s great. The agency will also pay for any of its employees to take a trip to Israel. That’s a trip I want to take, but not just yet. I want to go when things aren’t so tense over there.”

Me: “Are you Jewish?”

She: “No. A lot of the employees aren’t, but it doesn’t matter -- the agency just wants us to understand the Middle East. And I want to understand it myself -- but it always seems so dangerous.”

Me: “Twenty years ago, during the first intifada, I spent a total of three weeks in Egypt and Israel. Before my arrival, the news was full of frightening stuff, but while I was there someone blew up a trash can in downtown Jerusalem, and a kid with a scarf over his face threw a rock that hit a car I was riding in -- other than that, things were fine.”

She: “I can’t figure out the Middle East.”

“I went there thinking, Okay, I’ll go have a look at the place and see who’s right, and who’s wrong, and I’ll figure out just how they should fix everything. And I left three weeks later with my head spinning, thinking, ‘I’m just glad I don’t have to live here!’”

She: “The more I learn and the more I read, the more hopeless it seems. Did you go only to Israel and Egypt?”

Me: “No, those came during the middle of a hundred-day, round-the-world backpack trip.”

She: “Now that’s a sabbatical! Was it just for fun?”

And soon I’m telling her about my trip’s premise -- to find a stranger to invite to America -- and the book I wrote about the whole experience.

She: “I want to read that book.”

For the past several shifts I’ve left home without remembering to bring along a copy. “I’ll write down the name,” I tell her. “You can find it on amazon for about a buck.”

When I pull over at Mission and Steuart my fare hands me a credit card. But when I swipe it, my meter ($15.25) can’t read it. She hands me a different card but, again, no response.

This happens from time to time, and I’m prepared with a Plan B. I pull out my “knuckle buster” (during the past year these things have come to feel like Stone Age relics), but I see that the slot in the glove box where I usually keep credit card slips is empty.

Fortunately, I’ve also got a foolproof Plan C. “You know,” I tell her, “everyday I give away one free ride. Let’s just make this my free ride for today.”

She protests, digs a few small bills from her purse and holds them toward me -- “This is all I have!” -- but I fight them off.

Me: “Here’s how you can pay me: On your sabbatical, just read my book...”

She: “Ahh… Now that’s a deal!”

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Declaring a truce

2010-08-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Shift #70

SUNDAY, AUGUST 29 -- 10th/Folsom to Park 55 Hotel -- $5.80

EARLY THIS MORNING THE FOG BURNED AWAY FROM DOWNTOWN and retreated out toward Ocean Beach, where I have -- several times now -- spotted it lurking like a cruising shark.

Downtown, a blessed cerulean blueness has been holding steady overhead for several hours already. We’ve suffered through recent weeks during which there were days (many of them, often consecutive) when we didn’t even once see the sun -- but now it’s shown up each day for a solid week.

Still, I have a foreboding that we’re pressing our luck, that if we don’t keep our attention focused on this nice turn in the weather, it will be yanked away again. I sense myself developing a ray-by-ray appreciation for sunshine. I swear I will never again take for granted a single sunny day.

A GUY WHO GREW UP IN BETHESDA, MARYLAND, and who now lives in New York City, is on his way to the airport: “For the past five years, I’ve been visiting some friends who moved out here, and I keep finding myself thinking, ‘Hey, I could live here.’”

Me: “Careful! I’ve heard that story a thousand times from my backseat -- and it’s pretty much my own story, too. You visit San Francisco one time too often -- and sometimes once is all it takes -- and it might just reach out and grab you. One visit too many, and you find yourself thinking, ‘Hey, I could do this!’ Watch out -- it’s a slippery slope.”

He: “Why do you like it here so much?”

Me: “There are so many reasons, but I think behind all of them is the fact that the place is just so darn beautiful.” We’re cruising through the city on the freeway at fifty miles an hour, curling between graceful green hills dotted with gingerbread houses. In the distance off to our left we can see the blue waters of the Bay, and then more green hills, and, peeking above them, the dorsal-fin peak of Mt. Diablo, four thousand feet high and thirty miles away. “You know how, when you see a really gorgeous man or woman, someone with movie star looks, you just can’t take your eyes off of them?”

He: “Sure.”

Me: “Well, San Francisco is like that for me. I’ve been driving this taxi for twenty-five years, and still, every single day, there is always some view that just sucks the breath right out of me.”

BY MID-AFTERNOON I still haven’t given away a ride. The city is surprisingly quiet, given that we’re right smack in the heart of tourist season. But the airport is hot -- thousands of people are arriving for a big VM Ware convention -- and as I leave downtown and head back to the airport I tell myself that if someone flags me, no matter where they’re going, they’ll be my free ride for today.

On Tenth Street, just two blocks from the freeway onramp, two women step from a row of parked cars and wave to me. One is from Denver, one is from Dover, Delaware. Both arrived this morning for the VM Ware show, and both are happy to be out of the heat in their respective towns, happy to be enjoying cool, perfect San Francisco.

“It must be nice to live here,” one of them says to me.

“Absolutely great,” I say. Fog? What fog? I’ve declared a truce…

They talk shop between themselves during their seven-block ride to the Parc 55 hotel. At the curb, I tell them about the unusual thing I do each day. They love it. They thank me profusely. As I drive off, I see them in my sideview mirror, standing on the sidewalk, smiling and waving good-bye…under blue skies…half a block from the Powell Street cable car turnaround…with moist, pure air from the Bay licking their skin… And also licking mine...

And that’s August. It’s a wrap. Put that one in the can. Locals often refer to September and October are as “our real summer.” And I say, Bring ’em on.

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WE’RE NOT IN TUCSON ANYMORE

2010-07-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Shift #60

Friday, July 2 -- Market/Portola to Alexa Software in the Presidio -- $15.25

“MY WIFE AND I MOVED HERE FROM TUCSON, ARIZONA, IN 1995. I work in software, and in Tucson I’d be six months between jobs, but in the Bay Area, in 1995, a software geek could just walk across the street and get hired. So I had easily lined up a job before we got here, but finding a place was going to be something else.

“In Tucson we had a two-bedroom apartment, with parking, for $330 a month, but now we were moving to one of the hottest real estate markets in the world. There was a one percent vacancy rate in San Francisco, everything was out-of-sight expensive, and for any open house you’d see thirty or forty couples show up -- early! -- with a credit report in hand and maybe some extra cash in their pocket to bribe the landlord.

“We were really looking forward to being in the Bay Area, but we absolutely fell in love with it when we were on the plane, in tears, and our flight attendant told us she was a landlord and she had an apartment she’d rent us. She said, ‘After the flight, I’ll meet you at the gate and we can do the paperwork.’ We told her we didn’t have our credit report or anything, and she said, ‘As long as we seal it with a hug, it’ll all be fine.’ And that’s how it worked out. And we knew we weren’t in Tucson any more.

“When we showed up the next day, she was waiting for us inside the apartment -- it was completely empty except for one black-and-white t.v. on which she was watching the O.J. Simpson trial. I remember making some comment about there being many layers of meaning in that -- watching the O.J. trial on a black-and-white t.v.

“She asked us, ‘Are you two married?’ And we said no. And she said, ‘So, this would be…living in sin?’ And we all laughed, because we knew it was a joke -- this was the Bay Area, after all. But we’d just come from a place where someone could have said that very same thing and been very, very serious about it.”

IN FRONT OF ALEXA SOFTWARE in the Presidio I turn around and say, “Well, here’s another Bay Area story. Every day, I give away one free ride…”

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A TOUGH GIG

2010-07-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

Shift # 61

FRIDAY, July 9 -- Francisco/Columbus to Union/Laguna -- $7.15

MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE MARK TWAIN QUOTE is this one: “The difference between the right word and almost-the-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

And right behind that quote is another Twainism that always gives me a personal wallop: “Everyone has two home towns -- his own and San Francisco.”

And a bit further down my top-ten list is one that I hear repeated more often than all the others combined (and squared), “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

I’M THINKING OF TWAIN this morning because “coldest winter” has been invoked by nearly every passenger who has ducked into my backseat -- and there haven’t been very many of them. The tourists we cab drivers count upon during the summer months must be huddling in their hotel rooms, waiting for this foggy-chilly-breezy July day to warm up a bit.

Toward noon I pick up a college-aged young man and college-aged young woman who are headed from Fisherman’s Wharf over to Cow Hollow. I size them up as out-of-towners, but when I ask where they’re from they both say, “Here.”

Before we’ve traveled even three blocks, and although she lowers her voice, I overhear the woman tell the man, “We probably should have walked or taken the bus.”

He: “We’d be way late. Anyway, it can’t be more than ten bucks.”

As we climb up Leavenworth, past the crooked portion of Lombard, the woman says, “Well, I’m glad we’re not walking up this.”

Me: “What are you two up to today?”

The man: “Work.”

Me: “What’s your work?”

The woman: “We’re canvassers for Equality California.”

Me: “Oh, boy... Canvassing has always looked like a pretty tough gig to me.”

The woman: “Oh, yes.”

The man: A heavy sigh of agreement.

Me: “How does it work? You do get paid, don’t you?”

The man: “We get paid minimum wage, plus thirty percent of everything above the average.”

Me: “What’s the average?”

He: “About a hundred-and-eighty-dollars-a-day per canvasser per day.”

Me: “Higher than I’d have imagined.”

The woman: “I think it dropped to one-seventy last week.”

The man attends UC-Santa Cruz, the woman the University of San Francisco, and for each of them canvassing is a summer job. They’ve been at it for about four weeks, moving around town from intersection to intersection each day. Today they’ll be spending approximately four hours trying to educate (and to encourage donations from) pedestrians near the intersection of Union and Laguna. They tell me that the organized, clipboard-toting canvassers visible in the Bay Area’s busier neighborhoods, those bright young people raising awareness of (and soliciting funds for) a smorgasbord of different causes, all have the same basic job descriptions and all earn about the same amount of money.

Me: “Have you gotten to where, when you see someone coming down the sidewalk, you can predict how your interaction with them will go?”

The woman: “You can usually tell who’s going to stop and talk to you, but you can’t really predict where it’ll go from there.”

The man: “Even in the middle of a conversation, it’s hard to tell if someone’s going to donate or not. But if they don’t even stop…”

Me: “Have you had any experiences out there that you’ll remember for the rest of your lives?”

They ponder this one for a couple of moments, and then the man says: “I did talk to a woman who once had lunch with Martin Luther King. That was pretty cool.”

AT UNION AND LAGUNA, I tell them that I hope the free ride I give away each day will get their shift off to a good start. They thank me and climb out, and just before my rear door snaps shut I catch the happy little yelp that the young woman has aimed in the direction of the young man.

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MOJITOS AND VUVUZELAS

2010-07-01T00:01:00.001-07:00

Shift #62

SUNDAY, July 11 – 16th/Church to Haight and Fillmore -- $4.90

FOR THE PAST HOUR, as I’ve been cruising through the Union Square, South of Market, and Mission Districts, periodic cries have rifled from countless bars and restaurants. Right now it’s halftime of the World Cup final between Spain and the Nederlands, and each cry has signified a flubbed shot, a sensational save, a penalty call… At the half, the score is 0-0.

At Sixteenth and Church I see three young people jumping up and down, waving. The two young women are waving their hands overhead, the young man a blue vuvuzela. Even from one hundred yards away I can see the smiles on each of their emphatically lit-up faces. As they pile into my backseat, one of the women shrieks to me: “Happy World Cup!”

Me: “And Happy World Cup to you!”

The three of them unleash a barrage of unhinged laughter, as though I were the funniest person in San Francisco -- Robin Williams, perhaps. My fares often do seem to regard me as being about one hundred percent more brilliant and two hundred percent wittier than my family and my friends seem to regard me, and I have come to believe that several factors are at play: 1) relief at having encountered a cab driver whose native language is English, 2) simple nervous public laughter (the same lines that bring down the house in my cab are big fat duds when delivered at my kitchen table), and 3) cab drivers’ collective reputation for being curmudgeonly -- so curmudgeonly that any driver exhibiting even a fleck of lightheartedness tends to be regarded as a quasi-saint.

Me, to these three soccer fans: “That’s the first live vuvuzela I’ve seen…”

I like to think that I occasionally do launch a fairly amusing line or two, but if you ask ten of my friends to describe me, not one of them will say, “Oh, he’s hysterically funny!” Nonetheless, my vuvuzela comment triggers from the backseat the sort of hooting one might expect in a comedy club: Oh my god, this guy is a friggin’ RIOT!

Me, plowing ahead: “On NPR this morning I heard a report that an Islamic cleric has issued a fatwah decreeing that to blow a vuvuzela at one hundred decibels is un-Islamic…”

Them: Another avalanche of laughter.

Me: “Ninety-nine decibels appears to be ok, but 100? That’s un-Islamic…”

Them: More delirium.

Me: “You folks are in a more-advanced state of happiness than anyone else I’ve…”

My observation is truncated by a loud and proud and complicated recounting of this trio’s ongoing, all-night, mojito-driven adventure, which I suspect has been helped along by fuels in addition to alcohol.

It’s a short, six-block ride to an open-fronted bar on Haight Street, where a group of other World Cup revelers are crowding the front door. My fares love my free ride announcement, and after the young man steps out onto the sidewalk he turns back around and tips me with a long buzzy blast from his vuvuzela. It’s not as bad, not as loud, as I’m anticipating. Not even seventy-five decibels, would be my guess.

It sounds kind of cute, actually.

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* * AWAKE? (Translation: POOP-da-betsa!)* *

2010-07-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

Shift #63

SUNDAY, JULY 18 -- All around town... and all through my mind...

I HAVE A FRIEND WHO, I suspect, often wakes up in the morning, gets dressed, and then meticulously strings himself with barbed wire. Last week he leaves me this voicemail:

“Do you ever give away a free ride just because someone asks for one? Or is it always just all about you?”

Well, both:

-- The reality is that people rarely ask me for a free ride, but when they do, I often -- not always, but often -- give them one.

-- And yes, of course, it’s always all about me.

ALPINE TERRACE -- 8:30 AM -- A young woman carefully descends the stairs of a freshly-painted, three-story Victorian up near Buena Vista Park.

In the soft early light she’s a vision. Dainty, pearl-blue, thin-strapped sandals which expose bright-red toenails... Pre-faded, sky-blue designer jeans... A snow-white, short-sleeved top with elastic cuffs that squeeze her sapling arms just above the biceps... Polished–looking skin the color of lightly creamed coffee... Shiny black hair that falls past her shoulders...

She’s going to Fourth and Townswend to catch a train to Menlo Park where today she’ll be watching after the two-year old, six-year old, and eleven-year old children of a family that is attending an enormous Silicon Valley picnic. She looks Indian, but her accent is…hmmm…well…it’s not Indian.

Me: “I grew up near Washington, D.C. May I ask where you grew up?”

She: “South Africa.”

Earlier this year she graduated from high school, next year she’ll be studying law in London, and in-between she is having a gap year. Three months ago she flew to San Francisco, which, she says, she has been enjoying in the extreme. This is her first time away from South Africa.

Me: “How did you choose San Francisco?”

She: “I didn’t choose San Francisco -- San Francisco chose me.”

Me: “And how did San Francisco choose you?”

A year ago she had registered with a South African au pair agency which matched her up with a family in San Francisco. “That first family was impossible,” she tells me, “and I had to tell the agency that I just couldn’t work there. But now they’ve placed me with a family that’s been working out just great.”

Me: “I’m fifty-eight. May I ask how old you are?”

She: “Nineteen.”

I want to tell her: You have no way of understanding how fortunate you are. To be walking down the steps of that house, halfway around this big lovely planet from the place where you grew up, in that miraculous healthy body that you undoubtedly -- like all young people, like me when I was nineteen -- take for granted. Food to eat. Fashionable clothes to wear. Money for a taxi. Parents in your corner. A gap year. Law school. A great life stretching ahead… We -- all of us -- we take so, so much for granted…

Instead I say, “What a great age to be out having an adventure.”

She: “In three months, I feel like I have already changed so much. Grown.”

Me: “Have you been homesick?”

She: “Not at all. I have a brother and I do miss him, but I haven’t been homesick.”

I am the father of a single offspring, a thirteen-year-old daughter whose departure from home is starting to loom as though it were scheduled for tomorrow morning. “How are your parents doing?”

She: “I think it’s hard for them, but they know this is good for me and they’re doing their best to accept it. I must say, I was sorry to miss the World Cup. All my friends tell me it was just fantastic, and it made them realize what a great country we have. They all say they now feel proud to be South African -- and these are people who never talked like that three months ago.”

Me: “You do have a great country. In 1989 I hitchhiked from Johannesburg to Capetown.”

She: “You hitchhiked?”

Me: “I did. I went down along the Garden Route -- beautiful...”

She: “You were just…traveling?”

Me: “I was also writing a book.”

She: “What was it about?”

Me: “It’s the story of a trip-around-the-world I took -- through the Philippines, India, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa -- knowing that at trip’s end I would invite one person, one of those three billion people on this planet who live on less than two dollars a day, to visit me in America for one month -- my treat.”

She: “And you did that?”

Me: “I did.”

She: “And did you get the book published?”

Me: “I did.”

She: “That’s fantastic! I want to read it. Please tell me its name…”

TOWARD NOON, at SFO, I pick up a thirty-eight-year-old black man with a set of golf clubs. Like me, my fare is a native of the Washington, D.C. suburbs. His mother works for the Veterans Administration. In January of 2009, on the night before Obama’s inauguration, my fare and his mother and two hundred other VA-connected people attended a dinner with Barack and Michelle, where my fare found himself talking directly with Barack.

Me: “What sense did you get of him?”

“A regular guy. He seemed like a regular guy who’d...who’d just decided to…to try to do something great.”

I tell my fare a too-complicated story about how my best childhood friend had a cousin named Barry. I never met this Cousin Barry, but I heard a lot about him over the years. And I’ve heard a whole lot more in recent years, as Barry shocked everyone in my friend’s family and, indeed, everyone in the entire world, by growing up to be Barack Obama. How about that!

AS I’M UNLOADING my fare’s golf clubs in the driveway of a luxury apartment complex on Daniel Burnham Court, a white man wearing a snazzy black tuxedo raises his eyebrows toward me and gives a slight nod. Soon we’re headed downtown toward Infinity Towers, those mold-green luxury condominium silos that have sprung up to block a pedestrian’s (or a cab driver’s) views of the hills.

My new fare has an accent I can’t place until I ask him: Russian. Eighteen years ago he came to the Bay Area to study electrical engineering at UC-Berkeley, and then he stayed…

His cell phone buzzes. He answers Dah and then has a long conversation, in Russian, with a woman to whom he several times says the word horosho (good).

My mother and her siblings and my grandmother all spoke Ruthenian, a language similar to Russian, and when I was young I used to wonder what “horror show” they kept on talking about -- and why?

My grandmother never learned English, but she did manage to teach me one bewildering Ruthenian nursery rhyme,* and when I recite it for my Russian speaking passengers -- as I like to do -- it most often delights (but occasionally also bewilders) them. Now I think: When my fare finishes his call, maybe I should perform?

And then: Or maybe I shouldn’t? My mind has been chewing on my exchanges with the golfer and the Indian woman (hers was a free ride -- $10.30) and examining them in the light of my friend’s barbed voicemail message. Why, I wonder, do I feel compelled to tell my stories, to perform my rehearsed little pieces? Am I trying to make myself look important in my fares’ eyes? In my own eyes?

Some time ago I realized that I’ve accomplished pretty much everything I ever hoped to in life. Or at least enough of those things so that my ego, if it were rational, should emit nothing but a continuous sigh of satisfaction. But no ego is rational, and few are quiet for more than an instant. Mine seems to exist only to constantly remind me that Really, buddy boy, you haven’t done enough, you don’t have enough, you are definitely not good enough -- and no matter what you do or how hard you try you never will be.

But several years ago, after stumbling upon the works of Eckhart Tolle, I began to entertain the notion that it might actually be possible for an “average” human being -- and even for our entire species -- to wake up, to become “enlightened.” Previously I had assumed enlightenment to be a province accessible to only the rarest of humans. Enlightenment wasn’t something one could induce or accomplish. Either it happened to you, or it didn’t -- either you had it or you didn’t -- either you were special or you weren’t. Somewhere along the line I recognized that this “out-of-reach” filter was the same filter through which I, when I was younger, viewed people who had accomplished things that I considered way beyond my own grasp: parachuting; running a marathon; circling the globe; authoring books. I believed that to accomplish any of those things, one had to be rich or brilliant or some sort of metaphysical superhero, but I long ago proved that one does not.

As Tolle’s thoughts on the present moment began to sink in with me, I began to suspect (and to hope) that enlightenment might be possible for anyone -- for you certainly, and even perhaps for me -- and that the key to that enlightenment lay simply in developing one’s awareness of the present moment. Every one of us has a present moment -- this moment -- but are we awake to it? Or are we on autopilot, hypnotized by reruns of our past, dazzled or terrified by our imagined futures? And, more specifically, what about me, this so-called Brad Newsham fellow? Am I awake to the present moment?

Very, very rarely.

Or quite possibly: Never.

Just recently I’ve come to regard my addiction to stories -- other people’s stories or my own -- as an impediment, perhaps the key impediment, to my waking up. Even seemingly benign addictions come with a downside, and lately I’ve been seeing how my love affair with stories takes me “away.” Instead of being present, I am almost always capturing and digesting someone else’s story; retelling, reframing, or reinventing stories from my own past; or fantasizing about my imagined future. I’ve started to think that I might be wise to trade all of my stories, if I could (and all of your stories, too, if I could), for a simple awakening, for an unrevokable, permanent enlightenment.

But, I realize, even this -- this earnest saga of a yearning for enlightenment -- is nothing but additional Story. (Is it ironic, or is it just sad, that I’ve so far spent twenty-five years in a profession whose real currency, no matter what it says on the meter, is Story?) And every time I side with Story over Presence, aren’t I actually voting for my ego, voting to allow it to co-opt, to nudge aside, my higher nature -- I’m voting to be hypnotized.

This morning I wasn’t really present with the Indian girl, but my ego certainly was -- bragging about my hitchhiking, my travels, my writing. And the “Cousin Barry” story -- that was just my ego trying to one-up the golfer. And now, what would I accomplish by performing (yet again!) my little Ruthenian ditty? Maybe, I think, maybe today I’ll just let it slide…

Two blocks from Infinity Towers my tuxedo-wearing fare utters a final horosho and clicks his cell phone shut. I allow him a moment of silence, and then ask: “What does your day have in store?”

He, quickly: “Wedding.”

Me: “Family...? Friends...?”

He, not so quickly: “Me.”

I turn around for a look. He’s got an eye twinkle and, around his mouth, a little smirk.

Me: “You!”

The smirk goes full grin. “Yes.”

Me: “This afternoon?”

He: “Yes.”

Me: “Are you nervous?”

He: “No. My fiance is nervous enough for two or three people. I will stay calm.”

Me: “Where is it?”

He: “A church. Over in the Castro.”

Me: “What time?”

He: “One o’clock.”

I look at the dashboard clock: 12:16 PM. “Do you need a ride?”

He: “We have one. Thank you.”

We’re stopped in front of his fiance’s view-blocking condominium silo. I punch buttons until my meter goes blank, and I say, “You can not pay me.”

He: “Why not?”

I turn around again. He’s grinning hugely now. I grin, too, look him in the eye, shrug, and repeat: “You can not pay me.”

He laughs. A deep and rich and healthy and extended laugh -- the idling engine of a strong, perfectly-tuned race car.

I laugh.

He laughs again -- one little tap on the accelerator. “What’s your name?”

“Brad. What’s yours?”

“Igor.”

“I’ve never had this particular conversation with anyone before, Ee-gor.”

He laughs. “Me either!”

And then Igor thanks me, shakes my hand, opens the door, and goes off to his new life that starts in forty-three minutes.

SHORTLY AFTER TWO PM, I get a call from my neighbor, Dawn, who lives five doors down the street from me in Oakland. At 1:05 this afternoon she and her husband, Jay, and their two kids (I’ve known Cole and Tate since very shortly after their arrivals on Earth) are watching the A’s game on tv when they decide, on a whim, to ferry over to San Francisco and spend the rest of this beautiful day wandering like tourists. Right now they’re calling from the ferry, mid-Bay.

These Hey-are-you-driving-your-cab-today? calls almost never work out, but I like it when they do. By 2:45, the four of them are piling into my cab in front of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero. For a while, we talk baseball. The four of them report that the As have just finished off a four-game sweep of Kansas City, and I tell them that I’ve been listening to my Giants try to do the same to the New York Mets.

This year the Giants have arranged for new season ticket holders (I am one) to personally meet with one player of the ticket holder’s choice. Yesterday was the day, and my daughter and I got to spend a few moment -- maybe ninety seconds -- alone with star pitcher Tim Lincecum. Four hundred and fifty other new season ticket holders received this same special treatment yesterday, and by the time my daughter and I sidled up to young Tim (he’s twenty-six) he had already been signing autographs for an hour and a half. Still, I can think of nothing he might have done to be more gracious:

He made eye contact first with my daughter and then with me. He thanked us for coming to the event and also for standing in line for so long. He signed my daughter’s Giants scarf and the bill of her Giants cap. Two nights earlier we had watched from our lofty seats in Section 302 while Lincecum threw a complete-game shutout, and yesterday when I mentioned to Lincecum the liner he smacked that night (and which would have been a sure double if the left fielder hadn’t zipped over toward the corner and snagged it), he chuckled and then chitchatted with me like we were old friends, until the Giants staff moved things along.

In the middle of telling this story to Dawn, Jay, Cole, and Tate, I catch myself. Will there ever be a time when I can just live my life -- and then let go of it? Will I ever stop regarding life as, mainly, a story-generating opportunity? Will I ever be fully present to, fully awake in, any particular moment -- or will I always be living with one eye and ninety-nine percent of my consciousness roving for ego-enhancing, dramatic possibilities?

At the base of Coit Tower, I say good-bye to my neighbors. (Dawn offers me money -- today, as usual, no one has asked for a free ride -- but she and her family are nonetheless this shift’s third freebie.) As I wind my way back down Telegraph Hill I note the white sails of at least one hundred yachts, pregnant with breeze, tipping halfway over, and looking like so many quill pens dipped into the ink-blue water of the Bay. In the distance, bridges unfurl gracefully under a cloudless sky that gleams like a blue teflon skillet.

In North Beach, the twin spires of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul look almost too perfect: they might be the façade of a movie set. The hundreds of people milling on the square’s green lawn -- they’re strolling, or doing tai chi, or perusing the framed canvases of a weekend art show -- might be movie extras waiting for the clack of the director’s “action” signal. And me? I’m the central casting cab driver, the grizzled-gray white guy rolling down Stockton toward Union Street, past the Washington Square Inn...past Cafe Divine...nearing the end of a ten-hour shift behind the wheel of Green Cab #914.

I’m tired -- that is a given.

But am I awake...?

*MY GRANDMOTHER’S BEWILDERING RHUTHENIAN DITTY (and you must imagine for yourself the corresponding hand motions: my babushka/grandmother tugging at each of my fingers, from my pinkie on down to my thumb, to which she always gave a delighted little pop):

In phonetics: Mama zrah-vella KAH-shoo. TOH-mah dallah, TOH-mah dallah, TOH-mah dallah, TOH-mah dallah. TOH-mah ho-RO-hah porah-zallah. POOP-da-betsa!

TRANSLATION :

Mother made some porridge. She gave this one some, this one some, this one some, this one some. This one, she pulled off his head and threw it in the oven!

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Oh, my!

2010-06-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

Shift #55

FRIDAY, JUNE 4 -- Mission/Appleton/ to Northpoint/Taylor -- $18.40

THIS MORNING I AM SO VERY, VERY DISTRACTED.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working my tail off to organize a “Slash Oil” event on June 26. I want a huge crowd to come to Ocean Beach to encourage our nation’s leaders to start to -- not just to talk about, but to actually take the first painful steps of required to start to -- wrench our economy and country and world off our addiction to oil.

The Park Service has verbally agreed to grant me a “First Amendment Free Speech” permit. This type of permit is a lot less hassle than the “special event” permits they issued for my Beach Imeach events in 2007. Also, and very importantly, the Free Speech permit is indeed actually free, which saves me about a thousand dollars.

In my permit application I requested approval for one thousand participants, but ever since the Park Service nodded its o.k. I have been thinking I should have specified two thousand. The Impeach-Bush-and-Cheney events were far more controversial, but still drew 1,000 to 1,500 each time, so wouldn’t it seem logical -- with millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf even as I write this, and with the whole world horrified -- that there would be at least 2,000 people who’d want to come to an anti-oil, pro-renewable energy event?

But I’ve been reluctant to ask for too much. In the past the Park Service personnel have been very even with me, but they’ve also been cautious. Their job is to protect public resources, such as Ocean Beach, and I completely support that. Are two thousand people a good thing for the beach? Well, who knows? Anyway, the permit and a million other details (helicopter rental, media coverage, and How in the world do I attract a crowd?) are what’s been distracting me these past couple of weeks…

DURING THE EARLY PARTS OF THIS YEAR nearly all of my creative energy has gone into keeping this journal, into writing about and thinking about my free ride practice. But during these past couple of weeks my creative energies have shifted over to Slash Oil. My free ride per day has almost come to seem like a distraction, even an annoyance. This morning I haven’t even really thought about it.

At Mission and Appleton a young man sees me coming and throws his hand high -- he seems motivated. His English is spotty, so we immediately switch over to Spanish. He tells me he’s overslept and now needs to be at his job at a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant by 9 a.m. Now he’ll make it on time. He has a Fast Pass that allows him to ride for “free” on any bus in the city for sixty dollars per month, but to cross town on a bus this morning would take an hour. This fare’s going to be almost twenty bucks. Expensive or not, he tells me, he needs to be on time. And I promise that he will be.

Sometimes I find talking in Spanish exhilarating, but at other times -- this time, for instance -- it can seem laborious. I learn that my fare grew up in Mexico City and has been in San Francisco for three years, and then I leave him to his thoughts and retreat into my own. These days, hanging out with my own mind is not so comforting. As we proceed down Mission, then down Guerrero, down Market, and up Franklin, a jumbled checklist of Slash Oil details scrolls through my brain. Twenty-two days to go. I think I can pull this thing off, but, my god, planning one of these events is always stressful -- capital S. My family hates the way I grow distant during the runups, and I don’t blame them…

And now, as my fare and I begin to drop down the front side of Pacific Heights, Free Ride? begins to distract me from the distractions of Slash Oil. Ever since Body took me to the woodshed a few days ago, I have surrendered to it -- not particularly cleanly, but more like a petulant teenager. Whatever, I tell it. You figure it out, let me know, I’ll be here. Big fat twenty buck fare, no problem. You the man.

As we pull up to my fare’s destination Body swivels toward the backseat and says, “Cada dia doy un viaje gratis…” Every day I give away one ride for free... Etc.

My fare has his hands up, with his money out, but now his arms go boneless and his hands drop to his lap. “Hombre...,” he says. “Seguro?” Man... are you sure?

Body: “Si, seguro.”

He: “Hombre… Come te llamas?”

Body: “Brad. Y tu?”

He: “Roya.” I’m not sure how he spells it, but he pronounces it Roy-uh.

Roya’s body language, loosely translated, tells me that I have made his day.

It’s almost nine AM now. The Park Service office is three minutes away. My contact, James Sword, doesn’t even flinch when I ask him if I can change my request from one thousand people to two thousand. “Sure,” he says, fifteen seconds after I’ve walked in his door. “We can do that.”

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ZERO GALLONS PER MILE

2010-06-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

Shift # 56

FRIDAY, JUNE 11th -- The bus zone at Sacramento/Fillmore to Church/Market Safeway -- maybe $8.05

YESTERDAY the Park Service sent me an email to inform me that my Slash Oil permit has officially been approved. And today, with just an hour to go in my shift, I drop by the Park Service office hoping to pick it up. The door is locked, and after I knock three times, with increasing vigor each time, I retreat toward my cab. As I’m about to climb in, I hear the office door open behind me and a woman’s voice call out, “Is that Brad who I see during commercials while I’m watching my Giants games?”

I haven’t seen Noemi Margaret for three years, and back then, before she was promoted to head of the Events Department, she was the Park Service functionary who issued my Beach Impeach permits. Body says it’s very good to see Ms. Margaret. Three years ago our relationship was a bit adversarial -- in the end I always got my permit, but it always required a struggle. Back then I definitely got the clear impression that nearly all the Park Service personnel were personally rooting for the Beach Impeach events (it’s hard to find too many people in the Bay Area who would argue that Bush and Cheney and a whole roster of other Bush administration officials don’t belong in prison), but they were always cautious about letting me know.

Whenever I went down to Ocean Beach to stretch my three hundred-foot tape measure across the sand and make my pre-event calculations, I was always approached by Park Service employees who, early on, would say, “Excuse me, can you please tell me what you’re doing?” But as the months went by, and as the Beach Impeach series acquired its dignified but ballsy reputation, these approaches warmed considerably: “Oh, cool -- another Impeach deal? Great!” On the morning of Beach Impeach #Two, one ranger asked me in a conspiratiorial tone if it would be ok for him to call his wife and tell her to come and join in. “Man, we both hate this administration -- I have to keep my mouth shut, but she doesn’t!”

Officially the Park Service employees were always neutral, always proper and officious -- as they should be. They were charged with protecting the common resource, and here I was, not only wanting to bring thousands of people to that resource, but also advocating for the impeachment and imprisonment of the Park Service’s ultimate bosses: President Bush and his boss, Vice President Cheney. How could these Park Service personnel openly embrace these events? But if I jumped through all the hoops, they couldn’t very easily deny me, either. So I jumped each and every time, even if it hurt. At Beach Impeach #3, at Crissy Field, I was required to pay three thousand dollars for several acres of parking for two hours. Fewer than fifty Beach Impeach participants wound up parking there. That one still hurts.

But all of that was during a different era. Bush and Cheney are not in prison, where they belong, but at least they’ve gone back behind the curtain. Today Ms. Margaret and I talk about our kids and about my Toyota commercial but mostly we talk about the Catastrophe in the Gulf and at length about Oil. We discuss the future of renewable energy and how we hope that we can get to that future before we completely poision the planet. I tell her how proud I am of getting 45 mpg from my Prius, but she’s way ahead of me. She points to her desk, where the book-sized battery of her electric bicycle sits atop a stack of papers. The bike itself is out back. Not only does Ms. Margaret use zero gas per mile on her daily commute, but at home she has a solar panel that recharges the battery.

As I’m leaving, I thank her for approving my “First Amendment Free Speech” permit -- I know she personally is the one behind this decision, which has saved me a thousand dollars and has also made my organizing job much simpler. She responds with something that turns my insides to mush: “I’m sorry,” she says, “that it took us so long to get it right.”

IT'S TIME to head back to the yard now. I haven’t yet given away a free ride today, but in the bus zone in front of the Noah’s Bagels on Fillmore I spot a likely-looking young man (I will soon learn that his name is John) reading a copy of the Bay Guardian which he has just pulled from the free rack. He quickly understands my offer and is very happy to accept. He’s headed to the Safeway at Church and Market, and the whole way there we talk about the one thing that’s on everyone’s mind these days: The Catastrophe in the Gulf.

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Margarita

2010-06-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

Shift #57

SUNDAY, JUNE 13 – 16th/Mission to Powell/Market -- $7.15

TODAY I’VE GOT three big extracurricular items on my calendar. And since I’m leaving town for a week tomorrow morning, I want to get them all cleaned up:

-- I’m three days behind on this journal, and if I head out to the airport cab lot early this morning I’ll probably have at least an hour wait during which I can write.

-- At 11:30 I’ve got an appointment with my videographer friend Stefan Ruenzel, who is going to meet me at Ocean Beach and shoot a two-minute film of me standing in front of my Green Cab and telling President Obama about the Slash Oil event. I actually hope (and I do believe that my hopes are not as un-realistic as you might think) that President Obama will personally set his eyeballs on this video after Stefan posts it to Youtube. The idea came to me just yesterday, born perhaps of desperation: I’m looking to attract a crowd of 2,000, and when I left the house this morning only 104 had registered so far.

-- And right after work I’m meeting with two organizers from Hands Across the Sand. The sudden appearance of this group (it started in Florida in January, but I became aware of it just three days ago) is to me nothing short of miraculous -- it feels almost life-saving. On the very same day as Slash Oil, these folks are organizing a global series of beach events, including one right at Ocean Beach at almost the exact same hour as Slash Oil. The Hands Across the Sand organizers and I are talking about combining energies and I think this just simply must happen.

WITH ALL THESE DISTRACTIONS crowding my head, I leave the yard intending to wrap up my free ride as soon as possible. And right away, there she is, Margarita, standing at Sixteenth and Mission, late for work.

She asks me to drop her off right across from the Powell and Market cable car turnaround. She works as a dispatcher for an association of businesses in the Union Square and South of Market areas which have “taxed” themselves to fund a patrol unit which includes casually-dressed “neighborhood ambassadors.” The ambassadors’ duties include: keeping the area litter-free; summoning the “cleaning unit” to move in and address a heavy duty garbage situation or, Margarita says, a “vomit accident”; and providing assistance to tourists and, perhaps, occasional gentle “guidance” (her word) to the area’s many street people. “Sixth and Stevenson is the toughest spot,” she says. Whenever things “escalate” beyond what the ambassadors can deal with, they call Margarita, who calls in the program’s uniformed private security guards, and then, if needed, the city’s uniformed police officers.

Margarita is in her early twenties and grew up in San Francisco. She asks where I’m from.

“I grew up near Washington D.C. But I’ve been here for nearly thirty years now, and I’m home for good.”

She: “How’d you pick San Francisco?”

“I traveled. I visited all fifty states and circled the world four times with my backpack. And then I picked the place that screamed to me the loudest.”

She: “That’s amazing. What made you decide to do that?”

Me: “In college two friends and I challenged each other: ‘Who can get to all fifty states the first?’

She: “I love that! And you won?”

Me: “I came in second. About six or seven years after we graduated, we were each stuck at about forty-five or forty-six states. And then one guy went off on a hitchhiking trip through all the states he hadn’t gotten and then he called the other two of us to tell us we were now playing for second place.”

“What was your last one?”

“Michigan. I was traveling across the country by train about twenty-five years ago, and I had a five-hour layover in Chicago. A friend picked me up at the train station and drove me along the edge of Lake Michigan for about an hour. When we crossed the border between Illinois and Michigan, we took the first exit and ate breakfast in a little diner in New Buffalo, Michigan. And then he drove me back to the train station.”

We’re almost to Mararita’s destination. “I bet you’ve got some stories, mister.”

“Everyone has a few."

“I’ve never been anywhere yet. I want to go to Europe.”

“When I was your age, I’d hardly been anywhere. You’re young. You can do anything you want to do. I’m not kidding.”

“You think so -- really? It seems so hard...”

Me: “Pretty much anything. I really believe that...”

We stop across from the cable car turnaround at Market and Powell.

Me: “I give away one free ride every day, and today this, my first ride, is my free ride.”

“Oh, man! You’re kidding! Really! You are just too much!”

The instant she closes her door, my first thought is: “Twelve days until Slash Oil... How in the hell am I gonna do this! Who do I think I’m kidding?”

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GOOSEBUMPS!

2010-06-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

Cab Shift #58

Friday, June 25 – Here, there, everywhere…-- $ ??.??

I COME WIDE AWAKE at 3:40 A.M., and there’s no way I can kid myself that I’m going to get back to sleep. Too much on my mind. The helicopter...the photographer...will the walkie-talkies work? Is anyone coming?

By 4:20 I’m pulling my car through the gates of the Green Cab lot at Sixteenth and South Van Ness. This is my first day back at work after a twelve-day absence. I spent last week in Minnesota with my family, and this week I’ve been frantically trying to pull together this helter-skelter event -- "Slash Oil" -- that’s taking place, geez, tomorrow!

At the side of the lot I see two of my Green Cab buddies talking together. One has been a cab driver for thirty years (five years longer than me) and the other is still a youngster who hasn’t quite yet finished his first year. I walk over and slide into the conversation. The veteran is assuring the rookie that Gay Pride Weekend is going to be great -- the money’s going to be fantastic, and hell no, you don’t have to worry about all those out-of-town gay people hitting on you. You can have fun with that, bro!

I can do a faux-hillbilly accent that comes in handy sometimes, and now I look the rookie in the eye and drawl, “You shore are a good-lookin’ man, Mister Cab Driver…”

It works. Suddenly I can see the backs of both drivers’s necks, as they're both bent over now, heads down around their knees, helpless with a double-case of the guffaws.

My god, it’s good to be back here, back in this pool of yellow light cast by the streetlamps at 4:30 A.M., catty-corner from the all-night gas station, one block from the all-night melodramas outside the BART station, in this gritty neighborhood that’s starting to somehow feel like home.

BY 5:04 AM I’m trolling slowly along Market Street, which is totally empty except for one guy jogging along toward Ninth Street. He’s no athlete -- he’s a middle-aged Chinese man wearing loafers and a v-neck sweater -- and I wonder why he’s jogging at this hour. And then a Muni bus overtakes and passes us. The jogger accelerates into a near-sprint, and I see that he’s hoping to catch the bus, which brakes to a stop up ahead at Ninth and Market. He’s giving it all he’s got, he’s closing the gap, he’s at the rear of the bus, it looks like he’s going to make it.... But the signal flips to green and the bus quickly jumps forward, gone... The jogger’s shoulders slump, his whole body goes almost boneless...

And then I pull up alongside him and call through the passenger side window, “Hey, come on. I’ll catch your bus for you for free. Hop in.”

He’s only going four blocks, but he’s late for work. He’s very happy when I drop him at his destination. The bus-zone-hero opportunity only presents itself a few times a year, but it’s always satisfying -- and today it gets me off to an outside-the-box start.

FOR THE NEXT HOUR AND A HALF I’m unsatisfyingly empty. At 6:35 I note an attractive young woman in a bus zone at Haight and Masonic, on the opposite side of the street from me. I cruise a block and a half to where I can make a legal U-turn and then pull back around. Now she’s standing ten feet from the curb, looking past me toward where that darn bus should be coming from. I stop right next to her and roll down my window. “Every day I give away one free ride. Would you like to be my free ride today?”

She smiles. “I would like that very much.”

She’s a nurse up at UCSF Medical Center. She grew up in Boston, has been a nurse for four years, and she’s happy to have a stable profession: health care. She’s not been a big soccer fan until recently, but just yesterday morning her soccer fan-ness, like my own soccer fan-ness, took a huge needle jump when Landon Donavan’s goal put the USA into the World Cup’s round of sixteen. She tries to pass some money over the backseat -- “It’s about what I’d have paid for the bus,” she says -- but I refuse. A deal’s a deal. A free ride is a free ride.

A PORTION of my day is taken up by attending to details for tomorrow’s event. I stop by the Park Service office and get a copy of the event permit that I’ve misplaced. At the Fillmore Street Kinko’s I fax out about ten final press releases. I call Channel 7 (they’ve put up their own helicopter for two of my events in the past) and bend their ears a bit. At the Chestnut Street Apple store I send a confirmation email to our helicopter pilot. I check the sign-up site -- six new people have registered, but it still looks like it’s gonna be a bust. I stop by the house of our photographer, John Montgomery, to review strategy for tomorrow. I stop at Safeway for some last minute supplies.

For much of the day, the weather has been thick and kind of ugly, but what can you do about the weather? I feel resigned to whatever tomorrow is going to bring. In fact I find myself feeling a bit more relaxed than I remember feeling one day before any other event I’ve ever organized, which means I’m only about three-quarters-psycho instead of full-psycho. About five p.m. yesterday evening I realized that yesterday -- a day which I’d spent chasing after agonizing organizing details -- was in fact my fifteenth wedding anniversary! “We can celebrate another night,” my sweet wife told me, as I was headed out the door.

BY MID-AFTERNOON I’M COOKED, but heading back to the yard I am flagged at Fourteenth and Dolores by a man whose name I will soon learn is Sam. I pull over and tell him, “I’m at the end of my shift. Where are you headed?”

Sam’s headed to a place just a few blocks past the yard, and that works perfectly for me.

“How,” Sam asks me, “did this ugly day suddenly turn so beautiful?” The sky above the Mission District has transformed into pure blue silk; back toward the beach we can still see looming white fog.

“I’m planning a big outdoor event tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’m hoping for this stuff instead of that stuff.”

He: “That thing out at Ocean Beach?”

I hold up a flyer that’s lying on my front seat. He glances at it and says, “I’m going to that! You organized it?”

I’m as flabbergasted as Sam is. “How’d you hear of it?”

He: “My sister. We’re bringing a bunch of people. And I don’t even know how she heard of it.”

We talk Oil for a while, and then Sam’s got lots of questions about the event, mostly about money. I tell him I’ve put up about three thousand dollars to make it all happen. I tell him that during the second, third, and fourth Beach Impeach events a friend volunteered to pass a donation bucket. “Those three events cost me almost exactly twelve thousand dollars altogether,” I tell him, “and in the end the donations came to almost exactly twelve thousand dollars altogether.”

Sam is impressed, just as I was. He says, “Man, if everyone just put in five bucks, it ought to work out.”

“Either way,” I say. “I feel like I’m loaded into the barrel of a cannon, the fuse is lit, and now I’m just hoping to enjoy the ride and survive.”

Sam’s auspicious appearance in my backseat...my last ride before the event...how do I know...maybe three thousand people will show up tomorrow. This ride has given me more than hope, it’s given me goosebumps. At ride’s end, I vaporize the numbers on the meter ($7.60) and turn toward Same, but he beats me to the punch -- he’s holding a twenty right under my nose. “This is for the donation bucket.”

What can I say? Only Thank you!

Sam and I promise to look for each other tomorrow.

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Pride Weekend

2010-06-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

Shift #59

Sunday, June 27 -- Haight/Masonic to Post/Taylor -- $9.85

WHEN I WAS A BOY, eight or nine or maybe ten years old, I surmised that girls had it made easy -- for life. Boys (and their eventual byproducts: men) were a dime a dozen, but girls were priceless. Any man would always want a girl around, especially a pretty girl. I imagined that if I were a girl, I would have no problems in life ever. And if I were a particularly pretty girl, almost any man would do whatever it took to keep me around, just to be able to bask in the miracle of my beauty and the honor of my presence. He would gladly spend his whole life working even the most grueling, most stressful job as long and hard as necessary; he would without hesitation beat up as many other men as required. I didn’t think of this as unfair. This was, obviously, just the way it was.

But I wasn’t a ten-year old boy for all that long. One need not be terribly mature or brilliant to observe that every life has huge challenges, or to come to understand that even a pretty woman can find her lot in life exasperating. And even those particularly striking women who walk among us sometimes appear to have grown particularly weary, even particularly angry, from the effort of transporting their beauty from Point A to Point B, from having to endure along the way the relentless scrutiny of the male gaze -- plus the jealous scrutiny of the female gaze. Anyone can see that, at least for some women, being beautiful can be burdensome, and sometimes it’s apparently nothing but a great big friggin’ hassle.

I’M FIRST-UP IN FRONT OF THE W HOTEL, engrossed in Depak Chopra’s Freedom, Power, and Grace. Mobs of rollicking people are streaming down the sidewalks, applying sunscreen and maneuvering themselves toward prime viewing spots for today’s Gay Pride Parade, which starts in another couple of hours. This clear, warm, blue-sky morning is exactly what I was hoping to have for yesterday’s “Slash Oil” event. Instead we had foggy, breezy, chilly weather. Four hundred and fifty people showed up. In spite of the disappointing numbers, we managed a couple of great photos, as always we honestly had a fantastic time (it’s hard to not enjoy a day at the beach with four hundred and fifty friends and a helicopter), and I came within a thousand dollars of breaking even... Suddenly a young woman opens my rear door and slips inside so quickly that it seems she has simply materialized in my backseat. I haven’t even closed my book yet.

Her abrupt entrance has precluded my giving her the customary, pre-ride, full-body scan, but in a fraction-of-a-second glance across the seatback I register her clear hazel eyes shining at me like twin miniature flashlights. Her face, just three or four feet from my own, seems perfectly proportioned, as though an architect graphed it out with the most specialized tools of the trade. And within the past hour either this woman or some attendant has washed and pampered and precisely-feathered her dark blond hair.

“Haight and Masonic,” she says. No salutation. No hint of warmth. Just the three words.

It’s a twenty-five block ride, and as we’re sitting through two early red lights, I float some innoucuous cab driver pleasantries, same as I do with any fare -- gorgeous, ugly, crippled, ancient, or you-name-it. This young woman bats each of them away with clipped, one-word parries: “Boston.” “Business.” “Software.” She may have queued up for a second helping in the Gorgeous line, but did that require her to forfeit her spot over in Civility?

I’m not leering. I’m not eye-balling her in the rearview. I’m a fifty-eight-year-old, happily-married cab driver, father of a thirteen-year-old daughter who in another decade or so will be about the same age as my fare is now. I like to think I’m non-threatening, like to think that spending a few minutes with me is not the world’s most oppressive proposition. But I immediately sense -- and this is a sense I get only very rarely in life -- that this woman regards me as though I’m some gross, slobbering, nineteen-year-old who has brashly plopped down onto the next barstool and belched up a “Whoa, mama!”

I let her stew in her beauty for a couple of silent blocks, and then as we’re crossing Market Street I try again. Has she ever been in San Francisco during Pride Weekend before? “No.” Is she planning to catch some of today’s Parade? “No.”

Nobody is required to talk to me in my cab. It’s easy to say, “You know, I’ve got a lot on my mind and I just don’t feel like talking today, thank you.” People do say that to me every now and then, and it’s like a straight-up gift. I mean, who doesn’t understand that? Who hasn’t been there? But to get into the back of my cab and simmer angrily for ten minutes, to rage against even the most benign small talk… Jesus Christ! Ugly people don’t act like this. It’s an affliction specific to the ravishing ones -- but certainly not all of them. During the height of her Olympic notoriety, the stunning, three-gold medal swimmer Summer Sanders sat in my backseat and could not have been more pleasant: she seemed tickled by her own beauty, her own fame, as though they were gifts she’d been handed with instructions to share un-begrudgingly with the world.

I feel like telling this youngster in my backseat, “Hey, next time, take the fucking bus.” But I, of course, don’t. I steer my mind over in the direction of, Well, everyone has a bad day. Or maybe she’s had a bad night. Maybe she’s regretting some Saturday night mistake -- maybe she actually did hook up with some slobberer from the next barstool.

After another extended silence, as we are waiting through another red at Fell and Gough, I give it one final try: “Have you been watching any of the soccer matches?” Just yesterday Ghana brought the USA’s World Cup adventure to a halt, winning 2-1 in overtime.

It’s like she’s been poised right behind me with a tennis racket. A zinging No! volleys past my right ear at about 140 miles an hour.

We ride the last fifteen blocks in a wordless cocoon.

At Haight and Masonic I guide the cab toward an open spot at the curb. A gay man in his mid-thirties is standing right there, and we glide to a stop directly in front of him. A huge smile spreads across his face. His hands float up from his thighs and extend outwards, palms up. A taxicab… pulling over to drop a passenger just exactly when I need one, exactly where I need one… I can’t believe my good luck!

One-Word-Answers pays me, turns away from me without speaking, opens the rear door, and steps out toward the gay man. As she raises herself up off my backseat, I notice that her bottom-side is trim and smooth and exquisitely curved and it is sheathed this morning in a sleek skirt/shorts outfit -- fire-engine red. Her legs, which are the work of a meticulous sculptor, are lashed tightly (all the way up her perfectly-tanned calves) by the long leather thongs of a pair of Old Testament sandals. The gay man is standing in her path, eagerly looking her up and down and up and down again, and I want to get out and hug him, maybe even kiss him, when I hear him trill, “Well hell-oh, darlin’!” I can’t swear it, but I believe I hear an irritated whoosh of air escape Little Miss Smoking Hot -- “Oooofff!” -- but maybe it’s just the hydraulic brakes of some nearby bus...

THE GAY MAN:

“I was in the Army for nine years, five months, twenty-four days. I’ve been out for six months now... I came directly to San Francisco... Today I’m meeting a couple of friends down near the parade. This is my first Pride weekend...

“Six months ago I was in Iraq… Yep, saw it all -- I sure did… No, I wasn’t out on patrol every day, but often enough. I was an information specialist. I had trained the twenty-five people who maintained all of our division’s communications -- all our phones, computers, radios, cell phones. My commander knew he couldn’t afford to lose me, and every time I went ‘outside the wire’ I had to get his personal permission. So I wasn’t out very often, but I wanted to experience everything there was to experience over there. And I didn’t want other people thinking I was hiding. I wanted them to know I’d been out, that I knew what the things they were going through were like. If they had some problem, I wanted to know exactly how it showed up for them in actual situations. But even inside the wire, we lived with the reality of mortar attacks. One could happen at any time -- and that changes the way you look at everything…”

Me: “Are you gay?”

He: “I am.”

Me: “How do you handle Don’t ask, Don’t tell?"

“Don’t ask, Don’t tell! -- I hadn’t even come out to myself until I’d been in for a few years. But after my first Iraq tour I was home on leave and I realized that even though I may have been acting all brave and manly and soldierly over there, it was ridiculous for me to try to trick myself into believing I wasn’t gay. So when I went back I stopped pretending. I didn’t make a big deal of it to my superiors or even to my peer. It really had nothing to do with my job, with whether or not I could do the work that needed to be done. But I stopped hiding it. And it’s been so much better this way.”

I try not to take money from active military folks or from those who’ve been recently discharged, especially those who’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. And today, Pride Parade day, well, what’s a boy to do? Free ride!

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BOGART

2010-05-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

SHIFT #44

SUNDAY, MAY 2 -- Hotel W to Pier 39 -- $8.95

RIDE #1: A MIDDLE-AGED COUPLE wearing full Giants’ fan gear -- black and orange everything -- walk out of the W Hotel. Their faces light up when they see me and my cab. The woman’s arms shoot into the air like she's just thrown the final strike-three of the World Series: "We've been looking for you!"

They live in Concord (or was it Walnut Creek?), have seen the Commercial too many times to count, and during the past couple of days they have talked about whether they might (they have even dared to hope they might) spot me. But to wind up in my cab! Oh, this is almost too much -- it’s just unbelievable!

They’re in San Francisco to have a big day with their son's Little League team -- the whole team is being allowed down onto the field this morning, before the game, and later the kids will get to run the bases. A block and a half from the ballpark, we see a line of about thirty people strung out along the Second Street sidewalk -- 10-12 year-old kids in blue “Braves” baseball uniforms, plus a few adults. When they see my cab they start cheering and whistling and calling out, “…commercial!...TV!...Green Cab!” Several of them start trotting down the street to try to keep up with us. The man says, “Oh, can you please pull over? Maybe we can get some photos?” And suddenly I'm beside my cab, surrounded by a Little League team, cameras, smiles... This has been FUN for me! And other drivers at Green Cab say it’s been fun for them, too -- throughout their shifts, customers keep bringing up the Ad. It is hot! [We exchange addresses, and I beg them to please send me some of the photos. They never arrive. Darnit.]

RIDE #3: THEY’RE YOUNG (they’re both 24), they’re each very personable and polite, they're attractive and fit-looking and brimming with youth, and to me they seem rather perfectly matched. They both grew up in Indianapolis but now they live in Chicago, where they feel quite at home. He works as a business consultant (“You’ve probably taken many of my brethren to the airport”) and she as a therapist focusing on relationships. I say, “Well then, you’re guaranteed lifelong happiness!” and they both chuckle convincingly, even though they’ve certainly heard that quip a million times before.

Today is a perfect weather day, perhaps the best of the year so far, and my fares are clearly in an excellent mood, as am I. They are here for three days to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, a tidbit I discover embarrassingly late in the ride. (Back on the sidewalk in front of the W Hotel, one of my cab driver brethren had warned them, “Be careful, this guy is famous now!” And so they had asked about it, and I spent the ride’s entire first half telling them the story.) At Pier 39 I apologize for having bogarted the conversation, wish them a lifetime of happiness, and tell them the ride is free.

“But,” shrieks the woman, “we love your story!”

Me: “Come on now... Don’t make me come back there and throw you out!”

And they flee, trailing laughter.
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* * My ‘Eff-bomb period’ * *

2010-05-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

SHIFT #45

WEDNESDAY, MAY 5 -- Fremont/Market to Howard/Third -- $5.80

DOWNTOWN AT NOON two women hail me for a ride to the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, a bar/restaurant across the street from the W Hotel. I’m not part of their conversation, but I overhear that one of them is a native of Puebla, Mexico, and for me this is reason enough for a free ride on this particular day. When I pull up in front of the Thirsty Bear and break the news, my fares seem a little uncertain about it all. I can tell they like the idea, but…Really?

“It’s Cinco de Mayo…,” I say, and as gently as I can, I slip my hand around to the handle of the back door and ease it open for them. “You can take a free ride on Cinco de Mayo, can’t you?”

It takes them just a few brief seconds for the date to register with them, and as we’re sitting there, this scenario -- door open, passengers reluctant to depart -- pushes to the forefront of my mind a chain of old memories, and I feel myself start to smile. But I suppress the impulse -- I can unravel those memories later -- and I just wait...

In the rearview I see them look toward each other. The one from Mexico smiles, the other nods. “Thank you very much!”

CHAIN OF MEMORIES: It’s the year 1985 and I am 35 years old, a green, newly-minted cab driver, very inexperienced in the nitty-gritty of street life. My first few weeks are like a trip to a foreign country: entertainment, an education, a peek into an entirely new subculture. At the end of each shift, I and a dozen other drivers squeeze into a tiny, beat-up hoboes’ shack at the edge of the cab lot and line up to slip our daily cab rental fees -- our “gates” -- to a cashier caged behind an iron-barred window.

Being new, I have no stories to tell, but I love listening to everyone else’s -- particularly the tales spun by a cocky, full-of-life fellow named Mickey. Mickey’s stories are hilarious, not just for their content but because Mickey’s accent and in-your-face demeanor are pure Brooklyn. One day his post-shift performance contains this line: “…so I tell dis broad, ‘Get da fuck outta my cab!...’”

I of course know that people don’t really swear like that -- not casually, not at strangers, and certainly not when those strangers are one’s customers. Besides, cab drivers can get fired for talking to fares that way. When Mickey’s finished, and when I’ve stopped laughing, I say, “Great story, Mickey. But you didn’t really say that to her, did you?”

Mickey: “Say what?”

Me: “You know -- ‘Get the fuck out of my cab!’”

Mickey: “Da fuck I didn’t!”

ROLL THE CAMERA forward just a few weeks, if you will, to a warm weekend night. Actually it’s about three in the morning and I’m at the tail end of a long shift when I’m flagged South of Market by a moderately-but-quite-noticeably-overweight young woman. I’m not so green anymore -- by now I’ve mopped up after a backseat pukers, have seen fares sprint off into the night without paying, have had a gun held to my head… When she opens my back door, but before she can get in, I tell this woman, “Excuse me -- I’ve only got a few minutes left in my shift, and I can only do a short ride. Where are you headed?”

She: “Daly City.”

Cab drivers who turn in late are charged, often, one dollar per late minute. (The greedier companies consider the late fee a profit center and happily pocket the money, but at a decent company -- Green Cab, for instance -- the late fee goes straight to the next driver, and the fee is charged only if that next driver is present and has been waiting for his/her turn in the cab.) Driving this woman to Daly City will require at least twenty-five minutes and cost me a bunch of money: “I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”

She starts to scream -- she questions my ethnicity, speculates pessimistically on the dimensions of my manhood, proclaims that the collective value of all cab drivers does not equal the collective value of all fecal matter -- and then she slams my door louder than all of that combined.

I’ve spent nearly ten hours chasing fares all over the city -- I’m drained -- but I spring from the cab, glare across the rooftop at her bulging face, and offer a suggestion: “Maybe, if you walk all the way to Daly City, you’ll lose some of that fat!” Tame, even lame, I know, but it’s the best I can come up with -- and it feels good! All the way back to the garage I find myself chortling, and also re-thinking Mickey: Maybe he did cuss that woman out?

ON A COLD WINTER NIGHT a few months later, I pick up two drunk white guys in North Beach. Within a block they toss off the n-word at least five times. Suddenly my hands jerk the wheel, my foot jabs the brake, the cab screeches to the curb at Union and Colombus -- on the far side of Washington Square, the twin, spotlighted spires of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul rise into the black sky. I reach across the back seat, yank the handle, throw open the door… “Get the fuck out of my cab!”

BEFORE THEY MOVED from Oakland to Oregon several years ago, I used to share my cab stories with my old friends Jon and Diana. One morning I woke them up so I could unburden myself of the saga of having a gun pulled on me during the night -- my third gun. They didn’t appreciate that story so much -- it alarmed them, it wasn’t such a great start to their day -- but they always liked my others. They enjoyed hearing about Mickey, and the fat woman, and the two n-word spewers, and about my growing infatutation with telling other obnoxious people to “Get the fuck out of my cab!” And about how this tactic was becoming perhaps my favorite of the few arrows in my cab driving quiver: “Get the fuck out of my cab!” Whenever we would get together, Jon and Diana would always ask if I’d had to let it fly lately?

One December in the early 1990s, Jon and Diana call me before coming to the City for a Saturday night Christmas party. I pick them up at BART and drop them at Ghiradelli Square. When they try to pay, I refuse. No, they say, it’s not right… We have to pay you…you’re working!…etc. But some things cannot be assigned a dollar value: in college, first baseman Jon used to dig my errant throws from third out of the dirt; publisher’s rep Diana has given me hundreds of dollars worth of free books. I tell them, “Hey -- what’s one free taxi ride between friends?” But they’re not having it: We’d have had to pay some other driver… If we’d known you were going to act this way we wouldn’t have called you…!

Stalemate across the backseat.

“Don’t make me say it...”

Jon keeps arguing, but I can see Diana starting to smile…

“I warned you...” I reach back, fling open the door: “Get the fuck out of my cab!”

We still laugh about it whenever we see each other.

NOW IT’S THE YEAR 2010, and I’m older and supposedly wiser and calmer. Also, I haven’t driven a night shift in years, and the day shift clientele is completely different: daytime fares are almost always sober. I can’t remember the last time I eff-bombed anyone, and it’s been a full five years since I’ve thrown anyone out of my cab.

But sometimes I look back fondly on my “Get the fuck out…” period. There was something liberating about it. In an odd way, I view my prior, more proper self as immature. Once I’d mastered Get the fuck out… I felt more complete as a cab driver, and as a person -- or, perhaps more accurately, I felt less incomplete. I can now look back and appreciate that the overweight woman and those two foul-mouthed racists and all their sorry relatives were doing me a favor, were setting me free, allowing me to grow up, giving me permission to do the right, if not the polite, thing. Even though we usually stifle the urge, sometimes the only right thing to do is to say, “Get the fuck out of my cab!” I don’t know where you work, dear reader, but I’m giving you permission. Go ahead. Next time you find it appropriate, just let ‘er rip. “Get the fuck out of my cubicle!” I’m willing to bet that the world won’t end. “Get the fuck out of my office!” “…my store!” “…my barber’s chair!” “Get the fuck out of my face!” At Green Cab, we don’t actually recommend this sort of behavior. We’re a small company -- growing but still small (and polite) -- and should “get the fuck out” get you fucking fired, well, there’s not much I (or we) could do for you. But the cab world does average thirty-three percent turnover each year -- and someone is always hiring.

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* * HEROIN! * *

2010-05-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

Shift #46

FRIDAY, MAY 7 -- Ninth Avenue/Irving to 19th/De Haro -- $2,551.71

THE GREEN CAB LOT is located in the heart of the city’s gritty Mission District. The nearby blocks are filled with grocery/liquor/lotto shops; tire and auto parts dealers; divey bars, trendy cafes, dirt-cheap taquerias, upscale restaurants; some of the city’s more affordable housing; a huge, brick complex (formerly the city’s armory) where quadruple-x-rated adult entertainment films are produced; and, at 826 Valencia, a “writing center/pirate store,” the give-something-back project of local writing/publishing legend Dave Eggers.

Our lot is less than one block from the Sixteenth Street BART station plaza, which at all hours of the day (photo) is occupied by people chanting Krishna or loudspeakering Jesus or proclaiming the end of the world or begging spare change or selling popsicles from a cart or eyeing your backpack or sitting on the curb, hands cuffed behind, while a couple of cops dubiously study IDs. A few battered storefronts away is a used-bicycle shop where recently, the day after my bike was stolen, I stopped by on an (incorrect) hunch that I might be able to repurchase it there.

At Sixteenth and South Van Ness, Green Cab rents fifteen parking spots from a smog check/oil change/garage business which until a few years ago was the site of a full service gas station. Our parking spots are located off toone side of the property, clustered around a tall canopy that used to shelter a gas pump island. The whole enterprise is encircled by a tall chain link fence, with a heavy gate that must be rolled back and forth whenever we drivers leave or arrive. During our comings and goings we are always careful to keep an eye on the local populace. Usually it’s just folks heading to or from BART, but there are always a fair number of loiterers or homeless people pushing carts and muttering quietly or sometimes very loudly to themselves.

THIS MORNING I ARRIVE IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS, get out of my car, unlock the gate, roll it back, drive my car into the lot and park in an empty space next to cab #914 -- my cab. I punch my waybill into the timeclock (5:04 AM), transfer my supplies (coffee cup, coin jar, clipboard, cross-street directory, etc.) from my personal car into my cab, roll my cab over to the vacuum machine and clean out the front and back (last week, while I was vacuuming under the front seat, the hose nozzle became clogged with…US currency...five bucks!).

This morning I’m the only person in the lot, and, as I finish bending down into the backseat with the vacuum nozzle, I stand up and notice that 1) I have accidentally left the gate to the lot wide open, and 2) a homeless-looking man has stopped on the sidewalk just outside the gate and is studying me. When I look at him he turns and walks slowly away, toward BART, but he keeps glancing back at me. No one’s in sight but the two of us. Diagonally across the street is a well-lit Union 76 gas station, but I’m probably 70 yards from the cashier’s door. I decide to roll the gate shut, but as soon as I move toward it the homeless man reverses his direction and heads right back my way. Just as things are about to get interesting, he stops -- we’re about fifteen feet apart now -- and speaks up: “It was you.” His face opens into a smile. “You was the one in the commercial -- wasn’t you?”

BUT OTHERWISE, my fifteen grainy minutes of fame seem to have drained right out of the hourglass. For the first couple of weeks after the Ad began to air, I was approached at least a dozen times each shift by people who remarked on it. But these things have a shelf life, and the ad agency must have cut back on the number of times it's airing (or maybe they stopped airing it completely?), and poof -- the number of mentions dropped to five or six per shift, and then earlier this week, straight to zero. As I go through my shift now, the whole thing can seem as though it never happened.

Television is supreme. We will watch, we will focus on, whatever the networks, the advertisers, and the ad agencies put in front of our eyeballs, and when those people decide it’s time to move on, we move like a flock, one big hypnotized flock. What power! And there’s no denying it: While that big monster spotlight was shining on me, it certainly was intoxicating. Two weeks ago, my friend and fellow Green Cab driver Mort Weinstein, who a few years ago had his own quarter-hour of fame when he organized Recording Artists Against Drunk Driving, warned me, “Enjoy it, but be careful -- don’t get hooked. It’s heroin.”

IT’S 3 PM, AND I’M ALL THE WAY OUT AT OCEAN BEACH. I need to gas up and get the cab back to the yard for the 4 PM driver. I haven’t given away a free ride today, but no big deal -- no law says that I have to, and every other year or so a shift comes along where a free ride just doesn't work out. I can always give away two tomorrow.

Today, however, is still possible. I’m at least twenty minutes from the yard, and maybe someone will flag me along the way or maybe I’ll spot someone in a bus zone. I cruise down Lincoln for forty blocks, looking, and then on a hunch I turn up Ninth Avenue to Irving, where a young man’s hand shoots into the air the instant he sees me. He’s headed to Potrero Hill, several blocks past the yard -- for me, absolutely perfect.

He says he’s thrilled to see me, and I say I’m thrilled to see him. He says he’s only been standing there for a couple of minutes, but those minutes have not been hopeful ones -- Ninth and Irving isn’t a prime cab-catching location, and it’s the start of the Friday afternoon rush hour and all -- and then suddenly, here I am…

He says he is not familiar with cabulous, but yes he does have an iphone, and within two minutes he has downloaded the free cabulous app and now he chuckles while watching, on his iphone’s screen, the one little blue dot representing his phone and the other little green dot representing Green Cab #914, rolling down Oak Street as cozily as if they’re married.

And then: “You know, I’m in the market for one of these Priuses. Do you like yours?”

Me: “I absolutely love it.” I tell him about running the numbers a year after giving up my Crown Victoria for a Prius; as a result of my switch, at least 5,000 gallons of gasoline did not get burned that year!

My fare has a new job, and a new hour-long commute for which he needs a new car. “I’ve narrowed my choice down to either the Prius or the Ford Explorer,” he says. “Last week I saw this great ad for Prius on tv, and it’s tipped me that way.”

Me: “Tell me about that ad if you will.”

He: “Well, it was just one guy, a cab driver. In fact, he was a Green Cab driver, and he was talking about how much he loved his Prius.”

I take off my baseball cap, turn around, grin: “Did he look anything like me?”

“He looked exactly like you…” My fare laughs. “Sorry, yeah, I knew -- I just didn’t want to put you on the spot…”

He goes on to say that it was a very effective ad, in fact, the “best car commercial I've ever seen." (This is the third time I’ve heard this comment, and twice it came from strangers.) I say thank you, and tell him that I haven’t yet seen it -- I could watch it on youtube, anytime, but I’m actually hoping to stumble upon it in the normal course of my life. He asks how the ad came about, and I give him the short version. He says some more very complimentary things, and volunteers that -- having already been tipped toward the Prius, and having now wound up in my cab -- he doesn’t see how he could possibly buy anything but the Prius.

“Oh god…,” I say, and I’m virtually moaning. “Oh god, I wish this ride were being taped. I wish the ad agency, I wish Toyota, could hear exactly what you’ve just said.”

I tell him about this blog. He tells me his name is Blake (Blake Kemp, I think), and I tell Blake Kemp there’s not a snowflake’s chance in hell that he can pay me for his ride today.

(NOTE: After work I find seven envelopes in my mailbox. One of them contains a congratulatory letter from, and an invitation to join, the Screen Actors Guild. The other six contain checks from the ad agency totalling $2,551.71)

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

My neighbor Jesse

2010-05-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

Shift #47

WEDNESDAY, MAY 12 -- W Hotel to 255 Channel -- $8.95

I’M STANDING OUTSIDE MY CAB in front of the W Hotel when I hear my name called. I swivel my head and quickly zero in on my neighbor, Jesse, coming down the sidewalk with a big smile on his face. “I was just looking for a cab,” he says, “and here you are!”

Jesse and his wife Hillary and their darling 18-month old son Dylan (lately Dylan has been waving to me from his stroller whenever the family passes by) live just three doors down the street from my wife and daughter and me in the Piedmont Avenue neighborhood of Oakland. Jesse used to work for San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and then for Mayor Newsom, and now he’s a self-employed business consultant. This morning he’s on his way to see a client over in the exploding Mission Bay area of the city. As we ride, we talk a little about work, but mostly about the wonder of watching our kids grow up on a cozy dead-end street in a mostly quiet neighborhood where the neighbors mostly all know each other.

Jesse knows about this blog, and probably even knows he’s not going to get away with paying for his ride, and in front of the Mission Bay Visitors Center he graciously succumbs to my terms, which are pretty simple, and pretty much all that any writer can ask: Every once in a while, please read what I write, and man, we are so even!

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"GET OUT!"

2010-05-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Shift #48

FRIDAY, MAY 14 -- Nob Hill to Multimedia Gulch -- Who’$ counting, anyway?

IT’S BARELY 6 AM, and a gauzy gray mist hangs low over Nob Hill. My first fare of the day is sitting inside the lit-up lobby of her apartment building, waiting patiently. She is a lovely young Asian woman, somewhere around thirty years old. She grew up in Toronto, and her accent is straight North American. She is headed to her job at the Fairmont Hotel -- she’s in her fifth year now. I remark that all the employees I drop at the Fairmont seem to love working there. “I love it, too,” she says. “Hospitality -- either you love it, or you’d better find something else to do.” She strikes me as exactly the kind of person one would hope to find behind a check-in counter at the end of a long journey.

Our journey together is a short one -- six blocks along the cable car line, with the Bay Bridge visible in the distance, tucked neatly under the low blanket of fog. The free ride Feeling is right there: it’s my first ride...I’ve just finished my coffee...the fare is exactly four dollars, almost nothing...she’s charming... Now I can sit back and let the whole rest of my day unfold. Also, a short, uncomplicated ride like this one will be easy to write about, and that’s a good thing, as I have fallen three shifts behind on this journal...

EARLY AFTERNOON. This has turned out to be a particularly slow day -- not the typical Friday. I punched my waybill at 5:02 AM -- seven and a half hours ago -- and since then I have grossed just $109 from 10 rides (no airports, darnit). The rent on my cab today is $102, and gas will cost me another $7-10, so I’m barely at break-even with just two and a half hours to go.

At 12:35 I’m flagged by a young blond woman at California and Presidio. Her father was in the oil business, and until she was sixteen my fare’s family lived in London, England, but then they moved back to the States. She is headed to her job at an Internet startup on Ritch Alley down near the Giants’ stadium. Back during the Dot-com Bubble this area was known as “Multimedia Gulch” but I haven’t heard that term used since the Bust. In college my fare studied something unrelated to business (was it literature?), but when she graduated she was open to anything: “There are people with experience willing to work for nothing these days -- so I was just happy to get a job, period.” The company has grown to fifty or sixty employees, making it big for a startup, and my fare says it’s starting to feel like it’s either time for them to be bought out by a bigger firm or to maybe think about throwing in the towel. She has been working there for three years, has a piece of the company, and is hoping for the buyout.

Toward the end of the ride, she says: “Thank you for driving the way you do -- in so many cabs, I feel like I’m either going to die or at least lose my lunch.”

Me: “Thank you for saying that. I’m 58, and I’m sure I’ve slowed down over the years, but I like to think that even when I was younger my driving wasn’t terribly scary.”

She: “Some drivers! I just had one an hour ago -- he was unreal! But my mom has the worst story. She was eight months pregnant -- this was in New York City, in a pouring thunderstorm -- and she told the driver I’m pregnant, and I’m feeling a little funny, could you please slow down a little bit… And he pulled over to the curb and said, ‘Get out!’”

My gut lurches and I briefly double over at the wheel. A sound escapes me: “Ooooo…”

She: “And she did -- in a pouring thunderstorm!”

I say: “I am so sorry…”

She: “It wasn’t your fault.”

I think: I wish I hadn’t given away my free ride already.

Body: Uh, dude…

Me, to her: “Were you the kid?”

She: “I think I was.”

We’re pulling into Ritch Alley, which is crowded with young startup employees on lunch break. During the dot-com days every street in this area looked this way during every lunch hour -- during every evening and every late night, too. The meter reads exactly $13.

I tell my fare, “Every day I give away a free ride. This is my free ride today.”

She: “Oh, you don’t have to do that...”

Me: “It’s payback -- tell your mom.”

She: “Oh, don’t worry."

(NOTE: During the two hours and twenty-three minutes remaining in my shift, I gross $112.)

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I’ve had it with men!

2010-05-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

Shift #49

SUNDAY, MAY 16 -- Bay to Breakers -- My biggest day of the year: $273

From the ESPN website:

SAN FRANCISCO 4, HOUSTON 3 -- The Giants had a little hometown help for this win.

Several Houston Astros players walked to AT&T Park when taxi drivers in San Francisco declined to transport them because of the Bay to Breakers foot race that was also taking place. Those who did manage to catch a ride spent almost an hour getting to the ballpark from the Astros’ team hotel, which was less than two miles from the stadium.

Houston manager Brad Mills finally arrived 30 minutes after persuading a taxi driver to take a chance in the traffic.

“I had to tell him how to get here, but we wound up getting here,” Mills said. “I’ve never had that before. It was nuts.”

I DON’T KNOW HOW the annual, street-clogging Bay-to-Breakers extravaganza sneaks up on me each year, but somehow it always does take me by surprise. It’s officially called a “race” (it’s the oldest consecutively held running event in the world), but today it’s difficult to spot many people actually working up a sweat. The event began in 1912 with a handful of participants, grew to several hundred over the years, and then dipped to fewer than 50 during World War II. But for the nearly thirty years that I’ve lived here, Bay-to-Breakers always attracts about 100,000 participants and at least a gazillion gawkers.

And today they’re all out here, dressed in all sorts of costumes: Elvis Presley; three pert young women dressed in the tightest, most intriguing Boy Scout uniforms I’ve ever seen (and I was a Boy Scout); a group of men carrying foul-looking mops and wearing oil-stained jumpsuits with “BP” stenciled on their backs; and so many, many more...

At 8 a.m. the race officially starts with an emphatic burst from two hundred elite runners. The remainder of the mob shuffle in behind, a good percentage of them guzzling from beer cans. Things take several hours to develop -- all day, in fact. At least an hour passes before the final entrant reaches and crosses the starting line. At 10:20 a.m., in the Mission District, a mile and a half from the race route, I see crowds of costumed late-comers (a woman in pink butterfly wings; a full-gear Santa Claus; a six-foot-tall owl wearing sneakers) waiting for a MUNI train. They’re all still aiming themselves toward the race, planning to join up halfway along, at whatever time they happen to arrive... Whatever is the day’s relevant word...

RECENTLY IT HIT ME that a fair number of my free rides involve “lovely” or “charming” or “delightful” young women. Not so many men. So at 10:13 AM, when I pull out of the Safeway parking lot at Market and Church and see a handsome young Latino man flagging me, I’m happy for the chance to even things out a bit. He’s got a solid build, thick dark hair, and a chiseled face, but his good looks are providing him no comfort this morning.

Me: "How's your day going?"

He: “Terrible.”

Me: “Why?”

He: “Breakers. I started at Sixth and Geary, but MUNI never came, and now I’m already an hour and fifteen minutes late to work. It’s a big party for the whole city, big fun, but not if you have to get to work.”

He’s been a cook “for years” at a restaurant at 24th and Church, but he doesn’t sound interested in chit-chat, and I let him be. When I tell him that his $5.80 ride is free, he resists, hard. “You have to make a living,” he insists. “I can’t accept this.” He holds his credit card toward me, but I punch buttons on the meter and disappear the numbers. “I can’t run a credit card now,” I tell him (and it’s true). “Everyone else is having fun -- you deserve a break, too.” And he surrenders. With a small smile, even.

MOMENTS LATER at 18th and Castro, another handsome man. This one is carrying a bag of ice and is headed to a party at a friend’s house on the Hayes Street Hill -- “Heartbreak Hill” in Bay-to-Breakers lingo. He’s in a much better mood than than the cook; he tells me right away that today is his forty-first birthday. He thinks this is the fourth time in the last twenty years that Bay-to-Breakers has collided with his birthday, and, to his way of thinking, this is not a good thing -- it’s a distraction from the main event: his own life. But when I tell him, at ride’s end ($7.60), that on his birthday I am refusing to take his money, he just ain’t having it. “No fuckin’ way," he says. He’s already got nine dollars in cash in his hand, and he reaches forward between the two front seats and stuffs the bills down into my coffee mug, which is plugged into the cup holder near the dashboard.

That’s it. I tried. I’ve had it with men. I’m going back to lovely, charming, delightful women now…

(NOTE: At 4 pm, as I turn in, the dispatcher is still calling for cabs at the race’s end point, Ocean Beach -- eight full hours after the race has begun...)

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MY FRIEND TRAVIS VAN BRASCH

2010-05-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

Shift #50

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20 – Panoramic/Longview to SFO -- $560

TRAVIS VAN BRASCH and I first met back in 2007, the remarkable and phenomenally stressful year during which I almost single-handedly organized the four Beach Impeach events.

Each event drew one thousand or more people, and for each of them I hired a helicopter, sent a photographer friend overhead with a camera, and later mailed an original, professional postcard to each of the event’s participants. During the weeks preceding and then on the ground during each of those events, I needed to attend to dozens of details ranging from the huge (Park Service permits, event insurance, helicopter rental) to the tiny (do I have the walkie-talkies? the rubber mallet? enough stakes?). I have, most unfortunately, not yet learned the skill of forming an organization, and during that year of my juggling a thousand things at once, my family and about half my friends thought I’d gone a bit mad. I maintained that I was “trusting the universe.”

Before each event I would send out an email to my list asking that, please, would anyone who could do so, please, show up early on the morning of the event and help me make it come off, please. On the day of each event I awoke during the wee hours (or, more accurately, I finally abandoned the pretense of trying to sleep) and headed off to the site to meet my fate -- all the while hoping that a few volunteers might show up. Please.

Each time, exactly the right number of people in fact did show up -- and usually just in the nick of time… (Digression: The crucial volunteer was a sweet man named Jim Reid. Later I would learn that Jim had several years earlier run for San Francisco mayor against Willie Brown and had received about 20,000 votes! Before Beach Impeach #2 Jim called me and volunteered to pass the hat. At Beach Impeach #1 no hat had been passed, and I’d paid that event’s $3,500 price tag from my own pocket. But at #2, #3, and #4, Jim’s donation bucket brought in $12,000 -- almost magically matching the cost of those three events.)

So you might think that by the fourth event, I’d have relaxed a bit. Nope. How could I really trust that enough volunteers and enough participants would show up? I lived with the fear of having the biggest, most embarrassing failure of my life. I’d invited 1,000 guests, I’d paid for the helicopter and now…? Now we shall see…

BEACH IMPEACH #4 takes place on a green lawn near the Berkeley Marina, with Cindy Sheehan and Cynthia McKinney and Michelle Shocked plus some 997 others on the guest list. The first volunteer to arrive that morning is Travis Van Brasch. Travis has attended the first three Beach Impeach events, but we haven’t really connected. This time, he arrives at 7 a.m., sees my pile of tools and gear, and says, “What can I do? Give me a job.”

In advance, I’ve painted the letters I-M-P-E-A-C and H onto seven posterboards. Now these need to be mounted (I’ve brought six-foot poles, a stapler, a mallet, etc.) and pounded into the ground somewhere so that arriving guests can spot them from the far-off parking area. Travis listens to my instructions, and says, “Consider this done.”

An hour later he’s back: “What else you got?” Over his shoulder, I see a row of neatly mounted placards stretching across a distant hilltop -- big and bold and precisely spaced, and with new arrivals trickling right past them. I could cry. Really.

Already I am way behind schedule and a little freaked out. The plan for the day is that the 1,000 attendees will initially occupy spots inside the outlines of 100-foot-tall lettering spelling “IMPEACH!” Before everyone’s arrival, I need to outline -- on the grass, precisely, with colored twine that must be stretched tightly and staked down -- the boundaries of the lettering. I spend 60 seconds showing Travis my crude ruler-and-pencil sketches and trying to explain my vision. We’re standing in the middle of a twenty-acre lawn next to my jumbled pile of tools and gear. Travis says, “We can do this. How about we just split it down the middle?”

Travis folds a copy of the plans into his pocket; he grabs a mallet, a couple of rolls of colored twine, a bundle of stakes, and heads off to the south part of the lawn. I head north. We each snag a couple of new arrivals and press them into service. Around 11:30 we meet up in the lawn’s center. One thousand people have arrived and are taking their places. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter has arrived. Cindy and Cynthia and Michelle have arrived. Jim Reid has set up a canopy under which he guards the donation bucket. At noon sharp, the helicopter buzzes overhead. Click. Click. Click… If you are there, if you arrive at say, 11:45, you probably think: “Man, someone sure knows how to organize an event!”

SOMETIME AFTER THAT BEACH IMPEACH YEAR, Travis adds me to his personal email list. I have no previous awareness of Travis’s involvement with Landmark Education, but in 2009 I receive a string of invitations to several Landmark guest events of which Travis is a part. My calendar prevents me from accepting any of these invites, but I wish it were otherwise. My first involvement with Landmark occurred in 1978. Experiences cannot be precisely distilled into words, but here’s a taste of what I learned: I, and only I, am responsible for my life. And: The only thing standing between me and the life I dream of is…ME! I’ve spent the last thirty-some years trying, with partial success, to live up to this simple but profound wisdom.

IN 2010 an old friend tells me that he’d like to finally accept my long ago offer to pay his tuition to the Landmark Forum. His wife would also like to enroll. The cost of the course has more than doubled, to $560 per person -- a big chunk of money. I’m reluctant. Like everyone, I’ve taken several financial hits lately. I haven’t been around Landmark for years. The person in my life who has most recently promoted Landmark is… Travis Van Brasch. I give Travis a call and tell him what’s up. He says, “We can do this. How about we just split it down the middle?”

At the end of this month of May, my friend and his wife will participate in the Landmark Forum in Manila. If it has half as much impact on their lives as it did on mine, I will, and I’m sure Travis will, consider the cost a bargain.

EARLIER THIS WEEK, I learn that Travis is headed to the airport on a day I’m driving my cab. Back east, Travis’ 74-year-old sister is in the last few days of her life. “Bro,” I say, “Let me take you to the airport.”

Travis says, “You know, that would be perfect…”

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* * Listen to ME! * *

2010-05-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

Shift #51

FRIDAY, MAY 22 -- Here, there, everywhere -- Maybe $1,000 or so?

FOR THE SHIFT’S FIRST HOUR-AND-A-QUARTER I’M EMPTY. But finally I snag a thirty-nine dollar airport off the radio and then, back in the city, I catch another radio call on the edge of the Castro -- my first free ride of the day. Her name is White Feather, and I remember that she rode in my cab back in 2006, the year when I took notes every day for a book I’ve yet to write.

White Feather is an old hippie, like me, and today she’s goin’ up-country. At the Civic Center she’ll be catching a bus to the isolated hamlet of Camp Meeker, in Sonoma County. Ten years ago she bought a cabin in the woods on the high ground above a creek, and now she heads to it every chance she gets -- it’s quiet there, peaceful. If I’m ever passing through, she recommends eating at the Union Hotel in the nearby village of Occidental: “If you order a pizza, you’ll get this frothy pesto sauce that’s been made fresh just for that pizza.”

I recall that White Feather has long ago, like me, published a book, and at the Civic Center, after I’ve told her that this (for me) enjoyable ride is my free ride for the day, I ask her to again please tell me her book’s title. She’s happy about the free ride, but even happier that I remember she’s an author. She says, “Rebel Without Applause: Tales from the Castro Renaissance,” and nods to the big building on the far side of Civic Center Plaza. “It’s still over there in the library.” (Which makes me wonder about my own...?)

MY NEXT FARE is a Citywide Dispatch regular who is heading from Pacific Heights to her job at 525 Market Street. As we’re driving down Post Street (ahead of me I note a bumper-sticker: Humankind -- Be Both!), I tell my fare that from 1982-1984 I, too, worked at 525 Market, in the Credit Card Department of Wells Fargo Bank.

My fare asks a string of the same sort of questions I like to ask when given an opening into someone’s life story.

Her first question: “What was your job?”

Me: “I was a secretary. I was thirty-two at the time, and my boss was a twenty-eight-year old woman -- a senior vice president and a rising star in the bank.”

My fare: “Did you get along?”

“We did. I understood that my job was to make her look good, and to do my best to make sure that her sixty-employee division ran smoothly. By the time I left she was nudging me toward an opening as speech writer/public relations guy for the head of the department -- six hundred employees.”

“Why did you leave?”

“My then-wife decided she no longer wanted to be married, and suddenly I found myself alone and free… Took a backtrip around the world… No, she never remarried… Back then it was of course impossible for me to understand, but now I get it: She simply just...didn’t...want...to be married.”

She: “Did you find someone new?”

“I’m married again, and we have a thirteen year-old daughter.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Yes, thank you. I feel pretty lucky.”

She: “My husband died fifteen months ago. We were married forty-three years.”

Me: “I am very sorry... How are you doing? I know that fifteen months isn’t very long.”

She: “I am lost. I am so, so very lost…”

A few moments later, too quickly, our ride and conversation end in front of 525 Market. I squeeze the cab up against the curb, pop on the flashers, and my fare quickly pays me. I hop out and dig in the trunk for a copy of All The Right Places, the book I wrote about my 1984 grief-stricken, round-the-world backpack trip. My fare and I are standing just a few steps from the forty-story building through whose front door I walked at this same hour every weekday morning, until the bottom fell out of that earlier life of mine, and now I am handing the instrument of my healing to a wounded woman whose eyes have welled up and who could quite obviously stand some healing of her own. She’s gulping deep draughts of San Francisco Bay air, but not because it tastes so sweet. Her shoulders are heaving. She’s trying to recompose herself back into presentable nine-to-five shape. Her tears, I notice, are dropping onto the front of her coat at a rate of about one per breath...

ONE BLOCK LATER, before I’ve had a chance to digest all the shared emotion, I’m flagged by a woman about my own age who is running late due to a BART snafu. Now that she’s in my cab she can relax -- she’ll be on time for her doctor appointment. She grew up in Texas, moved to San Francisco during her twenties, a move that was, she says, probably the best, the smartest thing, she ever did. She loves it here. Loves the scenery, the diversity. She hated the kind of thinking she remembers growing up with in Texas. The racism, the mono-culture... On her most recent visit back, she found herself descending an escalator in a shopping mall: “And I realized I was going down into a solid sea of white faces. It scared me. It was suffocating… A while ago my mom died, and an old boyfriend from high school read the obituary and found my phone number. He’s a banker, makes more money than God -- I’m not kidding, he’s absolutely loaded. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s as red-neck as they come. And I thought, ‘Look what I could have become.’ Oh, thank you, Jesus!”

We’re half a block from her doctor’s office, and she’s opening her purse. “What’s your work?” I ask her.

She: “I’m an attorney. I’ve probably helped more down-and-out people than is good for me. Recently I learned that I charge less than what the non-profit legal services charge. But I don’t care…”

Body: Free ride…

I fight back as hard as I’ve ever fought back: I mean, holy shit! I’ve been out here for almost four hours, and I’ve made forty-nine bucks so far -- not even counting for my coffee and bagel. I’m fifty-eight years old. That’s twelve bucks an hour, and I don’t even get to keep it. I’ve got to make another sixty, maybe sixty-five bucks just to pay my gates and gas …

Body: Listen to me, asshole!

No, you listen to me for once! You told me to give White Feather her ride, and I gave the other woman my book -- that would cost at least fifteen bucks in a book store, even on amazon. I can’t give away everything! What the fuck!

Body starts screaming, and slapping me around: Amazon! You fat phony -- you write and write and write about how you listen to me. What crap! You wanna write that shit, you gotta actually fuckin’ LISTEN TO ME! Or STOP FUCKING WRITING IT! Who do you think you’re fooling, you fuckin’ idiot. I’m SCREAMING at you. CAN’T YOU FUCKIN’ HEAR ME!

We’re at the curb. My fare’s money is out, in her hand. She’s got the door open.

“Every day I give away one free ride, and today this is my free ride.”

Her mouth drops open. Her cell phone rings. “Are you sure?” she asks me.

Me: “I’m sure.”

She glances down at her ringing phone: “I hardly know what to say… But thank you so much!” She flips opens the phone and steps from the cab.

I’M SITTING ATOP PACIFIC HEIGHTS, looking out at the sun shining on San Francisco Bay. I’m feeling a little beat up, but it’s nothing serious. Yeah, yeah, so what I’ve been out here for four hours and I’ve only got forty-nine bucks to show for it! I could look at it another way: It’s a gorgeous day and I’ve got forty-nine bucks! I’ve also got a place to sleep tonight, food to eat, people I love and who love me, a city I adore. Right over there is the Golden Gate Bridge -- people all over the world dream about coming here to see it. There’s Alcatraz, there’s Angel Island, Sausalito, Tiburon. There’s the little church where Bob and Nancy got married…”

Then: “And hey, there’s Fort Mason. I should drop on down and check in with the Park Service. It’s nine o’clock -- someone should be in the office by now.”

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL WEEKS I’ve been stopping by the Park Service office to discuss the particulars of an application I’ve filled out but haven’t yet formally submitted. I’ve been hemming and hawwing about whether or not to organize a Beach Impeach-style event in June -- my real desire is to hold such an event every June, but right now I’m just trying to sell myself and the Park Service on the idea of the first one, which I want to hold on the morning of June 26.

I think...

These things are always a ton of work. And they’re expensive -- they’ve ranged from $2,500 to $7,000, and this one will probably come in around $2,500-$3,000. At the last three events, donations covered nearly all of the costs, but you never know. The work, the coordination, the details… It’s gruelling. And my family hates the madman they say I become while I’m sweating out one of these things.

What drives me, however, is this: When I run into or exchange emails with someone who has attended one (or more, or all) of these events, they almost always say something like this: “When are we going back to the beach again? That sure was fun…”

So I’ve been dickering with the Park Service. I’ve asked them to issue me a “First Amendment Free Speech” permit. I did ask for this type of permit at all four of the Beach Impeach events, too, but was always told no, and each time I wound up with a “photographic event” permit costing $300-500 per. And before securing each photographic permit, I was required to purchase $500 (or more) worth of “event insurance” -- and, each time, it seemed just about impossible to find an insurer willing to sell it. But each time, just as I was thinking I’d have to cancel the event, some insurance hero would come through for me. The helicopters were plenty tricky by themselves, but the Park Service permits and especially the event insurance -- those suckers gave me fits.

I’M BARELY IN THE DOOR, we haven’t even shaken hands yet, when my Park Service contact says, “Hey, we decided we can give you a free speech permit this time.”

I’ve barely absorbed this news (ca-ching -- there’s three to five hundred bucks I don’t have to scramble for) when he says, “And for a free speech event, you don’t need event insurance.”

A thousand bucks. My two biggest headaches have just been blasted with morphine.

As I’m walking back to my cab, Body whispers to me: Dude…

Yeah, yeah, I know…

Body grabs the front of my shirt with both hands and jerks me off my feet: Dude! Do Not FUCK WITH ME!

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NO DRAMA

2010-05-01T00:06:00.000-07:00

Shift #52

SUNDAY, MAY 22 -- W Hotel to Lombard/Polk -- $8.95

MY FIRST FIVE RIDES have been long ones -- one over to Oakland and four to or from SFO. The winter rains have been dragging on much longer than San Franciscans are used to, but today we’ve had nothing but sunshine. It seems that the entire populace is out enjoying this gift from the weather gods and trying to forget, for a while, if possible, that millions of gallons of oil are this very minute gushing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The young couple I pick up at the W are in a lazy Sunday afternoon mood. They slump down in the backseat, leaning in toward each other and murmuring so quietly that I would be rude were I to intrude. I don’t even bother to eavesdrop... At the end of the ride they graciously and delightedly accept the gift that they had no idea was coming.

Catastrophe

2010-05-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

Shift #53

FRIDAY, MAY 28 -- 11th/Minna to 23rd/Bartlett -- $7.60

TODAY I’VE BEEN ASKING EVERYONE THE SAME QUESTION: “When you woke up this morning, how long was it before the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher came to your mind?”

Answers have ranged from “Immediately!” and “As soon as I saw the front page...” to “Until I logged on and saw the top headline!” No one reports having not thought of it prior to my question.

My followup: “And have you got a sense of how long this will reverberate in our minds?”

I’ve heard: “Until they get it capped...” “Ten or fifteen years...” “Five hundred years.” Some people think the Gulf will wind up being more of a long-term shock to humanity’s consciousness and our collective way of living -- in America, as well as globally -- than 9/11 was. Some say the Gulf shock will reverberate, like Hiroshima, for decades.

My fares include: an FBI agent from DC; two urologists from Mexico; a San Francisco social worker trying to steer people toward “clean and sober” programs; a contractor from Southern California who tips me twelve bucks after a thirty-eighty dollar ride in from SFO; a corporate recruiter who earlier today was himself recruited by Google; a man from Seattle who sells imaging equipment to urologists (a convention of 18,000 urologists starts tomorrow at Moscone Center)...

Some of my fares hold out hope that much good may come out of this terrible thing: Maybe this disaster will help usher in the realization that we’re ALL in this together, and that we simply HAVE to move away from oil. But today every single one of them is aghast, and feels both powerless and at least partly responsible. (I personally feel more than partly responsible, perhaps even wholly responsible. This morning I drove my gasoline-burning car from my natural-gas-heated home to my job, which might accurately be described as “pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere for ten to twelve hours a day.”)

Late in the shift I pick up the day’s youngest-looking fare -- my guess: under twenty-five. His name is Lars. He grew up in Rhode Island. He’s been in San Francisco for four years. Last night he went to a kickass concert at the Fillmore: Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. During the middle, one of Lars’ friends remarked that, although the show was indeed a great one, he was having trouble enjoying it because of the Catastrophe in the Gulf. “But I keep thinking,” Lars’ friend said,” that we’d better enjoy it, because we just don’t know: Is this thing going to kill us all?”

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FORTY-NINE SQUARE MILES

2010-05-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Shift #54

SUNDAY, MAY 30 – Laguna Honda/Rockaway to 19th/Hollaway -- $7.60

AFTER AN HOUR EMPTY I accept a radio order from an address on Rockaway Avenue, a short, dead-end street up in the Twin Peaks area. On a clear day, one can see from Twin Peaks all the way to Mt. Diablo (thirty miles to the east) and to the Farallones Islands (twenty-six miles offshore to the west). Today a thin mist hides all of this spectacular geography, but the air is warm and windless and I can tell that before long we’ll be enjoying another pristine day. For weeks now, the populace has been grumbling about the lingering winter/spring rains. But San Franciscans are a forgiving group -- one clear, still day and all is forgiven, and today will be our third beauty in a row.

It’s been at least a decade since I’ve been to Rockaway Avenue, and I feel confident that I can still feel my way right to it. I have yet to meet the cab driver who claims to know every one of the hundreds of short streets and alleys that are sprinkled throughout San Francisco’s forty-nine square miles. Many of these are virtual phantoms -- dead-ends, barely a quarter-block long -- and even after twenty-five years I am forced to consult my cross-street directory about once a week.

In the end, Rockaway defeats me. After wandering in the Twin Peaks mist for several minutes I pull to the curb on Ulloa Street and pull out my directory, which, darnit, shows that I’m stopped just twenty-five yards from the obscure mouth of Rockaway.

MY FARE is ready and waiting -- a bit anxious, actually -- and she thanks me for coming. Previously she has used the services of a bigger, computer-dispatched cab company, but after One time they just never came! she switched to Citywide Dispatch (415-626-4733) and has been a believer ever since -- she likes hearing a live human voice on the other end of the line.

She’s heading to San Francisco State University, out in the southwest corner of the city. She looks like she’s in her late teens or early twenties, and my questions pry loose an interesting tidbit: she is one of the one hundred members of the elite dancer troupe Funkanometry SF. When I ask how long she’s known that she was a dancer, she says, “Since I was in ninth grade.” A while ago friends steered her toward a tryout with Funkanometry SF, and today she and the others are traveling from SF State to a performance at Great America amusement park. She says that, yes, members of the troupe are paid, and when I ask if one can make a living at it, she says, “Some can.” But the ride is a short one, and that’s all I get from her today. Quickly, and with what seems like complete enthusiasm, she accepts my free ride offer.

I HAVE NOTICED THAT SOME LARGE PERCENTAGE of these free rides go to my first ride of the day. I think this is because, really, my inclination is to give away all of my rides for free, and in the early morning, before practical thinking and strong daylight have eroded away my idealism, I have no resistance to the notion. I often reflect on Eckhart Tolle and how, during the two years following his awakening, he sat on a park bench, freed up from practical thinking, impervious to daylight, and enjoying a state of unassailable bliss.

Fresh out of college I spent a couple of years hitchhiking around the United States, which meant spending hundreds of hours watching thousands of cars pass me by. Later, when I came to hold title to automobiles of my own, I became a diligent picker-up of hitchhikers, and I now regard my current so-called career as, somehow, a logical extension of all those hitchhiking experiences. Even if there were no such thing as money, I would still want to spend many of my days driving around San Francisco, gawking at the dance of mist and light on the hills and the ocean and the bay; eyeballing the populace strolling from coffee shop to coffee shop and neighborhood to neighborhood; and chatting up those who wind up in my car.

Over dinner a while back, my friend Nancy Ruenzel, publisher of Peachpit Press, told me that as a result of hearing my cab stories, she has started initiating conversations with the cab drivers she encounters during her frequent business trips. Some don’t want to talk, Nancy told me, but many do. “Do you talk to everyone?” she asked me.

My answer was immediate, but not rehearsed, and the minute I heard it come out of my mouth I fell in love with it. “Yes. I’d hate to think that God got into my cab and I forgot to ask -- forgot to get his life story.”

BACK WHEN I WAS AN AUTHOR I was frequently invited to tell my story to writing groups, book store audiences, and the occasional book club, and I grew accustomed to hearing people of all ages tell me, “You’re lucky -- you always knew what you wanted to be. I don’t know what I want to be.”

For me, writing was and still is hard work. I love having written. I love being a writer. But I can’t say I’m in love with the work of writing. Sometimes I hate it. Cab driving is hard work, too, but I almost always find it about a thousand times easier and more fun than writing. And I do feel lucky to have found a place where I feel appropriately slotted, an activity to indulge my passions for people and stories and motion.

When I worked at Wells Fargo Bank, my estimate was that roughly two or three percent (absolutely no more than ten percent) of the bank’s employees actually belonged there. Very few of us were bankers at heart; the rest of us were there just for the paycheck. Whether we enjoyed our work or loathed it, whether we did an excellent job or a poor one, most of us, if we had won the lottery, would have disappeared in an instant. But those two or three percent who were bankers to the bone would, I believe, have kept right on banking after a lotto shock. They’d have felt lost without their work.

If I win the lottery I will still want to drive a cab once or twice a week -- or maybe I’ll discover that once or twice a month will satisfy me. Whatever the rate, the fact is that whenever I’ve taken long stretches away from cab driving I have ached for it. Without it, I feel cut off from something vital.

The first time I went to apply for a cab driving job, I noticed a coffee mug full of pens and pencils sitting on the desk of the cab company’s head of personnel. Taped to the cup’s lip was a scrap of paper clipped from a columnist’s list of random factoids that used to run in the San Francisco Chronicle every Sunday. At first I didn’t believe this factoid, but I am now part of its proof. Thirty-three percent of cab drivers claim that there is nothing they would prefer to do for a living.

I find myself thinking about this today because, as the school year comes to an end, in order to hang out with my freed up daughter as much as possible, I am now switching over to my “summer schedule.” January through May I work thirty hours a week, in the summer I cut back to just ten or twenty. And already I’m feeling a small hole open up inside me.

NO PEACE IN LA PAZ

2010-04-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

Shift #34

FRIDAY, APRIL 2/ -- Sixteenth/Valencia to Northpoint/Mason -- $11.65

IT’S 5:50 A.M., STILL DARK OUTSIDE, AND QUIET. The only moving vehicles are police cars and delivery trucks and other cabs. Just two blocks from the yard, my first fare of April steps from the bus shelter at Sixteenth and Valencia and raises his arm. He’s headed to Il Pescatore, the Italian restaurant at the Tuscan Inn at Fisherman’s Wharf, where he has worked for the past five years. He was born in La Paz, Baja California, Mexico, just north of Cabo San Lucas, but he grew up all over the place. During his youth, his parents moved the family around Mexico and then around California and then around some other states, too.

Six months ago he went back to La Paz to visit friends and family, and he was shocked. Never before in Mexico had he seen people so scared and upset -- “excited” was his word. It used to be that Mexicans who were in trouble could go to the police, he says, but now the drug cartels have given money to everyone -- the police, the army, the politicians, maybe even to your neighbor. Who can you trust? As we climb up Franklin, clear the crest of Pacific Heights, and catch sight of the Bay down below us, his words come softly out of the backseat darkness, like the voice of a horror film narrator. Everyone either works for the cartels or has been threatened by the cartels or has become terrified of or paralyzed by the cartels, he says. There is no one to turn to. It was scary enough in La Paz, but he also went to Mexico City for a couple of weeks, and it was much worse there. Walking on the streets, he could see it in people’s faces: the fear. Who is with the cartels? What’s going to happen? Soon, says my fare, something bad is going to happen in Mexico. I could feel it, he tells me. The time to deal with it -- to confront the cartels and root them out -- was twenty years ago. Now it’s too late, he says. Fear has started to change the mentality of the people. Something bad, something big, is soon going to happen in Mexico.

I tell him that I spent the year 1990 in San Miguel de Allende, a sleepy town four hours north of Mexico City by bus. The place was corrupt, with policemen casually stopping motorists and squeezing money from them on the spot, and a clique of rich business and political operators controlling everything, but day-to-day life seemed peaceful, tranquilo. The masses were obviously poor, but to me they seemed content, accepting, friendly, happy. Or maybe they were simply defeated, and I lacked the proper cultural filter through which to see reality… Nonetheless, I never thought people on the street seemed afraid.

They are all afraid now, my fare says.

I ask if he thinks the cartels would collapse if we legalized certain drugs here in the States.

Maybe, he says. Who knows? Certainly the States are part of the problem. After all, he says, every single one of the guns used by the cartels come from the States.

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* * My mouth gets into the act * *

2010-04-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

Shift #35

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7 – Bush/Polk to SFO -- $34.60

I DON’T KNOW WHY I wake up two hours before my alarm is set to go off. It’s 3 A.M. and the house is silent, but I soon have an awareness that my mind is inventorying all the problems and situations in my life. I roll onto my back, focus on my breaths, scan my body toes-to-tip-of-head, and then ask, “So, are we awake now, or should we try to get some more sleep?”

Body says, Watch this, dude...! and then slowly rolls us off “our” side of the bed and plants his feet on the floor…

By 4:20 I’m cruising up Van Ness, wondering if I can make it without coffee for another hour-plus. My favorite Noah’s Bagels store at Mission and Fremont doesn’t open until 5:30. Maybe I should head toward the twenty-four-hour Starbucks out at Laurel Village? I’ve got my ear on the radio, wondering if I’m going to score an early airport ride or is this going to be one of those demoralizing mornings where I drive around empty for two or three hours? Many veteran cab drivers claim they’ve developed a sixth sense about where to find business, and while experience does count for a lot, simple coincidence plays a role, too. I have no conscious thought about what, if anything, causes me, this morning, to turn the steering wheel away from Laurel Village, away from coffee, and down Bush Street instead, but after a quick block and a half, just past Polk Street, I see a young man with a world-travelers’ backpack. He’s standing between two parked cars, hand in the air, and behind him, in the sidewalk shadows, I see a young blond woman with her own backpack...

At the back of the cab, I take the weight of the woman’s backpack in my arms and wait for her to slip its straps, a maneuver that became second-nature to me thirty years ago during a six-month, round-the-world journey with my then-wife. These two folks are from England, can’t be more than 25 years old -- well, maybe 30 -- and are in the fourth month of their own six-month, round-the-world trip. They spent the first three months in Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, their first visit to southeast Asia. Highlights? The woman mentions the tranquil Vietnamese beach town of Nha Trang. The man mentions an attraction in northern Thailand that allows willing humans to spend time in a pen with non-drugged, fully-clawed, full-sized adult tigers -- these particular kings of the jungle were raised in captivity and are docile enough that you can lie down with them. So far, San Francisco has been the highlight of the American portion of their trip, “But,” says the man, “the only other place we’ve seen is Los Angeles.” The woman says they were warned not to leave their hotel room in downtown LA at night, and so they spent several evenings in a windowless room listening to sirens, distant and up-close, and thinking that LA was probably not a place they would want to live.

Things were much better here in San Francisco -- they enjoyed the four or five nights they spent at the Encore Express hostel on Bush Street. Now they’re off to SFO and Florida via a cheap US Air flight (so cheap that they added Florida to their itinerary just yesterday), and later they’ll be visiting the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and then it’s back to England. They both recently completed the years-long coursework necessary to “qualify” in their respective professions -- she’s a child care provider, he’s a plumber -- and back home they both have positions they believe are rather loosely being “held” for them. They started dreaming about this trip a year ago, and bought their air tickets last July. The economy in England has been horrible, and this seems a convenient time to be out seeing the world. In Southeast Asia, their money seemed to last forever. The woman: “In Cambodia, air conditioned rooms cost four dollars...”

My “traveling self” easily remembers the alarm one experiences when moving from a poor country to a rich one and suddenly saying money fly from one’s pocket. A part of me is dying to make this my free ride. Another part of me doesn’t want to give up such a big fare. My ego wants these two kids to grow old and someday fondly remember magical San Francisco and the cab driver who drove them to the airport long before the sun came up -- for free! And the loudest part of me says, “You are such an ignorant fool!”

On the approach ramp to the airport, I have no idea how it’s all going to go down. I tell Body and my mind to sort it out and let me know, but I don’t think they actually do reach an agreement. They are both still yapping at each other when -- surprise! -- my mouth steps in and takes control. We’re at the terminal now. I pull to the curb and stop the meter, and the deed unfolds right under my nose. My lips part, my voicebox rumbles to life, my ears register the sound waves, and my brain interprets them: “Every day, I give away one free ride, and today…”

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OPENING DAY

2010-04-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

Shift #36

FRIDAY, APRIL 9 – Sacramento/Battery to Lombard/Battery -- $5.80

TODAY I’M JUST HOPING TO BREAK EVEN.

On Fridays I pay $102 to rent my cab (from 4 A.M. until 4 P.M. it’s mine to do with as I please), and gas costs me another $5-10, so I’ve got to clear about $110 before I start making money “for myself.” But today -- a windless, cloudless, beautiful spring day, expected high around seventy degrees -- I’m knocking off at noon. The San Francisco Giants play their first home baseball game today (the Giants are 3-0, the only undefeated team in the majors in this young season), and my old friend Larry Habegger and I are going to inaugurate my new season tickets.

Larry is in his late 50s, like me, and a few years ago had the special geezer thrill of seeing a Minneapolis newspaper columnist remember him as maybe “the best high school shortstop ever to play in the Twin Cities” or maybe it was “God’s gift to baseball” or something else kind of like that, but whatever it was, for the past decade Larry and I have enjoyed watching baseball together and polishing up our glory days.

My two seats constitute the “last row” in the stadium -- to reach them you go to the upper deck, walk down the right field section as far as you can walk, climb the last row of steps as high as you can climb, and voila, there you are. I have sat in seats all over the stadium and in my opinion there are many views worse than, but none better than, the view from my seats. You’re up so high that you actually look down on the flat top edge of the right field foul pole. One hundred feet straight below your right elbow you see kayakers and pleasure boaters puttering just beyond the right field fence, in McCovey Cove, waiting for a “splash hit” home run to come sailing out of the park. The long elegant arm of the Bay Bridge stretches across miles of blue water and seems to point, like Babe Ruth calling his shot, toward the cross-bay cities of Berkeley and Oakland. Thirty miles in the distance, beyond the green East Bay hills, you see the tip of the Bay Area’s highest mountain, Mt. Diablo (3,849 feet), at the base of which my daughter is in school this morning.

To me, it’s worth sacrificing a little income to sit in my seats on Opening Day. But in fact, it looks like I’ll be sacrificing all my income today -- by noon I’ll be lucky to have earned even one dollar of profit. After hitting the streets at 4:21 AM this morning I was empty for more than two hours, and since then I’ve had just four “local” rides (no airports) and grossed just $46. And now, at 8:55 A.M., I’m flagged in the Financial District by three thirty-something guys wearing business suits. I move all my stuff (notebook, computer, jacket) off the front seat and into the trunk so that one of them can, more comfortably, ride up front with me.

The three of them are from Atlanta, and as businessmen go, they are kind of rowdy, talking smack about which of them will do the speaking during their upcoming meeting. Eventually, each of them volunteers tongue-in-cheek to not say a friggin word, but to just sit there and shut up and let the other two do all the talking. The one in the front seat suggests that if they get this thing over with by noon, maybe they can go catch the Giants-Braves game. One of his colleagues in the backseat says, “The game isn’t even in San Francisco, doofus -- it’s in Atlanta.”

I butt in “No… They’re playing in San Francisco at 1:35 pm.”

The guy in the backseat: “No, I heard it on the tv in my hotel room this morning -- it’s in Atlanta.”

Me: “Now don’t make me stop this cab, get my jacket out of the back, and pull my game ticket out of the pocket for you...”

The man up front turns toward the backseat: “You know, James, it’s entirely possible that this fellow who actually lives here and actually has a ticket to the game, he might just know what he’s talking about. Not highly likely, but still, entirely possible…” And everyone laughs.

It’s a very short ride. I love the dumbfounded looks on their faces, especially the one in the back, when I tell them this is my free ride for the day. They recover, however, and seem to warm to the idea pretty quickly.

Two rides later: Oakland airport -- fifty bucks.

At noon I turn in with $28 in my pocket.

Play ball!

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