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!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 1, 2010
NO DRAMA
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.
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
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?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FORTY-NINE SQUARE MILES
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.
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.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
NO PEACE IN LA PAZ
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* * My mouth gets into the act * *
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…”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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…”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OPENING DAY
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!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
