Brother, you haven’t lived until you’ve stood for ten minutes in a rainstorm trying to ignore a corpse.
I remained outside the cab waiting for the evening supervisor to arrive along with an ambulance. As soon as I had ascertained with certainty that another awful thing had occurred in my life, I had reached in and radioed the dispatcher. There is a code word that RMTC cab drivers use to let the company know that a fare has died in his cab. I won’t tell you the code, but they taught it to us during our one day of training back when I first started driving. Everybody laughed when the instructor told us the code. Nobody expected to use it. Who dies in taxis? Mister Zelner did, and that’s why I was soaked when the evening supervisor, Mr. Bailey, showed up in an unmarked cab. Supervisors drive gray cabs, which are former police interceptors. Mr. Bailey cruises the mean streets of Denver observing the driving habits of RMTC cabbies and reporting violations like curb jumping, rolling stops, etc. He has never nailed me for violating the rules. I’m a good driver. By that I mean I’m a paranoid driver. I get along well with Bailey, as I get along well with everyone who never catches me.
“What’s the story, Murph?” he said, after he pulled up next to my cab and got out. He didn’t put on a raincoat. I liked that.
“My fare is dead,” I said. “He must have had a heart attack or something.”
Bailey nodded and went over to the right-rear door of my cab, pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his back pocket and yanked them on. He opened the door and leaned in to examine the corpse. I couldn’t watch. Call me a sissy—as if I give a damn.
Bailey came back around the cab and told me that an ambulance and a police car were on the way. He pointed a thumb at his vehicle. “Hop in.” I climbed into the shotgun seat and began telling him about picking up Mr. Zelner at Union Station and driving him across the viaduct. The ambulance showed up while I was talking. Red lights but no siren. I assumed that the medics had their own code for the dead. A police car showed up a few minutes later. That made me nervous for reasons that have nothing to do with reality. Cops always make me nervous. That’s their job.
By then the rain had stopped. I got out and stood by the vehicles feeling lousy while the medics did what they were paid to do. That’s one job nobody could pay me to do. It’s part of a rather long list of jobs aside from taxi driving. Name any job—it’s on my list.
But I don’t want to dwell on the scene. Instead I will dwell on how I felt after the policeman finished interviewing me, and the ambulance went away with no siren or red lights. By then it was a quarter after seven, but Bailey told me I wouldn’t be charged a late fee when I got back to the motor. The code word for this situation is “compassion.” He asked me if I was okay. I lied and said yes. But I wasn’t okay. I didn’t want to get back into 123 and drive to the motor. I don’t believe in ghosts, but there are a lot of things I don’t believe in that often affect my behavior. Bailey said he would meet me at the motor. I would have to write up an “incident” report.
I reluctantly got back into 123, and only then did I realize I had not shut off my meter. As a result, the meter read nine dollars and sixty cents. The waiting-time clock had been running all along. I shut it off fast. Strangely, this made me feel better, as though I had exorcised Zelner’s ghost from my backseat. It got me to thinking about body language, symbolism, and moronic gestures in general. As I drove up the Valley Highway I contemplated the odd little rituals, moves, and hand signals that people learn as children, which are often accompanied by face making. This took me up to the teen years where body language drifts toward “acting cool.” This includes diddybopping, slouching, eye rolling, and the unfortunate obscene gestures that we all learn in the gutters and soda shops of America. I realized that during the teen years, face making is replaced by a kind of stoic somnambulism that is supposed to hide true emotions and express disdain for such things as classical music and gym coaches. I was raking the army over the coals and thinking about the peculiarity of the salute when I arrived at the entrance to the Rocky Cab parking lot. I had to put my sack of hypotheses back into the mental steamer trunk where I keep most of my pointless observations, and prepare myself mentally for writing down on an official form the things that I described above—not counting the theory and practice of acting cool from grades 9 through 12.
During the ride from Diamond Hill to the motor I never once looked into my rearview mirror. If I have to explain why to you, then you don’t know me very well, which is probably a good thing.
I wrote the incident report upstairs in Mr. Hogan’s private office. Hogan is the managing supervisor at RMTC, but he was gone for the day. I get along well with Hogan. Don’t ask me why. It seems like every time I find myself in his office the police are there too, usually investigating a crime for which I am a “person of interest,” which is cop lingo for “suspect.” Murder, kidnapping, bank robbery—you name it, I’ve been found not-guilty of it. Maybe that’s why Hogan and I get along so well. I don’t look forward to the day when I make him ashamed of me. When I was a younger man, my supervisors were that frequently.
After I finished writing the report I carried it downstairs and handed it to Bailey, who was standing by the cage talking to Stew, the night cashier. The Word was out: an RMTC fare had “exited en route.” You can’t keep a euphemism like that a secret in the small world of cab driving. But it wasn’t the sort of gossip that would be joked about in the on-call room the next day—even cab drivers have a sense of propriety, in spite of the way we dress.
I told Stew that the left-rear taillight needed to be replaced on 123. He made a note of it on my trip-sheet.
“I’ll be back on Friday,” I said to Mr. Bailey for no apparent reason. But I felt the need to say it. I felt the need to tell somebody besides myself that I wasn’t going to let a bad day stop me from coming back to work. If I ever let that happen I would never get out of bed, and that’s not an exaggeration. I possess documented proof—I call it “Cincinnati.”
I walked outside, crossed the parking lot, and got into my ’64 Chevy. I drove in the direction of home. Home is an apartment on Capitol Hill. I call the apartment my “crow’s nest,” and that’s exactly where I wanted to be right then, at the top of the mainmast of a schooner sailing across an ocean with the ruins of civilization at my back. Denver is as close as I’ve ever gotten to the ruins of civilization.
I made a quick stop at a Burger King on east Colfax. I wasn’t in the mood to cook that night. Death does that to me. The difference between stopping at a fast-food joint and cooking a burger on my stove is five minutes but I needed that five minutes. I needed it bad. Real bad. I intended to use it to sit in my easy chair and stare at the wall above my TV. I had learned long ago that the best way to overcome traumatic events is to sit and do nothing.
I refer to doing nothing as “the great equalizer.” When you do nothing to avoid anything, the thing bothering you melds with everything that you don’t do—ergo, you develop the proper perspective. Which is to say, it’s all equally meaningless. The absence of meaning is the key to peace of mind. If I ever thought that anything I did meant something, I would develop a psychological tic and become prudent, and that’s one cross I refuse to bear. I’ve lost count of all the crosses I’ve borne in my lifetime. But that’s no surprise—I’m lousy at math.
It warmed my heart when I pulled into the parking lot behind my building and looked up at my apartment on the third floor where the kitchen light was on. It also pissed me off. I had forgotten to turn the light off when I went to work that morning. I hate leaving a light on when I go to work. There’s no rational basis for this because my utilities are covered by the rent. But it’s a psychological tic. If a light is burning all day I feel like a rain forest is going to disappear, and I don’t want the blame.
I parked my Chevy in the choice V-spot where two wooden fences meet at a 90-degree angle. I climbed out with my sack of burgers and fries. The sack felt like a warm puppy. This made me think of Rod McKuen’s smash bestselling record album, Listen to the Warm. If you’re too young to know who Rod McKuen was, I’ll gladly trade places with you.
When I got inside I set my cab accoutrement on the kitchen table, then went into the living room and quickly placed my taxi profits into my copy of Lolita, which I keep on a bookshelf. I have perhaps the only bookshelf in the world made of books. Okay. I’ll admit it. The books are unpublished manuscripts. They were unpublished by me. I’m an unpublished novelist, but its been a long time since I haven’t published anything. I keep promising myself that I’ll sit down and start another unpublished novel one of these days, but if you know anything about unpublished writers then you probably know that the worst thing that can happen to one is to run headlong into a wall of free time. That’s when his bluff is called. That’s when he knows he has to get creative—and he does. You’ve never seen a writer get more creative than when he starts thinking up alibis for not writing. I’m as prolific as James Michener when it comes to excuses.
But I didn’t have that problem when I got home on Wednesday night. I had the greatest excuse in the world not to write: death. If I had been a cab driver when I was ten years old I could have stayed home from school an entire week with an excuse that good. My Maw was always a sucker for good excuses. When I was in the sixth grade our sheltie dog— Shelteen—died. I got a two-day break from homework out of that bitch. Shelteen I mean.
I went into the kitchen and grabbed a beer from the fridge, then carried my sack of warm food into the living room and sat down in my easy chair. I picked up my TV remote and began searching for Gilligan’s Island. Standard Operating Procedure for a work night. Unfortunately Gilligan’s was over. The death of Mr. Zelner had seen to that. I had missed the end of the show by ten minutes. Out of curiosity I picked up my TV Guide to see what I had missed. Big mistake. It was an episode where Mary Ann wore a bikini. I closed the guide and vowed that I would never again read a blurb for a Gilligan episode. I had enough torment in my life even when my cab fares didn’t die.
I toyed with the idea of watching an episode of The Secret Life of Henry Phyfe, which is broadcast out of Chicago on Wednesday nights. Red Buttons kills me, although he’s no Bob Denver. But the death of my taxi fare had drained me of the will to laugh. There are some things in life that a man cannot avoid, and death is one of them. Try it sometime, and let me know how it works out.
That got me to thinking about what might have happened if the castaways had started kicking the bucket before the show was canceled. I assumed that Mister Howell would be the first to go. Later on, Mrs. Howell. There would probably be a knee-slapping episode where the rest of the survivors haggled over the Howell estate. The professor would probably don the robe of a judge and make a division of the booty, with Ginger and Mary Ann fighting over Mrs. Howell’s jewelry. The skipper would get the jaunty yachting cap that Mr. Howell always wore. And of course it goes without saying that—due to a legal technicality—Gilligan would end up with Mrs. Howell’s dresses.
As I sat there in the easy chair thinking about this, I got so wrapped up in the endless possibilities that it was like I was watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island that had never been broadcast. I got to laughing so hard that I choked on a French fry and had to run into the kitchen to drink a quick glass of water. I was terrified of getting the hiccups.
I stood for a few minutes holding the glass of water and listening to my esophagus to make sure I wasn’t going to hiccup—or “hiccough” as the tight-asses say. Listening to my body made me think of Rod McKuen. I was having a terrible night—hysterical laughter followed by commercial poetry. By the time I got back to the living room I was so full of water that I couldn’t drink any more beer. But rather than let my half-can of booze go to waste, I carried it into the kitchen and stored it in the fridge. I do not believe in wasting beer. Beer is like a rain forest. This got me to thinking about Rod McKuen again, so I decided to call it a night.
I often turn in early after close encounters with death, manual labor, or old friends, so hitting the sack early wasn’t unusual for me. I had learned to do it in the army. In basic training they never let us sleep at all—except between the hours of nine p.m. and five a.m. Admittedly that’s eight hours, but what’s that got to do with my life? Prior to getting drafted I was a twelve-hour man. “Twelve-up and twelve-down,” that was my motto. On the first day of basic training I tried to explain my sleeping requirements to my drill sergeant.
I really don’t want to talk about that any further.
I turned off the lights in the kitchen and living room, then I went into the bedroom. I kicked off my Keds, turned off the table lamp, and collapsed into bed. I got undressed too, but I’ll leave that to your imagination. As I lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling, I started thinking about poor ol’ Mr. Zelner. Died in a taxi. I wondered who he was, how old he was, where he had been going, and what he had been planning to do when he got there. What was on Diamond Hill? All of the office buildings appeared closed for the night. Was he planning to meet someone there? Or did he live nearby? I wondered if he had died without ever seeing a single one of his dreams realized. I often wonder that about dead people. I wonder it about myself too—in the future tense I mean. But I am consoled by the fact that I once caught a glimpse of Mickey Rooney in person, so my life isn’t a total waste.