I know what I did was wrong. I just want people to understand I didn’t set out to become a thief. I was only looking for love.
It was a fact. I was no Tobey Maguire. I stood five-seven, one hundred and twenty pounds. I had a shaved head, bad teeth, bony arms, and was so skinny people made TB and tapeworm cracks about me. I was twenty-three, living in a boarding house, working as a maintenance man for a cab company and doing my best not to get my ass kicked. I had a flaming skeleton devil head tattoo on my right arm that I had gotten to make myself look tougher, but people even made fun of my tat. I had wanted a menacing specter, but they said my devil looked more like a goofball than one of Satan’s crew. Sadly, it was true, and once you are branded with indelible ink, it doesn’t come off easy.
I cleaned the offices and garage at Yellow Cab, washed, vacuumed and changed the oil on the rides, and when one wasn’t signed out to a regular driver, the owner let me work the streets. I worked mainly at night, and split everything I took in with my boss. It wasn’t the best deal, but it helped pay off the money I owed for burning down my neighbor’s garage. They were never able to prove I had done it deliberately—they thought I had done it in retaliation for my belief that he had poisoned my dog—but since I agreed to pay the bastard back, they decided that was punishment enough, and it kept my adult record clean, my juvenile stupidities already purged on my eighteenth birthday.
I liked driving, working the Hartford streets, both the customer contact and the knowledge of the roads, which came in handy for my later employ. If people wanted to talk, I was more than happy to converse with them. If, which was most often, they wanted me to just to drive, I easily assumed the role of the invisible man.
My mother didn’t like me working at night, particularly in the North End, but she didn’t complain when I kicked some cash her way to help meet her mortgage or to subsidize her Monday bus trip down to the casino. Our unwritten deal was if she hit the slots jackpot, I would receive an equal share, but any profit she ever made on any particular visit just went back into her general slot fund, which was always eventually returning to zero. That was all right. At least I got a motherly kiss and an “I love you” after Sunday dinner, which was more action than I was getting from women of my own age.
The closest I came to any sex was the business that went on in the back seat of my cab. I’d pick up old men at the elderly housing and take them for a ride down Ashley Street, where a crack whore would get in the back and give them the business for ten bucks. Sometimes the whores would just take the cash and bolt. Then I’d get stiffed because the poor old guys wouldn’t pay me the fare, blaming me that they’d been ripped off, as if I were the pimp. Hell, I wasn’t even getting a commission, not that I had the nerve to ask for a percentage nor the desire to profit from such a trade.
Those crack whores were mean, nasty women, who no doubt had mean, nasty upbringings that had dragged them to that point where they had sold their souls to the rock which made them do what at some point in their life must have been unthinkable acts. After a while I learned which women to avoid—the rip-off artists, the ones who’d spit the exchange back out on the seat, and the ones who were cops. I promised not to tell what the one who showed me a badge said to me. Let’s just say silence is expensive and talking even more so. Everybody’s got a racket.
On Saturday nights I cruised downtown where all the high school, college and young nine-to-five working-girl lovelies were dollied up and out drinking at the bars. One night a young redhead and her man came out of the Pig’s Eye Pub and hailed me as I came slowly down Asylum Avenue. She was skinny, blue eyed with a freckled nose. She was real cute in her lime-green sun dress. She couldn’t have been old enough to drink. He was older, maybe mid-twenties, broad-shouldered, wearing a white shirt with a loosened red power tie, carrying a suit jacket. He looked like he had a good job and could have whatever woman he wanted. He asked to go up to Girard Street.
They hadn’t been in the back long enough for me to write their destination down on my manifest when he asked her to straddle him, and she did and started tugging at his belt. All that shifting around and groaning and in no time she was bouncing off him and telling him to keep doing what he was doing. When she’d arch her back I could feel her long hair against my head.
I was embarrassed and leaned forward to avoid letting her hair touch me, but then I admit I kind of got excited myself. I don’t consider myself a pervert—I mean the only porn I ever bought myself was an occasional Penthouse or Swank—a guy has to get by when he can’t afford the cover charge, a beer and tips at the tittie bar—but hearing her say over and over what she was saying, well, I tried to imagine she was saying it to me. Her hair had a wonderful scent—like bubble gum and strawberries. She was young and wild and crazy and I imagined she wanted me like girls in the movies want the hero. I drove as slowly as I could, and then instead of parking right in front of the apartment, I pulled a little bit past to a spot not under a street lamp. I heard a groan then, and she tried to keep riding, but he said, his voice changed, “Easy.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “Play that song for me.” She kissed his neck, and as she did, his eyes met mine in the rear view mirror. He looked irritated.
“I’m tired,” he said to her.
“I’ll get you going again.”
“Ow,” he said, “No, I need to sleep.” He nudged her off him.
“What?” she said.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“That’s it?” she said as he buckled his pants.
He reached into his wallet and handed me twenty bucks. The meter only read five dollars and forty-five cents. “This ought to cover it with a tip. Take her where she needs to go.”
“That’s it?” she said again.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been fighting a migraine all night. He’ll take you back downtown. Here’s my card. Call me. We can hook up another night.”
He handed her the card. She took it, and then threw it back in his face. “I can’t believe you. That’s it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Get out,” she said. She hit him. “You fucking jerk!”
He looked at me as he stepped out of the car like she was the crazy one and maybe I might have some male sympathy for him. I just shook my head. I couldn’t believe the way he was treating her either.
“I agree with you on that one,” I said to her, after he’d disappeared inside.
“What!”
“I agree he’s a jerk.”
She just grunted, and looked out the window.
What I wanted to say was something smooth, something soothing, and maybe a little funny, something to make her feel all right and maybe see me in a different light—as a man, not as a witness to her humiliation. I didn’t think anything I could think of would work. I told you I was no Tobey Maguire, because if I was she would have ended up home with me, not in my boarding house, but in my Prospect Avenue mansion overlooking the city.
“Where can I take you?”
“Back downtown.”
She turned her face to the window.
I was silent as I drove her back to the Pig’s Eye Pub, where I waited while she went in, only to see her come out and look around like a lost little girl.
I called to her. “You going to be all right?”
She looked at me at first like she was going to blow me off, like what kind of creep was I to be stalking her. But she had no friends at that moment. “They left,” she said.
“Where do you live?” I finally asked.
“What?” she demanded.
“I’ll drive you there.”
“I have no money.”
“It’s on me,” I said. “I’m done for the night anyway,” which I wasn’t. “Get in.”
I hit the meter off. “You can sit in the front if you want.”
“I’m fine back here,” she said.
“Okay, your preference.”
I put the radio on. Bob Seger. “‘Night Moves.’ You like this?” I asked. “This is a great song.”
She didn’t answer. I keep glancing up in the rear view mirror as I drove. She was crying, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, and decided silence was best. If I couldn’t be the hero, I’d best not be a fool.
She lived about fifteen miles away in Glastonbury, in a big house at the end of many dark roads. When I approached the drive, she said, “Right out here is fine.” She got out, closed the door and tottered up the long drive, not a word to me.
Instead of going to Cousin Vinny’s on West Service Road, where I sometimes went to see the dancing girls, I went home and lay in my single bed and dreamed I had a different life. I dreamed that I lived in a big house at the end of a dark road, and that I was handsome and brave, and that at night, I made love to my cute red-headed wife who slept with her cheek on my strong chest knowing I would always keep her safe.