My alarm clock went off at six a.m. that Monday morning. I immediately hit the snooze button. I had been up the previous evening thinking about trying to write a novel, and nothing drains a writer more than thinking about trying to write. A lot of it has to do with the energy it takes to not watch television. Not watching television is like going to a bar and not drinking. That’s as far as I can take the analogy, because I’ve never done that.
But as I sat in my apartment the previous evening staring at the blank screen of my TV, I subconsciously got the urge to turn it on. I could feel every muscle in my body aching to get up and walk across the living room and pick up the remote control, which I had purposely set on top of the TV to keep it out of my reach. I managed to resist the urge to get up, but it took an enormous amount of effort. It reminded me of the Charles Atlas course advertised on the backs of comics when I was a kid.
I’ll admit it. At the age of ten my dream was to kick sand in the face of a bully. I had tried that once at the age of eight, however at that time I did not possess a thorough grounding in the art of modern advertising.
Later on, while reading a comic in the hospital, I realized what I had done wrong: I had not sent Charles Atlas ten cents. The ten cents was to cover the return postage on an introductory booklet for his muscle-building course—or so he claimed. After I was released from Wichita General I asked my Maw if she would give me the necessary ten cents. She said she would be glad to give me ten cents if I mowed the lawn.
I mulled this over for a few days, then came to the conclusion that it just might be worth it. If things worked out the way I planned, I might be able to extract revenge against Danny Doyle. His was the face into which, in my marketing-and-distribution naiveté, I had sent a spray of sand. This was at a place called Courtney Davis, a swimming resort that apparently no longer exists in Wichita. It was like a Club Med for Jayhawkers. Why did I kick sand into Danny Doyle’s face? It’s a long story but I think stupidity covers all the bases. Briefly, he had knocked an ice-cream cone out of my hand while roughhousing with his pals.
I was always amazed that bullies had pals. Where did they get pals? Did a kid have to apply for friendship with a bully? What were the requirements? Was there an annual fee?
Anyway, it took me two hours to mow the yard and by the time I was finished I no longer wanted muscles. That was the end of my business association with Charles Atlas. But when I turned thirteen, I learned the secret of “dynamic tension.” This was one of those secrets that ran the grapevine of adolescent boys. Word on the street said that some kid had actually sent away for the Charles Atlas course, and had blown the lid off dynamic tension. I suspected it was Danny Doyle. The secret consisted of flexing your muscles real hard, which was about as disappointing as learning it was impossible to literally “throw your voice” with a gadget that cost a buck. I don’t want to talk about that.
Nevertheless, I immediately set out to flex my muscles—in secret of course. I didn’t want any trouble with the U.S. Patent Office. I didn’t have that many muscles when I was thirteen but I did manage to flex the ones I found. I was primarily determined to develop gigantic biceps and pecs, so I spent hours in the bathroom behind the locked door flexing my muscles in front of the mirror. After two days of this grueling workout I did not detect any visible signs of progress, which led to my loss of faith in comics.
But since I had given my Maw the impression that I was willing to mow the lawn, I earned forty cents a month during the summer of my thirteenth year. I ate twelve chocolate sundaes in twelve weeks, not including my usual sundaes. By the time school rolled around I had a gained a pound of muscle in my wrists from pushing the lawnmower. Also five pounds of fat on what appeared to be my stomach. On the night I weighed my wrists on the bathroom scale, me ol’ Dad walked past the doorway and saw me, but didn’t say anything.
Anyway, I was sitting there in my living room staring at the TV and found myself fighting the instinctive reflexes of my muscles. My body wanted to get out of the chair, but I wouldn’t let it. This went on for half an hour. It was just like going to the gym where I had once paid two hundred and fifty dollars to walk through the front door twice.
At the end of the half-hour I was covered with a sheen of sweat, and I was breathing heavily.
But I had spent so much time fighting my muscles that I forgot to think up the plot of a novel. It didn’t matter though because I was so exhausted that I didn’t have the energy to cross the living room and turn on my RamBlaster 4000 personal computer and wait for it to warm up. It’s the waiting that kills you. Instead, I staggered into my bedroom, kicked off my Keds, and collapsed into bed.
When the alarm went off the next morning I hit the snooze button. It was set for ten minutes. Unfortunately, after the radio came back on I slept through the rock songs. I truly was exhausted from my Herculean writing labors of the night before.
Suddenly “Jailhouse Rock” erupted and my eyes popped open. Whenever I hear Elvis Presley I immediately begin making calculations, trying to discern whether it’s the pre-army Elvis or the post-army Elvis. I like the pre. In fact I have a theory that the man who came home from Germany in 1962 was not the real Elvis Presley, but I don’t want to get into that and neither do the gate guards at Area 51.
I stared at the ceiling for a while, then I casually rolled over and glanced at the clock, and nearly had a heart attack. It was seven twenty-five. Normally I sign out my cab at the Rocky Mountain Taxicab Company (RMTC) at seven a.m. I immediately panicked and got out of bed. I staggered into the living room and did something I had never done before in my life, which was to make a telephone call at dawn.
There is a rule at Rocky Cab that says a driver is allowed thirty minutes to pick up his assigned taxi or it will be given to someone else looking for a day lease—unless the assigned driver phones in to let them know he is coming. I had to call Rollo, the man in the cage who is in charge of handing out keys, and let him know I was coming. I had never gotten along very well with Rollo, but when he answered the phone he didn’t give me any jive. He said he would hold cab #123 until I arrived.
It sort of annoyed me to have to talk to Rollo like a normal person because I like to employ subtle forms of sarcasm when speaking to him. I felt cheated.
After I hung up the phone I rushed around my apartment getting dressed. It infuriated me. Not that I’m opposed to getting dressed, but I hadn’t rushed around in panic in a long time. I did do that a lot in the army where they had things like sergeants and bugles, but that was a quarter-century ago, which is a long time to not panic.
I grabbed my plastic briefcase and walked out the back door, locked up my crow’s nest, and hurried down the fire escape. I hopped into my Chevy, fired it up and drove onto 13th Avenue.
I felt foolish as I negotiated the dawn streets of Denver. Everybody was heading for work, the rush hour was on, and I was a part of it. I felt like Jason Robards. It wasn’t a good feeling.
I arrived at the motor at ten minutes to eight. The parking lot was dead. The seven a.m. shift-change was long over, i.e., the bustling of asphalt warriors climbing out of night-shift cabs and the day-shift drivers replacing them like soldiers at the parapets of the Alamo. Well. Something like that.
The silence was eerie as I headed for the door of the on-call room. Normally I like silence but I can do without eeriness. It reminded me of being late for school, the most gut-wrenching thing that can happen to a first-grader. I was glad to get inside where the eeriness was normal, especially with Rollo seated behind the glass window of the cage eating a donut. Rollo bears a resemblance to half the character actors who ever made B movies, my two favorites being Sidney Greenstreet and Andy Divine. Take your pick—there’s plenty more where they came from. Anybody here remember Eugene Pallette?
Rollo is the man in charge of Rocky drivers in the daytime. He’s like a line producer on a movie set. The man in the cage wields a lot of power in a cab company, in the way that a bottleneck wields power over anything that gets stuck anywhere. Use your imagination.
I felt foolish walking up to the cage almost an hour late. Rollo was now like a school teacher. Even before I opened my mouth, he knew he had won. I could tell he knew because he didn’t lord it over me. You may find this hard to believe, but cab driving is one of the few arenas of my life where I am actually competent. I can’t offhand think of the others. But when I screw up in the cab arena, it’s hang-my-head time. I waited for Rollo to toss a little malicious condescension my way. Standard operating procedure. I was like a guy in an old-fashioned duel who fires his pistol first and then has to stand there like a doofus while his opponent takes careful aim.
I set my plastic briefcase on the ledge and made a big bustling production out of pulling my seventy dollars from my T-shirt pocket and counting it out while Rollo just gazed at me. But I knew exactly what the bastard was doing. He was waiting for me to chuckle and say, “Guess I overslept,” which I proceeded to say, otherwise he would have instigated the protocol of condescension and crushed my ego to a pulp. He’s a stickler for the conventions of the duel. But he just smiled approvingly and took the seventy dollars and handed me my key and trip-sheet. Then he said, “Keillor is scheduled to sign out your cab at seven this evening, Murph.”
I nodded. I would be pulling an eleven-hour shift while paying for a twelve-hour shift. This is one of those “cracks” that people often talk about things falling through.
There is simply nothing Rocky Cab can do for a driver who shows up late for work. He has to pay for the full shift. Rocky’s sole source of income is lease payments, and if a man can’t pay, there are plenty of other losers waiting to take his place. Fortunately, the turnover rate of losers at Rocky is so high that even if I got fired I could reapply and be back on the road in two hours.
“I’ll be here at seven,” I said, even though convention did not require that I say it. But this was Rollo’s finest hour. He gets one of those every couple of months. I get my share, too. Rollo and I approach our mutual revulsion in the way that WWI pilots engaged in aerial combat over the fields of Flanders. We’re a couple of goddamn gentlemen.