“Four thousand Cherry Creek Drive,” the dispatcher said.
I snatched the mike and yelled, “One twenty-three!” I heard dark laughter.
“Do you have enough change on you to break a one-hundred-dollar bill, Mister Tardy?” the dispatcher said. He was giving me the ol’ one-two punch: a hundred-dollar bill plus a wisecrack. He knew I had just come on the road and that my ability to break a hundred was questionable.
“Check,” I said.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “There’s an elderly lady named Jacobs at a clinic who needs a ride to Capitol Hill, but she only has a one-hundred-dollar bill on her. So she wants us to send someone who will be able to break it for her.”
“No problem,” I said.
“It’s all yours, Murph,” he said, then he moved on down the road, offering bells and yells to newbies.
I hung up the mike and aimed my hood ornament at the Cherry Creek Shopping Center. The clinic was located nearby. A trip to Capitol Hill might amount to only eight dollars or so, even with a tip, but just the thought of seeing a one-hundred-dollar bill right at that moment did more to raise my spirits than a hot cup of alkaloids. I needed that sight.
I needed it bad.
Real bad.
I drove straight to Colorado Boulevard, turned right, and headed south. Traffic was light. I was breezing along. This was the stuff. I was an asphalt warrior headed into the fray. Things were back to normal. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get things back to normal. I don’t know why. My normality is neither healthy nor realistic, but whatever it is, I’m good at it.
The clinic was located along the concrete-walled banks of Cherry Creek, the river where gold was discovered in the Denver area back in the 1850s. I’d like to give you an historical overview of the subsequent gold rush, but let’s get to that elderly woman with the C-note burning a hole in her purse.
She was waiting outside the clinic. Short, white-haired, perhaps seventy years old, and wearing a print dress. Your basic garden-variety old lady. I could practically smell that eight bucks.
I pulled up at the front door and hopped out and hurried around and opened the right-rear door of my taxi.
She hobbled toward me. “Did the taxi company tell you about the one-hundred-dollar bill?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right then,” she said. I proceeded to help her into the backseat, which consisted of cupping her right elbow. I don’t know how much help that was, but I was fishing for a tip.
I got back into the driver’s seat and pulled away from the clinic. I had to make a run along the river before I could get my taxi turned around and aimed back toward Capitol Hill. Cherry Creek Drive runs one-way in opposite directions on either side of the river. It’s complicated and annoying. Let’s move on.
“My bank is located in the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, ma’am,” I said. “We can stop there to break the hundred dollars. I’ll even knock a dollar off the fare for you while you wait.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought you would have the money on you.”
“I’m just starting out for the day, ma’am, so I only have twenty dollars on me. But my bank is right on the way so we can just pull up to the drive-in and I’ll get your one hundred changed. As I say, I’ll give you a dollar discount on the cost of the ride.”
I was talking to her image in my rear-view mirror. She nodded. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I have change at my house. If you would rather, we can just go to my house and I will get the money. I just didn’t have anything smaller than a one-hundred-dollar bill on me and I was afraid a taxi driver wouldn’t want to give me a ride if the money was at my house.”
“Oh that’s no problem,” I said quickly.
Have I ever mentioned the fact that a lot of people seem to be afraid of cab drivers? They have this idea that we’re something we’re not, when in fact we are the complete opposite.
The old lady seemed to be one of those people. She obviously was afraid of the idea of getting into a taxi with no money on her person. I wish more people were like that. But I occasionally get people whose money is sitting in a house at the end of the ride. It’s rare but not a problem. I’ve read that millionaires sometimes have to borrow money from friends when they’re at lunch because they never carry hard cash on them, the pricks. Someday I hope to be a prick.
I drove to University Boulevard, bypassed my bank, and headed north toward “The Hill.” Capitol Hill rises up from Lincoln Street in midtown and extends east across the city and out onto the plains, and stretches all the way across Kansas to the Mississippi River. I know what you’re thinking—Capitol Hill is not a hill at all, and you’re right. The truth is, Lincoln Street sits in a valley. I wish Albert Einstein was still alive. He would have a field day with that one.
I turned west at the intersection of 14th and University and drove the elderly woman seven or eight blocks and pulled around a corner and parked in front of her house. The house was on a rise. Six concrete vertical steps, then a short horizontal sidewalk, then six vertical steps. I helped her all the way up to the porch, which was horizontal.
“I’ll be right back out with the money,” she said.
She opened the screen door, opened the regular door, stepped inside, and shut both of them. I sat on the porch railing and waited. I felt kind of sad. I had really wanted to see ol’ Ben Franklin’s face. If you’re like me, you rarely see hundred-dollar bills. It’s like seeing a Picasso at the Denver Art Museum. You stare at it and think about how much money it’s worth. Maybe you don’t understand painting, and maybe you don’t understand why something that looks like it could have been drawn by you is worth millions, but just knowing that armed guards are planted discreetly all around the room gives you an appreciation for art that you never got from Jon Nagy.
I glanced at my wristwatch. The woman had been gone five minutes. She was a slow walker it’s true, but experience had taught me that people who are afraid of cab drivers are capable of performing feats of astounding strength in times of crisis, like lifting cars off trapped bodies. When I was a kid I always wanted to do that. Whenever I saw a man changing a flat tire, I kept my fingers crossed.
After ten minutes I went to the front door and tried to peek through the window. No-go. But I did not believe for one moment that she had run out on me. I’d had that happen. All cab drivers get a “runner” in the backseat sooner or later. It comes with the territory. You get skunked, and you feel skunked, but you rarely lose more than five or six bucks. Runners never seem to rack up the big meters. They’re usually panic-stricken losers. Hell, if a guy gave me a good enough sob story I would give him a ride for free. I’ve done that, believe it or not. One time I pulled up in front of a house with a female fare in my backseat and she suddenly broke down crying, and said, “I don’t want to go to jail.” I was with her so far, but I didn’t understand why she said it. “I don’t have any money,” she said. “I lost my job and my boyfriend. Please don’t call the police.”
That was a bona fide sob story, an authentic simon-pure tale of woe. She must have had me confused with a cab driver. She had no way of knowing that I was an unpublished novelist and had about as much interest in calling the police as I ever do. I told her she didn’t have to pay me, that she could have the ride for free. The meter came to six bucks. This may have been a big deal to her, but all I wanted was to get a new fare into my backseat as quickly as possible. Then she leaned toward the front seat and hugged my head. I wasn’t going to mention that, but it puts me in mind of even more colorful stories that I will never tell you.
I finally rang the doorbell.
It was another couple of minutes before I saw the silhouette of the lady moving toward the door. She fiddled with the knob for a moment. Apparently she had locked it behind her when she went in. I hadn’t noticed that. I’m usually aware of it when people lock me out.
She dragged the door open and said, “You made me lose count!”
She was standing behind the screen door. I didn’t know what to say. Then she shoved the screen door open and stepped outside holding a saucepan in her hand. The pan was filled to the brim with pennies.
“I was counting and the doorbell made me lose count!” she said.
I stared at the pot full of pennies. She had been counting out eight hundred pennies. Part of my brain was wondering how high she had gotten, and the other part was helping me talk.
“I can’t take pennies,” I said.
Little-known fact—at least, it was little-known to me until I read it in a newspaper article: pennies are not legal tender in America. This is why people who try to pay their federal income taxes with jars of pennies are told by IRS agents to go home and bring back real money. That was in the article I read. The perpetrator was an anti-tax fanatic. I felt bad for him. I always feel bad for optimists. I figure the Founding Fathers had anticipated optimism, and wrote a law excluding the one-cent piece as legal tender. You know a man has hit rock-bottom when he devises a scheme to get the government’s goat. Believe me, that goat is ungettable.
“Why not!” she demanded. “What’s wrong with pennies? It’s perfectly good money!”
I stood there slack-jawed, flabbergasted, nonplused, and mute. Not only that, I was trying to calculate how long it would take to count eight hundred pennies with anything resembling accuracy. Included in this quick calculation were the recounts.
“Don’t you have any dollar bills?” I said.
“This is my only money!” she said. “I have only pennies!”
If she had been fifty years younger I might have gotten rough. Instead I said, “Keep your pennies,” and walked down the steps and got into my cab and drove away.
When I got to Colfax I said, “Jaysus!”
Normally I say “Fer the luvva Christ” but I was wound so tight that
I went with Hemingway rather than Faulkner.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and I had earned three whole dollars. I turned west and drove six blocks before I remembered to turn on my RMTC radio. I didn’t even know where I was going.
That “elderly lady” as I shall call her had completely destroyed my mental equilibrium. I couldn’t get the image of that panful of pennies out of my mind. But what really bothered me was the fact that I had started thinking bad thoughts about an old lady—and liking it. I envisioned a couple of cops snapping the cuffs on her and snarling, “Save your sob story for the judge, granny.”
I pulled into a 7-11 parking lot.
I turned off the engine and radio, and sat gazing at the glass storefront. The silence, and the sight of the ever-present “Help Wanted” sign on the door, had a calming effect. I felt like a penitent kneeling before a roadside shrine in Mexico.
After a few minutes I got out of my cab and went up to the door and peeked inside. No enemy in sight. I went inside, bought a cup of joe, came back out to my cab, got in, and sat sipping until my mental faculties were as intact as they ever get. Then I reached for the radio knob. It was at this precise point in time that I suddenly realized what had happened.
I had been the victim of a modus operandi!
The one-hundred-dollar bill. The panful of pennies. The print dress. It was all so obvious. The woman had done this before!
I heard dark laughter.
The radio was off so I knew the laughter was coming from inside my head.
I had been scammed.
That woman knew I would walk away in disgust without collecting the eight hundred pennies. That’s what all the cab drivers had done after picking her up at the clinic, or the Safeway, or the AARP meeting— Rocky Cab, Yellow, Metro, Checker, all the cab companies. I was now a member of an exclusive club, an elite organization composed of taxi drivers who did not know each other’s names and who would not recognize each other on the street. We had no secret handshake, password, discreet pin attached to our lapels, striped tie, raccoon hat, or inscribed ring that would indicate our membership in this fraternity of dupes. We shared only the unspoken bond of acute embarrassment.
How many of my fellow asphalt warriors had been skewered by Morgan La Fay?
Legions?
I didn’t know.
I only knew that I would never speak of this thing to anyone as long as I possessed a taxi license.
It was a quarter after ten and I had three dollars to my name, although I had already spent at least that much on joe and Twinkies. But that was “yesterday’s” money as I like to think, meaning part of my starting cash. As bad as I am at math, I am capable of mentally dividing numeric concepts into neat categories that make me feel like I’m not broke. I don’t know why they teach algebra in high school when denial is far more useful.
I turned on the radio.
“Chambers and Arapahoe,” the dispatcher said.
That was a million miles away in south Aurora, the suburb that runs along the eastern border of Denver. I sipped at my coffee and waited. I decided to remain at the 7-11 and listen for an address on Capitol Hill. I was afraid that if I started the engine I would black out and wake up in front of the Brown Palace with a paperback in my hand.
“Blood bank,” the dispatcher said.
That was a call near the CU Medical Center over on Colorado Boulevard. Close, but not close enough. I was waiting for a bell on The Hill.
“They need cabs at Union Station!”
I chuckled softly. Only a newbie would make a dash for the railyards.
“Cherry Creek.”
Interesting. There were no taxis at Cherry Creek Shopping Center. I had the urge to take the call, but I knew that by the time I got there another driver would have snatched the customer away. We cabbies have an old saying: “He who lives by the mall, dies by the mall.”
The place is just too big and traffic is too heavy to expect a rich lady with a bag full of loot from Saks Fifth Avenue to stand on the sidewalk waiting for a taxi from the specific company that she had called. She’ll flag down any cab that happens by. I’ll admit it. I’ve “accidentally” picked up plenty of fares at the mall. Cherry Creek is a free-fire zone.
“Capitol Hill.”
Did I mention the fact that my microphone was in my hand and my thumb was poised over the button? The dispatcher barely got the word “Capitol …” out before my thumb went into action CLICK “… Hill.”
“One twenty-three,” I said.
“Twelfth and Pearl.”
“Check.”
Bingo.
That’s how it’s done.
The address was three blocks away.