As I drove out of the RMTC parking lot I passed a cab coming in off the day shift. A newbie was driving. I recognized him. He had driven his first shift two weeks earlier. An old pro named Jacobson had won twenty dollars in the “newbie” pool, but I’d rather not go into that.
As we passed each other, I took a good look at the kid.
Kid.
He looked thirty. But I thought to myself, “Fourteen years from now he’ll be the same age I am now.” Which was true in terms of experience if not age. It didn’t matter whether you were thirty-five or sixty-five—if you had driven a taxi as long as I had, you were a member of my generation. We spoke the same lingo, made up the same colorful songs, and dreamed the same big dream. It didn’t matter whether or not a cab driver aspired to score off writing novels someday. The true big dream of all asphalt warriors is to stop driving. You know you’ve conquered Everest when you can afford to park your hack for the last time.
But I never dreamed that the top of Everest would be so cold and lonely. I never dreamed that I would walk away from Rocky Cab in disgrace. Disgrace is for amateurs. But who was I to claim to be anything else? Looking back over the previous three days, I realized that disgrace was the only logical outcome. And to think that it all started by hitting the snooze button.
If I hadn’t hit the snooze button, I wouldn’t have shown up late for work on Monday. If I hadn’t shown up late, I never would have gotten stuck in a long line at 7-11. Never would have picked up a pedestrian who gave me a twenty for a three-dollar ride. Never would have been in a position to pick up the penny lady, or the kid going to his reunion, or the Dagwell lady, or the Hobbits, never would have pulled a boneheaded blunder worthy of a tenderfoot by jumping the Chambers bell, a call so far away, so off the charts, so monumentally unrealistic that it was laughable—and thus never would have found myself standing in front an armed and desperate man at the Glendale Bank & Trust.
And that was just Monday. How about Tuesday?
If I hadn’t hit the snooze button I never would have found myself in front of the penny lady’s front door at seven-thirty in the morning, never would have threatened to call the police on a woman who was probably living on a fixed income and had concocted a scheme to avoid paying cab fares that was so brilliant it was worthy of me. I couldn’t begin to tell you some of the crap I’ve pulled in my life. My two years in the army alone would fill the Encyclopedia of Goldbricking.
And now it had caught up with me at last. But the funny thing was, even though I knew “it” had been pursuing me all my life, I had never really known what “it” was. But on the day that I found myself driving home from Rocky Cab for the last time ever I realized exactly what “it” was: justice.
I deserved a nickel in the slammer.
That’s what I told myself as I guided my heap along the mean streets of Denver toward The Hill. I deserved two of those years for the lie of omission that I had committed in front of Ottman and Quigg that afternoon. “You’re a good man, Murph.”
It put me off my feed.
And then there were all the “bad” thoughts I had reveled in concerning Mrs. Jacobs, who was lying in a ward at DGH with tubes and wires attached to her feeble frame. And how about all the “bad” thoughts I would have invented for Mr. Hollister if he hadn’t died? Oh yeah. I wasn’t kidding myself. I had the senior citizens of Denver in my rifle sights that week. One down and one to go. And for all I knew, Mrs. Jacobs was already dead.
I deserved a seat on Ol’ Sparky.
I headed for a Burger King where I intended to pick up dinner. I didn’t feel like cooking for myself that night. That was how I normally rewarded myself if I did something unexpectedly right. I celebrated by going commercial, with a side order of fries. I once tried to boil frozen French-fries in a saucepan at home, but let’s move on.
I had all but pulled into the burger joint drive-up lane when I changed my mind. My feed had not come back, and I never could abide eating cold commercial hamburgers, which was what I would have ended up with if I had bought some and taken them home and not eaten them right away. And cold French fries were beyond the pale. So I bypassed the drive-up lane and headed home. No. If my feed ever came back, I was going to force myself to take the Daniel Boone route: If you want to eat, then you’re going to have to catch it, kill it, and cook it yourself, pilgrim.
I had pretty much finished berating myself by the time I pulled into the parking lot behind my crow’s nest. I guided my Chevy into the choice V-spot, then shut off the engine. I sat in the silence of The Hill thinking about the thing I had been avoiding thinking about ever since I had heard Detective Ottman say, “Mr. Hollister confessed that he had stuffed the money down behind the backseat of the taxi that he had ridden in on the day he robbed the Glendale Bank & Trust.”
If I had gone through with my plan of figuring out a way to steal the one-hundred thousand dollars, there was no question that I would already be in jail. But did that scare me? Not as much as the fact that I had seriously considered trying to pull it off. I had examined it from every angle, and the plan had seemed flawless. All it would have taken would be the death of Mr. Hollister. And after I learned that he had died, it was as if Fate had taken me by the hand and shown me the way to Tahiti.
That’s what really scared me.
There was somebody inside of me that I had never met before: Me.
That was the only name I had for it. As good a name as any, and better than most.
I reached up and took hold of the rear-view mirror and turned it so I could see my eyes.
I stared at those eyes.
I stared long and hard.
I stared until I fully understood that if it hadn’t been for sheer luck I would be staring at iron bars.
But I wasn’t.
I was sitting in my Chevy on The Hill, having what I could only describe as a very bad epiphany.
Except, had it been sheer luck? I tried to mentally trace the timeline of my movements back to the moment when I had found the money in my taxi. I had been parked in this very spot. I had taken the money upstairs, then fiddled around for God only knew how long, pretending I was going to call the police, and had finally slipped into a surreal, dreamlike state where I had extrapolated upon a means by which I could flee the country a wealthy man. And then … and then …
And then what happened?
Then I remembered.
The telephone rang.
The ringing had snapped me out of it.
I had been saved by a goddamn telephone!
I climbed out of my car and locked the doors, even though locked doors meant nothing to car thieves. I guess I locked it to keep out the good people. I climbed the fire escape to my crow’s nest, went inside, set my briefcase on the kitchen table, and walked into the living room. I looked at my answering machine. No messages. The auto-answer was off. I pressed the button turning it back on. I waited.
Nothing happened.
I was sort of hoping the telephone would immediately ring. That’s what it normally did when I didn’t want it to. If it rang though, I was going to do something I could not remember doing in a long time. I was going to pick up the receiver before the answering machine kicked in. I was going to listen to the sales spiel of the telemarketer. The odds of it being a telemarketer were well above 90 percent. The odds of it being a friend were zero. Of course odds have nothing to do with reality, which is why so many people go home sad from the dog track.
But if it had been a telemarketer on the other end of the line I was going to ask whether he had called earlier, and if it turned out that he was the capitalist who had snapped me out of my crime spree, I would thank him for saving me from going to Cañon City for a minimum of five years with time off for behavior so good that the screws would wonder if I actually was innocent. I have a theory that jailhouse guards do not spend a lot of time wondering that about prisoners.
Having disposed of the Hollister Case, I now turned my attention to the latest charges against me: the assault on Mrs. Jacobs.
Her word against mine.
The prosecution rested.
I thought about cooking a hamburger, but my feed had not come back because I had too many “important” things to think about. First of all, I had to find a job. On top of that, I was going to jail. It occurred to me that they sort of canceled each other out. But then I realized that while going to jail canceled out getting a job, getting a job did not cancel out going to jail. I wondered if there was an algebraic basis for this truth. The words, “inverse,” “obverse,” and “converse” came to mind, but I couldn’t remember what any of them meant. For some reason they made me think of tennis shoes.
Well—I didn’t have a job, I wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t in jail, so there was only one thing to do: collapse onto my mattress. No use worrying about tomorrow. The happiest people I know live unexamined lives.
That night I dreamed I was walking through a mall that resembled the Cherry Creek Shopping Center. I was trying to find a store, but I couldn’t remember what store, or what I wanted to buy. When I woke up, I couldn’t help but marvel at what a mediocre subconscious I have. I looked at the alarm clock. It was a few minutes after four a.m. I had slept for ten hours. I was bothered by the fact that I had not slept fitfully. Given the rigidly defined parameters of my immediate future, an objective observer might have concluded that I was out of touch with reality. But mostly I was hungry. That’s the stomach for you—the phoniest organ in the human body. It runs away when things are going badly, but it always returns when it wants something.
I almost threw the covers off my bed, but managed to stop myself in time. I didn’t want to knock over my lamp and blow a fuse in the building and go downstairs and wake the manager to tell him that everybody’s digital alarm clocks weren’t going to buzz on time.
I got as dressed as I ever do, then went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and looked at my food. I don’t want to describe the contents of my refrigerator. You heard me right: plurals. I did have more than one content on the shelves, even though I was a bachelor. Two of them were eggs. I decided to boil them in a pan of water, and then walk down the block and pick up a copy of the Denver Post.
It was that time again, a time known to all bachelors of all ages, but mostly young bachelors. It was time to look at the want-ads and see if there was anything listed that I might possibly be able to do to get money. Of course I rarely found jobs in the want-ads, but reading the ads was like priming the pump. The next step would be to go down to the state employment agency, which was as close as you could get to reality without actually being there. I had never gotten a job through any state employment agency, and that included Pennsylvania, although I had heard rumors. The real way you got jobs was through your friends. Unfortunately I didn’t have any friends. It depressed me to know that if I was going to find a job, I would have to tap into my vast network of enemies. They loved to see me work.
I put the eggs in the pan to boil, then I stepped outside and went down the fire escape and walked through the pre-dawn darkness to the corner and bought a newspaper. I’ll admit it. If there was any way I could have stolen a newspaper I would have done it. I admitted it to myself as I stood there jiggling the door open and closed before inserting a quarter. Face it. Any man who would go to unusual lengths to plan the heist of one-hundred thousand dollars would have no qualms about stealing a newspaper. I was the living embodiment of pure evil and I knew it.
I walked back to my crow’s nest thinking about the fact that if it wasn’t so cold in the Arctic I wouldn’t mind living in a place that was dark half the year. During the bright summer months I could move down to the Antarctic. I wondered who the genius was who named the Antarctic.
When I got back upstairs, my eggs were boiling. I set my morning paper on the table, then pulled a dish out of the cupboard and crushed some saltines onto the plate. I cracked open the soft-boiled eggs and poured them onto the saltines. I grabbed a soda from the fridge and sat down at the table. Bachelor breakfast. Married women don’t know what they’re missing.
I scooped up a spoonful of egg-on-cracker and shoveled it into my mouth, then I looked at the front page of the Post.
And started choking.