I pulled into the cabstand at the Fairmont Hotel just as a call came over the radio. There were five cabs ahead of me at the stand so I figured I had better take the call. If there had been four cabs I would have settled in with my Coke and Twinkie and paperback book, but five cabs meant that the waiting time for a fare to come out of the hotel would have been too long in terms of the “Work/Loaf Ratio” that I have spent fourteen years perfecting as a taxi driver on the mean streets of Denver. I won’t bore you with a long-winded explanation of the “W/LR” save to say that it is an algebraic formula of such complex numeric subtlety that it can be understood only by mathematicians and hobos.
“One twenty-seven,” I said into the microphone.
“Eight-fourteen Tremont,” the dispatcher said. “Party named Trowbridge. He’ll be waiting outside.”
“Check.”
I hung up the mike and pulled out of the cabstand and drove down the street. A couple of the taxis were Rocky Cab hacks. I knew what the drivers were thinking: Murph knows something. Whenever a cabbie jumps a bell from a cabstand, the other cabbies think he knows something. Vail trip, they think. A rich businessman going to Denver International Airport, they think. They think anybody fool enough to abandon the security of a cabstand must be hip to a jackpot. I like people to mistakenly assume good things about me. It enhances my rep.
It took one minute to get to the Tremont address. I saw the guy waiting outside the building, but he was no businessman. It’s easy to recognize businessmen. They wear suits and vote Republican. It’s true that this guy was wearing what could loosely be defined as a “suit,” if you think of Bozo the Clown as wearing a suit. Unmatched sports jacket, baggy pants, and dusty shoes, plus unkempt hair. That’s all you need to know. He was standing in the midst of what I took to be all of his worldly possessions. My heart sank.
Every so often I get one of those people. “Movers” as they are referred to by us cabbies, although they are not to be confused with “movers and shakers.” Movers are people who think a taxicab is Mayflower Van Lines. They are people forced by tragic circumstances to flee their current residence and find someplace else to live. Their modus operandi is always the same. They give a little wave signaling that they called the cab, then they begin loading your trunk with their stuff. They disappear into their apartment building and come out with more stuff. There’s usually a shabby suitcase or two. My heart sinks when I realize I’ve got a mover on my hands because he or she usually has an apartment lined up not far away, so the fare comes to only three or four dollars. It’s worse than a supermarket run, because shoppers rarely have as much stuff as movers.
But my heart goes out to these people even as it’s sinking, which is scientifically feasible as I know from experience. Out and down, that’s where my heart went when I pulled up to the curb. I couldn’t tell if the guy was older than me. It’s always a shock to find myself in the presence of desperate people my own age. When I was a kid I always assumed that bums, losers, and grandparents had to be at least fifty years old.
“I have a few more things inside,” the guy said as he thrust his shabby suitcase into my trunk along with a cardboard box filled with the twisted remains of his life. I nodded. I knew the drill. There’s nothing you can say. You know you’re in for at least a half-hour of downtime, meaning you won’t be jumping any good bells for the next thirty minutes. It’s sort of like waiting for a bus to nowhere except you’re the driver.
I watched the guy disappear into the building. It was an old nineteenth-century Denver building, a five-story, red brick joint that had an appointment with the wrecking ball. The upper stories were apartments, and the ground-floor space had been a lot of things in its time, including an X-rated magazine store. I knew this because when I was a student at nearby UCD, I sometimes walked past this building on the way to a bar after class, but I never had the guts to step inside. (The word around the English department hinted that the store traded in 1950s Playboys, but nobody knew for sure.)
When Trowbridge came back outside with his arms loaded down with more stuff I worked a pleasant smile onto my face, but he didn’t look at me. He was embarrassed, I could tell—me and embarrassment are old pals. I didn’t offer to help him carry any of his stuff. That’s the unwritten code between cabbies and movers. It may sound cruel, but that’s the way the game is played. The cabby pretends to be miffed, and the mover is required to feel embarrassed. It’s his punishment for tricking the cab driver into playing Mayflower, because he knows he’s not going to give you a tip, and so do you.
When I say the cabbie pretends to be miffed, the truth is that the cabbie really is miffed, but only at himself for getting roped into a lousy trip. Cabbies are like gamblers. They hate to lose, but you’ll notice that they never walk away from the craps table. And do you know why? It’s because they believe that after they drop off the short fare they will get a Vail trip to balance their bad luck. Does the phrase “God is on my side” ring a bell? The worst part of being a cabbie gambler is that, unlike a Vegas gambler or a dog-track gambler, cabbies always break even. By this I mean you can tear your hair out over a short fare or click your heels over a trip to Vail, but at the end of the fiscal year you still average seventy lousy bucks per day. Fifty, if you happen to be me. You can’t win in this game, but you can’t lose either. It’s sort of like high school—you can loaf through four years or study your ass off, but in the end everybody is handed the same ol’ sheepskin.
“Where to?” I said.
“Five-sixteen Curtis,” he replied.
A two-buck trip tops—it was almost a record.
I once got a call at a motel on east Colfax where a woman was moving from her motel room to a room in a motel next door. It was my first experience with a mover and I was staggered. I was thirty-one years old. I was fairly new at cab driving. The woman was around the same age as me, I could tell. After I got over my shock and outrage, my heart went out to her. She really seemed embarrassed. I helped her carry some boxes. I didn’t know the rules. The fare came to a dollar-sixty. After I dropped her off, I drove away wondering what she would be doing when she was forty-five. You already know what I’m doing.
I pulled up at the Curtis address. It was another old, red brick building. The meter came to two dollars and twenty cents. Trowbridge leaned over the back of my seat and held out a crisp new five-dollar bill. I took it and reached into my shirt pocket for change but he said, “Keep it,” and waved a horizontal palm as if shooing away pigeons. This made me feel bad. The guy obviously had taken similar trips and knew how cranky some cabbies could get about short trips. Me, I keep my crankiness to myself. Short trips come with the territory—and there actually is something to the belief that the next trip might end up a Vail trip. By “Vail trip” I mean any long trip that will bring the average of this hour’s take to fifteen bucks. Everything evens out in the world of cab driving, unfortunately.
I did hop out though and help remove some boxes from the trunk, just to acknowledge the 115 percent tip. But I only set them on the sidewalk. I knew this was what he would want without asking. I could sense that, in his own way, he was an old pro and did not need or want help carrying his stuff into his newest awful digs. He got right to work hauling the boxes into the foyer and setting them down and striding back out to retrieve the rest of his stuff. He knew his business.
“Need any help?” I said, just to bring closure to the tip.
“No thank you, I’m fine,” he said. It had a practiced sound. I nodded and climbed back into 127 and drove away. As I pulled up at a red light, I took a deep breath and said with a sigh, “There but for the grace of God, etc.” I sigh that quite frequently. I have no idea what my life would be like or what I would be doing for a living if it wasn’t for cab driving, but I suspect it would involve manual labor. Who the hell invented cab driving anyway? A Pharaoh?
As I wended my way back toward the Fairmont I began to wonder what age Trowbridge was. He could have been younger than me but not by much. Sitting in a cab all day doing nothing has helped me to age well, unlike, for instance, a farmer battling hail and cows. Trowbridge had looked old, but that was partly due to his clothes and wild hair and four o’clock shadow. I myself sport a ponytail. The chicks tell me it makes me look younger. My male friends say it makes me look like I’m not “with it,” meaning ponytails are “out” and have been, I guess, since the sixties. But after disco was invented, I pretty much lost interest in American cultural innovation. For some reason, I still feel the same age I was when I began driving a cab fourteen years ago. As I overtly implied, I’m forty-five years old. I’ll never forget the day I turned thirty-seven. On that day I said to myself, “I’m the same age as James Bond.” It was one of the biggest thrills of my life, so you can imagine how thrilling my life is.