I was fifty bucks to the good when I called it quits that evening. Just to clarify things for people who have no grasp of cab driving, it costs me seventy bucks a day to lease my cab at the motor, which is what we call the cab company. I also pour ten dollars’ worth of gas into the tank at dawn, so I have to earn at least eighty bucks before I start seeing any profit. It’s always a kick when I hit the eighty-one-dollar mark, but I usually blow the first buck on a lottery scratch ticket. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I’ve had my fingers crossed ever since the Colorado legislature legalized stupidity.
I have a friend named Big Al who holds nothing but contempt for the lottery, which strikes me as strange because he’s a gambler—plays the dogs, the horses, poker, etc. I’ve never played poker with him and never will. He wins. He also wins at the track. Not always, but always enough. I would think that, to him, the lottery would be like the slots in Vegas, where he goes twice a year to “clear out the sewage” as he puts it. He has told me that slots are what he plays to relax from the craps and blackjack tables. I have never played craps and do not want to learn, although I once lost three hundred dollars playing blackjack. There is no story there. I just lost.
I do watch craps games during my occasional trips through Reno to California, where I go every so often to visit my evil brother Gavin, who is a businessman with a real job. Craps requires a rudimentary comprehension of mathematics, which automatically disqualifies me from playing. Eighty-one dollars and a lottery ticket I can understand. Fifty bucks profit I can understand. But when it comes to the esoteric nature of odds, I’m like one of those skiers you read about in the papers who was last seen trying to outrace an avalanche—the body is dug up come spring. Remind me to tell you the story about the day I walked away from a slot machine jackpot because I was late for a transcontinental bus.
I drove back to the Rocky Mountain Taxicab Company (RMTC) a little before seven P.M. I had pulled a twelve-hour shift, had my fifty-dollar minimum quota of profit, and was ready to head home and relax in front of my TV. Things had been going like this for the past couple of months. Profitable days and quiet nights. Somehow I had avoided getting involved in the personal lives of my fares during that time, although it was no accident. I had made a conscious effort, which is rare for me. Without going into too much detail, my life sometimes gets complicated when I make the mistake of trying to help people who have problems that are too overwhelming for them to deal with by themselves. Given my age, sex, educational background, and income bracket, I do not know what makes me think I am qualified to help anybody do anything. Big Al tells me it’s because I have no control over my rampant ego, but I like to think it’s because I’m bored. However, sometimes people actually do ask me for advice.
I was shocked the first time a fare asked me for advice. I had been driving a taxi for only two weeks. Back then I didn’t know that I would be driving a taxi for the next fourteen years. I thought it was just a temporary gig until I sold my first novel, but let’s not get into that.
The guy who asked me for advice was younger than me, and said his family wanted him to become a doctor, except he didn’t really want to go to medical school. He asked me what to do. I thought he was nuts—I was just a cab driver, not a career counselor. To jump ahead here a little bit, I eventually came to realize that most people seem to think that all cab drivers are founts of wisdom. But I also learned that the amount of advice a cab driver hands out can affect the size of his tip. Maybe I do understand mathematics. At any rate, being a beginner with no practical knowledge of anything at all, I told the kid that he should do only what he wanted to do—and I added that, personally, I wouldn’t want my appendix removed by somebody who wasn’t in the mood. He tipped me four bucks. My education as a cab driver had begun in earnest.
I learned my lessons well, but the most valuable lesson I learned was to avoid getting involved in the personal lives of my fares. Some people call it “the road to hell.” It’s funny how true clichés can be. I don’t know why English professors criticize clichés. I’ve never met a cliché I didn’t like, which may explain why I’ve been an unpublished novelist for twenty years.
But I was feeling pretty good when I dropped off my taxi for the night. I entered the on-call room at Rocky Cab and turned in my trip-sheet and key. The day-man in the cage, Rollo, had already gone home, which made me feel good. Me and Rollo don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. The night-man had already come on duty. His name was Stew. It still is. He’s a model-railroading buff. ’Nuff said on that subject.
As I say, I was feeling pretty good when I got off duty. I climbed into my heap, a black 1964 Chevy with red doors, and drove back to my apartment on Capitol Hill. I live on the top floor of a three-story apartment building, which was some sort of millionaire’s mansion back in the nineteenth century. I don’t know who lived on the top floor back in those days, but I like to think it was the scullery maid. It’s a cozy dump. I call it my “crow’s nest.” I can see the rooftops of the city from up there. I parked in the dirt lot behind the house and climbed the rear fire escape and entered by the back door, which opens directly into the kitchen. I set my cab accouterment on the table and entered the living room and walked over to one of my many bookshelves where I pulled out my copy of Finnegans Wake. That’s where I stash my cab profits. I plucked my take out of my shirt pocket and started to stuff it into the book, but then I noticed some handwriting on the back of one of the bills.
I recognized the bill. It was the crisp new fiver handed to me by the mover, Mister Trowbridge. I don’t get that many crisp fivers on the job. Don’t ask me why, except that people who take cabs rarely give me “crispies,” as we hacks call new bills. There are basically two classes of people who take cabs: poor people and rich people. The middle class tends to stay out of the whole mess. Poor people for the most part can’t afford their own cars, and the rich simply don’t drive themselves to the airport, which is practically the only place I’ve ever taken a rich person. There are exceptions of course, but the middle class have a tendency to drive themselves wherever they go. I’ve never fully understood why anybody goes anywhere, but I suppose if I was middle class, I would probably go somewhere, too.
I held up the fiver to get a better look at it. I could see the details pretty well. I wear bifocal contact lenses. The printing was small, cramped, and squared, and looked relatively fresh, so I got the feeling that Trowbridge had written the words, especially when I read what the English professors refer to as the “content,” which went as follows: “You must wake up each day in a state of total despair.”
I stood in the silence of my crow’s nest pondering these words. Due to the fact that I am a graduate of the University of Colorado at Denver with a Bachelor’s degree in English, I began to parse the sentence. This is what English majors do. It’s what we’re trained to do. We don’t know how to do anything else, except drive cabs. But I couldn’t quite nail down the exact nature of the statement. Maybe Trowbridge had simply written a note to himself, like one of those reminders that you see on preprinted tablets that say “Things To Do Today.”
Why would a guy like Trowbridge have to remind himself to do a thing like that? One look in a mirror ought to be enough.
I pondered the word “must.” It had the connotation of a command rather than a polite suggestion, i.e., “You must wake up in a state of total despair, or all is lost.”
I shrugged and started to put the bill into my Finnegans, but then my esoteric knowledge of sentence structure, combined with my inherent paranoia, suddenly gave me pause. It occurred to me that Trowbridge might have been making an observation about me—“By the look of my cab driver, I can only conclude that he must wake up each day in a state of total despair.”
I could picture Trowbridge sitting in the backseat staring at my ponytail, and then … passing judgment!
It gave me the willies.
I jammed the fiver into the book and closed it. I set the book on the shelf and went back into the kitchen and started to fry up a burger for supper. Gilligan’s Island was scheduled to start in a few minutes and I didn’t want to miss the opening song. I’ll admit it. I always sing along with the theme song. Who doesn’t? Women maybe.
When Gilligan’s Island first appeared on TV, I was a kid living in Wichita, Kansas, where I was born. I thought Bob Denver was the lead singer of The Wellingtons, the group that recorded the song. I guess this was what my Maw was talking about when she talked about the superiority of radio over television, and how radio forces the listener to use his imagination. There seemed to be something Bob Denverish about the lead singer’s voice. I later discovered to my dismay that he was not a part of the group. But since Bob Denver had once played the role of Maynard G. Krebbs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, I imagined him looking like a beatnik and playing an acoustic guitar and singing the song while Sherwood Schwartz sat at the controls in the recording booth. That tells you everything you need to know about my imagination, and my Maw.
I flipped the burger once and accidentally flattened it on the frying pan with the spatula, but I kept thinking about that fiver in my Finnegans. I finally set the spatula down and went back into the living room and pulled the book off the shelf. I opened it and took the bill out and reread the sentence. Then I set the book back on the shelf and reached for my copy of The Stranger by Albert Camus. I placed the fiver inside, and put it back on the shelf.
I decided I wanted to hold onto the bill for awhile. I didn’t want to spend it until I came to grips with both the message and the audience. Had Trowbridge written it to himself, or to me? The possibility of ever learning the truth was nil, which was why I felt it belonged in my Camus. One thing I had learned in college was that if you ever had a question about truth, reality, or the meaning of existence, read a novel by Albert Camus. Pretty soon you’ll be so baffled you’ll forget the question.
(For those of you who never served in the army and subsequently faked your way through seven years of college, “Camus” rhymes with “Shamu” [the killer whale]).
But merely opening The Stranger had helped me. Five minutes later I was seated in front of my TV with a beer and a burger, waiting for the tantalizing vision of Mary Ann to come sashaying down the beach in her tight denim short-shorts. I don’t know who invented the word “sashay,” but Mary Ann brought it to life and gave it meaning. She always makes me forget Albert Camus.