Three days later I had a rare run of good luck. I picked up a businessman at the Hilton Hotel and he uttered the magic acronym: “DIA.” I pocketed fifty-five dollars at the drop-off point at the airport terminal, then I took a quick run down to the staging area to buy a Coke from a machine.
The staging area is far away from the terminal, out in a kind of weed field. It’s a little island of asphalt where the cabbies wait anywhere from three to five hours for a fifty-dollar trip back to Denver. I did that a few times after DIA opened for business, hoping that somehow I could squeeze in three trips per day. One hundred and fifty bucks for a day’s work would have suited me fine, but it was like trying to beat the house odds in Reno. All I needed at the airport was just one extra tiny little hour to make my scheme work, but the gods laughed at me. Two trips per day was all I could eke out, so I gave it up and went back to what is loosely defined in the taxi business as “work.” Hotels and bells, that’s what the gods had in mind for this ponytailed Odysseus.
Okay. Here’s my Reno story:
I was headed to San Francisco on a bus, and we made a short stop in a little town near Wendover. To kill half an hour, I climbed off the bus and wandered into a casino, which was virtually deserted. It was almost noon, and I had my pick of the slots. I decided to try my luck at a quarter machine near a window where I could keep my eye on the bus parked across the street. I was new at the game and wasn’t familiar with the payoffs, which were printed on a metal plaque on the front of the machine for reasons that I never understood. Who reads machines?
The slot I chose to play had a metal pole sticking out of its top and was cluttered with colored lights like an artificial Christmas tree. I didn’t know what it was there for. I didn’t know anything about slots, but I knew how to put money into a hole. I had been doing that all my life.
So I stood there and poured quarters in and pulled the handle and won and lost small amounts. Pretty soon passengers started climbing onto the bus, so I figured it was time to go. I shoved my last quarter into the slot and pulled the lever, and as I did this I saw the driver come out the door of a little café and climb onto the bus, so I figured I had better get out of the casino. And then it happened.
The wheels on the slot machine stopped spinning and suddenly the Christmas tree lit up. The pole began rotating. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. But the bus was about to leave and I didn’t have time to read the goddamned knowledge plaque. I waited a few seconds to see if any quarters came pouring out of the machine but nothing happened. So as they say in the far West, I “hightailed it” out of the casino and ran across the street and hopped onto the bus just before the driver closed the door.
I made my way to the backseat of the bus where I always sleep on cross-country trips, and looked out the rear window. I could see the Christmas tree revolving through the tinted window of the casino. The bus pulled onto the road and headed out of town. I knelt on the backseat and watched the flashing colored lights grow smaller and smaller as we made our way into the empty wastelands of the desert.
A week later I was back in Denver and I ran into Big Al, who was parked in the cab line outside the Brown Palace Hotel. I told him about the casino and the flashing lights and the rotating pole and the mad dash to the bus. After I finished relating my vivid narrative, he stared at me in silence.
I began to grow nervous.
“Do … you … have … any … idea … what … you … did?” he said slowly and distinctly.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know anything about slot machines. That was the first time I ever played one.”
Big Al refused to speak to me for a month. He never did explain to me exactly what I did, but I sort of figured it out by myself.
After I got to the DIA staging area, I parked 127 in a slot adjacent to the cinderblock building where they have pop and candy machines and restrooms, plus it’s the place where the DIA personnel send cabbies up to the terminal. The DIA dispatcher sits at a window like a ticket booth at a movie theater, and manipulates a system of traffic lights to signal the drivers when they can go. It’s complicated. The building reminds me of the Nevada casino. It’s out in the middle of nowhere.
I put fifty cents into a slot and won a Coke, then I stepped outside the building and looked at the scores of taxis waiting for the signal to drive up to the terminal. The cabbies were either seated inside their hacks, or standing around discussing politics and women. It looked like an annual convention of town loafers. I’ve been there.
I climbed into 127 and drove away. I took Peña Boulevard to I-70, and then a call came over the radio for a fare waiting at a 7-11 store nearby. Normally I don’t jump 7-11 bells because half the time the callers disappear before you show up, but I was feeling good, and it was a nearby call, and money is money, so I jumped it.
The fare turned out to be a construction worker whose car had broken down on the way to work and he had been trying to catch a ride for three hours. I won’t bore you with his sob story the way he bored me, but after I dropped him off at his construction site, another call came over the radio for a fare that was one block away. I jumped it immediately. That’s the ideal situation for a cab driver. It’s like playing pool. You try to position yourself every time you drop off a fare so you can pick up a nearby fare. I was sinking shots left and right that day, baby.
The fare turned out to be a young businessman who needed a ride down to the Denver Technical Center, which is a massive business park south of the city. Young businessmen are my favorite customers, turks with the facts and figures at their fingertips, men on the make in their five-hundred-dollar suits and forty-dollar haircuts. Well-bred, intelligent, articulate—even in conversations with me they talk as though they’re making a presentation at a board meeting. They always seem curious about my job, the gut details, how much mileage do I rack up in a year, and are the old Checker cabs still being manufactured? It’s a treat to talk to junior executives. I imagine how easily they would finesse me in business deals if I was one of their kind. Strategies, stats, game plans, they thrive on the very things that stump me.
But this guy was different. He was probably ten years younger than me, and had an air of smugness about him. I didn’t blame him. He was wearing a suit. I once had a suit, and a job to go with it. I felt pretty smug on my first day at the office. The smugness lasted an hour. The job lasted a year. It was at a corporation called Dyna-Plex. It’s also located at the “Tech Center” as we Denverites call it. Denverites love to say “Tech Center.” Sometimes we shorten it even further to “DTC.” It’s kind of like saying “LoDo,” meaning “Lower Downtown Denver,” but let’s move on.
He asked me the usual questions about cab driving, how long I had been doing it, was it dangerous, had I ever been robbed, etc. Standard fare chatter. But then, when we were about five minutes away from the Tech Center he said, “Do you plan on doing this all your life?”
I glanced in the rear-view mirror.
Did I mention that he had a briefcase? It was upright on his lap. He was holding it by the handle, utilizing both hands. I could tell he liked his briefcase. It was leather bound. I could smell it.
“I rarely make plans,” I said.
“Seems to me you could do better than this,” he said.
I interpreted his statement to mean that I ought to be doing what he was doing, whatever that was—being a success or something. He was young. Maybe he wanted me to start asking him questions about his job. Perhaps he wanted to talk about himself and do a little bragging, or “tooting his own horn,” as me ol’ Dad used to say. I usually cut young people a lot of slack. I know how gauche the young can be, and early success can go to your head, so I’ve been told. Never been there.
I thought about telling him that I planned on making a fortune writing bestsellers, but decided against it. He might ask me to explain precisely how I intended to go about bringing this grandiose plan to fruition, and I had enough problems fleshing out the subtle details of my fantasy without wrestling with the nuances of reality.
“I’m not qualified to do much of anything else,” I said.
“What are the qualifications to drive a cab?” he said in a tone of voice that I can only describe as “supercilious.”
“To tell you the truth, there aren’t all that many qualifications,” I said. “Mostly you need a clean motor-vehicle record. But there is a catch.”
“What’s that?”
“Catch-23.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anyone who has a desire to drive a cab is considered insane, so he isn’t allowed to drive a cab.”
He frowned, then leaned toward me. “I’m not sure I understand. Are you telling me that only people who don’t want to drive cabs are allowed to drive?”
“That’s correct.”
“But … why would anybody become a cab driver if he didn’t want to drive a cab?”
“Catch-24,” I said, as I wheeled into the Tech Center and began heading toward his office.
“What’s that?”
“Anybody who does something he doesn’t want to do is considered insane, so he’s forbidden to drive a cab.”
He sat back in his seat and thought this over. “Well … by that logic, there shouldn’t be any cab drivers at all.”
“Catch-25,” I said, as I pulled up at the entrance to his building. “You’re not making any sense,” he said as he pulled out his wallet.
“Catch-26,” I said.
“Keep the change,” he said, dropping two tens onto the front seat.
“Catch-27.”
He got out and slammed the door shut and walked away.
I always pull that schtick on people who look down on cab driving. It gives them something to be irritated about for the rest of their lives.
I pulled away from the building and drove down the block until I came within sight of the hi-rise Dyna-Plex building. It looked exactly like it had on the day I quit my old job. I wondered who was doing my job now. My job had been to write twelve brochures a year, which meant I worked twelve hours a year.
Just for kicks I tried to work up some nostalgia for the old place, but all it did was make me want to smoke a cigarette. I decided to get the hell out of there.
I took I-25 north toward downtown Denver, listening for calls on the radio. I hated to deadhead for such a long distance, but I wasn’t about to hang out at one of the Tech Center hotels. The fares from the DTC hotels are good but the lines are too long for me. The DTC cabstands are similar to DIA, except you don’t have to wait three hours for a trip, although that can happen. It’s a gamble. I always leave gambling up to the bright-eyed newbies looking for a big score, although I do know old pros who work the Tech Center on a regular basis. But each to his own, I always say. I have smaller fish to fry. I conquered the dream of the big score a long time ago, as far as cab driving goes. I save my big dream for the typewriter, but let’s not get into that.
I had just come off I-25 at Lincoln Boulevard when a call came over the radio. The address was in central downtown. I grabbed it because the long drive from the Tech Center had left a bad taste in my mouth. Deadheading will do that, and I wanted to get back into the game. The dispatcher gave me an address that I recognized, then he said something that made me wish I hadn’t jumped the bell: “Party named Trowbridge. He’ll be waiting outside.”