See? This is what I meant when I said that in the world of cab driving, everything evens out. I had been doing well that afternoon, banking balls off bumpers and sinking every shot, but now I was behind the eight ball again. The mover was back: Trowbridge. I continued up Lincoln filled with bitterness. I had given up on the dream of scoring big long ago, but it still scalded my ass to get roped into what amounted to a repeat short trip. I didn’t have any doubt about it. The worst part was knowing it ahead of time—another half-hour shot to hell. The fact that I sometimes spent an entire hour seated in a cab line outside a hotel reading a paperback and sipping a Coke without a care in the world did nothing to lessen my irritation. Einstein was right when he blew the lid off relativity.
I saw Trowbridge as soon as I came around the corner. He was standing at the curb wearing the same shabby clown suit, but there weren’t as many boxes laid at his feet. I knew where they were, though: inside the building. Doubtless he was playing a game. He wouldn’t want to scare off a cabbie by displaying a vast array of personal belongings out front.
Let me tell you a truth about taxi driving: cabbies do not have to pick up anybody that they really don’t want to pick up. If a cab driver feels that the impending fare might be dangerous, he can bypass him as long as he lets the dispatcher know about it. People have funny ideas about cab drivers and cab rules. For instance, people think that if they call a taxi company and request service, the company “sends” a cab driver to their address, as if we cabbies hung around an office waiting to be “sent” somewhere. Not true. Cab driving is one of the last bastions of free enterprise, and when a civilian calls a cab company, the dispatcher hollers the address over the radio and any driver who wants the trip can claim it, but if no driver does, then the civilian is out of luck.
By out of luck I mean that the civilian has to take a bus, or walk, or call his cranky buddy who owns a car. Civilians don’t always understand this. They don’t understand why cabs sometimes never arrive at their homes, especially when the weather is bad. If it’s snowing and you’re trying to get home from a grocery store with a cart full of plastic bags, good luck, because all the cabbies are hauling rich people to the airport. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Cab companies like to keep this info on the QT. I’ll probably get canned now.
Trowbridge gave a little flip of his hand as I pulled up to the curb. Same procedure as last time. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that I was curious to see if he would recognize me. He didn’t indicate it, but then he didn’t look at me very closely. I got out and opened the trunk, and he dumped his worldly possessions next to my spare tire. Then he headed for the right rear door of 127. This surprised me.
“Is that everything for the trunk?” I said.
He glanced back and nodded quickly, then climbed into the backseat. The guy didn’t have as many worldly possessions today. This made me feel bad. I wondered if he had been forced to hock some of them. But it was none of my business. Frankly I was pleased, because it shortened the length of my downtime. My bitterness had been wasted. This was turning out to be a regular fare. He gave me an address on Capitol Hill less than five minutes away, near Washington Street and east 19th Avenue. So I was glad after all that it was a short trip. Get him in and get him out. That’s the number one rule-of-thumb in cab driving. You automatically make a dollar-fifty as soon as someone climbs into your taxi and you drop your flag and start your meter. If you do that ten times a day, your gas and Twinkies are paid in full.
I glanced in my rear-view mirror as I drove toward The Hill. I tried not to be obvious. I tried to make it look like I was just checking to see the traffic behind me, which I rarely do—anybody fool enough to get behind my taxi is living dangerously. But I was really examining Trowbridge. He looked morose. He was sitting slouched, gazing out the side window. I thought about telling him that I had picked him up a few days earlier, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. I only embarrass people who enjoy a higher income-bracket than myself. That includes practically everybody in North America, but Trowbridge wasn’t one of them. I don’t claim to be a fount of wisdom, but I know a doppelganger when I see one.
The address wasn’t far from the site of the old Fern Hill bookstore. I know all the used bookstores in Denver. They come and go, thrive and die. Fern Hill is gone now, but I used to shop there when I first came to Denver. I collect old paperbacks. Next to watching TV, my favorite thing to do at home besides sleeping is browsing through my collection of vintage potboilers. It’s kind of like being a model-railroading buff. ’Nuff said on that subject, hey?
I had to parallel park because the street was narrow and there was traffic. Like most cab drivers, I hate to parallel park at a curb. You may have had experience in your lifetime with the infamous “double-parked taxi.” It might even have been me. I’ll admit it. I do it. I won’t make excuses. I double-park whenever I can. Being a cab driver is like being a drunk—you’ve always got an excuse for everything. The excuse for double-parking is: “I’m trying to make a living here, give me a break!” I could offer more colorful variations, but the First Amendment is not a license to shock old ladies.
By the time I got parked, Trowbridge already had his billfold out. He handed me a five and said, “Keep it,” then opened his door. I stuffed the bill into my T-shirt pocket and hopped out to open the trunk for him.
He gathered his boxes and set them on the sidewalk, and I thumped the lid closed. “Need any help carrying your things inside?” I said, but he just shook his head no. Didn’t even look at me. I could tell he was embarrassed, but his embarrassment seemed to have diminished in direct proportion to his worldly belongings, which had been halved. I didn’t stick around to add to his mortification. I only do that to my friends.
I got back into 127, started the engine, and pulled away. I glanced at my rear-view mirror and saw Trowbridge trundling his boxes up to the door of the apartment building. The whole trip had taken less than ten minutes. I figured if I could get a steady flow of trips like that, I could make thirty bucks an hour. This is how cab drivers think. Even after you’ve abandoned the dream of the big score, you still waste your time making nonsensical calculations. It’s a PUC regulation.
I headed back down The Hill and decided to make a run past the Brown Palace to see how long the line at the cabstand was. The Brown Palace is my favorite hotel to wait outside while reading paperbacks and eating Twinkies. It’s an historic hotel, and I do like Denver history. I don’t know why the word “historic” has to have the word “an” in front of it. This isn’t England, fer the luvva Christ. But that’s what they taught us at UCD, and I’m not about to argue with English professors. I gave up on that when I was a student and told a professor that the word “English” itself is misspelled. I told him it ought to be spelled “Anglish,” since the language is named after the Angles. I don’t know where the Jutes and Saxons fit in, but I do know this: the sonofabitch Anglish professor gave me a Cfor the semester.
There were only three cabs at the Brown, so I parked at the rear of the line. It was time to pull a little first-echelon maintenance on my trip-sheet, the dullest part of cab driving. The dullest part of life, too, I suppose—paperwork. I began writing down all the starting points and drop-off points of my morning’s fares, and roughly estimating the times of departure and arrival. This is my favorite part of doing paperwork: lying. It sort of reminds me of April 15. Not that I cheat on my income taxes. I don’t earn enough money to cheat on my taxes, although I hope to eventually take part in that national pastime. I sometimes feel like such an outsider.
I plucked my money from my shirt pocket in order to sort it out and hide the twenties in a place that I won’t reveal to you, although it was not on my physical person. That’s when I noticed the handwriting on the fiver that Trowbridge had given to me.
I froze.
The writing was in tiny print along the top edge where the paper is greenish-white. It looked like a punch line coming out of Abraham Lincoln’s mouth. He was saying, “You must harbor a secret in your past so dreadful and shameful that the mere thought of it sends you lurching violently to the nearest liquor store.”
The cramped, squared printing was the same as the printing on the other fiver stuck in my Camus back home, so I was certain that Trowbridge had written it. But I didn’t know why.
My paranoia began to well up. This was not unusual. In fact I would say it was overdue for the day. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was getting on toward three in the afternoon. Yep—if I’m not stricken by a nauseating wave of paranoia by lunchtime, I start to get worried.
But this was different. Most of my paranoia is generated by what my Maw used to call my “active imagination,” meaning that it was all in my mind and really had nothing to do with the dirty looks given to me by friends, nuns, clerks, cops, and taxi fares after having innocently said something that they may or may not have taken offense at. You might not believe this, but I often say things that I regret. But I had never actually held in my hands a manifest cause for paranoia.
I stared at the message coming from ol’ Honest Abe’s face, and again noted the word “must” tucked between the words “You” and “harbor.” It possessed the definite quality of a command, not a mere suggestion or observation. The fact that I do harbor shameful secrets in my past made me feel like I was seated naked inside my taxi. That guy Trowbridge seemed to have me pegged, because one of my shameful secrets involves sitting naked inside a taxi. That was back in college. It was during Springtime Crazy Days at Wichita State University, an annual celebration that takes place each March prior to spring break. I won’t bore you with the details of how I ended up naked inside a taxi in the middle of downtown Wichita. Let’s just say it involved a streaking incident combined with the misreading of a street sign, plus quite a bit of beer.
At any rate, I decided to separate the fiver from the rest of my daily take. I knew what I was going to do with it and knew exactly where it belonged: in between the pages of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger, the fountainhead of absurd human behavior and the graveyard where all mysteries go to die.